COURSE DESCRIPTION AND OUTLINE

Logics of Inquiry Dr. Lance deHaven-Smith

Fall Semester 2000 Office: Inst of Govt

Office Phone: 487-1870

e-mail: ldsmith@garent.acns.fsu.edu

Web Page:

garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~ldsmith

Required Texts

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization

Patrick Grim, ed., Philosophy of Science and the Occult

T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia

Leo Strauss, An Introduction to Political Philosophy

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Helpful Auxiliary Texts

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers

David John Farmer, The Language of Public Administration

Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination

Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge

The Purpose of the Course

The truth about truth. “Logics of Inquiry” introduces students both to the philosophy of science and to several theoretical traditions in the social sciences, with emphasis on how the latter relate to public administration and policy. The use of the plural--”logics”--is intentional. During the past several decades, debate over how science progresses has led to the conclusion that scientific fields are characterized by competing research “programs,” each having its own research questions, definition of the domain of inquiry, and observation methods. Within a given field, these “logics” cannot be adequately grasped either abstractly or individually. Rather, each must be viewed historically and in relation to the others. Moreover, the boundaries of the domain of inquiry–that is, of the subject matter or “field”–are themselves subject to dispute and are delineated differently within different research traditions. In fact, within each tradition, the boundaries of the field will change over time as research is conducted and new discoveries are made.

These conclusions about science are not easily accommodated by our usual ways of thinking. They require us to reformulate our ideas, not just about scientific methods and theories, but about truth. Our everyday experience of the world teaches us to believe our eyes. Early in its development, science taught us that truth is capable of concealing itself behind our perceptions. When we look at the sun in the morning sky, we see it moving upward, even though we now know that the earth is actually spinning beneath it. This misleading perception of the cosmos is built into our language. We speak of the sun “rising,” “coming up,” “dawning,” etc., not of the earth turning over.

Still, despite our science-based recognition that truth is not self-evident, we have tried to hold onto our notion that somehow knowledge comes straightforwardly from looking and seeing. For the past several centuries, we have thought that, while casual observation, especially when it is clouded by religious or philosophical convictions, may be deceived by appearances, careful observation cannot be, at least so long as we keep an open mind and double-check our conclusions. In fact, it was this idea of a more penetrating form of observation that we had in mind when two centuries ago we began to speak of “science” in contradistinction to philosophy and theology. The “scientific enterprise,” as we refer to it, is envisioned as a form of observation that probes and questions. Science works, we believe, because it interrogates the world roughly. Indeed, the word “science” comes from the same Old English word as “knife”; science is seen as getting at the truth by cutting the world into pieces, one by one. Tellingly, this was the way truth was derived in the law courts of Europe and England during the late Middle Ages, when modern science was born; only testimony given under torture was thought to be fully true.

But, as we shall learn from our readings in this course, conclusions from the philosophy of science point to a very different account of truth. We now know that the world and the truth within it are not our prisoners. Truth runs ahead of us through a dark forest, and we scientists merely track it. We never actually overtake it; we never actually discover all of what the world has hidden within it. There is no scientific field that has been completed, or in which all of the knowledge that can be found has been stockpiled and inventoried, nor is there any expectation that such a state of complete knowledge will ever be attained, even within very specialized subject matters. Each discovery, no matter how great, is only the truth’s footprint; it is not the truth itself, or at least not the final truth. The world, we might say, is at bottom quite mysterious; it is, to describe it in mythological terms, like the strange god Jehovah who conceals his image but who is nevertheless always present.

If science is a hunt for something always hiding, being a good scientist does not mean having an open mind, at least not so open as to be easily changed by a few disappointments. Scientists do not just search once and move to another trail, another line of inquiry. They search and search again; they re-search. When they run into dead-ends; when, in other words, their research does not lead to the findings or discoveries they expected, the line of inquiry is seldom abandoned by those who are trying to follow it through, but is instead redirected in ways intended to salvage the theory by accounting for the previous failure and producing a discovery of another sort. Sometimes this works: consider Kepler’s revision of the Copernican model of the solar system. Copernicus had said the planets move around the sun in perfect, concentric circles, but Brahe’s observations showed that the planets did not fit the expected pattern. Kepler rehabilitated the sun-centered theory of the solar system by realizing and demonstrating that the planets’ orbits are elliptical. To use our analogy of pursuit, Kepler kept on the sun-centered path.

