Critical interpretivism : the first outline

Dörfler, Viktor (2023) Critical interpretivism : the first outline. In: PHILOS 2023: 3rd Colloquium on Philosophy and Organization Studies, 2023-06-22 - 2023-06-24, Minoa Palace.

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Abstract

This paper is the first result of nearly two decades of speculation about a sound philosophical framing of my research. I have always broadly positioned myself as an Interpretivist, but not of the sort that goes so far as to say that 'if nobody has heard a tree falling then it did not make a sound'. Instead, I would say that we cannot know for sure, but we could assume that it did. Some Critical Realists (CR), including Roy Bhaskar, suggested that I should become (or brand myself) a Critical Realist. Indeed, what I do in my research in the philosophical methodological sense is typically acceptable to CR. However, I have two significant problems with CR, both stemming from the underlying objectivist ontological position: (1) I do not believe that all relationships are necessarily causal. I do believe, that there are causal relationships, but also that there can be other kinds of relationships. (2) I do not believe that all processes are necessarily deterministic, therefore I dislike the term mechanism, which alludes to the exclusivity of mechanistic processes. Sure, some processes are mechanistic, but maybe not all. I have also felt uneasy about the idea of Absolute Truth, and of Science as The Way to this Absolute Truth. Little by little, an idea started to take shape in my mind: I decided to try to do to interpretivism something similar to what Roy Bhaskar did to positivism – create a critical variant of it.

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