The new editors of Theory & Society have a strange new statement of goals with some minor platitudes about what makes for a good theory—e.g., “general, abstract, and amenable to empirical investigation.”
But most of the statement is quite superficial in content and angry in tone.
So, what actually makes for a good “scientific theory”?
I’m just going to copy-paste this list of good principles:
FORMAL VIRTUES
Testability
The theory should express commitments about the world that in principle can be confirmed or falsified on the basis of empirical evidence.
Internal Coherence
The theory should be coherent and should not contain contradictions.
PRAGMATIC VIRTUES
Fertility
The theory should suggest new and exciting avenues of research. It should generate new research questions faster than it can answer them.
Conservatism
The theory should retain crucial bits of what came before and not break too quickly or too dramatically with tradition without a compelling reason for doing so.
AESTHETIC VIRTUES
Simplicity
The theory should posit only those entities, properties, causal relations, etc. that are necessary to account for the phenomenon.
Elegance
The theory should be compact and graceful.
EMPIRICAL VIRTUES
Empirical Adequacy
The theory should accommodate or fail to conflict with well-established phenomena.
Prediction
The theory should make accurate predictions and retrodictions, particularly concerning phenomena that would be surprising were the theory to be false.
Explanation
The theory should explain the phenomena in its domain either by showing how they follow from general laws of nature or by showing how they are produced, given rise to, or maintained by mechanisms.
External Coherence
The theory should be supported by (or at least consistent with) other well-accepted non-rival theories.
Generality
The theory should apply to more phenomena than its rivals.
Unification
The theory should unify diverse phenomena by showing them to be instances of a common pattern.
From: Craver and Darden (2013, pp. 83–84)
Note. Craver and Darden (2013) advocate for a mechanism-based view of scientific explanation which nowadays has superseded the “covering law” approach to scientific explanation (i.e., 20th century positivism). Mechanism-based explanations have been heavily endorsed by “analytical sociology” (e.g., Hedström and Swedberg 1996; Hedstrom 2005); unfortunately, most sociologists see this literature as being exclusively committed to rational-choice theory and agent-based modeling. Read the book!