Book Cover -- Title -- Contents -- Preface to the second edition page -- Introduction -- Knowledge in context Some misconceptions about knowledge -- Knowledge, work and communicative interaction -- The relationship between subject and object -- Some implications of subject-object relations -- Versteh -- Theory, observation and practical adequacy Knowledge and object -- 'Theory' -- The conceptual mediation of perception -- Sense and reference and the conceptual and the empirical -- Truth and practical adequacy -- -- Theory and method I: abstraction, structure and cause Abstraction and structural analysis -- Structure, agency and reproduction -- Contentless abstractions -- Generalization -- Causation and causal analysis -- Concl -- Theory and method II: types of system and their implications Stratification and emergent powers -- Closed and open systems and regularities -- Laws in science: causal and instrumentalist -- Prediction -- Rational -- Some influential misadventures in the philosophy of science Atomism and the problems of induction and causation -- Necessity -- The accusation of 'essentialism' -- The limits of logic -- Popper and deductivism -- Quantitative methods in social science Quantification -- Mathematics: an acausal language -- Accounting and quasi-causal models -- 'Theoretical' and 'empirical' models and closed and open systems -- The role -- Verification and falsification Philosophical criticism -- Existential hypotheses -- Predictive tests -- Causal explanations and explanatory tests -- Interpretations -- beyond evaluation? -- Conclusions -- Popper's 'falsificationism' -- Problems of explanation and the aims of social science Explanation and the question of difficulty: I orthodox conception -- Research design: intensive and extensive -- Explanation and the question of diffic.

Appendix: Notes on realism, writing and the future ofmethod in social science Narrative versus analysis -- The neglect of description -- The influence of rhetoric -- Notes and references -- Bibliography -- Index.