A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs. These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice". The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs are firmly fixed in the student's mind. Scientists take great pains to defend the assumption that scientists know what the world is like...To this end, "normal science" will often suppress novelties which undermine its foundations. Research (...) is therefore not about discovering the unknown, but rather "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education". (shrink)

Suppe, F. The search for philosophic understanding of scientific theories (p. [1]-241)--Proceedings of the symposium.--Bibliography, compiled by Rew A. Godow, Jr. (p. [615]-646).

Described by the philosopher A.J. Ayer as a work of 'great originality and power', this book revolutionized contemporary thinking on science and knowledge. Ideas such as the now legendary doctrine of 'falsificationism' electrified the scientific community, influencing even working scientists, as well as post-war philosophy. This astonishing work ranks alongside The Open Society and Its Enemies as one of Popper's most enduring books and contains insights and arguments that demand to be read to this day.

Social science can achieve falsifiable theory, but only if dependencies of regularities upon milieu and context are explicitly considered. Achieving falsifiable, general theory depends upon finding a set of relationships which is in fact relatively independent of context, and specifying the boundary conditions or domain of applicability to models. Contemporary sociologists such as Herbert Blalock and George Hornans believe theory is possible without recourse to history, but Raymond Aron and especially Max Weber suggest how and why history and theory are (...) interdependent. Weber's image of the historical as inexhaustible concrete adds the insight that whenever theorists find a determined, lawful causal sequence, they will have to understand the situation at the start of the sequence as a set of rich, historical givens. Metatheoretical philosophy of explanation in social science best addresses the problem of infinite residue and bridges the gap between disciplines. (shrink)

pt. 1. Gaston Bachelard's historical epistemology.--pt. 2. For a critique of epistemology.

Introduction There are (at least) two questions which readily arise in the minds of sociology students when they begin courses in the philosophy of social ...