ABSTRACT
Whether their focus is basic or applied research, most international affairs and comparative politics analysts tend to fall somewhere between two poles of a continuum. At one extreme are the “traditional” approaches which invoke wisdom and intuition as guiding tenets; at the other pole are stri-dent methodology-driven orientations which substitute abstruse terminology and arcane techniques for substantive expertise and relevance to the “stuff” of politics. These two poles--the Delphic oracle and the politically naive devotee of statistics, mathematics, and computers--are caricatures, but it is nevertheless possible to discern manifestations of these ideal types in the literature on the philosophy of social science research and in actual research applications.
