Method

I believe social reality to exist with objective content independent of the human mind, and to exist as a multiplicity of beings: the variety of ways that nature is differentiated into and can be identified, perceptible to the human mind as representations of different things in themselves (i.e. chair, table, earth, human, cat, plane, sea, etc.). This viewpoint aligns with ‘dialectical materialism’ or realist ontology, which accords primacy to content and being over form (i.e. the ideal) and thought (Kipfer, 2009). Dialectical materialist ontology is encapsulated in the concept of “social formation” by Marx and Engels, who argue that “consciousness can never be anything else than conscious being” (Marx and Engels, 1998, pp. 36–37). The ‘form’ of individuals in the process of becoming a conscious being is determined, among others, by their production, which not only entails physical production and reproduction, but also a definite form of expressing life on an individual’s part. The human, in this view, is the empirically perceptible grounds of social reality, rather than being an ideal or a subjectively constructed phenomenon in an abstract rigidity (as with the dead facts in the case of empiricists or the imagined subjects of the idealist). This ontology views social reality as amenable to empirical research through sense experience and observation (for a discussion on the distinction between this and other approaches to social inquiry, positivism, empiricism and rationalism, see May, 2011, and Markie, 2017).