Some of the critical issues that seem to divide political science as a discipline into factions turn on what science is understood to be. First, the suggestion that "unscientific" methods are essential to political inquiry requires that we have at least some understanding of what "science" might be--and secondly, the identification of "behavioralists" seems, generally, to turn on the disposition of some political scientists to attempt to employ the methods of science in their work. Science, and the methods of science, should be, therefore, the first objects of analysis if one wishes to assess the cognitive merits of the "behavioralist-non-behavioralist" dispute.
The effort to unpack the concept "science" and to offer a summary account of "the scientific method," is beset, of course, with innumerable difficulties. The term "science" obviously has persuasive force.... It has also enjoyed a long history. Its specific cognitive meaning is, as a result, difficult to isolate, not only because of the persuasive employments of the term, but because the term has had a long and confused philological history....
Once this qualification is made, it can be argued that the term "science" has taken on a relatively (but not undisputed) specific contemporary meaning: it refers to those procedures, which, as a matter of historic fact, have provided a systematically articulated and comprehensive body of maximally reliable knowledge claims that afford men survival and adaptive advantage by affording explanatory and predictive leverage. Such an explication thus includes both a consideration of "science" as process (that is to say, the term refers to methods and procedures invoked to provide for maximally reliable truth ascriptions) and "science" as product (that is to say, the term has as referent that corpus of linguistic entities to which truth can be ascribed with maximal domain variant reliability). The former is commonly spoken of as the "scientific method," and the latter "scientific knowledge." Both are historic products and both are historically relative.
What this implies is that neither specific observational nor experimental procedures, nor methods of generalization, nor specific logicodeductive strategies, nor any collection of procedural assumptions or presuppositions, nor any technique of measurement or instrumentation is absolutely essential to the method of science. Furthermore, no single existential assertion delivered by scientists, nor any conjunction of such assertions, is absolutely essential to the corpus of science. Science is neither a specific collection of procedures nor a specific body of essential truths. Every truth warranting procedure and every truth claim remains, in principle, subject to review--none are specific to science.
...
The one feature we have gradually come to realize as constitutive of science in whatever form it has taken, a feature pervasive of science both as process and product, is its necessary concern with reliability. Without reliability argument and deliberation cannot proceed. Knowing anything becomes impossible.
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Our preoccupation with reliability is dictated by the generic human concern with adapting to, and controlling, our complex and changing environment. We find it necessary to anticipate futures--and we do that best by exercising the imagal trial-and-error techniques, and their subtending rationale, that we identify as rational behavior....
[pp. 21-23; all emphasis his]
What I think is interesting here is that science is given such a purely procedural definition: science is X, where X is whatever set of methods and procedures that have generated the most reliable set of knowledge claims that help us predict stuff and adapt to our world. There's no a priori constraint on what those methods or knowledge claims could be--indeed, Gregor says elsewhere that "[i]f intuitions, mystic insights, the dialectic, phantasy, or whispered intelligences from God proved to be maximally reliable in permitting men to empirically adapt to and effectively control their environment, they would become, ipso facto, constituent procedures of science." In other words: science is whatever gets results, dammit!
While the definition of science is in this view procedural, it is still the case that all science candidates must output empirically testable results--otherwise, you would have no common measuring stick by which to compare the reliableness of the different candidates. So a possible science in which you ask the High Priest for the correct answers is permissible, so long as the High Priest is giving predictions that can be verified in an uncontroversial way later on.
Now, Gregor is not coming up with all this in a vacuum--he has a specific purpose in mind, which is to show that--because science has no immutable, first-order claims, it therefore cannot be considered an "ideology". Gregor identifies as an essential feature of ideologies that they have one or more first-order claims that one cannot negate while still claiming to be an adherent of that ideology. For example, one cannot negate that some races are superior to others while still claiming to be an adherent to National Socialism--thus, National Socialism is an ideology. Since science only contains a second-order claim (that is, a claim that is not directly about objects in the world, but rather, one which is about claims that are about objects in the world--in this case, the reliability of such claims)--that science is X, where X is the most reliable set of methods etc.--it contains no individual substantive first-order claim that is truly immutable. It is in this sense forever self-correcting and irrigid--and so definitely not an ideology.
But I wonder if Gregor makes a hash of things in this defense of science. Indeed, it seems that by defining a science solely according to its empirical track record, it collapses the distinction between method and theory. Let's say that we have set of scientific methods M that taken together define a science, and that, adhering to M, scientists generate a set of theories T. In the normal course of events, the scientists would conduct empirical tests of all the various theories in T, and the ones that yielded reliable predictions would be kept as "(provisionally) true" and the ones that yielded bad predictions would be scrapped as "false"--and over time more theories (generated in accordance to M) would be added to T and so on. But now if we face the question as to the legitimacy of M--of the methods that generated all these theories--Gregor would have us apply the exact same criterion to M as we did to the theories in T, namely, that M yields reliable predictions.
