The Nature of Political Theory

60 The Nature of Political Theory

Contrary to the basic premises of behavioural theory, ideology, and normative theory
did seem to be more effective in addressing such issues.
However, it was also argued by a number of political theorists, during the 1970s,
that empiricism was both a challengeable epistemological and ontological thesis.
In fact, the epistemology revealed the character of the ontology. Empirical polit-
ical theory was a clear example of a deeply-embedded ontology. It revealed not so
much any foundational truths about politics, as certain embedded and unchallenged
ways of understanding our ‘political being’. Thus, empirical political theory had
to be considered as just another epistemology. It was a philosophically-contestable
epistemology, amongst other epistemologies. The basic foundational distinctions
between, for example, explanation and interpretation, or facts and values, made
within the epistemology of empirical theory, were not therefore categorically true.
They were, conversely, philosophically-challengeable assumptions. In this context,
empirical political theory began to lose its privileged and hegemonic status.
The above point was further underscored by critical developments in the philo-
sophy of science. Reflection on the methods of natural science did not cease with the
claims of hypothetico-deductive methods or logical positivism. The collective phe-
nomenon of ‘post-empiricist science’, developed in writers such as Thomas Kuhn,
Michael Polanyi, Peter Winch, Paul Feyerabend, and Mary Hesse, which grew over
the 1970s and 1980s, raised a new series of detailed questions about the way in which
we view natural science explanation and by default all empirical theories. Western sci-
ence, as envisaged within this post-empiricist programme, was not the high point of
civilization and human knowledge, conversely, it was an epistemological moment.^47
As such, we do, in fact, have a great deal to learn from careful and sensitive examina-
tion of different cultures and distinct knowledge structures. We also need to pay more
careful attention to self-reflexive critique within our own systems of knowledge, that
is to say, purportedly objective empirical data is not, in reality, so easily detach-
able from theoretical models. Interpretations can have a constitutive effect. Theories
can be seen, ironically, as the facts of natural science. This post-empiricist view of
science throws considerable doubt on the projects of verification, covering law the-
ory and hypothetico-deductive methods—all pervasive in behavioural and empiricist
investigations.
Although the post-empiricist programme did not deny the separate role of natural
science language, a number of points were made which linked, fortuitously, with
ideas in both interpretive and normative theorizing. First, theory is neitherabout
reality, nor an adjustment to reality, rather it has some role to play inconstituting
reality. Assumptions implicit in certain theories confer meanings and shape the world.
There are no brute facts, which are not permeated with interpretative assumptions.
There is thus no unmediated or uninterpreted reality. Valid knowledge is not the
putative representation of something external.^48 In consequence, it is more difficult
to speak of the clear truth or falsity of beliefs or their measurement against some
external empirical standard. Theories can be more or less persuasive or fruitful in
the way in which they constitute realities. Truth or falsity would be premised on
alternative ideological or theoretical schemes. Such schemes would also be subject to
historical change.