ABSTRACT
Research in political economy is motivated by a wide variety of reasons. Some authors aim at making policy recommendations, others point to successes and/or failures in economic policy. Some works aim at making sense of what happened in the past, while others strive for predicting the future. Some writers derive their research problems from scholarly literature, others from everyday political and economic events. On closer inspection, these and many other motivations can be reduced to a fairly small number of basic goals of scientific inquiry: explanation, prediction, causal attribution and theory building. These have been extensively dealt with in philosophy of science. In this chapter our focus is on what this field of research tells us about these basic goals of scientific work. Admittedly there may be other, more personal goals involved in scholarly work; for example, authors may aim at fostering their academic careers and/or at impressing their colleagues. These motivations belong to the field of sociology and psychology of science which is beyond the scope of the present work.1
