Critical Realism: Philosophical Origin and Methodological Principles

During the past few decades, social sciences and humanities has been involved in numerous methodological and theoretical debates that is described as the paradigms war between positivists, interpretativists and critics. In the 1970s or theoretical turn period, first constructivist interpretive and critical approaches emerged then hybrid approaches entered into this field. Critical realism is a modern approach that tries to combine paradigms and make a new definition of reality, knowledge, values, and research. This paper intends to overview the three dominant paradigms in social sciences and humanities in order to analyse methodological and theoretical innovations of critical realism.