Mapping Reality: An Evolutionary Realist Methodology for the Natural and Social Sciences

With postmodernism and poststructuralism sweeping the social sciences and humanities, a whole generation of students from disciplines as diverse as history, English literature, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology are learning that "truth" is bogus - a tired old liberal humanist fiction. Language is incapable of telling the truth, and science, nothing but a socially constructed discourse, functions to maintain the status quo. There is much to be said for this point of view, but ironically, relativists face precisely the same quandary, for if all claims to knowledge are equally valid, then de facto the knowledge claims of the most powerful are the ones disseminated and acted upon. This timely book offers a way out of the current realist/relativist impasse. Azevedo uses the insights of evolutionary epistemology to develop a naturalist realist methodology of science, the "mapping model of knowledge", and applies it to solving the conceptual, practical, and ethical problems faced by sociology as a discipline. The model is developed from the practice of the natural sciences, and comes with an easily applied and powerful heuristic based on mapping, filling the gap left by the downfall of positivist and empiricist methodologies. It shows the inescapably social nature of science, but argues that scientific theories can in fact be validated in perspective-neutral ways - not despite the social and interest-driven nature of science, but because of it.