Meta-Jackson: Rethinking Patrick Thaddeus Jackson's conduct of inquiry

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 41, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 248-269

  Suganami, Hidemi ^a  

^a ABERYSTWYTH UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

International relations; Jackson; Meta theory

Indexed keywords

EID: 84871428342     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829812463474     Document Type: Article

References (94)

1. Patrick Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (London: Routledge, 2011). Hereafter, I refer to this book as 'Jackson' followed by relevant page numbers or simply with a page reference in brackets, as appropriate.
2. 'Neopositivism' is a label Jackson uses to denote a positivistic scientific methodology which takes into account criticisms of logical positivism by the falsificationist philosophers (most famously, Karl Popper) but, in his view, the position, despite its stress on hypothesis-testing, is akin to logical positivism in its tendency to picture science as a search for certainty rather than conjectural provisionality. See.
3. Jackson, 50-9.
4. A leading neopositivist in IR is Robert Keohane.
5. Jackson notes: 'In many ways, the field has not gotten beyond the situation that Wendt lamented in 1992, in which "Science disciplines Dissent for not defining a conventional research program, and Dissent celebrates its liberation from Science"' (182).
6. According to Jackson, however, what is science is not settled among philosophers, and IR scholars are in danger of picking up a criterion that suits them (15).
7. 'science ought to stop functioning as a trump card in our internecine debates' (189); and because 'science' is used to disqualify the opponents, it is best to adopt a wide definition (18).
8. He remarks sharply: 'It is a lie that only the neopositivist way of studying world politics is scientific - a lie that derives some of its power and plausibility. from our general lack of familiarity with issues in the philosophy of science and their implications for IR scholarship' (206).
9. Jackson, 1-26, 193-6.
10. Jackson, 194.
11. Jackson, 24.
12. Jackson, 194, 211-12.
13. Jackson, 197.
14. Gary King, Robert O. Keohane and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
15. Jackson, 201, emphasis in original.
16. Jackson, 160.
17. As is commonly the case with meta-IR discussions, potential contributions of the contemporary philosophy of history are entirely neglected in Jackson's work.
18. See, among very many insightful works, F.R. Ankersmit, 'The Dilemmas of Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Philosophy of History', History and Theory 25, no. 1 (1986): 1-27.
19. Jackson, 196, 197.
20. Jackson, 34, 156, 196, 197.
21. Jackson, 207.
22. What 'mind-world dualism' and 'mind-world monism' mean is an important part of the analysis which follows and I shall avoid explicating them at this point. Similarly, the meanings Jackson attributes to 'phenomenalism' and 'transfactualism' will be explained more fully as my argument unfolds later.
23. Jackson, 24-40.
24. Jackson, 31.
25. Jackson, 59.
26. Jackson himself remarks that 'science does not stand for or against any particular mode of knowledge-production that is systematically focused on generating facts about the world' (189).
27. The 'facts' thereby generated are thus scientific knowledge claims about the world. He also writes that scientific research 'is directed, of necessity, at the world and the objects within it' (195; my italics).
28. Jackson, 37.
29. The two works by John Dewey which Jackson cites are: How We Think, new edition (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1910)
30. Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Kissinger, 1920).
31. What we can 'experience', 'observe', 'detect', what 'appears' to us and so on are expressions which may require some analysis but, for the purpose of my discussion here, it is sufficient to make note of this and treat them as roughly interchangeable.
32. See Jackson, 81ff.
33. Jackson remarks that separating ontology and epistemology is a move that only makes sense within a mind-world dualist conception (74). It is not clear to me whether his own reference to the four philosophical presuppositions specifically as philosophical ontological commitments makes him a dualist by his own account.
34. 'Mind-world dualism enables hypothesis testing, inasmuch as testing a hypothetical guess to see whether it corresponds to the world makes little sense in the absence of a mind-independent world against which to test that hypothesis', remarks Jackson (42).
35. James Lee Ray, 'Wars between Democracies: Rare, or Nonexistent?', International Interactions 18 (1993): 251-76.
36. Jackson, 36-7.
37. Note, however, that Bhaskar uses the adjective 'transfactual' to refer to the character of causal laws as operative both in closed and open systems, which is different from the sense intended by Jackson here.
38. Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (London: Verso, 2008), 92, 132.
39. This is my reading of the basic argument of Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, which underlies Jackson's exposition of critical realism.
40. Bhaskar is right, I think, to say that the possibility of science presupposes (the scientific community's subscription to) the realist understanding of causal powers as features of the objects and circumstances in the world. But I am not persuaded by his argument that 'given that science occurs', philosophy can say that causal powers must really exist and be at work.
41. See Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 52.
42. Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science.
43. H. Patomäki and C. Wight, 'After PostPositivism: The Promise of Critical Realism', International Studies Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2000): 213-37, at 223.
44. My own hesitancy in using the expression 'to know' (rather than 'to understand') here may be due to a residual element of phenomenalism in me; it may be that I am hesitant to claim 'I know' when I know I cannot witness what I am inclined to claim to know.
45. At one point in explicating the idea of 'mind-world dualism', Jackson, however, remarks: 'if we observe a situation in which two democracies do not go to war with one another, we do not have any reliable way to turn back the clock, make one of the countries a non-democracy, and observe what happens. The mind-independent world simply does what it does, leaving us and our world-independent minds to observe it' (66).
46. This rendition of mind-world dualism equates it with our inability to go back in time and our general inability to conduct experiments in social science. Unfortunately, Jackson's explication here gets in the way of articulating what is common to neopositivism and critical realism but is not shared by the other two positions - for neither of these other positions would deny the impossibility of going back in time or our general inability to conduct experiments in social science.
