The philosophy of social science has played an important role in the formation, development,
and practice of IR as an academic discipline. Often issues concerning the philosophy of social
science are described as meta-theoretical debates. Meta-theory does not take a specific
event, phenomenon, or series of empirical real world practices as its object of analysis,
but explores the underlying assumptions of all theory and attempts to understand the
consequences of such assumptions on the act of theorizing and the practice of empirical
research. One way to think about this is in terms of theories about theories.