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HUMANITIES 121 archives, as well as taped interviews with many of the key players. Given this, one might have hoped for a more colourful and anecdotal approach to the story, and more details about programming and operations. Siegel's interest is primarily institutional. The author has been poorly served by his editor and publisher. Literally from the first page of the preface to the last page of the index, the reader stumbles over innumerable basic typographical, grammaticat and factual errors. Radio Canada International: History and Development is a welcome first attempt to place the contemporary debate over Canadian international broadcasting in its larger historical context. However, as the preface to the book itself acknowledges, the full story of international broadcasting in Canada remains to be written, and its next chapter remains uncertain. (IAN ALEXANDER) Mario Bunge. Finding Philosophy in Social Science Yale University Press. xii, 432. us $4.5.00 Bunge has long been an outspokencritic of philosophies of science that are out of touch with the content and practice of actual science, philosophies that fit science to preconceived philosophical models or spin out rational reconstructions of the science presented in prefaces, textbooks, stock hlstorical examples, and isolated cases. Nearly twenty-five years ago he argued the case for a resolutely a posteriori program of inquiry to be undertaken by 'amphibious' scholars who 'work in - not just study - some science' and whose 'metascientific' questions arise as much from critical reflection on science as from philosophy (inMethod, Model and Matter, 1973, chapter 1). Finding Philosophy in Social Science is the first of two volumes in which Bunge promises a 'science-oriented' account of social and behavioural research. Such an intervention is especially welcome; all too often the social sciences have been treated as an export destination for philosophical models of science based primarily on physics. Only recently has there begun to appear a body of philosophical work that takes seriously the actual problematics and practices ofthe social sciences, in the I amphibious' spirit recorrunended by Bunge. Finding Philosophy in Social Science begins with a surrunary of areas of common and overlapping interest between philosophy and the social sciences in which Bunge stresses the fundamental role of philosophical presuppositions; whether recognized or not, scientific .inquiry of all kinds, especially social scientific inquiry, depends on ontological assumptions about its subject domain, epistemological corrunitments concerning the nature and grounds of 'authentic' scientific knowledge, and various forms of evaluative (moral) judgment. In so far as social scientists rely on philosophies that are 'obsolete,' or on imprecise concepts and poorly 122 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 articulated assumptions, their substantive research islikely to be compromised ; philosophical analysis that refines this conceptual base can have a practical payoff. Itis this work offormulating a clearlyspecified, I exactifiable' conceptual framework for social science that Bunge takes up in Finding Philosophy. He "begins, in the first of three partsl by defining such basic concepts as what counts as a fact in general and social facts in particular, patterns (causal and otherwise), and systems, and by characterizing in highly abstract terms the components of properly scientific inquiry: problems, data, hypotheses, models and theories, and finally, truth, the goal ofinquiry. In part B, Bunge builds on these latter, epistemological concepts and adds a meta-ethical discussion that establishes grounds for treating science as intrinsically valuable and therefore in need of no further, or utilitarian justification. In the chapters central to this section he sets out an account of key elements. of scientific practice - explanation, the evaluation of knowledge claims that culminates in a multi-factor definition ofscience, 'the system of factual scientific research fields'; he subsequently uses this as" the basis for elaborating the contrast between, on one hand, science and, on the other, technology, non-science, and pseudo-science. In part c, Bunge tums to a consideration of Igeneral philosophy problems in social science' in " the course of which he develops a case for extending to the social sciences the scientific realism of which he is a well-known proponent. Here he uses the conceptual scheme set out in the first two chapters, and the resources ofhis realist theory, to resolve long-standing disputes between holists and individualists (Bunge advocates 'systemism' which...

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