I have argued that there are good reasons to seek greater methodological unity in the social sciences, but that existing approaches do not fully achieve this objective. I shall take a nuts-and-bolts approach to this problem. What makes a work of social science true, useful, or convincing (“scientific”)? Why do we prefer one treatment of a subject over another? What reasons do we give when we accept or reject a manuscript for publication? These are the sorts of ground-level judgments that define the social sciences and their various subfields. These are the points of agreement and disagreement that we encounter in the normal course of a day, in interaction with students, colleagues, and in our own work. This is our local knowledge.

How, then, can we systematize this ubiquitous, and often unstated, set of intuitions? Are there unifying threads that tie our intuitions together into a broader framework of norms and practices across the social sciences? Can local knowledge be transformed or reorganized into general knowledge – without losing contact with the workaday tasks of academic inquiry? These are the questions that guide this project of methodological reconstruction.

It is a bottom-up approach, by and large, though it builds on the prodigious literature of social science methodology. Naturally, it is highly synthetic endeavor.