Sometimes, however, these efforts to salvage a line of inquiry prove faulty. An example often cited in the philosophy of science is the now-abandoned field of phrenology, of trying to judge a person’s character by the size, shape, and protrusions of his or her head. In its day, this idea made sense. The brain, after all, is where character resides, and we might expect the brain’s form, as revealed in bumps on the head, to offer clues about the personality of the person on whose shoulders this head sits. We did not know that this path would take us nowhere until we actually took it.

How to educate future scientists. This understanding of science leads to a particular way of teaching students how to become scientists in public administration and policy. If we cannot decide on the truth of a theory simply by testing it in isolation against expected observations; if, instead, we can only evaluate one theory against another in terms of each one’s relative ability to produce discoveries over time; if we can expect scientists to try to explain away troubling findings and reformulate their ideas to account for anomalies; then good science in a particular field requires a thorough knowledge of the history of competing perspectives, including how the ideas underlying a particular approach have been modified and why, what discoveries have been generated, and what anomalies remain.

Students do not need to know everything; they do not need to know the twists and turns of every little trail in the dark forest through which the truth they seek is running. But they do need to know the lay of the land. They need to be very familiar with the main pathways, the field’s most important works, each of which offers a map of the area under study. And they need to know enough to make an informed judgment about which of these maps to use and which path on this map to follow when they themselves enter the forest of truth. For, in their course of study they will be expected to select an area of concentration, and, when they write their dissertations, most will be choosing the direction of their life’s work. Surely, no one wants to spend a lifetime conducting research that turns out to be useless. A wise student seeks guidance from a mapmaker, or at least from someone who has looked at all the maps and who can lay them out to be examined.

In this course, the assigned books and articles are works that, today, are part of the canon in the social sciences. They include one or two of the most important works in each of the major theoretical orientations guiding research across the disciplines. This is true also of the materials we will be reading in the philosophy of science. Students should emerge from this course with a working knowledge of issues in the philosophy of science and of several theoretical traditions in the social sciences. They should be able to articulate their own view of science and of scientific progress; be able to describe the history of the social sciences in relation to public administration and policy; and be able to suggest promising lines of research from different theoretical traditions.

The main objective of the course is for students to learn how to target their research both theoretically and politically. The history of science generally, and of public administration and policy specifically, shows that research must be carefully focused to have significance, and appropriately framed to have influence. We do not need more “facts”--we are choking on facts--we need more important facts.

Organization of the Course

In effect, the course is divided into three parts: (1) an introduction to the problem I am trying to teach you how to deal with; (2) an overview of the solutions or methods that are currently being used on this problem; and (3) an exploration of five theoretical traditions and associated research programs.

The Problem. The central problem we face in conducting research is that no subject matter is self-constituting. We only see what we look for, and, further, what we see must be interpreted. Consequently, we can examine the same domain of inquiry from different theoretical perspectives and literally see different things. How, then, are we to show that a theory is false? How are we to choose between theories? What is the appropriate method for achieving scientific progress? Nietzsche posed the issue by saying that “the truth disappears beneath its interpretation.” He also explained that, if we cannot solve this problem, we face ethical nihilism and political anarchy. In Nietzsche’s words, “If nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

We will begin by reading short excerpts from all of the most important works in the philosophy of science. At the same time, I will use videos and class discussions to sensitize students to the many theoretical premises embedded in all scientific observations, no matter how transparent they may seem. Most of the works we will read in the philosophy of science were written during a relatively brief period--between 1940 and 1970—when a flurry of research and theorizing erupted around questions about science, especially about what differentiates scientific ideas from those that are non-scientific or pseudoscientific.

