I am indebted to Professor Edward Shils for his comments on the first draft of this paper. The research was supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation.

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¹⁰ One of the earliest monographs in this category was Merton's, Robert K.Science, Technology and Society in 17th Century England (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper Torchbooks, 1970 (first published in 1938)). Others included in this group were Kingsley Davis, George C. Homans, and Edward Shils.Google Scholar

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¹⁹ See Popper, K. R., The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. IIGoogle Scholar: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath (London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1945), pp. 88–92.Google Scholar

²⁰ Exceptions are books on theory construction such as Blalock, Hubert M., Theory Construction (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hal I, Inc., 1969)Google Scholar; and Stichcombe, Arthur L., Constructing Social Theories (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968).Google Scholar The fact that what is called theory in sociology is usually not theory at all has been noted by Robson, R. A. H., ‘The Present State of Theory in Sociology’, Lakatos, lmre and Musgrave, Alan (eds.), Problems in the Philosophy of Science (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Co., 1968), pp. 349–70, 374–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. That paper, and the comments on it by Harsanyi, J. C., pp. 371–3, in the same volume, also contain a good discussion of Homan's theory. But the weakness of Robson's paper is that it restricts itself to the general sociological theory and overlooks the much more real theorizing which takes place in the sub-fields of comparative sociology.Google Scholar

²¹ Since I only deal with this problem, I am obviously unable to do justice to the volume as a whole. But it should be mentioned that the book also includes a discussion of the relativity of social knowledge by Jarvie, I. C. and Winch, Peter, ‘Understanding and Explanation in Sociology and Social Anthropology’, pp. 231–70Google Scholar. For a more satisfactory discussion of that issue, see Gellner, ErnestGoogle Scholar, ‘The New Idealism—Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences’ and ‘Discussion’ of that paper by Cohen, P., Watkins, J. W. N., and Gellner, E. in Lakatos, and Musgrave, (eds.), op. cit., pp. 377–432.Google Scholar

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²³ See Toulmin, Stephen, ‘Reasons and Causes’, in Borger, and Cioffi, , op. cit., pp. 1–48.Google Scholar

²⁴ See Grundy, J. H., ‘Is the Brain a Physical System?: Comment’ in Borger, and Cioffi, , op. cit., pp. 123–31.Google Scholar

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²⁷ See Hamlyn, D. W., ‘Conditioning and Behavior’, in Borger, and Cioffi, , op. cit., pp. 139–65.Google Scholar

²⁸ See Boakes, R. A. and Halliday, M. S., ‘The Skinnerian Analysis of Behavior’, in Borger, and Cioffi, , op. cit., pp. 345–74, 381–6.Google Scholar

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³⁰ See Chomsky, Noam, ‘Problems of Explanation in Linguistics’, in Borger, and Cioffi, , op. cit., pp. 425–70.Google Scholar

³¹ In view of Merton's long-standing advocacy of what he calls ‘medium-range theories’— see Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1949), pp. 9–10—this is rather surprising.Google Scholar

³² See Bell, Daniel, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: The Free Press, 1960).Google Scholar