Foregrounding ontology: Dualism, monism, and IR theory

Review of International Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 129-153

  Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 38149032302     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210508007948     Document Type: Article

References (129)

1. James Mahoney and Gary Goertz, 'The Possibility Principle: Choosing Negative Cases in Comparative Research', American Political Science Review, 98 (2004);
2. Charles C. Ragin, Fuzzy-Set Social Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
3. Gary King, Robert O. Keohane and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
4. Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
5. Alexander E. Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
6. see also Heikki Patomäki and Colin Wight, 'After Postpositivism? The Promises of Critical Realism', International Studies Quarterly, 44 (2000),
7. and Fred Chernoff, 'Scientific Realism as a Meta-Theory of International Polities', International Studies Quarterly, 46 (2002).
8. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 25.
9. Imre Lakatos, 'The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes', in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978);
10. Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
11. Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism;
12. John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995).
13. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1975);
14. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
15. J. David Singer, 'The Incompleat Theorist: Insight Without Evidence', in Klaus Knorr and James N. Rosenau (eds.), Contending Approaches to International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 62-86.
16. Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, 'Is This the Curriculum We Want? Doctoral Requirements and Offerings in Methods and Methodology', PS: Political Science and Politics, 36 (2003), pp. 379-86.
17. Giovanni Sartori, 'Concept Misinformation in Comparative Polities', American Political Science Review, 64 (1970), p. 1033.
18. Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, 'Lessons from Lakatos', in Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman (eds.), Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 2003).
19. Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005);
20. Timothy McKeown, 'Case Studies and the Statistical Worldview', International Organization, 53 (1999).
21. Max Weber, 'Die "Objektivität" Sozialwissenschaftlicher und Sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis', in Elizabeth Flitner (ed.), Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Potsdam: Internet-Ausgabe, (http://www.uni-potsdam.de/u/paed/Flitner/Flitner/Weber/), 1999), pp. 154-5.
22. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 119.
23. Arkady Plotnitsky, Complementarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
24. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A. Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
25. Francis A. Beer and Robert Hariman (eds.), Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1996).
26. Habermas (Philosophical Discourse, p. 321) argues that a world-disclosing assumption needs to be submitted to 'an ongoing test across its entire breadth' by continual comparison with the results of ultramundane practice within the world. Perhaps it is a failure of imagination on my part, but I cannot conceive of a mundane, practical result that could even in principle confirm or deny dualism (or its opposite, monism). As I suggest below, the most compelling arguments in favor of dualism rest not on this kind of practical testing (which presumes dualism), but on transcendental arguments about the conditions of possibility for ordinary linguistic formulations.
27. In so designating this position I have in mind roughly the same thing that William James meant by philosophically dissolving the traditional opposition between consciousness and the objects of consciousness: William James, The Writings of William. James: A Comprehensive Edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 169-83. I am aware that the term is often used in the philosophical literature in a somewhat different sense, having more to do with questions of the material/ideal relationship. But most of this literature seems concerned with the position of a knowing subject in the world, and less of it seems to be directly concerned with the position of a researcher trying to generate knowledge about such subjects in the world. Rom Harre (personal communication) suggests that the real issue here is whether human beings can ever have knowledge of the world as it is in itself, with dualists presuming that they can and monists arguing that they cannot.
28. Hans-Joachim Dahms, Positivismusstreit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994).
29. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp.42-3.
30. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1974). p. 3.
31. Ibid., §5.61.
32. A further, IR-specific irony is the use of the term 'post-positivism' to describe those theories and approaches that reject the pursuit of covering-laws in favour of the procedures of hypothesis-testing, as in Yosef Lapid, 'The Third Debate: On the Prospects of International Theory in a Post-Positivist Era', International Studies Quarterly, 33 (1989). Historically, those theorists advocating falsification - including Karl Popper - should be classified 'post-positivists', inasmuch as they come after positivism and arise through a critique of positivism's assumptions. By contrast, IR 'post-positivists' are critical theorists in the broad sense: reflexive, concerned with how knowledge practices interact with and/or construct the world and objects within it, and so on. It is precisely this terminological confusion that I am trying to avoid by using non-standard labels.
33. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach.
