‘A major aim of science, even social science, is to provide us with a common set of epistemological tools, in a discipline, for ascertaining the nature of reality and therefore testing the adequacy of our theories” (Keohane, 1989: 250).
This is a positivist statement. The notion of 'testing the adequacy of our theories' reveals the belief that we as the researcher can test hypotheses against an objective empirical reality out there. This is part of the positivist project of identifying law like, causal relationships in the social totality.