Research with a Purpose: A Reply to My Critics

I would like to thank Brendan Hogan and the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy for organising a session around my book at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) in San Francisco in 2007. The articles in this symposium are revisions of the contributions to that session. My book fits the agenda of the society in that it 'advances' a position which is at least partly indebted to American pragmatism. It is also, to a lesser extent, indebted to Gadamer's hermeneutics, but the influence of neo-pragmatism looms large. This does not mean, however, that my position is compatible with classical pragmatism, and indeed some of the contributors to this symposium claim, rightly I think, that my position is in some respects at odds with that of Dewey's. Before I deal with the various criticisms, it might be appropriate to put my pragmatist-inspired proposal in the context of my own intellectual trajectory in order to make sense of the rationale of the proposal and explain its distinctiveness. Unlike a substantial number of philosophers of social science, I was trained not just in philosophy but also in a social science, have actually carried out social research, am based in a sociology department and teach in an interdisciplinary social and political sciencepr programme. This has given my work in the philosophy of social science quite a distinctive angle in comparison to the armchair philosophy of social science that is prevalent these days. Whereas the content of philosophy of social science used to be tied to the emergence and establishment of new social scientific disciplines like sociology (Baert and Dominguez Rubio 2009), it has in the course of the twentieth century become an increasingly autonomous intellectual enterprise. I have been particularly struck by how generations of philosophers of social science