ABSTRACT
Theory is crucial to how we understand the social world for three reasons. First, there exists general agreement throughout much of the social sciences that ‘a theory of truth based upon correspondence with an external reality’ (paraphrased from Hooker 1987: 33) is unavailable. This is the basis upon which positivism rests, at least in its unreconstructed form. Instead, the current state of thinking is that science (natural as well as social) does not explain the reality of the nature of things but rather that it artificially imposes structure by way of theory upon ‘facts’ or data which in turn enables us to understand the world. If we accept this position, theory becomes crucial to understanding the world. As Waltz argues (1997: 913-14), theory is the primary tool with which social scientists explain a ‘circumscribed part of reality of whose true dimensions we can never be sure’. King et al. (1994: 8) make a closely related point when they argue that the task of science is to make descriptive and causal inferences ‘beyond the immediate data to something broader that is not directly observed’. Accordingly, if we accept this epistemological position, relying upon direct questioning of policy-makers in order to recount the ‘truth’ of what happened without any theoretical basis is a flawed exercise.
