Toward Understanding in International Relations

Abstract

It is impossible to disagree with the denotation of an essay that concludes with a plea for abstract theorizing, quantitative and nonquantitative analyses 'of implicit theories, or of informal, ad hoc, or personal hunches', and smalland large-N studies. I am completely sympathetic with Bueno de Mesquita's rejection of empiricism and purely inductive exercises associated with justificationalist and neo-justificationalist epistemologies. Lakatos's (1970) sophisticated methodological falsification offers a reasonable set of criteria for assessing research. However, I am skeptical about the possibility of comparing theories which are drawn from different research programs, about the benefits of large-N over small-N studies, and about the merits of quantitative over nonquantitative research. Kuhn's (1962) Structure of Scientific Revolutions touched off a lengthy debate about realism and rationality, about theory-laden observation, theory incommensurability, and criteria for belief and evidence. Kuhn's work challenges the traditional views of major philosophers of science who had held, at least in part, that science is an effort to learn about the one real world, that there is a sharp distinction between scientific and other beliefs, that scientific findings are cumulative, that there is a clear distinction between theory and observation, that hypotheses are justified by observation, that theoretical formulations proceed through deductive reasoning, that concepts have fixed meanings, and that there is a basic unity to all sciences (Hacking, 1981a: 1-2). Kuhn strongly doubts that one could decide objectively about the relative merits of diffierent paradigms. Competing approaches often use different terms. Even when they use the same terms these terms take on different meanings: 'Though most of the same signs are used before and after a revolution-e.g. force, mass, element, compound, cell the ways in which some of them attach to nature had somehow changed. Successive theories are thus, we say, incommensurable' (Kuhn, 1970: 267). Kuhn argues that the choice among competing paradigms, a choice which could bring about a scientific revolution, involves sociological and psychological factors, not just some set of criteria that could be accepted as scientific in the traditional sense. Lakatos's sophisticated methodological falsification is an effort to rebut Kuhn, to establish both empirically and logically that science can and has progressed rationally. He contends that it is possible to establish objective criteria for deciding among competing paradigms. For Lakatos, progress involves selecting research programs