The most widely read (but not necessarily best) piece from the philosophy of science is T.S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It was in this book that the term “paradigm” was first used in the manner employed frequently today by scientists and non-scientists alike. Kuhn examined the actual history of science, as opposed to speculating about it abstractly (the approach often used in philosophy) to demonstrate that scientific ideas are never disproved and probably never can be. Scientists share a “paradigm,” a basic idea or sketch of their subject matter, and their research involves gathering data to refine and elaborate the shared vision. If a certain research project fails to produce its expected results, the results are ignored or attributed to measurement error or some other factor. Only when a new paradigm is formulated in response to many anomalies will a scientific community shift to a new frame of reference. Kuhn’s research implied that scientific progress does not occur incrementally through a gradual accumulation of facts, but instead proceeds through a series of “paradigm shifts.” A more controversial claim of Kuhn’s was that the criteria by which these shifts could be judged as “progressive” are unclear and perhaps do not exist. Thus Kuhn raised the radical possibility that much of what scientists observe depends on what they assume at the start about the area under investigation.

Still, Kuhn and the others whom we will read in the philosophy of science do not go as far with this idea as they should; they do not consider what it means for our understanding of human beings and their manner of living collectively. The philosophers of science stop short of the full implications of their conclusions, because virtually all philosophers of science have taken natural science as their model of science, to the exclusion of social science. By doing so, they leave themselves partially blind; they can see that observations and observation methods are theory laden, but they do not see that the subject matter and the observer are inextricably bound together. They continue to retain the distinction between the world and our observations of the world, because they consider only the science of the observed, and not also the science of the observer.

Let me explain this, so that you can keep it in mind as you cover the readings in the book by Patrick Grim. Our field is public administration and policy, and in this field, as opposed to, say astronomy or meteorology, ideas about science are not separate from ideas about the subject matter. Indeed, they are one and the same, only stated in different terms. For convenience, let us refer to this situation as “circularity.” On the one hand, views about how to conduct science, about what are the higher and the lower forms of knowledge, about what kinds of questions can be answered and what kinds cannot, etc., necessarily contain premises about human nature, such as how human beings perceive the world, how they decide what is true and what is not, and how the mind reasons from one idea to another. Thus, when we scientists decide what methods we are going to use to study human beings, we are deciding how human beings think and perceive, and yet this is supposedly what we are trying to determine through our research. On the other hand, theories about human nature, which guide the social scientific enterprise, entail commitments regarding the conduct of science. If, for example, human beings are thought to be reasonable by nature and capable of working together cooperatively to achieve common goals, then presumably science can proceed in the same way, that is, with a certain casualness and easygoing cooperation. By the same token, if people are thought to stray easily from the truth, to become frequently embroiled in conflicts over the meaning of events, and to have great difficulty deciding between contending points of view, then obviously science will need rigorous rules, some mechanism to arbitrate conflicting perspectives, and some system to enforce conclusions once they have been reached. All of this is simply to say that epistemological, ontological, psychological, and political assumptions are intertwined and can never really be disentangled.

We can see this in the philosophy of science itself, and in this field’s own lack of theoretical self-awareness. Ironically, while pointing out to us just how theory-based our observations are, the philosophers of science take their own subject matter for granted. They do not wonder at what they themselves wonder about and why. We social scientists, however, have read not just Nietzsche and Weber, but also Habermas and Foucault, and we ask about the asking: Why is it that the philosophy of science emerges in the first half of the twentieth century? Why does it divide along the fault lines between various forms of empiricism? Why does Kuhn seem so plausible to the Americans but not to the British? Why are the British so upset about the conclusions of Kuhn? Why are the Germans and the French absent from the debate?

