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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
1 The concept of “object domain” is taken from Habermas, Jurgen, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston, 1971)Google Scholar, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, though at this point we will refrain from delineating any of the specific attributes of political science's domain.
2 While hardly a unique example, one instance of such a sociology of knowledge attitude is evident in Gavre, Mark, “Hobbes and His Audience,” American Political Science Review 68 (December 1974), 1542–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the criterion of intersubjective testability is not the unique possession of behaviouralism/empiricism. See, for example, Schutz, Alfred, “Concept and Theory-Formation in the Social Sciences,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. Natanson, Maurice (New York, 1963), 246.Google Scholar
4 An all too inadequate sketch of this evolution might begin with the “pluralist–elitist” confrontation, e.g., Dahl, Robert, Who Governs (New Haven, 1961)Google Scholar compared to Mills, C.W., The Power Elite (New York, 1956).Google Scholar It could then proceed to that point where substantive criteria became critical, e.g., Polsby, Nelson, Community Power and Political Theory (New Haven, 1963)Google Scholar, as well as the introduction of the concept of nondecisions by Bachrach, and Baratz, , “Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review 56 (December 1962), 947–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar It is at this point that methodological problems became prominent, e.g., Bay, Christian, “Politics and Pseudo-Politics…”, American Political Science Review 59 (March 1965), 39–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Of late, the community power debate has taken a new turn. Wolfinger, Raymond, “Nondecisions and the Study of Local Politics,” American Political Science Review 65 (December 1971), 1063–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, hints at the inutility of the concept of power itself: and Hayes, Edward, Power Structure and Urban Policy (New York, 1972)Google Scholar, on the other hand, contends that the substance of the power structure can be isolated by simply investigating who systematically “wins” in the decision-making process. Obviously, this evolution was not entirely sequential. In any case, a bibliography of the community power debate is presented by Hawley, W.D. and Wirt, F.M. in The Search for Community Power, ed. Hawley, and Wirt, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968).Google Scholar
5 Almond, Gabriel and Verba, , The Civic Culture (Boston, 1965)Google Scholar; Przeworski, Adam and Teune, H., The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (New York, 1970).Google Scholar
6 Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962).Google Scholar Some obvious instances of this interest in epistemology are: Jackson, M.W., “The Application of Method in Construction of Political Science Theory,” Canadian Journal of Political Science V, (1972), 402–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Miller, Eugene, “Positivism, Historicism, and Political Inquiry,” American Political Science Review 66 (1972), 796–816.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 3–5, (critically) describes the historical “achievement” of this restriction as the replacement of epistemology by the philosophy of science: by the emergent concern with methodology at the expense of a theory of knowledge.
8 For a statement of the behavioural position one has Eulau's, HeinzThe Behavioral Persuasion in Politics (New York, 1963)Google Scholar; for phenomenology, Existential Phenomenology and Political Theory: A Reader, ed. Jung, Hwa Yol (Chicago, 1972)Google Scholar; and for language analysis, Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972).Google Scholar
9 The Behavioral Persuasion, 6. Of course, there is no reason to equate operational with empirically relevant, or more precisely, to think that only operational languages are empirically relevant.
10 The Interdisciplinary Study of Politics (New York, 1974), 12
11 Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry, 11, 94ff
12 Carnap, Rudolf, “The Methodological Character of Theoretical Concepts,” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. I: The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, ed. Feigl, Herbert and Scriven, M. (Minneapolis, 1968), 53Google Scholar, notes that most empiricists realize “that the connection between observation terms and the terms of theoretical science is much more indirect and weak than it was conceived either in [his] earlier formulations or in those of operationism.” See also, H. Feigl, “Some Major Issues and Developments in the Philosophy of Science of Logical Empiricism,” in ibid., 3–37. See also Hempel, C.G., The Philosophy of Natural Science (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), 85–100.Google Scholar
13 Przeworski and Teune, Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry, 94–6
14 The concept of nondecisions proposed by Bachrach and Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” is attacked by Wolfinger, “Non-decisions and the Study of Local Politics.” See as well Debnam, G., “Non-decisions and Power,” American Political Science Review 69 (September 1975), 889–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 Wolfinger, Raymond, “Rejoinder to Frey's ‘Comment’,” American Political Science Review 65 (December 1971), 1103CrossRefGoogle Scholar
16 Wolfinger, “Nondecisions,” 1079
17 Winch, Peter, The Idea of a Social Science (London, 1958)Google Scholar; Whorf, Benjamin Lee, Language Thought and Reality (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).Google Scholar
18 Peters, R.S., The Concept of Motivation (London, 1960)Google Scholar; Melden, A.I., Free Action (London, 1961)Google Scholar; Louch, A.R., Explanation and Human Action (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966)Google Scholar; Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice.
19 Herbert Feigl, “Some Major Issues and Developments,” 15
20 Bernstein, Richard, Praxis and Action (Philadelphia, 1971), 278–80Google Scholar; Cornmann, James W., Materialism and Sensations (New Haven, 1971), 281Google Scholar; Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 7ff
21 The Behavioral Persuasion, 134
22 Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Feyerabend, P.K., “How to Be a Good Empiricist: A Plea for Tolerance in Matters Epistemological,” Philosophy of Science: The Delaware Seminar, ed. Baumrin, B., Vol. 2 (New York, 1963), 3–39Google Scholar, are both instances of arguments which cast doubt upon the singularity and univocality of scientific procedures.
