Of ‘Science’ in Political Science.

In a well-known passage in the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in language and language seemed to repeat it inexorably." The thesis of this paper is that for most of the past century views about the nature of the scientific enterprise, the relationship between the social and natural sciences, and the nature, configuration and aims of social scientific inquiry have similarly been held captive by series of pictures. The most recent picture, I will maintain, is not quite the Wittgensteinian picture of knowledge generally but rather a more specific picture of natural scientific inquiry. Along Wittgensteinian lines, however, I contend that this misleading picture frames our understandings of science in ways that foreclose consideration of a number of promising options for rethinking the nature of social and political inquiry. Indeed, so powerful is this image that many of those who strive to resist the impulse to pattern political inquiry on one or another model of natural scientific inquiry remain in the grip of it. If one attends, for example, to some of the recent analyses of political inquiry advanced by supporters of the Perestroika movement, it is evident that aspects of this picture continue to shape and color their arguments. Consequently, even when these writers aim to vindicate what are in my view generally laudable ideals of theoretical and methodological pluralism, they do so in ways that threaten to perpetuate a variety of distortions and oppositions and to blunt the critical force and effectiveness of their own arguments. In what follows I shall therefore maintain that if the recent issues raised by the Perestroika controversy are to succeed in prompting a discussion about the nature and aims of political inquiry that yields something more than yet another dreary reenactment of the methodenstreit, it may be important to make this picture explicit and to show how it misleadingly figures both our view of natural science and our understanding of the enterprise of political inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]