48 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
development. Although implementation of such policy advice is typically justified as another
example of knowledge hastening progress, there are good reasons to challenge such optimism.
For there is at least as great a likelihood that scientific knowledge will subvert freedom as that it
will contribute to undisputed “progress.”
Positivist approaches to political science are committed to the belief that definitions are and
must be value free, that concepts can be operationalized in a thoroughly non-prescriptive manner,
and that research methodologies are neutral techniques for the collection and organization of
data. Positivism conceives the political scientist as a passive observer who merely described and
explained what exists in the political world. Postpositivism challenged the myth of value neutral-
ity, suggesting that all research is theoretically constituted and value permeated. Illuminating the
means by which the conviction of value-free research masks the valuative component of political
inquiry, postpositivism questions the fundamental separation between events in the political world
and their retrospective analysis by political scientists. In recent years, critical theorists and
postmodernists have suggested that this notion of critical distance is yet another myth. Emphasiz-
ing that every scientific discourse is productive, generating positive effects within its domain of
inquiry, postmodernists caution that political science must also be understood as a productive
force that creates a world in its own image, even as it employs conceptions of passivity, neutral-
ity, detachment, and objectivity to disguise and conceal its role (Foucault 1973, 1979). In this
period of “democratization,” there are good reasons to treat the postmodernists’ cautions seri-
ously, for particular methodologies in political science not only construe the political world dif-
ferently, but also act subtly to promote specific modes of political life.NOTESThis essay draws upon arguments developed in this author’s Theoretical Issues in Policy Analysis (1988);
“The Science of Politics and the Politics of Science,” in Mary Hawkesworth and Maurice Kogan, eds.,
Encyclopedia of Government and Politics (1992); and “Political Science in a New Millennium: Issues of
Knowledge and Power,” in Mary Hawkesworth and Maurice Kogan, eds., Encyclopedia of Government and
Politics (2003). I am grateful to Peri Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow for their helpful suggestions to im-
prove an earlier version of the chapter.- Empiricism is an old and rich epistemological tradition that dates at least to Aristotle. Many ver-
sions of empiricism suggest that the senses can generate reliable knowledge of facts as well as values, and
material as well as immaterial reality. This chapter focuses exclusively on versions of empiricism dating
from the nineteenth century that severely constrict what the senses can know. Auguste Comte was the first
to coin the term “positivism,” suggesting that reliable empirical knowledge must eschew metaphysical
and theological questions and restrict itself to material domains that can be corroborated by the senses.
See his Course in Positive Philosophy (1853) and the System of Positive Policy (1854). - Within political science, “pluralism” has had more than one incarnation. In this chapter, I am using
the term as it was defined in the 1960s by scholars such as Harold Lindblom (1965) and Robert Dahl (1971)
to refer to a conception of politics as “interest accommodation” and to the endorsement of incrementalist,
“trial-and-error,” or “satisficing” approaches to political knowledge. - The term postpositivist implies theories that (1) have been developed in the aftermath of positivism,
(2) incorporate a systematic critique of positivist conceptions of knowledge and science, (3) reject instru-
mentalist conceptions of theory (i.e., the belief that theories are “tools” consciously created and held, fully
explicable, and easily abandoned when falsified), and (4) shift from a correspondence theory of truth to a
coherence theory of truth. Although Popper’s critical rationalism fits the first criterion and approximates the
second, it does not entail the radical break with positivism incorporated in the second two dimensions of
postpositivism. Indeed, as noted above, critical rationalism shares sufficient ground with positivism that it is
typically considered a qualified modification of, rather than a systematic alternative to, positivism. Similarly
Imre Lakatos (1970) tried to preserve the Popperian conception of falsifiability as the ground for the “ratio-