The main realism/anti-realism issue in the philosophy of science is the issue of scientific realism, concerned with the unobservable entities of science. However, there is also a more general issue, often known as “realism about the external world,” concerned primarily with the observable entities of common sense, but which spreads to scientific entities, both observable and unobservable. The i...

Being an essentially multi-disciplinary field, Information Systems does not appear to be informed by a single dominant underlying philosophy. Since IT is an integral part of IS, its philosophical roots are associated with logical positivism. While logical positivism has several merits, its proponents have been unable to respond to criticisms leveled by the Humean Skeptics. Logical empiricism to...

This paper invalidates the anti-realist point of view on the existence of mental illness by reviewing the anti-psychiatry challenge to official psychiatry. We present the anti-realist ideas of Thomas Szasz as the most radical anti-psychiatric author followed by the more moderate thoughts of Cooper and Laing. We then present the criticism of all these authors, most notably by the Canadian philos...

despite the often false impression that the analytic philosophy as an anti-metaphysical movement has nothing to do with metaphysics, there can be found good reasons to grant the metaphysical dispositions of analytic philosophers, and thereby, to minimize the anti-metaphysical nature of analytic philosophy in its all phases. since analytic philosophy is a historical movement the main nature of w...

Recent philosophical debates in human geography tend to misappropriate critical realism as a method per se. Drawing upon an extensive review of the realist philosophy and method in social science, this article argues that critical realism is a philosophy in search of a method. It ®rst delves into recent debates about critical realism within the wider geographical discourse. It then suggests thr...

Instead of examining critical realism directly, this essay critically examines claims made by two prominent critical realists, namely Andrew Collier and Tony Lawson, on behalf of their philosophy. These are (a) that critical realism supports Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and (b) that critical realism is illustrated by the workplace organisation theory of the relative...