The Rationalitätstreit Revisited: A Note on Roth’s “Methodological Pluralism”

Abstract

Roth’s analysis of the Rationalitätstreit (i.e., the debate[s] about rationality) stands as one of the major works on how the debate affects a wide range of issues in the philosophy of science and the social sciences. His principal thesis is that the debate may be seen as a series of Quine-type “translation manuals,” exhibiting characteristics of paradigms (following Kuhn 1970) that can be treated as testable scientific theories by adequate empirical tests. The author argues that Roth’s notion of empirically testing translation manuals is not possible given his criteria. He suggests a clearer definition of “methods” and develops a case whereby translation manuals can be adequately tested within an inductive model—but with rather severe restrictions. Implications are indicated.