Recent philosophy of science has concentrated on the practices and histories of scientific disciplines rather than concentrating on confirming the validity of scientific knowledge. "New Philosophy of Social Science" examines how such an approach might be applied to the social sciences. Its starting point is three recent social science research programmes: rational choice theory, ethnomethodology and the theory of communicative action. The book considers many basic problems of the social sciences, including the nature of causality, rules, interpretation and social criticism, and provides extensive discussion of current debates. Each problem is solved by reconstructing successful explanations within the research programmes, and each reconstruction is presented as a "pattern" of explanation.