Social Scientific Inquiry and the Metapractical Voice

Abstract

Even though there is a persistent temptation to make the mistake of assimilating the academic practices of political theory to the lineage of classic canon of political thought, it is persuasive to claim that the problems and characteristics of metapractices that address political issues have been, in various ways, exemplified in the literature of that retrospectively and analytically constituted “tradition.” The nature of politically oriented metapractical discourse is, however, in many respects most visible and distinct in the age of differentiated and institutionalized forms such as those represented by the modern social sciences. Social scientific inquiry inevitably confronts questions involving the relationship among three modes or levels of discourse: the social practices that are the objects of analysis; the practices of social science; and accounts of the logic and epistemology of social science—whether the latter are an internal dimension of these sciences or the formulations of autonomous external commentary such as the philosophy of social science. There are two fundamental paradoxes, or essential tensions that are manifest in the relationship between social science and its subject matter as well as in the relationship between the practice of social science and metatheoretical claims about the nature of social scientific inquiry.

When I interpret, I step from one level of thought to another.

—Wittgenstein