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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Tue, This book intends to develop and apply a new, naturalist realist methodology of science for sociology. It will interest those sociologists who have a passion for the philosophical debates that reside within all sociological theory. The author's goal is to resolve both the "conceptual problems" in sociology (conflicting truth claims and conflicting assumptions) and the "practical problems" of the field (sociology is ideological and it receives inadequate funding). Asevedo contends that naturalist realism is the key.The author's game plan, the classic philosophically realist approach, involves arguing against any fundamental difference between natural and social sciences by softening the assumptions of natural science while toughening up those of the social sciences. Asevedo first argues that natural science theory inevitably offers an imperfect and necessarily incomplete map of the real world. The "lack of reliability of social scientific research" is not a problem because a "naturalist realist accepts the fallibility of all theories." These maps are, after all, intuitive, "abstractions from the phenomena to be accounted for." She follows this assertion Mapping Reality: An Evolutionary Realist Methodology for ie Natural and Social Sciences, by Jane A zevedo. Albany: State University of It is a sterling event when advocates of sharply opposed methods of analysis can address each other with precision. For that reason, this collection of essays represents a forceful step in discussion of comparative method and . macrosocla lnqulry.The eight essays that leacl the collection were conceived as responses and counterresponses to John Goldthorpe's widely circulated criticisms of methods of causal inference in historical sociology. Goldthorpe presents here a stronger, more constructive critique of those methods than he has done previously. It is honed on three issues: Galton's problem of identifying independent cases; the uncertainty in inferring causal regularities from small samples of cases; and the "black box" puzzle of unraveling the social

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