The Empirical Counter-Revolution? Jaakko Kuorikoski 1 Methodological anti-naturalism is dead - at least in contemporary philosophy of science. Winchian arguments claiming that explanation of human action and social phenomena is a conceptual impossibility, an illegitimate application of the grammar of the natural sciences to the normative sphere of rule governed meaning, have not gained much traction in contemporary philosophies of language, mind, or explanation. Arguments from the centrality of free agency in the understanding of human experience, sometimes combining existential phenomenology and philosophical anthropology to hermeneutic ideas, seem similarly limited in appeal. These arguments have been unable to move the compatibilist consensus in philosophy of science, which regards the inconsistency of free will and causal explanation as a naïve conceptual confusion and leaves no room for any residual notion of agent causation. The apparent lack of strict laws of human behavior and societies (see Reiss this volume) is no longer seen as an insurmountable obstacle for causal explanation. The causalist consensus is now further bolstered by the currently popular theories of causal explanation and discovery which are not founded upon a nomothetic ideal of science. Also the locality and contextuality of social knowledge that motivated Clifford Geertz’s anti-naturalism is now being tackled with these new ideas of causality, mechanisms and extrapolation. Even the inherently value laden nature of social science has now been accommodated within broader conceptions of scientific objectivity capable of acknowledging the fact that scientific knowledge in general is a fundamentally human product and thus its production and even evaluation legitimately subject to various social and political considerations. Finally the old accepted truism that social sciences are necessarily non-experimental has been rendered decidedly obsolete by the widespread adoption of laboratory and field experiments. Besides such purely philosophical arguments, anti-naturalist positions can also be motivated by practical empirical concerns. Whereas the philosophically motivated anti-naturalisms based on a priori arguments from the nature of human action, experience, or sociality have been, more or less, refuted by other philosophical arguments, empirically motivated skepticism against the possibility of a truly “scientific” social science can only be met with examples of empirically successful “scientific” social science. In this chapter I will highlight some relatively recent methodological trends within the social sciences that arguably exemplify the way in which empirical research fulfilling the epistemological criteria of the methodological naturalist is possible in practice. These trends are the rise of experimental social science, the methodological debate on causal inference in case studies, big coordinated interdisciplinary research projects utilizing various empirical methods, and the promises of Big Data. These trends by no means exhaust empirically successful and self- consciously “scientific” social science. Other notable methodological developments include the theoretical and formal advances in causal inference from statistical data, which are covered in this book (Kaidesoja’s contribution, see also Morgan and Winship 2007), and the methodological reform movement of analytical sociology, which emphasizes various empirical methodologies, such as empirically calibrated agent-based models and experimentation. 1 The author would like to thank Caterina Marchionni and Petri Ylikoski for their valuable comments. The writing of the chapter was supported by the Academy of Finland.