Social scientists continue to struggle over the relative merits of their many enterprises: explanation versus interpretation, causal versus descriptive analysis, the development of theories versus the testing of hypotheses. Two questions are foundational: What constitutes a good theory? And at what point does the evidence for an argument turn from plausible to compelling? These problems, present from the birth of social science, have grown no less thorny, but also no less critical, since how we choose to solve them informs the evidence we believe and the theories we generate. This workshop focuses on the clarity and cogency of social theories and the logic and effectiveness of evidence in social research.