Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism: Reunifying Political Theory and Social Science

The author does a good job of summarizing clearly the main thrust of MacIntyre's and Taylor's critiques of naturalism, and the relevance of those critiques for social and political theory. I have read a fair amount of MacIntyre, almost everything by Taylor, and a lot of secondary literature. Despite these philosophers' relatively clear style of writing, they are still often misread in important respects. This author doesn't misread them and clearly grasps the import of their work. It was a delight to read--almost finished it in one sitting.

This is a good intro to the thought of both MacIntyre and Taylor. It covers a variety of topics in a clear and adequate way, yet it lacks a more in depth analysis of the construcción of a new social science, perhaps the most important issue on the authors agenda.

This book is a decent introduction to some of Alasdair Macintyre's and Charles Taylor's ideas. However, as a defense of "anti-naturalism" it is decidedly lacking. The book does nothing to expand or develop Macintyre and Taylor's ideas in response to various objections and responses to their work in the last fifty years, or developments in the philosophy of science and social science. One serious problem with Macintyre and Taylor's ideas, which Blakely never addresses, is that they have an extraordinarily narrow and stilted view of the natural sciences--much more so than the logical empiricists. For example, Macintyre argues that genuine scientific laws must have well-defined scope conditions and employ the universal quantifier. However, laws in the natural sciences may lack these conditions--Carl Hempel documents numerous examples of unspecified "provisos" in the natural sciences in his paper "Provisoes: A Problem Concerning the Inferential Function of Scientific Theories." Taylor similarly thinks that "brute" data is possible in the natural sciences, which ignores both the theory-dependence of observation and the irrelevance of data's "bruteness" for science to function as a knowledge-generating practice. The examples from political science that Macintyre and Taylor criticized, such as Amond and Verba (1963), are almost three generations out of date by now, and Blakely does nothing to update them.At best, Macintyre and Taylor showed that there are challenges for social science that may not confront some of the natural sciences, and perhaps some ways in which the social sciences will never be like e.g. Newtonian physics. Newtonian physics isn't like most of science, however, and Macintyre and Taylor's argument doesn't tell us where the limits of social scientific explanation lie. This is hardly reason to give up criteria such as empirical precision, theory-building, and responsiveness to evidence in the social sciences and go back to telling stories.