ABSTRACT
We saw in the previous chapter that the Achilles heel of the positivist approach to social science was the need for a justification for the metatheory. The only cogent justification lay in the claim that positive science leads to an ability to understand and thereby control our social environment. This, though, necessarily involved a causal explanation of the social world, and explanations solely in terms of observable regularities were insufficient for this. Causal explanations invariably involved recourse to theories.
