The Scientific Status of Political Science—another Comment

It seems odd that in 1972, political scientists still find it necessary to take the scientific pulse of their discipline, to exhort, cajole, and recommend, in the manner of a reproving family physician, their colleagues to ‘pay more serious attention to what the scientific study of a phenomenon entails’. Such an injunction is doubly regrettable when accompanied by a naive and confusing analysis of concept formation and confirmation in science, an account sure to encourage a dogmatic epistemology among social scientists who, in other circumstances (specifically, the opportunity to devote scarce time to careful study of the voluminous literature in the philosophy of science), would likely identify themselves with a more catholic epistemology and methodology. Mr Ake, in his account of the logic of scientific inquiry, glosses major issues in the philosophy of science, and, as a result, tacitly represents the community of scholars in the latter discipline as univocal with regard to fundamental issues of language, logic, and epistemology. I shall briefly try to state more of the case than Mr Ake has done, in a manner so that I might not too be accused of glossing (or, at least, of glossing with a minimum of distortion) the major issues he has raised in his note.