Abstract: Realism is an ontology, or theory of the nature of the world. As (Nochlin in Realism. Penguin, 1971) illustrated, when Plato set down the philosophy of idealism, his argument contained “a realism of Ideas—it puts Ideas outside the subject as particular self-existent entities rather than as objects within the subject” (p. 41). Realist analysis applies this ontological view of the world in order to make sense of it. Realist research is particularly concerned with identifying causality. Within the social sciences, adaptations to realism have been introduced to account for the complexity of lived experience. Two main branches of realism are Critical Realism and Social Realism. Each of these examine phenomena by using a realist ontology that also pays close attention to the socially, culturally, and politically constructed nature of knowledge in order to infer the most likely causal elements of the subject under investigation.
Publication Year: 2023
Publication Date: 2023-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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