Introduction

This thesis is conceived as a development of recent [1950s and 1960s] work in the philosophy of science and application of this to the metatheory of the social sciences. It seeks to show, by immanent critique coupled to transcendental argument, first, how a model of man – reflecting aspects of positivist social science – underpins empiricist philosophy of science. Second, how empiricist philosophy of science, and the theory of language presupposed by it, contains a critical omission, viz. of the concept of science (and language-using) as a social activity, which largely accounts for positivism’s ‘monistic’ theory of the development of science and ‘deductivist’ theory of its content. Third, how positivism generates a false theory of the practice of science, embodying the assumptions of a ‘completed’ science and an explicitly and operationally defined language, which presupposes a non-general theory of reality as a ‘closed’ world of structureless things acting in an exclusively Cartesian way. In this way the idea is generated of an unstructured and undifferentiated reality at the three levels of language, beliefs and their subject matter with which (in Chapters 1–3, respectively) we are concerned.

In opposition to this it is argued that the world is structured and differentiated over individuals and over time, and that our beliefs are too, and that our language is well designed to cope with this.