34. Karl Popper, 'Normal Science and its Dangers', in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 57.
35. Lakatos engages in an attempt to salvage the notion of rational scientific progress (in a sense other than 'as instruments for puzzle-solving': see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 206), with his notion of progressive problem-shifts in research programmes (Lakatos, 'The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes'). But this is still a dualist position, inasmuch as the ultimate arbiter of such a problem-shift involves the explanation of 'novel facts' in addition to all of those facts that were explained by the previous research programme. The new research programme must therefore be in some way closer to reality, even if there is no theory-independent way to evaluate this. (We should not lose sight of the fact that Lakatos' whole procedure concerns retrospective reconstruction rather than a foundationalist argument from the known character of'reality': 'one can be "wise" only after the event': Imre Lakatos, 'History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions', in John Worrall and Gregory Currie (eds.), The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 113).
36. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 19, 111-12, 168; Popper, 'Normal Science and its Dangers', p. 56.
37. In fairness, Kuhn is somewhat ambiguous on this point. He does argue that 'the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its "real" counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle', but links this to the fact that he sees 'no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like "really there" ' and pairs it with the declaration that he does 'not doubt, for example, that Newton's mechanics improves on Aristotle's and that Einstein's improves on Newton's as instruments for puzzle-solving' (Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 206). As such, his position seems to be that a theory's specific assumptions about the world are not directly relevant to its ability to produce tangible results. But to the extent that such tangible results are not themselves endogenous to the knowledge practices in question, but have instead to do with the interaction between knowledge practices and the world, it seems possible to subsume Kuhn's position at the time he wrote The Structure of Scientific. Revolutions under Lakatos' notion of 'research programmes' or Searle's realism of brute facts and correspondence (see below). Kuhn's later work moves in a more radical direction, taking the problem of translating between theories to be considerably more damaging to simple notions of empirical progress, but that need not concern us here.
38. King, Keohane and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, p. 19.
39. Ibid., p. 76.
40. Although many neopositivists (for example, King, Keohane and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, pp. 91-3) argue that unit homogeneity can be empirically demonstrated via repeated tests of correlation, in practice the assumption of unit comparability is used as a structuring assumption that both alleviates the need to perform any such tests and opens the possibility of performing comparative case studies in the first place: Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon, 'Globalization, the Comparative Method, and Comparing Constructions', in Daniel M. Green (ed.), Constructivism and Comparative Politics (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), pp. 100-1. Indeed, the idea that unit homogeneity could be 'proved' or 'disproved' through evidence designed to test hypotheses about cross-case correlations is nonsensical, since unit homogeneity is an assumption built into the (dualist) procedures of neopositivist hypothesis-testing in the first place.
41. Hacking, The Social Construction of What?, pp. 42-4.
42. In IR in particular, Barkawi and Laffey suggest that this may be true of the notion of the 'democratic peace': Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, 'The Imperial Peace: Democracy, Force, and Globalization', European Journal of International Relations, 5 (1999).
43. See also Grunberg's discussion of 'hegemonic stability': Isabelle Grunberg, 'Exploring the "Myth" of Hegemonic Stability', International Organization, 44 (1990).
44. Lakatos, 'History of Science and Its Rational Reconstructions', p. 111.
45. Ibid., p. 118.
46. Chernoff, 'Scientific Realism as a Meta-Theory of International Polities'.
47. Richard Rorty, 'The Ambiguity of "Rationality"', in William Rehg and James Bohman (eds.), Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn: The Transformation of Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 44.
48. George Tsebelis, Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 32-3.
49. Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf · Politik als Beruf (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, [1917/1919] 1994), pp. 8-9.
50. Patomäki and Wight, 'After Postpositivism?'
51. Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, p. 51.
52. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality;
53. Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality (London: Verso, 1989).
54. Heikki Patomäki, 'How to Tell Better Stories About World Polities', European Journal of International Relations, 2 (1996).
55. David Sylvan and Stephen Majeski, 'A Methodology for the Study of Historical Counterfactuals', International Studies Quarterly, 42 (1998).
56. Alexander E. Wendt, 'The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory', International Organization, 41 (1987).
57. Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, p. 64.
58. Indeed, the most sophisticated defence of realism to date argues that the correspondence theory of truth is more important to realism than the presumption of a mind-independent world. Such a position involves both re-evaluating truth as a limiting case of verisimilitude and accepting the notion that science is performed on instrument-world complexes rather than on 'the world' in itself. The particular affordances of the world revealed by a particular set of instruments and 'conceptual resources' are, if not mind-independent, at least non-arbitrary (Jerrold L. Aronson, Rom Harre and Eileen Cornell Way, Realism Rescued: How Scientific Progress is Possible (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1995), pp. 140-1),
59. and theories are ultimately reducible to arrangements of natural kinds 'that must exist independently of any human project or conceptual system' (Ibid., pp. 43-4).
