This is a book of six essays, two of them coauthored, focusing on related themes. In terms of the book's content, the title has a double meaning. One meaning is that the human sciences are becoming less and less relevant to real-world problems. As Shapiro says, "in discipline after discipline, the flight from reality has been so complete that the academics have all but lost sight of what they claim is their object of study" (p. 2). The other meaning is that reality as sought after by the human sciences is regrettably not that of the scientific realists who equate reality with the current scientific picture of the world: the human sciences in ignoring scientific realism, which seeks causal explanations, are confining themselves to shallow understandings of human phenomena. For Shapiro, both the behavioral and the interpretive systems exemplify a flight from reality even though proponents claim otherwise.
展开▼
