POSITIVISM, SCIENTIFIC REALISM AND POLITICAL-SCIENCE - RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

During recent decades in which political scientists have been debating positivism, the official philosophers of science have made a radical about-face and declared logical positivism defunct. The philosophers o f science have adopted a new metaphysic, scientific realism, which tur ns away from the positivistic emphasis on universal laws, prediction a nd the legitimation of theories through the falsification process; and emphasizes instead scientific models, attention to the mechanisms and processes that underlie observed behavior, and the search for rigorou s, complete explanations of scientific events. This shift at the metap hysical level puts several issues in political science in a new light because the scientific realist approach makes it possible to be 'scien tific' without being a positivist in the traditional sense. This creat es new options and new challenges for rigorous political science resea rch, and clarifies existing methodological discussions.