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- Philosophical or 'meta-theoretical' issues have become increasingly salient in IR inquiry and are, it is argued here, fundamental to all theoretical approaches to the study of international politics.
- Meta-theory explores the underlying assumptions that theories hold, and attempts to understand the consequences of such assumptions on the act of theorizing and practice of empirical research.
- All theoretical positions make assumptions about: ontology (theory of being) epistemology (theory of knowledge) and methodology (theory of methods).
- Two key meta-theoretical questions in IR have been:
- What does the scientific study of world politics entail? and
- 'Is IR a science or not? ' - Positivism as a philosophy of science has dominated and still dominates IR scholarship, particularly in the United States. Although it has been discredited as a scientific practice within the discipline in recent years, it remains crucial in understanding the heritage of the discipline.
- The history of IR has often been narrated in terms of 'great debates', although this notion is not unproblematic. There are four key debates generally recognized.
- The first great debate took place between the idealists and realists during and immediately after the First World War.
- Idealists advocated the development of institutions and the use of reason and knowledge-production to control the irrational desires and frailties that infect the human condition.
- This was met by critique of the realists, who accused the value-driven idealists of focusing on how the world ‘ought to be’ rather than dealing with how it was objectively.
- The second great debate was concerned largely with questions of methodology, and took place in the 1960s between the behaviourist advocates of scientific inquiry and the traditionalist defenders of a more interpretive (hermeneutic) approach.
- The inter-paradigm debate in the 1970s and 1980s pitted realist, pluralist (liberal) and globalist (Marxist) positions against each other.
- The so-called fourth debate has characterized IR since the mid-1980s. It can be characterized in many ways: as a debate between explaining (scientific) and understanding (interpretive), between positivism (empiricist) and post-positivism and between rationalism and reflectivism.
- The explanatory theorists seek to emulate the natural sciences in seeking general causes and in following scientific methods accordingly.
- The interpretivists argue that rather than simply accepting an a priori commitment to science we should understand what is distinctive about social life and focus on understanding the internal meanings, reasons and beliefs actors hold.
- Positivism is a philosophy of science informed by an empiricist epistemology.
- Empiricism believes that all knowledge originates in empirical observation. Empiricism entails that scientific knowledge is only secure when based on empirical validation, in other words they advocate hypothesis-testing.
- Positivists aim at systematic observation in accordance with rigorous guidelines. They also look for regularities and they avoid talking about realities that cannot be observed. The positivist approach has undergone some significant shifts since the 1960s towards post-behaviourist forms of positivism, which also embrace qualitative inquiry.
- There are a multiplicity of post-positivist positions which challenge the positivist approach to social inquiry. Some draw on interpretive theory, some seek to articulate a non-positivist version of science. However, all postpostivist theories reject positivism as a mode of knowledge-production and sense-making of the (IR) world.
- The rationalist/reflectivist terminology which encapsulates both of the debates above is used to refer to the division in the discipline between those that apply rational choice and positivist methods and those that reject these methods and advocate interpretive and reflective methodologies.
- In IR, approaches such as critical theory, constructivism, poststructuralism and feminism are sometimes referred to as reflectivist.
- Some theorists in the discipline have challenged the positivist framing of the fourth debate and have, instead, advocated scientific realism, a philosophy of science critical of positivism.
- For scientific realists observation and generalizations are not central to social science. Instead, they focus on conceptualisations of the nature of unobservable social forces. Epistemologically and methodologically scientific realists are pluralist: they advocate the use of a variety of methods and ways of knowing, contingent on the kinds of questions different inquiries seek to ask.
- There are many conceptions of the notion of theory in IR.
- Explanatory theory, or ‘problem-solving theory’, explains events by seeking causes in a temporal sequence.
- Critical theories question particular social structures and their outcomes.
- Normative theories examine ethical or moral questions.
- Constitutive theories ask how social objects, such as the state, are constituted. - In more general terms theory can also be seen to be a ‘lens’ through which we look at the world.
- There are varying views also on the questions of objectivity. Some theorists claim detachment from the objects of their theorizing, while others contest this. Further, interpretations of theory testing and the theory-practice relationship in IR varies between theorists that draw from different philosophical schools of thought. These need to be appreciated in evaluating IR theories and their contributions.
- Being aware of meta-theoretical issues is important in understanding the nature of IR theorizing. All theoretical positions in IR are characterized by certain meta-theoretical assumptions.
- It is important to reflect critically on the limitations of each of the approaches and to realize that all of them are subject to dispute on certain grounds. This is significant because meta-theoretical and theoretical debates are not merely abstract philosophical exercises but carry political consequences.