23 Some arguments for symmetry are presented by Carnap, Rudolf, The Logical Structure of the World, trans. George, Rolf A. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967).Google Scholar One may also note Neurath, Otto, Foundations of the Social Sciences (Chicago, 1944).Google Scholar Obviously, this is by no means an inclusive list.
24 Feigl, “Some Major Issues and Developments,” 7, discusses the utility of the synthetic-analytic distinction, making no claim as to its “correct” status. That is, it is a useful, assumed distinction of propositions. The “classic” assault on the distinction is expressed by Quine, Willard van Orman, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” From A Logical Point of View (New York, 1961), 20–46Google Scholar
25 The concept of “new teleologists” is borrowed from Bernstein, Praxis and Action, 236
26 Peters, The Concept of Motivation; Melden, Free Action; Louch, Explanation and Human Action
27 Bernstein, Praxis and Action, 278–80
28 Ideology and Utopia (New York, 1936).
29 Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 307
30 Ibid., 309
31 Ibid.
32 For further discussion of this possibility see: Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science: Methodological and Historical Essays, ed. Cohen, R.S. and Wartofsky, M.W. (Boston, 1973).Google Scholar
33 Hanson, N.R., Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge, 1958)Google Scholar; Kordig, Carl, “The Theory-Ladenness of Observation,” Review of Metaphysics 24 (March 1971), 448–84Google Scholar; Scheffler, Israel, Science and Subjectivity (Indianapolis and New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Shapere, Dudley, “Notes toward a Post-positivistic Interpretation of Science,” The Legacy of Logical Positivism, ed. Achinstein, P. and Barker, S. (Baltimore, 1969), 115–60.Google Scholar The use of the term “commensurability” is somewhat troublesome, since its technical, philosophical definition relates to the coextension of coverage/scope of different theories; we might, therefore, have been well-advised to employ the labels of “the theory-ladenness of observation” or “comparability” in its stead. However, since our purpose is to caricature the responses these issues have received, and since they do seem to overlap so significantly, at least in contemporary discussions, we have decided to continue to use the term commensurability – and to conflate it with the question of “the theory-ladenness of observation”.
34 Feyerabend, “How to Be a Good Empiricist,” defines the commensurability issue as equivalent to the question of meaning, and the incommensurability position as corresponding to the meaning-variance stance.
35 Kordig, “Theory-Ladenness,” 452–3
36 This sense of a challenge to the possibility of “objectivity” provides the focus of concern for Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity, and Kordig, “Theory-Ladenness,” who both seek a refutation of the incommensurability stance.
37 See, for example, Allison, Graham, Essence of Decision (Boston, 1971).Google Scholar
38 Palmer, Stern, and Gaile, in The Interdisciplinary Study of Politics, for example, recognize the impact of conceptual frameworks on the research executed, without admitting that this interferes with objectivity per se. But a considerably more sophisticated treatment of this problem is presented by Israel Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity, 64–5. Along with Feigl and Carnap, Scheffler concedes that observational concepts are not as closely linked with theoretical ones as the operationalism of Palmer, Stern, and Gaile et al. might lead us to believe. In this context, Scheffler proposes that one can avoid the “subjectivity” of a Kuhn without resort to the naivite of the operationalists. Specifically he suggests “the possibility of shared processes of decision on the referential force of a term by application to cases. Such possibility allows for an independent understanding of referential interpretation of a law by opposing theorists, and is thus sufficient to prevent the subjectivist denouement. It is, however, compatible with this possibility to allow that what is judged decidable by application to cases may well vary with history, purpose, and prior theoretical context. Such variation is an index of the fact that referential modes are not fixed forever, that the learning of new languages is possible. The relative independence of observation from theory must not be taken to imply some single descriptive language, fixed for all time, within which science must forever fit its experimental accounts …”
39 Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, 134–59
40 Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 241–63. See also: Alasdair Maclntyre, “The Idea of a Social Science”; Martin Hollis, “Reason and Ritual”; and Charles Taylor, “Neutrality in Political Science.” All articles are collected in The Philosophy of Social Explanation, ed. Ryan, Alan (London, 1973)Google Scholar along with other pieces designed to respond to Winch's position.
41 Hollis, “Reason and Ritual,” 33–49
42 Ibid., 39
43 Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 7
44 Feyerabend, “How to Be a Good Empiricist,” Philosophy of Science: The Delaware Seminar, ed. Baumrin, B., Vol. 2 (New York, 1963), 3–39Google Scholar
45 Knowledge and Human Interests, 3–5
46 The criteria of appropriateness and adequacy are borrowed from Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality (New York, 1960).Google Scholar
47 Eulau, The Behavioral Persuasion, 13–19
48 Foundation of Political Action (Boston, 1972), 12–14
49 “Spatial Archetypes and Political Perceptions,” American Political Science Review 68 (March 1975), 20
50 Strawson, P.F., “Persons,” Wittgenstein and the Problem of Other Minds, ed. Morick, Harold (New York, 1967), 127–53Google Scholar
51 Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 1 (New Haven, 1955), 167Google Scholar
52 Feigl, “Some Major Issues,” 3–37
53 See, for example, Richard Bernstein, Praxis and Action, 277–8.
54 Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, 288