Scientific Realism and the Study of Government

Abstract

When we discuss governmentgovernment we refer to social entities, forces, and relations like these: organizationorganizations, agency, social networksocial networks, culturalculture scheme, social actorsocial actor, normativenormative system systemnormative system, institutioninstitutions, and local cultureculture. The fundamental question of social ontologyontology raised here is this: what kinds of entities, powers, and causal influence do we need to postulate in order to have an adequate theory of government? To take these questions seriously, we must be realistsrealism in the philosophical sense: we must assume that there is a reality underlying the observable characteristics of the thing we are investigating. Scientific realism is the view that developed areas of science offer theories of the nature of the real things and properties that underlie the observable world, and that the theories of well-confirmed areas of science are most likely approximately true. The chapter introduces the reader to the central ideas of scientific realism in application to the social sciences.