60. Hence there is an 'intransigent order of nature' (Ibid.),
61. but that order is only ever accessible through knowledge practices which affect how and in what form it will manifest itself; different practices will reveal different orders, and progress will occur through convergence rather than through hypothesis-testing (Ibid., pp. 194-6).
62. Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, p. 47.
63. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, pp. 8-9.
64. Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, pp. 57-8.
65. Critical realists also offer the 'miracle argument' (only a realist position makes the success of science anything other than a miracle) and an argument that only a conception of knowing subjects as essentially pre-social entities adequately preserves human agency. The former argument has parallels with the defense of neopositivism that I critique above; on the latter argument, see Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, 'Hegel's House, or, "People Are States Too"', Review of International Studies, 30 (2004).
66. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, pp. 186-7.
67. Ibid., p. 61.
68. Searle's argument also depends on a series of presuppositions about individuality and individual minds, such that 'ordinary communication' means that the contents of my head and the contents of your head can be brought into rough correspondence: 'normal understanding requires sameness of understanding by both speaker and hearer' (Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, p. 186). This is related to the absence of a robust conception of intersubjectivity in Searle's work;
69. communal meanings for Searle are always carried around inside of individual heads, and the only alternative to 'inside of the head' is 'external to all possible heads'. Missing is any sense that meanings and perceptions might be common to a group of people without being strongly shared by that group of people (Mark Laffey and Jutta Weldes, 'Beyond Belief: Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in the Study of International Relations', European Journal of International Relations, 3 (1997)). This is also an issue for Habermas; see below.
70. Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), pp. 15-17.
71. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. §6.41.
72. Weber, 'Objectivität'.
73. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), pp. §94-5.
74. Ibid., §189.
75. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, pp. 30-1.
76. Jürgen Habermas, 'From Kant's "Ideas" of Pure Reason to the "Idealizing" Presuppositions of Communicative Action: Reflections on the Detranscendentalized "Use of Reason"', in William Rehg and James Bohman (eds.), Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn: The Transformation of Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 15.
77. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, p. 298.
78. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical 'Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 64-6.
79. Actually, I am not sure how well-known this is. I regularly see references to the position that I described in the previous paragraph linked to Habermas' name, even though Habermas' whole philosophical project is dedicated to a defence of a notion of truth and validity that transcends local contexts. Admittedly, Habermas is not the clearest of authors, especially on this point. But as one of Habermas' foremost defenders points out, 'The internal relation of meaning to validity means that communication is not only always "immanent" - that is, situated, conditioned - but also always "transcendent" - that is, geared to validity claims that are meant to hold beyond any local context and thus can be indefinitely criticized, defended, revised': Thomas McCarthy, 'Introduction', in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. xvi-xvii. One simply cannot separate Habermas' comments about actual, empirical communicative practice from this broader normative concern.
80. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, pp. 322-3.
81. Habermas, 'From Kant's "Ideas" of Pure Reason to the "Idealizing" Presuppositions of Communicative Action: Reflections on the Detranscendentalized "Use of Reason"', p. 13.
82. Ibid., p. 33.
83. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, p. 199.
84. Ibid., p. 321.
85. Ibid., p. 127.
86. Habermas, 'From Kant's "Ideas" of Pure Reason to the "Idealizing" Presuppositions of Communicative Action: Reflections on the Detranscendentalized "Use of Reason"', p. 16.
87. Ibid., p. 18. This is a critique of the famous line from Wittgenstein's Tractatus: 'The world is the totality of facts, not of things' (Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. §1.1).
88. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, pp. 246, 279.
89. Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, p. 93.
90. Rorty, 'The Ambiguity of "Rationality" '. pp. 43-4.
91. Ibid., p. 42.
92. Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter, p. 99.
93. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 119.
94. But does not exhaust. For alternative, but equally monistic, accounts of a social science freed from the presumption of classical objectivity, see, inter alia, Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989),
95. and Stefano Guzzini, 'A Reconstruction of Constructivism in International Relations', European Journal of International Relations, 6 (2000).
