ISRF Professorial Research Fellow

University of Cambridge

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Dr Tony Lawson

October 2011 – September 2014

The research programme is intended to generate a book and papers on a range of topics as well as to support participation in workshops and networks.  The most likely areas of focus are expected to be those set out below.

• The basic nature of social reality
  A book is proposed which will address questions such as:  What is social emergence and is a general theory of emergence feasible whereby social emergence is a sustainable special case? What is the nature of social power?  Do social powers adhere to social structures or individuals and groups or both? How do social powers emerge? What are social relations?  What precisely is the nature of, and contribution to social life and stability, of such seemingly foundational phenomena as trust, rights, obligations, and promises?  Are there social kinds that are kinds in the sense of natural kinds, facilitating social generalisation, and so social scientific and capable everyday interaction?  If so what is their nature or form?  Are there in fact social objects at all or merely social facts?
• Inter- or cross-disciplinarity in social research
  Research to address questions including:  Is there a case for inter-, cross- or even perhaps post-disciplinarity, rooted in social ontology? What follows if there is? Do the results suggest a need for cross disciplinary research projects, or perhaps even an institutional re-integration of the various branches of social science?  What follows in terms of epistemology and methodology, i.e., for the actual conduct of theoretical and empirical enquiry?
• Explanatory method for social science
  Research to address questions including:  Are there alternative non-formalistic methods of social enquiry to mathematical deduction that can be shown to be relevant to socio-scientific research in the light of our more sustainable conceptions of social ontology?  Can these be systematised?  Are there formalistic methods of a sort previously untried in social theory that carry the potential to bear insight?  Under what conditions if any might existing methods prove fruitful?  To what extent, and in what conditions (if any), can methods developed and successfully utilised in other non-social disciplines (for example evolutionary biology) be appropriately abducted into economics?

Further items that may be covered include:

• Social ontology and ethics
• Development of categories within a social scientific ontology
• Comparative research in ontology
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The project will allow support to continue to the Cambridge Realist Workshop and the Cambridge based Social Ontology Group.