Abstract
As recent contributions to the social science reformation literature, the books reviewed in this essay articulate rather different visions of social science. Set against the background of the `science wars', incorporating a model of human decision-making, and drawing upon the ideas of Aristotle and Foucault, Bent Flyvbjerg expounds his own `phronetic social science' that highlights context, value rationality and power. Andrew Sayer, on the other hand, targets `defeatist' strains of postmodernism and assesses the concerns of critical social science from an already established theoretical framework: the philosophy of critical realism. A few problems with these books are discussed, including Flyvbjerg's views on cognitivism's failure to investigate `value rationality' and Sayer's linking critical realism with postmodernist anti-foundationalism. The complexities of foundationalism, ignored by both books, are discussed further in a concluding section.
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