Empirical Enterprise Research Articles

Beyond Methodolatry: Two Conceptions of Relations Between Theory and Research in Research on Teaching

Two views of the relationships between theory and empirical research are described as Aristotelian and Galilean, following Cassirer 1923) and Lewin (1935) . The two conceptions of theory and research differ with respect to the nature of the conceptual models they employ and the roles and expectations they hold for empirical research. These matters are discussed in the context of research on teaching. The Aristotelian versus Galilean distinction is held to be more fundamental to the conduct and interpretation of such research than other, more frequently discussed contrasts such as descriptive/explanatory, qualitative/quantitative, discovery/verification, or positivist/constructivist. The central claim is that all extant programs of research on teaching inappropriately construe research on teaching as primarily an empirical enterprise, leading to an overemphasis on methodology.

Toward a Methodology for Mere Mortals

Statistical Models and Shoe Leather will be very difficult for most quantitative sociologists to accept. It goes to the heart of their empirical enterprise and in so doing, puts entire professional careers in jeopardy. It also gives no comfort to thoughtful empirical sociologists who make little use of numbers, since the issues raised go well beyond the uncritical use of regression routines in SAS or SPSS. What is needed, therefore, is a brief series of clarifications and expansions that anticipate efforts to wriggle off Freedman's hook. It will also prove useful to suggest other issues for which a lot more thought is necessary.

Causality as an Overarching Principle in Physics

In the recent philosophy of science literature, several authors have stressed the many-faceted and evolving nature of the scientific enterprise. Dudley Shapere (1984, pp. xiii-xv) characterizes a central weakness of the logical empirical program as its focus on the formal logical structure of scientific theories to the exclusion of the process by which these theories were constructed, thus ignoring the possibility of fundamental changes in the nature of science itself. He has stressed the importance of formulating a view of science based on an accurate description of actual scientific practice, which includes attention to how the meaning of a scientific term is rooted in this evolving matrix of practice. Janet Kourany (1982) has attempted” …to lay the foundations for a purely empirical method for establishing a theory of science” (p. 526). In arguing that the a priori has no place in such an approach and in responding to the charge that such an empirical method cannot produce an absolutely fixed set of criteria, Kourany (p. 546) reminds us of Popper’s observation about another empirical enterprise and suggests that we apply this same admonition to our expectations for an empirical method of constructing a theory of science itself.

From the Editor

The early social scientific effort to understand law and the legal system is largely associated with attempts at grand theory. The names of Durkheim and Weber, in particular, stand out, but Maine, Pashukanis, Timascheff, and others all offered encompassing perspectives. The renewed interest in law and social science, which began in the United States in the 1950s and came to flourish in the sixties and seventies, has had just the opposite character. It has been largely an empirical enterprise. In tracing the rebirth of social scientific interest in law and the legal system, one speaks not of theories but of studies; for example, Schwartz's (1954) research into the legal orders of two Israeli communities, Ball's (1960) study of rent control violations in Honolulu, and Macaulay's (1963) inquiry into non-contractual relationships among businesses.

Political Science and the Uses of Functional Analysis

Political science, as an empirical enterprise, shares with the other behavioral or social sciences at least one characteristic feature: partial formalization. For a science to most reliably discharge its two principal functions, explanation and prediction, statements embodying acquired knowledge must be systematically organized in subsumptive or deductive relations. Minimally, a set of such systematically related propositions, which include among them some lawlike generalizations, and which can be assigned specific truth value via empirical tests, is spoken of as a theory. A theory, in a substantially formalized system, includes as constituents (1) an uninterpreted or formal calculus which provides for syntactical invariance in the system, (2) a set of semantic rules of interpretation which assign some determinate empirical meanings to the formal calculus thereby relating it to an evidential or empirical base, and (3) a model for the uninterpreted calculus, in terms of more or less familiar conceptual or visualizable materials, which illustrates the relationships between variables in structural form, an alternative interpretation of the same calculus of which the theory itself is an interpretation.The virtues of standard formalization need hardly be specified. For our purposes here it is sufficient to indicate that formalization seeks to satisfy the minimal requirements of any serious knowledge enterprise: to provide for syntactical and semantic invariance without which reliable knowledge is simply not conceivable. The language shift, exemplified in any cognitive effort, from ordinary to specialized language style is the consequence of attempting to reduce the vagueness, ambiguity and tense obscurity that afflicts common speech.

The very idea of a social science

In The Idea of a Social Science Winch, argues that, sociology is more properly conceived as a branch of philosophy than of empirical science. Winch falls victim here to the Humean assimilation of the empirical to the generalizable. He notes that much of our talk about social practice is in terms of conventions, so that explanations of social action can be given without recourse to statistical or experimental findings. But such talk depends nonetheless on the accuracy and detail with which the situations in which actions occur are‐ recorded, and this is surely an empirical enterprise. It is the misleading conception of sociology as a discipline, characterized by common procedures, that leads Winch to espouse the assimilation of sociology to conceptual inquiry. We need to see instead that sociology embraces a group of questions and subjects so loosely connected that it would be mistaken to speak of, and idle to project, a procedure common to all of them.