Abstract
O NCE UPON A TIME (not so long ago), presenting a social science perspective on personal narratives would have been a relatively uncomplicated exercise. The editors of Signs would have been able to find an author who, despite her attachment to a particular discipline like sociology or political science, held a set of assumptions about the nature of reality, knowledge acquisition, and truth so widely shared among social scientists that editors, readers, and author alike could have felt confident that the product reflected a "typical" or "representative" social science viewpoint. The resulting essay would have been based on (at least) the following assumptions: that the subject matter of interest to social science-that is, social reality-is as hard or concrete as the physical objects studied by botanists or geologists and is "out there" waiting to be revealed; that social science acquires systematic knowledge by adhering to rules of hypothesis testing, controlled (unbiased) observation, and the replication of previous research results; and that by using the prescribed methodology, social science arrives at Truth, which consists of lawlike generalizations that take the form, "Given conditions A, B, and C, when X occurs, Y will follow," laws that make possible the prediction-hence, the control-of events.
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