Kim Quaile Hill (PS: Political Science and Politics, July 2004) makes a somewhat nuanced contribution to the appraisal of epistemic controversies in the discipline of political science. His primary concern is for the manner in which erroneous presumptions about the nature of the scientific method in fields such as chemistry or physics have encumbered the effort to instill students with the habit of applying similar approaches in the study of politics. At first, the argument seems directed at uninformed students who do not recognize the social sciences as legitimately “scientific.” Upon further reading, it quickly becomes clear in her elaboration of five common “myths” about science that the more implicit intention of this piece is to challenge the assertion of some in the field that the abstract, variant qualities of political phenomena make these applications somehow inappropriate. The point that he proffers—that the physical sciences are hardly as rigid, finite or objective as some may assume—is certainly a valid one.

Yet, in my view this essay fails to address the more critical issue of how these scientific approaches are actually being represented in some political science graduate programs. From my own experiences as a doctoral student, it has become apparent that, despite Hill's assertions, a certain number of advocates of positivism really believe that the natural and physical sciences are relatively more “intellectually powerful and successful,” and that social science disciplines such as the study of politics are in their infancy because they have only recently begun to adopt their previously established and rigorous standards of inquiry.

Such proponents also seem to suggest that the purpose of the field should be to mirror the ambitions of the physical sciences in establishing universal explanatory constructs, and that only those agendas that are directed at accomplishing this task are truly relevant. This often accompanies the opinion that scholarship that does not proceed from these tenets is only “descriptive” (i.e., the recitation of names, places, and events) or relies on “inductive reasoning” that is incapable of producing logically consistent and empirically supported theory. Those academics that focus on the politics of particular countries or regions are regarded as being especially guilty of such inadequacies. While it may be true that the aims and emphases of these authors may differ from those sought by positive and formal theorists, I find it difficult to accept the assertion that all small-N, discursive writing in comparative politics does not concern itself with systematic analytical logic or applying and developing theory. I would suggest, in fact, that this charge constitutes a myth.

Corollary to this attitude is the belief that those academics who are critical of reifying general, deductive models as the singular goal of the discipline are so only because they, like the Copernican view of the solar system, have been outmoded by superior approaches and are therefore whining about their obsolescence, rather than voicing an informed concern that such a view might mischaracterize or suppress research interests that do not conform. Worse, such a mindset overlooks the distinction between rejecting prior perspectives because they contain ideas that have been repeatedly proven false by subsequent studies, and engaging in what Imre Lakatos referred to as “naïve” or strict falsificationism, in which a theory that does not pass muster in the first trial is quickly discarded rather than salvaged for its potentially novel content which might produce other testable propositions. Positive theorists are of course aware of this difference, but the danger of committing that absurdity is only reinforced by such attitudes.

What is equally troubling about the fallacy that research agendas in the physical sciences are never conditioned or even motivated by subjective biases is that it fosters the incorrect assumption, or myth, among some students that the investigation of normative concerns in politics—what people believe and the role of those beliefs in constituting political association— somehow cannot be objective, or that it simply involves the scholastic promotion of one's individual preferences rather than impartial and critical analysis. A perusal of the work on normative political theory that is regularly published in the APSR or any number of other peer-reviewed journals should demonstrate fairly quickly that this, too, is a falsehood.

Despite my own conversion to empiricism as a result of exposure to and training in statistical and formal methodologies, I refuse to adopt these narrow, unsophisticated impressions of the field. In sum, Hill's concern for the obstacles to training political science students in the intellectual habits of scientific reasoning does not take into account a related problem: the misrepresentation of this reasoning among faculty and students who are committed to one perspective to the exclusion of all others, and insist that the rest of us should reflect similar attitudes if we expect to be taken seriously in the discipline as a whole.