We can understand the philosophy of science more fully than it understands itself, because we study these things, the human things, and we know that for human beings, questions of truth are always related to questions of power. As the Greeks pointed out to us at the founding of our great civilization, Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, always wears armor. The philosophy of science emerged during, and out of, a great war, in fact, the greatest war, World War II, which itself was a repeat of World War I. Together, these wars were preceded and followed, like a huge earthquake, by a series of lesser but nevertheless important conflicts. Today, with a little distance from this era, we can see that the world is emerging from almost a century of constant warfare, during which almost all people in the advanced nations, including the scientists and the philosophers, were preoccupied with war-related issues. The century-long warfare was about the course to be taken by Western civilization, which is the only civilization built around science, the systematic development of knowledge through theory-driven observation and experimentation.

The issue that arose in the West is unique to the West. It is the question of who should rule the world, and how. This question is unique to the West because Western Civilization alone claims to have found truths that are true for all time and for all people, independent of what may happen to be believed by a particular people or during a particular historical era. The question originated in Greek philosophy, which arose from the belief that most laws are based on arbitrary conventions rather than on what is necessary or best by nature. Greek philosophy proposed that the world should be governed according to nature, and that the laws of nature could be discovered by disciplined argumentation and observation. Eventually, Roman law became the embodiment of this viewpoint, and many of the Roman Emperors thought of themselves as philosopher kings.

The second answer to the question came forward when Hellenistic culture tried to absorb Judaism. Many conquered peoples rebelled against the Romans militarily; the Germanic tribes are the best example. But only the Jews rebelled both militarily and intellectually. The Jews believed in a force higher than nature, a force capable of suspending nature’s laws. They called this force God. When the Romans subjugated the Jews, the Jews pointed to this force in the world; they claimed that it existed in the hearts of humankind, that it had been placed there by God when he breathed life into the human body, and that human beings alone, of all God’s creations, had this spirit which raised them above nature. Eventually, the Jews convinced the people of the West that the laws of Rome should be replaced by the higher laws of God, and Western culture was transformed by what is now called Christianity. For the next 17 centuries, Western Civilization sought to convert the rest of the world to this same religion, if necessary by force.

The question of who should rule the world and how, became open once again with the emergence of modern science, which, from its very beginnings, sought to replace the Biblical account of the world with a naturalistic account. Modern science is not just a science of any old thing. It is a science of issues raised and answered by the Bible: How was the world formed? How was humankind created? How long have human beings been here? How should human beings live? What causes crime? What are the appropriate punishments for crime? What should human beings eat? How long will the world last? What will cause the end of the world?

As Christianity lost its hold on the West, three competing answers were offered to the question of power and truth. The English-speaking nations believed in representative government and universal rights. The Europeans, on the other hand, favored a more autocratic political system. Some wanted a tyranny of labor (communism), others a tyranny of industrialists (fascism). All three claimed science as the basis for their right to impose global order. The warfare of the past century was fought over which of these viewpoints would prevail. Although the military war is over, the intellectual war continues. It appears that, while the English-speaking nations won the former, the Germans may win the latter, just as the ancient Greeks won the cultural war with the Romans after the Romans had defeated them in war.

The philosophy of science is a very important battlefield in the cultural war within the post-Christian West. The battle began as an intellectual effort by the English-speaking countries to deny scientific status to Marxism and fascism. You will see this in the paper by Karl Popper included in the Grim reader. The initial purpose of the philosophy of science was to find “demarcation criteria” for distinguishing between science and pseudo-science.

Solutions: The problem of circularity of theory and observation has been more disconcerting to the social sciences than to the natural sciences because social science is so highly implicated in modern politics and administration. We can see the tight connection between social theory and political regimes in the fact that different sciences of economics (Marxist and Smithist) have led to their own political-economic systems, which still compete globally for adherents. At a more general level, we can change Nietzsche’s aphorism about truth into a political principle: If something is true, then something is false, and certain ways of life are prohibited. This means that any method for establishing truth has social and political implications.

