ABSTRACT
The study of International Relations (IR) has undergone epistemological fracturing. Understandably, most scholars either have not been particularly interested in or know little about philosophy of science. Instead, they have concentrated on “doing” their research. Even when philosophy of science criteria are utilized, they often have been used implicitly or poorly. The result is that powerful available tools for facilitating dialogue and exchange between researchers have been underexploited, or worse, ignored. IR has not been making use of resources that are critical to effective self-evaluation and productive exchange of ideas or disagreement. The profession virtually ignores a crucial asset of collective knowledge production and unfortunately many scholars remain content with this. Not enough scholars appreciate why they are doing research, to what larger stock of knowledge they contribute, whether and how their work is persuasive to their peers, and what the profession is amassing (Chernoff, 2014; Jackson, 2011). The field has a major problem that cries out to be addressed. IR lacks tools for scholars with different epistemological orientations and training to speak to each other clearly, and to understand, fairly evaluate, and even use each other’s insights. The growing size of the international studies research community has often not produced a symphony, but a cacophony. This book offers a systematic evaluation of how knowledge is produced by scholarly research in IR. What are the different approaches to defining the “scientific method” in application to IR? To what extent is scientific progress and accumulation of knowledge possible? What are the different accounts of how this occurs? And what are the dominant critiques of these positions? What are the domains within which researchers in IR claim to have achieved scientific
progress? One area that might be cited as a model of scientific progress is inquiry into the democratic peace, or the absence of war between liberal democratic states (Doyle, 1983a; Maoz and Russett, 1993). Yet can the study of the democratic peace act as a paragon for scientific progress in IR? What disagreements are there within the field about the past and future trajectory of democratic peace research and what is their significance? This book’s objective is to increase understanding of the sophistication and complexity of these debates and their importance for the conduct of inquiry in the field’s major research programs. We aim to provide an accessible “road map” for researchers and students negotiating this epistemological minefield. Ours is the first book to survey the full range of perspectives available for evaluating scientific progress, as well as dominant critiques of scientism. It offers a unique key guide to these increasingly salient discussions. Our aim is to cut through confusion and allow scholars and students to understand and use tools available from debates in the philosophy of science better and more easily. We do not seek to “push” one particular position or line. Here there is a difference between our approach and some of the more conventional or “hard positivist” takes, such as that offered in Elman and Elman’s (2003) volume based on Imre Lakatos’s influential Methodology of Scientific Research Programs (MSRP). The importance and suitability of such conventional approaches is acknowledged, engaged with, and identified in our book from a variety of angles. Indeed, the centrality of Lakatosian methodology, and more broadly of mainstream positivist approaches to current debates in IR, is emphasized (James, 2002b; Harrison, 2003). However, we also consider a range of soft positivist and non-positivist approaches, and show how these perspectives offer valuable alternatives for understanding IR. We firmly believe that this type of interchange increases the scope for deepening mutual understanding and the possibility of cross fertilization of ideas in the profession. We hope our book provides a model for how this kind of constructive conversation can take place across the positivist/non-positivist divide. This volume developed in the critical space opened up by two influential recent contributions to debates about the philosophy of science and its role in IR. That two such influential analyses have been published just three years apart is a hopeful sign that the field as a whole is at last engaging in visible debates about epistemology. The most recent of the books is Fred Chernoff ’s Explanation and Progress in Security Studies (Chernoff, 2014). While Chernoff himself advocates methodological pluralism (2014: 24; see also, Chernoff, 2007a), his book is valuable also for providing a comprehensive account of the positivist tradition. According to the positivist view, methods from the natural sciences are directly applicable to studies of the social world. Law-like regularities and general patterns of behavior can be identified by researchers, and these may be examined with reference to causal explanations. Competing hypotheses regarding causality may be tested against the evidence on the basis of a free, fair, and objective competition, and over time a consensus will emerge as toward which causal accounts are the most accurate (Chernoff, 2014: vii). While these criteria are stringent as
