ABSTRACT
Philosophers of science or of the social sciences incline to one of two roles, although the dividing line is not strict. First, there are ‘commentators’, who largely restrict themselves to analysing the doings of others: be they scientists or investigators. Such commentaries – critical, clarificatory, cautionary, diagnostic, evaluative and sometimes hortative – may indeed prove useful to the worker-bees they study. Second, there are (a smaller number) of philosophers of science who explicitly define their role as ‘under-labouring’ for a given discipline(s), by supplying an explanatory programme, a toolkit of concepts and, very occasionally, an illustrative model to guide practitioners. The latter has been the case with Roy Bhaskar, who has described his own role
as under-labouring for the social sciences. His has been a generous contribution, consisting of threemain elements: a realist social ontology, vindicating the propriety of attributing emergent properties and powers to the social world; a fallibilist epistemology, insisting upon the limitations of our perspectival knowledge and thus the invalidity of substituting what we (think we) know for the way things really are (even if that eludes us); and a judgemental rationality, advocating a constructive (though pro tem) method of arbitrating upon theoretical disputes.1 In social theorising, this generous under-labouring has gone even further and Bhaskar advanced the illustrative Transformational Model of Social Action (TMSA).2 Nevertheless, none of the above does the sociologist’s (or any other social scientist’s) job for them. In a nutshell, the Weberian task of explaining why, in any given case, social matters are ‘so, rather than otherwise’ remains to be undertaken. In practice, this means that specific accounts are required to explain how par-
ticular parts of the social order originated and came to stand in a given relationship to one another, whose actions were responsible for this, through which interactions, when andwhere andwithwhat consequences. In all of this, the practising sociologist has to know a great deal about the historical origins and current operations of ‘x’. Such practitioners may feel drawn towards realism but, even with its underlabouring, realist philosophy of science cannot give them guidelines about how to examine the questions listed above. This is what the ‘morphogenetic approach’ seeks to provide. It is an explanatory framework, which complements the realist
philosophy of science and furnishes specialised practitioners with guidelines for explaining the problems they have in hand. Far frommaking such specialists (in the sociology of health, education, migration etc.) redundant, it is they alone who are qualified to specify the relevant parts, relationships and mechanisms pertinent to problems in their areas of expertise. What the explanatory framework offers are guidelines forhow to undertakemorphogenetic andmorphostatic analysis,whatever the problem may be. A hallmark of realist philosophy and social theory alike is that both are meant to be of practical use.