47. Jackson himself denies that it is possible for different methodologies to come to contradictory conclusions about some matter of fact, betraying his belief that all of the four methodologies would agree on the need to test any factual claims against empirical evidence.
48. See Jackson, 209.
49. Jackson, 114; my italics.
50. Jackson, 114; my italics.
51. Jackson seems to concur when he remarks that 'the world' is 'that realm of actuality that a methodology takes to exist' (195).
52. To say of 'the world' that it is an idea does not entail that material objects do not exist. They do exist in space and time; they are in the empirical realm. But 'the empirical realm' cannot itself be an object of sensory experience. It, too, is an idea. And that there is a world of which an empirical realm is only a part is, of course, an idea.
53. Jackson observes (143; my italics).
54. 'As for John Dewey, concepts and theories are for Weber instrumental idealizations for phenomena and relationships rather than representational copies of them - and as such are always provisional. firmly linked to the specific goals and purposes that animate them.
55. See, for example, P.H. Nowell-Smith, 'The Constructionist Theory of History', History and Theory 16, no. 4 (1977): 1-28.
56. Michael E. Hobart, 'The Paradox of Historical Constructionism', History and Theory 28, no. 1 (1989): 43-58.
57. As Jackson acknowledges, there is a standard label which refers to a combination of mind-world monism and phenomenalism, which is not 'analyticism' but 'constructivism'. However, he wishes to avoid using this term because, in IR, it 'names not a philosophical ontology but a scientific ontology and a set of substantive foci; norms, ideas, culture, and so on' (141). 'Constructionism' offers a convenient way out.
58. Jackson, 114; my italics.
59. Patomäki and Wight, 'After PostPositivism: the Promise of Critical Realism', 229.
60. Jackson remarks that reflexivist claims should not be mistaken for 'representational conjectures' (169).
61. Jackson, 156ff.
62. The 11th thesis of Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach.
63. See David McLellan, Karl Marx, Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 158.
64. Jackson states: 'For a reflexivist, knowing the world and changing the world are inseparable' (160).
65. Heikki Patomäki, After International Relations: Critical Realism and the (Re)Construction of World Politics (London: Routledge, 2002), 10.
66. Whether neopositivists, qua neopositivists, could be oriented towards 'transforming the world' is an interesting question. My doubt stems from the fact that they are especially strongly committed to the fact-value distinction, considering their mode of inquiry to be scientific because they are committed to showing the world as it is in contradistinction to how it ought to become. I should perhaps add here that Tables 3a and 3b summarise the moves I have made so far to expose the fact that
67. he four methodologies do not fit neatly into Jackson's 2×2 table; they are what Table 1 destructs itself into, according to my reasoning and interpretation. They are not presented here as a final product that I wish to see replace Jackson's original table.
68. Compare, inter alia, Hayden White, 'Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth', in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the 'Final Solution', ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37-53, esp. 38.
69. Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, esp. 249-50.
70. As with many polar opposites, constructionism and representationalism are not two discrete entities but form a continuum. However, if representationalism and constructionism are different only in what they stress, that is, the representational versus constructed nature of representational constructions/constructed representations, we may wonder what may be juxtaposed to them taken together.
71. The answer is found in dialecticism, which takes the world to unfold historically as knowledge claims, stemming from it, are brought to it. Indeed, Jackson draws attention to the dialectical/historical nature of 'reflexive' knowledge claims (Jackson, 160), which tends to suggest that 'reflexivity' stands out from the rest whose knowledge claims are representational/constructionist.
72. I am grateful to one of the referees of this article for alerting me to this important point. It reconfirms my main thesis that Jackson's 2×2 table does not work well but also suggests that there may be a number of schemes that can replace it.
73. Jackson remarks that knowledge claims produced by neopositivists 'refer to' what is hidden behind the phenomenal realm, although they do not claim to have direct knowledge beyond this realm. Jackson, 156.
74. If I have been right in my analysis, analyticists would not objectify 'the world' as a fixed object which we try to get at by knowledge production.
75. Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science.
76. Milja Kurki, Causation in International Relations: Reclaiming Causal Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
77. See Hidemi Suganami, 'Narrative Explanation and International Relations: Back to Basics', Millennium 37, no. 2 (2008): 327-56.
78. See Michael Scriven, 'Causation as Explanation', Noûs 9 (1975): 3-16.
79. Jackson, 146ff.
80. Jackson, 199.
81. Jackson, 160.
82. Jackson, 160.
83. Jackson, 160.
84. An 'open system', the opposite of a closed (i.e. controlled experimental) space, does not mean that a system is open for human agency to redesign it at will. It is of course subject to all kinds of constraints.
85. Jackson, 167.
86. Jackson, 167.
87. Jackson, 167.
88. On de-naturalising, see Jackson, 201.
89. A system of knowledge claims, addressing any of these three purposes, may be exploited for those objectives which many of us do not regard as benign, for example, for glorifying 'our' nation's history, defending racist politics, subjugating and controlling other ethnic groups. I am grateful to Andrew Linklater for alerting me to this point.
90. Robert W. Cox, 'Social Forces, States and World Order: Beyond International Relations Theory', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 10, no. 2 (1981): 126-55.
91. See Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge: Polity, 1984), chapter 2. Jackson's four methodologies may thus be seen to collapse into the familiar three: positivism, hermeneutics and critical theory. See
92. Ted Benton, Philosophical Foundations of the Three Sociologies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).
93. Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976).
94. Andrew Linklater, Beyond Realism and Marxism: Critical Theory and International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1990).