Popper’s effort to deny scientific status to Marxism and fascism, and thus to deprive their political systems of legitimacy, was advanced in The Logic of Discovery. He argued that what distinguishes science from other forms of thought is that scientific propositions are testable, that is, they are capable of being shown to be false. However, Popper’s approach to knowledge, which came to be called “falsificationism,” was eventually rejected by philosophers of science, who pointed out that if an hypothesis is disconfirmed, it is often the observation method or the details of the hypothesis that are questioned, not the underlying theory.

The failure of falsificationism continues to have repurcusions in Western culture, politics, and government. With falsificationism, Popper was trying to hold onto our cultural conviction that there is an objective truth. The political result of the conclusion that truth does not flow easily from observation has been an increasing distrust of mainstream values, traditions, and institutions. Truth is now thought to be perspectival. Culturally, we can see this relativism in the value system referred to as “multi-culturalism.” The latter has benefits, but it also leaves us unable to criticize deviant subcultures, undermines convictions and norms important to social stability, and may lead, ironically, to intolerance rather than tolerance. (See Bloom’s book if you want to explore this further.)

The notional that the world is perspectival, that it can be seen from many different perspectives all of which are in a sense true, is inherent in the term “paradigm.” As you read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, focus on Kuhn’s definition of “paradigm” and his account of the circumstances surrounding a “paradigm shift.” Kuhn uses the word “paradigm” rather than “theory” for an important reason. The notion of a “theory” implies that scientific ideas are static. The image is of fixed ideas being tested and either confirmed or refuted (a la Popper). Kuhn cites the history of science to show that theories actually evolve over time. He uses the term “paradigm” to suggest a research process guided by a general framework or template.

Kuhn’s ideas were criticized and refined in 1965 at an important conference, the proceedings from which are contained in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Sections of some of these papers are contained in the Grim reader. The position presented by Lakatos falls between Kuhn’s and Popper’s; it is a weakened version of falsificationism. Today, if there is a mainstream view in the social sciences about how best to conduct science, it is Lakatos’. He believes that we can evaluate research programs over time, but he is very doubtful about theory-testing as traditionally conceived. This means that it is difficult if not impossible to say in advance whether something is or is not scientific.

Although the search for demarcation criteria failed, it did have the important and very salubrious effect of making social scientists aware that their observation methods are inherently theory-laden. Unfortunately, this conclusion has not yet been adequately processed within the disciplines. Its obvious implication is that we must work hard, not to test a single theory or paradigm, but to consider competing viewpoints and assess their relative ability to generate discoveries and explain anomalies. Where possible, we should also try to bring conflicting perspective into contact. The difficulty of achieving the latter is finding observation methods that are theoretically neutral. As we shall see, each major theoretical orientation (or paradigm) in the social science is at once both a conception of the social world and a body of social scientific methods.

Paradigms. The remainder of the course focuses successively on several important paradigms within social science. Let me describe each of these briefly

(1) Liberalism/pluralism. The dominant research tradition in American social science fits under the broad umbrella of liberalism and its 20th century formulation, pluralism. In this paradigm, the political system is viewed as the arm of civil society, which in theory preceded the formation of government. We see this instrumental conception of government early in the liberal tradition, for example, when John Locke and Thomas Paine speak of government as a convenience established in a state of nature that is supposedly reasonable and orderly without political institutions. More recently, liberalism can be seen in many of the subject matters selected for study in American social science. The civil society is separated out and examine in the fields of economics, sociology, and anthropology. In political science, research is conducted on public opinion, with the obvious assumption that government in some sense serves a pre-existing collective will and that this public, as it is called, is self-forming. Other areas of political science examine the transformation or translation of popular opinion into law via legislative and judicial bodies. Public administration examines the execution of this legislatively embodied collective will. The field of public policy, which did not emerge until the 1950s, seeks to view the entire cycle of public opinion, political organization, legislation, implementation, impact, and evaluation as a more or less rational learning process. We shall examine three exemplars in this tradition: Harold Lasswell's seminal book chapter on the policy sciences, Charles Lindblom’s “The Science of Muddling Through,” and Theodore Lowe's book review in which he presents a typology of policy types.

