On learning from Wendt

Review of International Studies

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 141-150

  Alker, Hayward R ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0034405137     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210500001418     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. The author wishes to thank Thomas Biersteker for helpful comments.
2. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 20 and 16.
3. Wendt, Social Theory, p. 23. He then and there lists five 'material factors' recurring in materialist discourse about Waltzean power polarities, etc: human nature, natural resources, geography, forces of production, and (most suggestively) forces of destruction. To describe either 'smart missiles' or human nature as 'material' rather than 'made of ideas' (or vice versa) is to miss the remarkable, embodied information-processing capacities of each, which are ontologically highlighted by Wendt's preferred 'realist' philosophies of inquiry.
4. Wendt, Social Theory, p. 112.
5. Gary King, Robert O. Keohane, Sydney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
6. John Searle, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 9; in the same book see also Searle's sophisticated treatment of institution-constituting rules in chs 4 and 5, and ch. 6 on 'Background Abilities and the Explanation of Social Phenomena'. Even more innovative is the post-Cartesianism of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999), which in a similar, micro-constructivist fashion links connectionist, neurophysiological science and cognitive linguistics to differently moralized political practices.
7. John Searle, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 9; in the same book see also Searle's sophisticated treatment of institution-constituting rules in chs 4 and 5, and ch. 6 on 'Background Abilities and the Explanation of Social Phenomena'. Even more innovative is the post-Cartesianism of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999), which in a similar, micro-constructivist fashion links connectionist, neurophysiological science and cognitive linguistics to differently moralized political practices.
8. Especially relevant citations to IR-oriented writings by Robert Axelrod, James Bennett, Lars Erik Cederman, Gavan Duffy, Joshua Epstein and others are contained in Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Part I and ch. 12, as well as my 'On the Ontology of Peace and War,' a 1999 Santa Fe Institute Working Paper downloadable from http://www.santafe.edu/sfi. The journal Complexity and the Santa Fe Institute sponsored Addison-Wesley series of advanced textbooks are excellent, more general, and often more technical sources on complexity theory.
9. Perhaps von Neumann will most be remembered not for his game theory, but as the Godfather of the 'artificial life/virtual reality' paradigm because of his constructive theorizing of the self-reproducing, self-organizing automata which are the most important entities in computational studies of artificial social life. Other authors sensitive to informational, biological and social ontological questions include Brian Cantwell Smith and many members of the research faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, as cited previously. Both older 'general systems theorists' and contemporary adaptive, multi-agent systems theorists of the Santa Fe Institute variety focus on the instrinsic structural properties of the self-organizing, enabling, powerful entities that are so important in Wendt's philosophical realism.
10. See the discussion in ch. 2 of Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations.
11. See especially the discussion in H. R. Alker, 'Bit Flows, Rewrites and Social Talk: Towards More Adequate Informational Ontologies', in M. Campanella (ed.), Between Rationality and Cognition (Turin: Meynier, 1988) and its cited sources.
12. See the case studies in Rodney Hall, National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) and V. Kubalkova, N.G. Onuf, P. Kowert (eds.), International Relations in a Constructed World (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998).
13. See the case studies in Rodney Hall, National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) and V. Kubalkova, N.G. Onuf, P. Kowert (eds.), International Relations in a Constructed World (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998).
14. See Valerie Hudson (ed.), Artificial Intelligence and International Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), all of whose contributors were influenced by Roger Schank and Robert Abelson's Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977). My 'Polimetrics: Its Descriptive Foundations', in N. Polsby and F. Greenstein (eds.), Handbook of Political Science (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975), culminates in an application of Abelson's approach to making sense of New International Economic Order debates and policy preferences. Subsequently, Schank and Abelson's students developed programmes simulating various politicians' attachment of new senses to various pre-existing actions or objects, a process that Searle argues is the essence of the construction of new, and the reproduction of old, institutional realities. This early, rigorous, IR-focused, but often neglected, technically demanding literature is explicitly meaning-or identity-or policy-constitutive in Wendt's sense.
15. See Valerie Hudson (ed.), Artificial Intelligence and International Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), all of whose contributors were influenced by Roger Schank and Robert Abelson's Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977). My 'Polimetrics: Its Descriptive Foundations', in N. Polsby and F. Greenstein (eds.), Handbook of Political Science (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975), culminates in an application of Abelson's approach to making sense of New International Economic Order debates and policy preferences. Subsequently, Schank and Abelson's students developed programmes simulating various politicians' attachment of new senses to various pre-existing actions or objects, a process that Searle argues is the essence of the construction of new, and the reproduction of old, institutional realities. This early, rigorous, IR-focused, but often neglected, technically demanding literature is explicitly meaning-or identity-or policy-constitutive in Wendt's sense.
