The debates between explaining and understanding and rationalism and reflectivism have produced a dichotomous logic that has fashioned two wings of the discipline: a ‘pro-science’ viewpoint versus an ‘anti-science’ position. Typically, this debate has been framed around positivism as the dominant account of what science is. While positivism and its debate with the anti-science faction of the discipline has been the dominant issue in IR, recent developments in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of social science suggest that this way of framing the issues is unproductive. Significant strides have been taken in the philosophy of science to move beyond positivism: positivism is no longer seen to be the only valid account of science and has been challenged by scientific realism . A comprehensive account of scientific realism is beyond the scope of this chapter; however, the important contribution it makes in terms of social science is to reject any attempt to arrive at a set of clearly defined procedures that fix the content of the scientific method. For scientific realists, each science must arrive at its own mode of operation on the basis of the object domain under study (see, for example, Roy Bhaskar 1978 , 1979 ).