Philosophical Underpinnings in the Philosophy of Science

Abstract The philosophy of science from the 1950s to the 1980s divided among four rival accounts of the nature and validity of scientific explanation. Although they focus on the model of physics, these different approaches mirror the four main explanatory methods of the social sciences—law-like, systemic, historical, and interpretive. Law-like approaches seek to discover universal truths or approximations thereof (e.g., Hempel, Nagel, and Popper); systemic approaches expect programmatic success (e.g., Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend); historical approaches look for progress over time (e.g., Toulmin and Laudan); and interpretive approaches privilege scientific creativity (e.g., Polanyi and Latour). The only thing on which these philosophers of science agreed is that they see little hope for the social sciences to be scientific in the manner of the natural sciences. Our question therefore is: why should political scientists have sought to emulate what philosophers of science said about what scientists (in physics) did when what philosophers of science did was to deploy the four methods of the social sciences to explain science? But many did, nevertheless.