Preamble

The thirteen papers reprinted in this book were written over a period of nearly forty years, in response to a variety of requests and opportunities, and draw on a very mixed bag of empirical data. Some are my contributions to symposia I was asked to join, others were written for Festschriften, and a couple were delivered as addresses to conferences. Yet although none was designed as a component in an orderly exposition of some gradually specified theoretical stance, they do all imply, some more strongly than others, a view of the enterprise of social science that differs from the views held by many of my colleagues. This view has gradually become clearer to me as I have argued with them. The time has come to make explicit the many assumptions that I have silently, and to a large extent unconsciously, made in writing these papers. In this introduction I try to meet the challenge; in particular I endeavour to present a picture of social inquiry that takes account of the inherent differences between the natural and the social branches of science, and that distinguishes social science from the humanities.

In building up this picture, my starting-point is the practice of social science, rather than the philosophy of social theory from which so many other views have been derived. I am concerned with ‘the social sciences, as actually practised and identified in contemporary societies’, as Gellner (1984: 567) puts it. In this way I am following my own intellectual development, for, like many social scientists of my generation, I began making empirical inquiries about the social world blissfully untroubled by questions of ontology and epistemology.