Since the behaviourist turn of the 1960s, questions concerning the appropriateness and desirability of a positivist research agenda have been at the forefront of meta-methodological debate within the social sciences. The evolving 'science wars' between positivists and normativists have also presented enormous challenges to the epistemological identities and professional self-images of scholars working in the academic field of International Relations (IR).
Whereas positivists maintain that the overarching aim of science is the experimentally guided explanation of empirical phenomena under 'covering laws', normativists and traditionalists hold that social scientists cannot — and, in fact, should not — emulate the causal models of the natural sciences. According to this view, it is virtually impossible to study the influences of distinct variables in complex social interactions, and statistical aggregation merely obscures the fact that the true 'causes' of events are rarely obvious in the social world.
Hence, the purpose of political and social research ought to be a desire to understand processes 'from within' rather than to explain them 'from outside'. Yet the traditionalist critique of social scientific positivism did not imply that positivists would be entirely oblivious to the importance of norms in international life.
IR does not only deal with descriptive, but with political (and, ultimately, prescriptive) aspects of the social world. Thus, it might appear worthwhile to ask: how scientific are so-called 'scientific' (positivist) approaches to the study of IR — if their theoretical premises and empirical achievements are taken at face value and judged by their own standards of 'scientific' neutrality and precision?
To answer this question, I will first describe the spread of positivist thought in IR. Secondly, I will outline in how far two research programmes which have been heavily influenced by positivist method — game theory and the democratic peace thesis — have challenged traditionalist approaches, and whether they can be regarded as 'truly scientific'. Drawing on these insights, I will conclude that, on closer inspection, positivist research methods in IR do lack a perfectly 'scientific' status, although they have made important contributions to the academic field.
Contents
1 Introduction: Some Basic Concepts in the Philosophy of Science, and What it Means to Be ‘Scientific’ in the Academic Study of International Relations
2 From Traditionalism to Behaviouralism: the ‘Second Great Debate’ of the 1960s and its Impact on the Contested Epistemology of IR
2.1 The Success of Positivist Methodology in the Natural Sciences
2.2 Traditional Approaches to the Study of IR and the Positivist Challenge
2.3 Positivism and its Shortcomings: Why ‘Scientific Realism’ Faces Significant Limits in the Social Realm
3 Assessing the Conceptual Adequacy and Empirical Potential of a Synthetic Perspective on IR Research Methodology: Two Illustrations, One Suggestion
3.1 Game Theory and its IR Applications: Reasons for and Against a New Orthodoxy of Rationalist Social Analysis
3.2 The Democratic Peace Thesis as an Example of Combined Positivist and Normativist Thought in IR
3.3 Bridging the Gap between ‘Hard Core’ Positivism and ‘Radical’ Interpretivism: the Study of World Politics and the Differing Foci of Causal and Constitutive Theories
4 Conclusion: Is Positivism (Still) an Appropriate Toolkit for Systematic Inquiry in the Social Sciences?
Appendix: The Four Humean Conditions of Causality
Abbreviations
References
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