Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 21:33:16 +0100
Subject: Re: BHA: Social Science


Hi Ismail,

Do you mean specifically African poverty and 'underdevelopment', or
other things? 

Nick Hostettler <nh8-AT-soas.ac.uk>

is working on a PhD thesis from a CR point of view on Eurocentrism in
social science.

Branwen Gruffydd Jones <b.s.gruffydd-jones-AT-sussex.ac.uk>

has completed a PhD thesis on Explaining Rural Poverty in Mozambique: a
Realist Approach, and has written an article for the Journal of Critical
Realism on a critique of the orthodox views on explaining globabl
poverty. Let me know off list if you want a copy and I'll send it to you
by attachment.

Bhaskar in his new book (edited talks of his) *Reflections on Meta-
Reality: Transcendence, Emancipaton and Everyday Life* Sage: New Dehli,
Thousand Oaks, Ca, & London 2002 pp. 123-4 relates the birth of critical
realism itself so far as he personally was concerned to the inability of
orthodox economics to explain underdevelopment. '... when I looked at
the philosophical tools which should have enabled me to point to its
irrelevance, I discovered that actually there was no way that I could do
that, because philosophy had actually pronounced a taboo on the world:
it had said you cannot talk about the world in itself, you can only talk
about our descriptions of the world'. This is a version of what he went
on to call the 'epistemic fallacy', which prohibits discourse in
philosophy about ontology. So he set out to make talking about the word
in itself (i.e. the real causes of African poverty!) philosophically
respectable, and thereby legitimated philosophically the kind of
structural explanation that is necessary to understand underdevelopment
(and change it).... (I've summarised this because I have an advance copy
of the book - it won't be in the bookshops I expect for a few months.)

Mervyn


Ismail Lagardien <ilagardien-AT-yahoo.com> writes
>
>Can anyone point me to arguments/texts on Social Science's European origins and 
>its ability/inability explain pre-colonial sub-Saharan Africa - or anything 
>related to this.
>
>Thanks
>
>Ismail
>
>
>
>---------------------------------
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-- 
Mervyn Hartwig
Editor, Journal of Critical Realism (incorporating 'Alethia')
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Paul Eluard



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