Conventional social science inquiry in human communication: Theory and practice

Critics have charged that the methods of conventional social science should be abandoned because they are inherently positivistic and positivism has been rejected. We argue that, although positivism has been discredited, it has never accurately represented the general practice of conventional social science. We also contend that the “hypothetico‐deductive” account of conventional social science is defective. In its place, we propose a “hypothetico‐constitutive” model.