Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and the Social Sciences

by Richard W. Miller

Book Overview

In this bold work, of broad scope and rich erudition, Richard Miller sets out to reorient the philosophy of science. By questioning both positivism and its leading critics, he develops new solutions... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691020450
• ISBN13: 9780691020457
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 628 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Not bad

In this book Richard Miller offers an ``adequate'' scientific explanation of phenomena as an alternative to the positivist ``covering law'' model (Hume, Hempel, etc.), which is still dominant among practicing social scientists today despite that it had already been severely criticized and rejected in the field of philosophy. Miller claims that the persistent popularity of positivist methodology is due to the absence of a genuine alternative method to replace good-old positivism. The first part criticizes of the covering law model (i.e explanation by law-like regularity), which requires any valid law (1) to be universal in its application, (2) to be empirically verifiable, and (3) to reduce causality to mere statistical correlation.After explaining how these criteria are actually irrelevant to scientific theory, Miller develops his alternative model of ``causal mechanism,'' which, without falling into hermeneutics, adequately explains causal phenomena. It may not be an easy read for students without the background of philosophy. After all the title of the book is _Fact and Method_; it reminds me of the likes of _Truth and Method_ and _Being and Time_. (^_^; Like the previous reviewer I read this book for Quantitative Method course tpp. We were also assigned Elster's ``Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences'' and other like short articles with it. Elster's should be easier to understand, but if you want to know the more rich, philosophical foundation of their methodology, you've got to read _Fact and Method_.