Overlapping traditions with divergent implications? Introduction to the special issue on pragmatism and critical realism.

Those disagreements have sometimes become quite heated, such as the debate between Christian Smith and John Levi Martin, although it is intriguing that the critical realist Smith begins with an olive branch and it is the pragmatist Martin who chooses battle instead (Martin [14], [15]; Smith [20], [21]). Jamie Morgan, for example, has suggested that critical realists would find value in the work of the leading contemporary pragmatist Nicholas Rescher (Morgan [16]). Bhaskar himself thus appears to take something like an "overlapping patchworks" approach to the relation between pragmatism and critical realism. Pragmatists have sometimes been positively hostile towards critical realist ontology (e.g. Kivinen and Piiroinen [12]), and critical realists have sometimes criticized pragmatism in fairly robust terms, as Doug Porpora does in his first contribution to our roundtable (Barman, Porpora, and Carrigan [2]). [Extracted from the article]