ABSTRACT
In The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations (2011), I suggested that science is a diverse collection of ways of knowing, each of which have their own type of internal validity, and as such there is no warrant for dismissing any of the methodological positions that I outline in the book (neopositivism, critical realism, analyticism, and reflexivism) as inherently “non-scientific.” I am all for disagreements – “contentious conversations” serves as something of a slogan for what I hope the field will be increasingly characterized by in the future – but let’s disagree about meaningful things, like the similarities and differences between the results arrived at by wildly and significantly different approaches to the systematic production of worldly knowledge. Refusing to engage on the grounds that one’s interlocutor is not properly “scientific,” as long as all parties are actually trying to engage in the explanation of events and outcomes, is a philo sophical non-starter. The only definition of “science” that can do justice to this variety of ways of doing research in international studies is a broad one, more of a sensibility than an operational specification. The broad definition of science that I introduce1 characterizes science as systematic, worldly inquiry subject to public criticism intended to improve its results. “Science” is precisely not an operational set of instructions, but is instead a characterization of that particular domain of human activity that aims at expanding a particular kind of human knowing: factual, explanatory, impersonal, and detached in a specific sense I will clarify. There is no such thing as “the scientific method,” although there are important differences between Science and other knowledge-domains such as Art, Ethics, and Engineering.2 There is, accordingly, no philosophical justification for the equation of neopositivism with “science” that one finds explicitly or implicitly in so many contemporary discussions of method and methodology.3