96. Weber, 'Objectivität', p. 170, emphasis in original.
97. Ibid., p. 180.
98. Erkennimsinteresses. The standard English translation of this essay renders the word as 'cognitive interest', which imports a subjectivity into the argument that I do not think is really appropriate. For an extended argument on this point, see Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, 'Rethinking Weber: Toward a Non-Individualist Sociology of World Polities', International Review of Sociology,12 (2002).
99. Weber. 'Objectivität, p. 161.
100. Ibid., p. 191.
101. Ibid., p. 154.
102. Weber, Wissenschaft, pp. 16-17.
103. Elsewhere, I have argued that contingency in this sense is an absolutely indispensable component of a robust conception of agency. For fuller statements, see Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, 'Defending the West: Occidentalism and the Formation of NATO', Journal of Political Philosophy, 11 (2003);
104. and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, 'Making Sense of Making Sense: Configurational Analysis and the Double Hermeneutic', in Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (eds.), Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006).
105. Note that Weber usually speaks of the 'cultural sciences' (kulturwissenschaft) instead of the 'social sciences'. Unlike Talcott Parsons and those sociologists who were influenced by Parsons, Weber does not make a systematic distinction between the social and the cultural aspects of a situation.
106. Weber, 'Objectivität, pp. 183-4.
107. Ibid., pp. 155-6.
108. Milton Friedman, 'The Methodology of Positive Economics', in Frank Hahn and Martin Hollis (eds.), Philosophy and Economic Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979);
109. see also Paul MacDonald, 'Useful Fiction or Miracle Maker: The Competing Epistemological Foundations of Rational Choice Theory', American Political Science Review, 97 (2003).
110. On 'thinking space', see Jim George and David Campbell, 'Patterns of Dissent and the Celebration of Difference: Critical Social Theory and International Relations', International Studies Quarterly, 34 (1990).
111. Note that the classical antecedents of both of these theoretical positions escape, to a greater or lesser extent, from this challenge. It would be a stretch to characterise Morgenthau or Niebuhr as dualists in the sense that I have outlined it here, since for both of these classical realists the line between 'the world' and 'accounts of the world' is far more blurry than it is for their intellectual descendents.
112. Alexander E. Wendt, 'Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics', International Organization, 46 (1992), pp. 396-7.
113. Laffey and Weldes, 'Beyond Belief; John Gerard Ruggie, 'Introduction: What Makes the World Hang Together?' in Constructing the World Polity (London: Routledge, 1998);
114. Alexander E. Wendt, 'On Constitution and Causation in International Relations', in Tim Dunne, Michael Cox and Ken Booth (eds.), The Eighty Years' Crisis: International Relations 1919-1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
115. Richard Price and Christian Reus-Smit, 'Dangerous Liaisons? Critical International Theory and Constructivism', European Journal of International Relations, 4 (1998).
116. Emanuel Adler, 'Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Polities', European Journal of International Relations 3 (1997).
117. Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, pp. 62-5;
118. Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, pp. 375-7.
119. Friedrich Kratochwil and John Gerard Ruggie, 'International Organization: A State of the Art on an Art of the State', International Organization, 40 (1986).
120. Patomäki and Wight, 'After Postpositivism?', p. 215.
121. Alexander E. Wendt. 'On the Via Media: A Response to the Critics', Review of International Studies, 26 (2000).
122. Other alternatives include the 'quantum' constructivism that Wendt is developing (for a preliminary statement, see Alexander E. Wendt, 'Social Theory as Cartesian Science: An Auto-Critique from a Quantum Perspective', in Stefano Guzzini and Anna Leander (eds.), Constructivism and International Relations (London: Routledge, 2006, and Vincent Pouliot's Bourdieu-inspired 'sobjectivism': Vincent Pouliot, '"Sobjectivism": Towards a Constructivist Methodology', International Studies Quarterly, 51 (2007)).
123. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, p. 302.
124. John Shotter, Cultural Politics of Everyday Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 220.
125. See the papers collected in Klaus Knorr and James N. Rosenau (eds.), Contending Approaches to International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).
126. For a reading of the 'second debate' that explicitly highlights such concerns, see Friedrich Kratochwil, 'History, Action and Identity: Revisiting the "Second" Great Debate and Assessing its Importance for Social Theory", European Journal of International Relations, 12 (2006).
127. Hedley Bull, 'International Theory: The Case for a Classical Approach', in Knorr and Rosenau (eds.), Contending Approaches, p. 26.
128. Onphronesis, see Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter.
129. This insight lies at the core of Andrew Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001).