But this seems confused. In the first place, it's odd to think of "reliability" as a property of M, when in fact M is not itself making a set of predictions about the world that are true or false--M generates theories that make these predictions. So when Gregor defines science as "those procedures, which, as a matter of historic fact, have provided a systematically articulated and comprehensive body of maximally reliable knowledge claims", he is moving too fast and skipping a step: the procedures that define a science do not themselves "provide" "knowledge claims", they provide testable theories; and it is these theories, once tested, that provide the knowledge claims. Perhaps we can infer that Gregor meant that science is the set of procedures that, as a matter of historic fact, has provided the most successful theories. However, this understanding presents a number of difficulties, chief among them being: what is the point of a scientific method, and what work is it doing for us? Certainly we could not, on the basis of the methods it utilized, dismiss a priori any questionable undertaking that called itself science, since any set of methods is fair game: we would have to wait for this set of methods to to churn out theories over a period of time sufficient for it to be deemed a "historic fact" that the set of methods did not yield a "comprehensive body maximally reliable knowledge claims". In other words, a scientific method, on Gregor's view, can only be evaluated a posteriori. But in this, a scientific method becomes functionally equivalent to what Gregor elsewhere describes as a "methodology"--a specific approach within a science that yields a specific kind of data and prediction, and whose value is determined by the quality of the predictions it makes (for example, in sociology there may be different methodologies--some qualitative, some quantitative, whatever--for determining the quality of life of a class of people, but these methodologies are all consistent with the same scientific method).
Indeed, I was under the impression that the whole point of defining a "scientific method" was so that we could impose some a priori constraints on just what kinds of theories were allowable, so that we could a) situate science in general in a broader philosophical/epistemological framework (or, put another way: as a philosopher, I should be able to talk about science such that it is abstracted from any particular claims it makes, in case I want to have a discussion about, say, the general difference between scientific and ethical claims), but more importantly , b) provide a procedural guarantee that the sort of knowledge claims that the science ultimately produces are of a kind consistent with science qua "human concern with adapting to, and controlling, our complex and changing environment". Now, about (a), don't get me wrong: it is not as if Gregor's definition leaves philosophers with nothing to say about science--he still allows it to be defined such that it must be about generating empirical claims, and science is necessarily tied to a general human activity (adapting to the environment, etc.). But it does seem weird that in a discussion about the rules of induction, you could not, by Gregor's lights, claim to necessarily be talking about something that is relevant to science (the "scientific method" could, after all, be nothing more than writing down the predictions of the High Priest). With regards to (b), it may be true that Gregor's conception of "science as maximal reliableness" is sufficient in most cases to convince us that its claims are of a common type--a type of claim that is characterized by its being in some essential way concerned with helping humans to adapt to their environment. However, the problem is that--while in lots of cases the notion of reliability is straightforward because theories are put to work making predictions--in some cases, a theory is put to work to explain something that happened in the past, and direct empirical testing of such theories is difficult or impossible. For example, cosmologists posit theories about how the universe first unfolded, or evolutionary biologists hypothesize about the sequence of events that led to life developing on earth. In these cases, a theory is created to retroactively explain historical evidence--and so any theory consistent with the evidence must be considered as "reliable" as any other, no matter what method that theory was generated in accordance with. So it is precisely in these cases where the idea a scientific method actually does some useful work: it brings unity to predictive knowledge claims and historical ones by bringing them under the same criterion, not of reliability--which isn't really applicable to historical claims--but of the procedural criterion of having been generated by the proper, "scientific" method. And with this in place, we are thus free to rule out historical (as opposed to predictive) theories a priori that otherwise would be impossible to rule out for lack of the ability to test their reliability.
(As a quick addendum, let me just add that, really, this idea of a One True A Priori Scientific Method is required if we are make any sense of science as something that is concerned with the human activity of controlling and adapting to our environment. The crucial distinction to keep in mind is between that of a science and that of a history. A history is just a straightforward record of stuff that happened, and so of course there's no a priori constraint on what a history might contain besides that it's logically consistent--so for example, there is nothing wrong with a history in which God parts an ocean or where the universe is created 4000 years ago. Its just data, which--true or false--is always admissible as data, as a history. But a scientific theory is not a record, and it is not simply a set of data--it is something like a schematized conditional claim of the form "if X occurs under conditions Y, then Z will occur". So when a cosmologist theorizes that the big bang occurred, properly speaking there is the scientific claim that goes something like "when you have a universe that is infinitely dense, then it will rapidly expand outwards", and, distinct from this, a historical claim that goes something like "15 billion years ago, the Big Bang happened". Of course, anyone who believes that it is acceptable for scientific claims to be used as the basis for the actual Historical Record of the World would have no trouble accepting all of what the cosmologist says, but someone who had, say, certain theological commitments could consistently accept the cosmologist's scientific claim while rejecting the cosmologist's historical claim. But, crucially, what our theologian cannot do is reject the cosmologist's scientific claim (except on scientific grounds)--nor can the theologian ever even submit a scientific theory in which a deity causes something to happen. Such a theory would not be admissible. Why? Because the introduction of divine causation breaks the schema in virtue of which scientific claims are tools of human adaption to the environment (you can use a conditional statement to help you successfully do stuff in the world; but you can't use raw data to help you do anything in the world...although you do need it to generate those helpful conditional statements). You cannot posit "if God comes down from the sky when the Israelites are on the run, then He will part the Red Sea", precisely because God doesn't necessarily act in a rule-like way--he acts according to His own divine will! And indeed, isn't it quite appropriate that a supreme deity who has total control over the universe and all of Creation would be ruled out a priori from a system of generating knowledge claims that purports to be an extension of humankind's dominion over its environment? How could God come under the dominion of humankind?)
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