(2) Phenomenology. Phenomenology is a tradition going back at least to Kant. It examines the subjective experience, and the many implicit premises underlying this experience, in the minds of ordinary people. The central theme of this tradition is to highlight the ways in which people’s seemingly obvious beliefs are actually socially constructed. Today, it is generally agreed that people's attitudes and beliefs are shaped by their social class, childhood, and important life experiences. Phenomenology is interested in tracing the origins of concepts, identity, conceptions of the social order itself, and so on, especially as they relate to evolving social and economic conditions. In the social sciences, phenomenology was initially most closely related to Marxism, as we shall see when reading Karl Manheim. However, this paradigm and associated research tradition has been absorbed into and modified by American social scientist into what could be called a diffusion theory of cultural development. On this view, an elite discourse takes place in which new ideas and concepts are formulated and hammered out. In turn, the ideas are transmitted through various media of communication downward into the class structure. We will see examples of this diffusion model in the works of Philip Converse and John Zaller, who provide exemplars in the study of public opinion. One issue to keep in mind as we read this material is whether Manheim might offer insights into mass opinion that American social scientists have overlooked because of their need to avoid Marxist formulations. One must ask whether some social constructs do not originate, so to speak, from below.

(3) Deconstructionism/Post-Modernism. This research tradition is similar to phenomenology in some ways, but it differs from it in focusing less on the development of ordinary ideas and their dissemination to the masses than on the origins and evolution of technical and scientific concepts. Although modern deconstructionists might have some qualms about claiming Weber as the originator of their tradition, a careful reading of The Protestant Ethic shows that the research program of deconstructionism is Weber's guiding vision. The basic idea of deconstructionism is that scientific or technical concepts develop haphazardly and always remain unstable. This is exactly Weber's account of the origins of capitalism and Protestantism. To get a sense of where this research tradition is headed, we will read Michael Foucault's study of the historical development of modern accounts of mental illnesses. You will see from the readings that Kuhn’s account of science is very similar to Weber’s account of culture and civilization. We may want to ask how science would be reconstructed in light of Foucault’s approach.

(4) Critical Theory. Although critical theory arose contemporaneous with phenomenology and deconstructionism, its role today is to serve as a sort of answer to deconstructionism's relativism. Critical theory argues that human speech has certain transcendental presuppositions that require science and culture to develop according to a certain logic. We will start into this tradition by reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which is a groundbreaking analysis of language. Wittgenstein critiques what he calls the “naming theory of language,” which says that words stand for, or name, objects. Wittgenstein shows that words are not names but instead signals in a context of action. Next, we will turn to Habermas' Legitimation Crisis, which seeks to explain the failure of capitalism to self-destruct as Marx had predicted, despite the fact that the Marxist analysis of capitalism was essentially correct. Habermas argues that all social formations must have a self-justifying account of themselves, because this is inherent in the nature of human beings as speaking creatures. In all cases, however, these legitimations idealize and mischaracterize the social order. People do not see through these socially constructed illusions, because communication, as well as thought, are block by subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) mechanisms of social control. Habermas argues that capitalism survives because its true character has been concealed beneath a complex web of myths and slanted sciences, but that periodic “legitimation crises” occur when contradictions between truth and myth become visible.

(5) Political Philosophy. The last tradition to be taken up in the course is classical political philosophy, a tradition that was resurrected single-handedly in the 1950s by Leo Strauss. Strauss argues that the social sciences in general are misguided in a number of ways and are creating a cultural crisis that may ultimately be the downfall of Western Civilization. To help us understand Strauss's claims, we will read Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy, which is actually the foundation, as Strauss points out, for most of the social science research programs we will have already covered in the course. Its premises can be seen in phenomenology, deconstructionism, and critical theory, although undoubtedly Nietzsche would be appalled at the way his ideas have been transmogrified. Nietzsche identifies two polar elements in Western culture—a spirit of moderation and order, as exemplified by the god Apollo, and a drunken exuberance represented in the figure of Dionysus—and he argues that the tension between them has driven the culture forward but now is waning. Strauss agrees with Nietzsche about there being a tension within Western Civilization, but he traces it to a tension between science and religion, or specifically between Greek philosophy, which becomes science, and the religion of Abraham, which becomes Christianity. The most important claim Strauss makes is that all civilizations are confronted by essentially the same set of questions and challenges, and that Western Civilization has met these questions, at least until Nietzsche, in the one best way. Strauss, too, is concerned about the collapse of the West, but he believes it is coming from science itself.

