ABSTRACT
The implications of the new philosophy of science for the social sciences are radical in some ways, inconsequential in others. What is rejected is positivism's effort to build a view of science stressing the unity of its method, and its search for laws, which the social sciences, if they were to become scientific, would have to emulate. For some realists, especially those concerned with the social sciences, this kind of conclusion is unsatisfactory. While recognising that positivism has been found wanting, they want to assert that science is concerned to describe real structures, entities and processes which constitute the external world. Rightly or wrongly, however, one of the implications that has been drawn is that Thomas Kuhn's arguments deny the possibility of scientific progress. Science does not grow, it simply changes. I. Lakatos's 'rationalist history' of science tries to merge philosophy of science's traditional concerns for the logic of the scientific method with those of the history of science.
