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The dominant schools in the philosophy of social science, as they are presented in a variety of articles, textbooks, and monographs, are often broken down analytically along three lines. These schools are given different names but are roughly grouped under naturalist, interpretive, and critical headings. However, there are also a growing number of attempts to go beyond these established categories and offer something novel in the philosophy of social science and Patrick Baert’s Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism can be seen as such an attempt (Baert 2005). His call for a pragmatistphilosophy of social science is in part a reading of a variety of main conceptual positions in the philosophy of social science and a recommendation given the problems and shortcomings of each of the programs he discusses. In these remarks I would like to focus on Baert’s reading and use of pragmatism for his proposed reconstruction of our philosophical understanding of the social...

DOI: 10.1007/s10746-009-9127-z

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