Course Requirements

In addition to assigned readings and class participation, the course has four requirements: a final exam; two brief essays; and a term paper presenting a literature reviews and a research design.

The final grade will be based upon the exam (20%), the two essays (15% each), the term paper (40%), and class attendance and participation (10%).

The Essays

The essays should be approximately 4 pages long, double spaced, and they should be written in a Baconian style. The latter will be discussed in class. The first essay should answer the following question: What implications do different accounts of science have for scientific norms, graduate student education, politics and government, and the role of science in society? The second essay should answer this question: What is the political theory underlying the combination of disciplines that make up American social science, what strategy of political action is implied by this theory, and how, if at all, is this strategy reflected in Public Administration and Policy?

The Term Paper

The term paper assignment is to draw on one of the paradigms covered in the class to develop a research design in public administration or policy. The paper should include (1) a discussion of the theoretical tradition in relation to public administration and policy; (2) a concise reconstruction of the history of research leading up to your proposed project, including competing research programs, major discoveries, applications, and outstanding anomalies; (3) an explanation of how your proposed project addresses an anomaly, extends a discovery, or provides a critical test; (4) a description of your domain of inquiry, unit of analysis, and observation method(s); and (5) a statement of how the research is likely to be used, and by whom.

Accommodations for Students with Disabilities

If you need accommodation for a disability, please talk with the instructor at the end of the first class.

Course Schedule

August 29 First class

September 19 Distance Learning Class

September 26 First Essay Due

October 31 Second Essay Due

November 21 Term Paper Due

December 5 Last class

December 11-15 Exam Week; See University schedule for exam date and time.

Course Outline and Readings

8/29 Introduction: Overview of the course and course requirements. Introduction of the idea that observation is theory-laden. Video on research issues surrounding the Sphinx.

Read: This syllabus, in class.

9/5 Theory and Observation. Summary of Popper’s falsificationism. Explanation of Kuhn’s notion of a “paradigm” as a specific example of exemplary research which is replicated on new problems. Summary of the shift from an earth-centered to a sun-centered conception of the solar system. Consideration of the nature of paradigms in the social sciences.

Read: Popper, “Conjectures and Refutations,” in Grim, pp. 104-111

T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Feyerabend, “The Strange Case of Astrology,” in Grim, pp. 23-28.

Kelly et al., “Astrology: A Critical Review,” in Grim, pp. 51-82.

Clark and Stalker, “Winning Through Pseudoscience,” Grim, pp. 92-102.

Cooter, “The Conservatism of Pseudoscience,” Grim, pp. 156-169.

9/12 Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge: Continued discussion of Kuhn’s notion of paradigms. Comparison of Lakatos’ idea of a “research programme.” Difficulties in assessing “problem shifts.” Discussion of Feyerabend’s “incommensurability thesis.” Application of these ideas to politics and public administration.

Read: Lakatos, “The Popperian versus the Kuhnian Research Programme,” Grimm, pp. 131- 140.

Baum, “Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos: A crisis of Modern Intellect,” Grim, pp. 170-182.

Feleppa, “”Kuhn, Popper, and the Normative Problem of Demarcation,” Grim, pp. 140-155.

Edward Conze, “Tacit Assumptions,” Grim, pp. 361-370.

Crease and Mann, “The Yogi and the Quantum,” Grim, pp. 302-315.

Brier and Schmidt-Raghavan, “Precognition and the Paradoxes of Caudality,” Grimm, pp. 243-252.

Suggested Reading: Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers