Conventional Realism and Political Inquiry Conventional Realism and Political Inquiry

Conventional Realism and Political Inquiry

Channeling Wittgenstein

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    • $42.99

Publisher Description

When social scientists and social theorists turn to the work of philosophers for intellectual and practical authority, they typically assume that truth, reality, and meaning are to be found outside rather than within our conventional discursive practices.

John G. Gunnell argues for conventional realism as a theory of social phenomena and an approach to the study of politics. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s critique of “mentalism” and traditional realism, Gunnell argues that everything we designate as “real” is rendered conventionally, which entails a rejection of the widely accepted distinction between what is natural and what is conventional. The terms “reality” and “world” have no meaning outside the contexts of specific claims and assumptions about what exists and how it behaves. And rather than a mysterious source and repository of prelinguistic meaning, the “mind” is simply our linguistic capacities. Taking readers through contemporary forms of mentalism and realism in both philosophy and American political science and theory, Gunnell also analyzes the philosophical challenges to these positions mounted by Wittgenstein and those who can be construed as his successors.

 

GENRE
Politics & Current Events
RELEASED
2020
February 10
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
208
Pages
PUBLISHER
University of Chicago Press
SELLER
Chicago Distribution Center
SIZE
1.7
MB

More Books by John G. Gunnell

Imagining the American Polity Imagining the American Polity
2015
The Orders of Discourse The Orders of Discourse
1998