The Logic of Posthuman Inquiry: Affirmative Politics, Validity, and Futurities

Empirical research informed by posthumanist philosophy is proliferating in the social sciences. This research takes many forms and is willfully pluralistic and creative in the analytic approaches it takes. The innovation, however, is not entirely free form. Posthumanist scholarship both employs fami...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Qualitative inquiry 2023-10, Vol.29 (8-9), p.897-913
Main Authors: Pratt, Scott L., Rosiek, Jerry Lee
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Action
Empirical analysis
Empiricism
Ethics
Free form
Innovations
Logic
Politics
Posthumanism
Representations
Social research
Social sciences
Values
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Summary:Empirical research informed by posthumanist philosophy is proliferating in the social sciences. This research takes many forms and is willfully pluralistic and creative in the analytic approaches it takes. The innovation, however, is not entirely free form. Posthumanist scholarship both employs familiar forms of inference and is also forwarding a distinctive array of inferential practices that until now have not been commonly present in mainstream/whitestream social sciences. Attending to the logic of emerging posthumanist empiricism can help clarify the affirmative ethics and politics of posthumanist inquiry. This essay offers that a modal, dialethic, paraconsistent logic of action is more suited to posthumanist inquiry than a classical logic of representation. This logic of action locates validity not with the accuracy of representations, but in the specific character of the futurities enabled and disabled by the ontologically generative action of inquiry. Implications for an axiology of posthumanist empiricism are explored.
ISSN:1077-8004
1552-7565
DOI:10.1177/10778004231162075