well as contested, they have been applied to research within IR and, at least for the democratic peace research program, arguably have contributed to achieving a sense of scientific progress. The chapter by Chernoff in this volume develops this argument further. Patrick Jackson’s The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations (Jackson, 2011) has provided a comprehensive account of both neopositivism and three alternatives to it, which he names critical realism, analyticism, and reflexivity. His book has already established itself as one of the leading texts dealing with epistemological debates in IR and is set to make a lasting impact on research and discussion. His chapter in this volume develops his take further. Jackson is keen to demolish the neopositivist account of science. His argument begins from the assertion that social science is just that – social not natural science. Due to differences in subject matters studied across the natural and social worlds, there is not and will never be one single definition of science in the social scientific arena, including IR. Instead, there are four different types of social science, each equally “scientific” and legitimate on its own terms. Alternatives to neopositivism emphasize unobservables and/or the mutually constitutive interaction between subject and object in social scientific research. Each of Jackson’s four categories of social science rests on certain assumptions or “wagers” (Jackson, 2011: 32) which are mutually incommensurable. Thus there is no need to resolve philosophical disagreements about the nature of “science.” Social scientific researchers need to be aware of the assumptions they make, of the limitations of their own approach to science, and appreciate how their work stands in relation to other social scientific expositions. IR needs to be mature and pluralistic enough to operate with different epistemologies that coexist. There is not one epistemological yardstick but four. This has major implications for how IR understands scientific progress, consensus, and cumulation. Jackson implies that IR should not have particularly high hopes for these goals. To the extent they are achievable, this biases the field toward a narrow neopositivist conception of science that many other researchers in the field reject or at least problematize. For that reason, Chernoff criticizes Jackson’s approach for offering researchers no guidance either on how to choose between competing conceptions of scientific method or rationally deciding which approaches to science are better than others at generating cumulative knowledge (Chernoff, 2013a: 352). Chernoff and Jackson offer powerful statements that have crystallized and synthesized important arguments, and which have already become landmark points of reference. We see our volume as contributing to a conversation they have opened up regarding how to combine systematic analysis of the criteria we use to judge progress in our field with an openness to what both call methodological pluralism. To that end, we explore the value of what we term “sociable pluralism” and demonstrate its potential benefits for researchers. The epistemological position of sociable pluralism is one that seeks to build bridges between and among soft positivism, critical theory, and critical realism. We hold that sociable pluralism represents the cutting edge in social scientific thinking about
knowledge production without slipping into dogmatic extremes that disallow productive conversations with scholars of different persuasions. Moreover, sociable pluralism also encourages and invites scholars skeptical about positivism to engage with debates about scientific progress and evaluation of it by more “mainstream,” hard positivist perspectives. Sociable pluralism is to be distinguished from methodological pluralism as defined by either Chernoff or Jackson. It explores boundaries and connections across different possible approaches in a way that is cognizant of their deep differences yet also open to cross fertilization and mutual exchange. In this way we hope to guide readers to make more informed choices and reach more sophisticated understandings of complex epistemological questions and debates. Our approach is ecumenical, allowing scholars and students to evaluate for themselves the subtleties and ambiguities of different perspectives in a back-to-back comparison, as well as to come to a greater appreciation of the nuanced complexities of the stakes. Our reasoning is that, if the differences between the various approaches and metrics used by communities of researchers can be understood more clearly, this will facilitate meaningful cross-cutting communication, dialogue, and debate. The starting point for this volume is an observation that social sciences generally, and IR more particularly, find themselves under increasing societal and political pressure to justify their existence and material support. This creates a need to demonstrate that we as scholars, collectively speaking, are doing something useful. Traditionally, attempts at self-justification in the (social) sciences have been tied to notions of both “science” and “progress,” which makes inescapable an engagement with these notions and the criteria that have been developed for identifying science, progress, and their corollaries (such as the ability to predict and control) in scholarly work. The first half of this volume (1) unpacks and problematizes these notions and (2) shows the range of possible and legitimate responses to the challenge of demonstrating our usefulness that fall within the paradigm of sociable pluralism. The second half of the volume applies this range of approaches to one specific research program. We use the research program on the democratic peace, which is considered one of the most scientifically developed research programs in IR (if not the most scientifically developed) to show what we gain by accommodating and enabling dialogue among the full range of epistemological approaches open to sociable pluralism. It becomes evident that, rather than inviting a cacophony of incoherent research efforts, an embrace of sociable pluralism is essential for building consensus behind theoretical claims. Our volume assembles preeminent scholars in the philosophy of science of IR to offer a guide to the state of the art in this increasingly important and yet vexing subfield. All chapters explicitly address three core questions: What criteria exist, and which should be advocated, for evaluating contributions to knowledge? How can we best utilize those criteria for evaluating past and future theoretical contributions? And what are the implications of these criteria for progress in IR? While the chapters in the first part address these questions at a
general level, the chapters in the second part provide concrete applications to what often is considered IR’s strongest research program.
