Until the early 1960s philosophical thinking about natural science in the English­speaking countries was dominated by the various forms of empiricism, together with Popper's Talsificationist' approach.

Both these traditions were committed to a view of science as radically distinct from other forms of knowledge or belief. It was held that the rules governing collection and analysis of empirical evidence, admitting only testable (or falsifiable) statements into the corpus of scientific knowledge, separating fact from value and so on, made scientific knowledge-claims especially reliable.

However, as the arguments we reviewed in Chapter 3 became more widely accepted, alternatives to the optimistic view of the rationality and objectivity of science were developed. Indeed, that such alternatives were available was an important condition for loosening the hold of the orthodox empiricist accounts of science. The existence and plausibility of these alternatives to empiricism makes it necessary for philosophy of social science to ask new questions about the relationship between natural and social science. The choice is no longer simply between the positivist approach discussed in the previous two chapters, on the one hand, or an anti-naturalistic hermeneutic or interpretivist approach (Chapters 5 and 6) on the other. This chapter reviews and offers also some limited evaluations of a selection of the non-empiricist accounts of science. As we will see, despite their important differences, these are generally united in their emphasis on the socially and historically located character of scientific practice. One such alternative view, critical realism, was devised precisely with the relation of the natural to social sciences in mind, and for this reason we deal with it only very briefly in this chapter, but return to it later (in Chapter 8).