Beyond Relativism
Subtitle: Raymond Boudon, Cognitive Rationality and Critical Realism (Routledge Studies in Critical Realism)
Publisher: Routledge
Published: January 18, 2002
Language: eng
Number of pages: 168
ISBN-13: 9780415258517
First sentence: Raymond Boudon was born in Paris in 1934 and, together with Michel Crozier, Alain Touraine and Pierre Bourdieu, he is part of the second generation of French sociologists who have helped to establish sociology as an academic discipline (Bell, 1998).
Description: "Beyond Relativism reflects the current identity crisis in the social sciences. The relativist consensus, exemplified through the ascendancy of postmodernism, holds that knowledge and moral values are so embedded in concrete social and cultural settings that any objective account of either knowledge or morality has been rendered meaningless. This questions the relevance of the social sciences."

"Raymond Boudon's theory of cognitive rationality represents a refreshing alternative to this view. Drawing on the assumption that mental contents and discourse are not completely shaped by society but rest on cognitive processes of active and reflexive subjects, his controversial approach suggests that social scientific knowledge is reducible neither to cultural and linguistic contexts nor to particular pragmatic interests. Can the theory of cognitive rationality simultaneously transcend relativism and overcome the limitations traditionally associated with methodological individualism?"

"Cynthia Lins Hamlin, in her challenging new work, persuasively argues that critical realism, by recognising both the agents' and social structure's causal powers and liabilities, offers the theory of cognitive rationality a powerful argument against the relativism that springs from the conflation of social reality and our ideas about it. Beyond Relativism is an important book for sociologists and for all those concerned with the methodology, and philosophy, of social science."--Jacket.