Why has policy science failed to generate a significant body of knowledge capable of playing a significant role in solving the pressing social and economic problems that confront modern urban-industrial societies? An important part ofthe answer can be traced to discredited, but often still operative, empiricist epistemological assumptions. Drawing on newer developments in epistemology and the sociology of science, the discussion outlines a postempiricist conception of policy science designed to address the multidimensional complexity of social reality. As a discursive orientation grounded in particular reason, the approach situates empirical inquiry in a broader deliberative, interpretative framework. More than just an epistemological alternative, the postempiricist approach is offered as a better description of what social scientists actually do in practice. The chapter closes with a brief discussion of the implications of the approach for both a socially relevant policy curriculum and deliberative governance.

The social sciences emerged in the main as an effort to develop a rigorous empirical science patterned after the methods of physics and the natural sciences. Today all but a few diehards are willing to admit that this ‘positivist’ programme has failed to pay off on its promises (Giddens 1995; Lemert 1995; Wallerstein 1996). The social sciences neither have developed anything vaguely resembling the promised causal, predictive ‘science’ of society, nor has their subfield, the policy sciences, been able to provide indisputably effective solutions to pressing social and economic problems (Baumol 1991; deLeon 1988).