16. See Valerie Hudson (ed.), Artificial Intelligence and International Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), all of whose contributors were influenced by Roger Schank and Robert Abelson's Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977). My 'Polimetrics: Its Descriptive Foundations', in N. Polsby and F. Greenstein (eds.), Handbook of Political Science (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975), culminates in an application of Abelson's approach to making sense of New International Economic Order debates and policy preferences. Subsequently, Schank and Abelson's students developed programmes simulating various politicians' attachment of new senses to various pre-existing actions or objects, a process that Searle argues is the essence of the construction of new, and the reproduction of old, institutional realities. This early, rigorous, IR-focused, but often neglected, technically demanding literature is explicitly meaning-or identity-or policy-constitutive in Wendt's sense.
17. Many social psychologists in the 1970s and 1980s found Rom Harré and Paul Secord's humanistic, ethnomethodologically motivated The Explanation of Social Behavior (Totawa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1972), and Harré's subsequent books, highly suggestive of a socially constructivist philosophical realism that Wendt also finds richly developed by Roy Bhaskar (a Harré student) and Anthony Giddens.
18. An exemplary, constructivist study of alternative possible threat interpretations and crisis developments in the Cuban Missile Crisis, built up from textually grounded typifications of agent-action conversational turn takings, is Thomas Schmalberger's Dangerous Liaisons, a 1998 Geneva Ph.D. dissertation and simulation downloadable from http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~thomass/index.html.
19. On the special relevance of LISP, in the context of delineating the cultural repertoires of civilizations, see Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations, ch. 3. For accessible, but rigorous uses of LISP and speech act theory, see David Sylvan and Steven Majeski, 'A Methodology for the Study of Historical Counterfactuals', International Studies Quarterly, 42 (1998), pp. 79-108; Gavan Duffy, Brian Frederking, Seth Tucker, 'Language Games: Dialogical Analysis of INF Negotiations', International Studies Quarterly, 42 (1998); as well as Duffy's, Mallery's, Bennett's and Thorson's contributions in Hudson's Artificial Intelligence and International Politics.
20. On the special relevance of LISP, in the context of delineating the cultural repertoires of civilizations, see Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations, ch. 3. For accessible, but rigorous uses of LISP and speech act theory, see David Sylvan and Steven Majeski, 'A Methodology for the Study of Historical Counterfactuals', International Studies Quarterly, 42 (1998), pp. 79-108; Gavan Duffy, Brian Frederking, Seth Tucker, 'Language Games: Dialogical Analysis of INF Negotiations', International Studies Quarterly, 42 (1998); as well as Duffy's, Mallery's, Bennett's and Thorson's contributions in Hudson's Artificial Intelligence and International Politics.
21. On the special relevance of LISP, in the context of delineating the cultural repertoires of civilizations, see Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations, ch. 3. For accessible, but rigorous uses of LISP and speech act theory, see David Sylvan and Steven Majeski, 'A Methodology for the Study of Historical Counterfactuals', International Studies Quarterly, 42 (1998), pp. 79-108; Gavan Duffy, Brian Frederking, Seth Tucker, 'Language Games: Dialogical Analysis of INF Negotiations', International Studies Quarterly, 42 (1998); as well as Duffy's, Mallery's, Bennett's and Thorson's contributions in Hudson's Artificial Intelligence and International Politics.
22. On the special relevance of LISP, in the context of delineating the cultural repertoires of civilizations, see Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations, ch. 3. For accessible, but rigorous uses of LISP and speech act theory, see David Sylvan and Steven Majeski, 'A Methodology for the Study of Historical Counterfactuals', International Studies Quarterly, 42 (1998), pp. 79-108; Gavan Duffy, Brian Frederking, Seth Tucker, 'Language Games: Dialogical Analysis of INF Negotiations', International Studies Quarterly, 42 (1998); as well as Duffy's, Mallery's, Bennett's and Thorson's contributions in Hudson's Artificial Intelligence and International Politics.
23. There is a remarkable overlap between Searle's explanation-relevant concept of 'background' abilities and the ontological, semantic and pragmatic presuppositions of Pierre Bourdieu, Schank and Abelson, and the narrative theorists reviewed in chapters 3-4, and 8-10 of Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations. For example, the discussion of 'life themes' on pp. 144-9 of Schank and Abelson richly suggests ways of operationalizing Wendtës thinking about identities as well as Amartya Sen's concept of 'life projects' in his famous discussion of 'rational fools'. My own, proto-Wendtian attempt to talk about historically changing states and inter-state cultural forms, ch. 5 of my Rediscoveries and Reformulations on 'the end of power politics', is also cast in Schank-Abelson terms.
24. Wendt, Social Theory, pp. 85-8.
25. King, Keohane and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry.
26. Personal dispositions and orientations are importantly prior to these influences, of course. The ideological distortions of the Cold War era - downgrading Marxian specialists on 'interpolation', Hegelian-Marxist 'internal relations', dialectical modes of inquiry, the constitutive role of social class vis à vis identities and interests, and sociology and social science more generally - should also be mentioned as of likely possible relevance.
27. Wendt, Social Theory, p. 79ff.
28. Wendt, Social Theory, p. 180ff.
29. Hidemi Suganami, 'Agents, Structures, Narratives', Paper delivered at the September 1998 SGIR/ECPR-ISA conference, Vienna. Suganami also rejects the agent-structure dichotomy in favour of the multicultural classification of causative factors into mechanistic, volitional, and coincidental ones.
30. Heikki Patomäki, 'How to Tell Better Stories about World Politics', European Journal of International Relations, 2 (1996), pp. 105-133.
31. Alker Hayward R., Thomas Schmalberger, Andrew Blum, Anita Schjolset, 'Testable Understandings of Structured Histories', Paper presented at the International Studies Association, Washington, DC, February 1999.