Methodological Diversity

The preceding sessions of our seminar have started to highlight how IR as an academic discipline lack of self-reflexivity in diverse respects. Obviously failing to offer much varying perspectives in terms of race, gender, social class, geographies, and histories, IR, as practiced in the West in general and in the the US in particular, may also have failed to comprehensively engage with the debates of adjacent—sometimes extensively used within the field—disciplines. This is the case, PTJ suggests, with philosophy of science, which in fact bears by essence a foundational character to any scientific enterprise.

Indeed, one cannot help but notice that, when philosophers of science are called upon in IR, their journey is oftentimes presented as a Lakatos’ progressing research program: everything fits rather neatly from Descartes to Weber, Kuhn, Popper, and is eventually harmonized and articulated in KKV. PTJ points out that these “opportunistic raids into foreign scholarly territory” have eclipsed the demarcation problem at the core of the actual debates. If PTJ proposes a (Weber-inspired) definition of science in the IR context (he later argues that “international studies” need not be a science, see PTJ 2015), the principal innovation is to uncover the lack of coherence in the field’s organization—if one consider carefully the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of different approaches—and to offer an alternative typology (p. 37-40).

At the crossroads of mind-world dualism and monism (concepts that could maybe be reversed: to be discussed in class), and phenomenalism and transfactualism, PTJ brings out 4 ideal-types, equally “scientific” but based on different evaluative criteria. His typology is sometimes counter-intuitive: for instance, analyticism is illustrated with the work of Ken Waltz, notorious father of neorealism (in the old typology; PTJ is challenged by Humphreys on this point). The extended metaphor of the democratic peace theory in different ideal-types illustrates the potential narrowness of interpretation of science if one of them holds an undue monopoly (namely, neopositivism). Indeed, many seminars in IR theory across the US would use Green et al. (2001)—which strongly criticize the use of pooled cross-sectional time series using the MIDs dataset so as to validate democratic peace theory—to demonstrate ongoing methodological debates in IR. Instead, it should be described as mere “discussion about methods for achieving neopositivist goals” (p. 68). The four scientific ways through which one can study world politics in fact respond to different philosophies (ontological) and use distinctive methodologies.

As Suganami suggests, could PTJ's propositions be rearranged in 3 categories, as their inherent and original character rests on “the questions they ask” and the interests they reflect rather than their “philosophical foundations”? Why would PTJ’s typology overlook the myth-historical character of IR, along with other parameters, as Michel implies? Is PTJ’s approach unsympathetic to engagement (Wight) or forgetful of major components in his ideal-types (Sylvester)? It can be noted that the literature PTJ engages with is American (comprehensively), Anglo-Saxon (in majority), and Western (quasi-exclusively?). Would his ideal-types have been different had the research been extended to more non-Western philosophers of science and social scientists?