ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the utility of the notion of closed system inquiry in quantitative sociological research. In Chapter 5 I have argued that in natural science the importance of closed system investigation (i.e. experimentation) followed closely from the basic realist premise that events in the physical world are conjoined because of the action of some underlying process. The purpose of experimentation is to provide a context in which the key generative mechanism acts as purely as possible to produce a given regularity. The investigation of the applicability of this idea to a non-experimental science like sociology faces several problems which I need to introduce here in order to establish the framework for this chapter.
