Philosophy of Science

Conceptual Overview

Debates in the philosophy of science can be organized around two sets of concerns: ontology asks what entities exist in the world; epistemology asks what kind of knowledge one can justifiably hold about those entities. One might imagine that the philosophy of science might have now reached a mature state in which there are some rather clear answers to each of these questions, but this is not the case. Philosophers of science still argue fiercely about ontological and epistemological questions.

These debates are often captured in terms of opposing positions on ontology and on epistemology. These tend to fall out in a set of binary divisions or dualisms, in which opposing positions are located in relation to each other. Hence, ontology is a contest between realism, which asserts the existence of entities in the world, and antirealism or idealism, which asserts that entities are not obvious brute facts but are the result of our ideas [Page 1244]about them. Epistemology is a contest between empiricism or positivism, which asserts that true knowledge of entities can be obtained through rigorous empirical investigation, and antipositivism or conventionalism, which sees truth as a conventional agreement within a community at any one time about what is “true.”

Sometimes claims about ontology and epistemology are grouped together, so that on one side we have objectivism, which involves ontological realism and epistemological positivism, and on the other side subjectivism, which involves ontological antirealism and epistemological antipositivism. Whichever position one holds, whichever way one carves up the various positions and whichever labels one gives them, the philosophy of science is almost always organized around this kind of division or opposition. Given that one will have an ontology and an epistemology whether one likes it or not, and given that there will always be others who will hold a different ontology and epistemology, there will always be some work to do in justifying the positions that one takes.

Though philosophy of science might appear to be an esoteric or philosophical matter, questions of the philosophy of science have in fact been central in the history of organization studies and in defining its nature today. We can see this if we consider, for example, the debates over bureaucracy following World War II. At this time, which was crucial to the emergence of organization studies, important studies by Peter Blau, Alvin Gouldner, Philip Selznick and others sought to elaborate a conception of organization, and in particular of bureaucratic organization, that built on the work of Max Weber, who at the start of the 20th century had outlined his sociological conception of bureaucracy. These later studies, which were typically case studies or ethnographies of large organizations, generally established their importance by objecting to the speculative nature of Weber's observations on organization and instead offered themselves as better grounded in empirical evidence gathered in a systematic fashion.

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