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Science, Salience and Comparative Education: Some Reflections on Social Scientific Inquiry

THE LEGITIMIZING POWER Of the term 'science' is apparently inexhaustible. One might have hoped, with the bankruptcy of crude philosophical positivism and the now recognized triviality and irrelevance of much of the 'scientific' research undertaken by students of man and society in the last two decades,2 that less scientized disciplines like education could bypass the unrewarding methodologism that has marked the fashionable, self-indulgent adolescence of too many of the developing humanities. While there is room in all of the humanities for increased rigor, more systematic, encompassing theory and a growth of comparative analysis, these modest aims often seem to be secondary in the rush to overcome an imagined inferiority,3 to stake out a claim to attention (and perhaps to a greater share of research funding), and to be done forever with complexity, uncertainty and even creativity. The remarks that follow may seem to some simplistic and unoriginal, but so then is the version of science advanced by certain ambitious social scientists to which the essay addresses itself. The comments fall into two parts: the first raising some basic problems in the philosophy of science, the second dealing more concretely with some specific difficulties that attend social scientific inquiry.