Positivism, Scientific Realism and Political Science

Abstract

During recent decades in which political scientists have been debating positivism, the official philosophers of science have made a radical about-face and declared logical positivism defunct. The philosophers of science have adopted a new metaphysic, scientific realism, which turns away from the positivistic emphasis on universal laws, prediction and the legitimation of theories through the falsification process; and emphasizes instead scientific models, attention to the mechanisms and processes that underlie observed behavior, and the search for rigorous, complete explanations of scientific events. This shift at the metaphysical level puts several issues in political science in a new light because the scientific realist approach makes it possible to be `scientific' without being a positivist in the traditional sense. This creates new options and new challenges for rigorous political science research, and clarifies existing methodological discussions.