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The Scientific Status of Political Science—another Comment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Extract

It seems odd that in 1972, political scientists still find it necessary to take the scientific pulse of their discipline, to exhort, cajole, and recommend, in the manner of a reproving family physician, their colleagues to ‘pay more serious attention to what the scientific study of a phenomenon entails’. Such an injunction is doubly regrettable when accompanied by a naive and confusing analysis of concept formation and confirmation in science, an account sure to encourage a dogmatic epistemology among social scientists who, in other circumstances (specifically, the opportunity to devote scarce time to careful study of the voluminous literature in the philosophy of science), would likely identify themselves with a more catholic epistemology and methodology. Mr Ake, in his account of the logic of scientific inquiry, glosses major issues in the philosophy of science, and, as a result, tacitly represents the community of scholars in the latter discipline as univocal with regard to fundamental issues of language, logic, and epistemology. I shall briefly try to state more of the case than Mr Ake has done, in a manner so that I might not too be accused of glossing (or, at least, of glossing with a minimum of distortion) the major issues he has raised in his note.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

1 Ake, Claude, ‘The Scientific Status of Political Science’, The British Journal of Political Science, II (1972), 109–15, p. 115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Ake, , ‘The Scientific Status’, p. 110.Google Scholar

3 Hempel, Carl and Oppenheim, Paul, ‘Studies in the Logic of Explanation’, in Carl Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: The Free Press, 1965), pp. 245–96.Google Scholar

4 See Hempel, , Aspects; Hempel, Fundamentals of Concept Formation in Empirical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).Google Scholar

5 Hempel, Aspects; Nagel, Ernest, The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961)Google Scholar; Salmon, Wesley C., ‘Statistical Explanation’, in Colodny, Robert G., ed., The Nature and Function of Scientific Theories (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), PP. 173231Google Scholar; Carnap, Rudolf, Logical Foundations of Probability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 1962).Google Scholar

6 This example is due to Salmon, , ‘Statistical Explanation’, p. 178.Google Scholar For Salmon's solution to this and similar counter-examples to the Hempel-Oppenheim model of scientific explanation, the reader is urged to read Salmon's lucid essay.

7 Kyburg, Henry E. Jr.,, Probability and Inductive Logic (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970), p. 176.Google Scholar

8 Ake, , ‘The Scientific Status’, p. 109.Google Scholar

9 Ake, , ‘The Scientific Status’, p. 110.Google Scholar

10 Ake, , ‘The Scientific Status’, p. 110.Google Scholar

11 See the two review articles, Prewitt, Kenneth and Nie, Norman, ‘Election Studies of the Survey Research Center’, British Journal of Political Science, I (1970), 479502Google Scholar, and Taylor, Michael, ‘Mathematical Political Theory’, British Journal of Political Science, I (1970), 339–82.Google Scholar

12 Lakatos, Imre, ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs’, in Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 100,101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The remainder of the Lakatos article, together with the other articles in the collection, are strongly recommended to the reader.