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Monday 17 – Friday 21 February 2020, 09:00–12:30
15 hours over five days
The purpose of this course is to help you 'unlearn' some of the default lessons about the conduct of social-scientific inquiry that you have likely soaked up by virtue of your socialisation as graduate students in a field dominated by neopositivism as a default way of being scientific.
Nomothetic generalisation, hypothesis-testing, controlling for variance… all of these techniques presume a whole series of things about the relationship between the mind and the world that are by no means categorically true, and by no means appropriate for all kinds of research questions.
In this course, we will explore one alternative way of doing social science with roots in the analytical approach of Max Weber and the reflections of key pragmatist thinkers.
ECTS Credits
2 credits Complete the daily assignments—questions for discussion
3 credits As above, plus submit a summary paper one week after the class ends answering the question 'what is analytical pragmatism?'
4 credits As above, plus submit a take-home paper due one week after the class ends—articulate your own research through a pragmatic analytical lens
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson is Professor of International Studies, and Director of the AU Honors Program, at the American University in Washington, DC.
His award-winning book The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations was published by Routledge in a second, revised edition in 2016.
At present he is working on projects on explanation in the social sciences, theological responses to climate change, and the theory and methodology of Max Weber.
For various historical reasons, the social sciences — especially in the English-speaking world — have been dominated by neopositivism for decades. Indeed, neopositivism, with its commitment to the elucidation of nomothetic generalisations through a procedure of hypothesis-testing across multiple cases, is all too often mistaken for 'the scientific method,' crowding out other approaches to knowledge-production. The epistemic interests of neopositivist research are then mistaken for the goals of science per se, despite the fact that neopositivism doesn’t capture the actual practice of physical sciences like physics terribly well.
The result of this methodological monoculture is that although we frequently have criticisms of neopositivism, we much less frequently have systematic explications of how to do empirical research that doesn’t conform more or less to neopositivist strictures. Even rarer is non-neopositivist methodological exploration that tries to retain key notions like causation and generality, but doesn’t treat those notions in the conventional neopositivist manner.
This course will give you a grounding in precisely such an alternative: a non-neopositivist approach to social-scientific inquiry that emphasises causal explanation and has a significant place for generality.
Building on the work of Max Weber and the tradition of American pragmatism, the analytical pragmatist approach seeks to articulate and refine conceptual tools that can be used to produce case-specific explanations of otherwise-puzzling outcomes.
We will begin with the philosophical foundations of an analytical pragmatist approach, and proceed to consider some examples of work that incorporates this sensibility, and how that sensibility might inform your own work.
Nothing specific required except a willingness to unlearn the default methodological background we have inherited from the tradition of 'mainstream' anglophone social science.
Day | Topic | Details |
---|---|---|
1 | How we think |
Lecture and discussion |
2 | Ideal-typification |
Lecture and discussion |
3 | Language-games and forms of life |
Lecture and discussion; workshop |
4 | Networks |
Lecture and discussion; workshop |
5 | Practices and traditions |
Lecture and discussion; workshop |
Day | Readings |
---|---|
1 |
John Dewey |
3 |
Bially Mattern |
2 |
Max Weber |
4 |
Padgett and Ansell |
5 |
Kustermans, Jorg John Shotter |
None. We ruminate and reflect, we don’t compute.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophical Investigations
Nicholas Rescher
Process Metaphysics
Alfred North Whitehead
Process and Reality
Dewey and Bentley
Knowing and the Known
Jackson and Nexon
Relations Before States
European Journal of Relations 5:3 (1999)
Knowing and the Known
Dvora Yanow's course
Network Analysis