Patrick Baert is a Belgian sociologist and social theorist, based in Britain. He is Reader in Social Theory at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge. Born in Brussels in 1961, Baert studied at the Free University of Brussels and at Oxford University where he obtained his D.Phil. in 1990. In Oxford he studied with Rom Harré and wrote his dissertation on George Herbert Mead's notion of time and its relevance for social theory, subsequently published as Time, Self and Social Being (1992). He carried out postdoctoral work with Claude Javeau in Brussels and Anthony Giddens in Cambridge. He also published Social Theory in the Twentieth Century (1998) (2nd edition co-written with Filipe Carreira da Silva: Social Theory in the Twentieth Century and Beyond 2010) and Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism (2005).
Baert argues in favour of a neo-pragmatist philosophy of social science which promotes social research in the pursuit of self-referential knowledge. Whilst contributions to the philosophy of social science tend to assume that social research is primarily an explanatory (and possibly predictive) endeavor, his argument is that few significant contributions to social research are straightforward explanatory works, and even fewer are exclusively explanatory. Baert's position is that most of those groundbreaking works involve ‘self-referential knowledge’: they enable a community to re-describe and re-conceptualise itself and its presuppositions (Baert and Carreira da Silva 2010, pp. 285–305). He has promoted research in pursuit of self-referential knowledge, and he has analysed the methodological strategies that make this possible in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from archaeology and social anthropology to sociology and history (Baert 2005, pp. 146–169). For instance, Nietzsche's genealogical history can provide contemporary communities with tools that enable them to re-evaluate the moral and cognitive categories they use to describe the world and their place within it. Baert has argued that the pursuit of self-referential knowledge ties in with the German notion of Bildung or self-edification and with a new role for the intellectual, whereby he or she helps to facilitate the awareness of alternative socio-political scenarios rather than presenting a set of normative guidelines (Baert 2007, pp. 45–68). A special issue of the journal Human Studies was dedicated to a symposium around Baert's Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism (32 2 2009). In this issue Stephen Turner questioned Baert's attempt to link types of research with specific outcomes (Turner 2009). In the same issue Paul Roth (2009) argues that Baert contradicts himself: whilst rightly rejecting the notion of a scientific method, Baert then surprisingly suggests a method for pursuing self-referential knowledge. Bohman (2009) contends that Baert underestimates the ability of social scientists to develop generalisations which can lead to emancipatory political agendas. For a critical exchange between Baert and Peter Manicas, see the Journal of Critical Realism (7 2 2008, pp. 235–275); Manicas accused Baert of courting a relativist, postmodern outlook.