ABSTRACT
Faith in mathematical and statistical methods in the social sciences is surprisingly tenacious in the face of repeated failures to meet positivist ideals of explanation and prediction.1 This chapter makes the case for a post-positivist paradigm of explanation by contesting the causal law paradigm, which privileges prediction as a constitutive element of the explanatory process. Of course, this aim is not new (see Steinmetz 2005). Nevertheless, in view of the tenacity of the positivist impulse in social science to survive in different guises, we need to continue to explore new ways of challenging and engaging with it, as well as new ways of conceptualizing alternatives. As Stephen White points out in the context of political studies, ‘[a]lmost all political theorists and scientists affirm some notion of a post-positivist model of inquiry. But when pushed to explain exactly what is meant by that, both at the theoretical-philosophical level, as well as at the level of concrete research, most of us become relatively inarticulate quite quickly’ (White in Topper et al. 2006: 734).
