Abstract
The issue of evidence and its role in generating warranted knowledge presents us with a variety of problems. There are those who believe that warranted knowledge is the result of following a particular method. In that case progress in the social sciences consists in applying this scientific method to a subject matter at hand. To the extent that the unity of science is based on this method, which produces causal explanations by inferences from limited observations, statistical techniques such as sampling, establishing correlations, T-tests, and the like are appropriate. Consequently, in order to arrive at warranted knowledge we have to “prime” our students with these techniques.
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Notes
This is the supposedly apt characterization of the issues underlying the debate by one international relations specialist who proudly disclaims any real acquaintance with the relevant literature but who nevertheless has produced a primer in order save his students from perplexity. See Stephen van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). See also his The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
Joseph Agassi, Science in Flux, “Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science,” No. 28 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1975).
See Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper, 1968)
Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (New York: Harper, 1965).
To name only a few, William Dray, Laws and Explanations in History (London: Oxford University Press, 1957)
Maurice Mandelbaum, The Anatomy of Historical Knowledge (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977)
Fredrick Olafson, The Dialectic of Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)
Rex Martin, Historical Explanation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).
Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 81.
For such a definition of essence see for example Andrew Sayer, “Essentialism, Social Constructionism and Beyond,” Sociological Review, Vol. 45, No. 3 (1997): 453–87.
Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 40.
See Imre Lakatos, “Falsificationism and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs” in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 91–196.
Paul Diesing, How Social Science Works (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1991), chap. 2.
See Steve Fuller, Social Epistemology (Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991).
See Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (New York: Harper, 1957).
John Ziman, Reliable Knowledge: An Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 62–63.
See the discussion in Richard Gaskins, Burdens of Proof in Modern Discourse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), particularly chap. 5.
Rom Harré, Varieties of Realism; A Rationale for the Natural Sciences (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 6.
For an interesting treatment of this problem in law and science see Richard Gaskins, Burdens of Proof in Modern Discourse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
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© 2007 Richard Ned Lebow and Mark Irving Lichbach
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Kratochwil, F.V. (2007). Evidence, Inference, and Truth as Problems of Theory Building in the Social Sciences. In: Lebow, R.N., Lichbach, M.I. (eds) Theory and Evidence in Comparative Politics and International Relations. New Visions in Security. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607507_2
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