After Theory, Before Big Data

Thinking about Praxis, Politics and International Affairs

Friedrich Kratochwil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000401646
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book's key purpose is to contribute to the ongoing "theoretical" discussion in the field of international relations (IR) concerning the status of grand theories.

However, it also has a wider, critical mission: to challenge mainstream social science and its dominant methodology, as well as the unfettered optimism that the problem of social order can be solved by the "application" of scientific knowledge to our practical problems. The author uses rigorous philosophical analysis to focus on the unexamined assumptions that form the bedrock of many contemporary scholars in IR and demonstrates the unavailability of a universal "scientific" procedure for finding the facts, when we face practical choices and issues of social reproduction.

This book will be of interest to upper-level students of IR, sociology, history, and philosophy of science; it will also speak to students of security, foreign policy making, migration, and political economy, in addressing the basis of their attitudes in thinking about the world and the role of scholarship.

1

Three stories to ponder and one Gedankenexperiment

DOI: 10.4324/9781003175070-2

Introduction

I shall begin my investigation with three little stories that seem to me emblematic for the problems of theorizing about our actions. My thesis is that the way we go about it is deeply flawed most of the time, as it involves us in using criteria and standards that are inappropriate for illuminating the world of praxis. This might not be news for most of us, since for quite some time there has been a considerable groundswell against the naivete of “primers”, pawned off on unwitting graduate students, that are supposed to get them from a theory-informed question to a research design, so that the users arrive at some scientific truth. Actually those “primers” may be little more than training devices that allow those following the instructions to jump with some bravura through the hoops, which the “profession” in its search for legitimacy has invented.

But then again even if we are less theory-obsessed and put our faith instead in the exploration and codification of practices, the belief that a set of practices having proven their usefulness in certain arenas – such as bookkeeping – is likely to provide us also with the appropriate tools for dealing with complex issues of peace-keeping depends on a rather heroic metaphysical assumption: that the continuity of nature provides us with “one world” which can be grasped by “one view” – the theoria of yore – which nowadays is identified with science, and that no significant differences exist between the theoretical and the practical world. Obviously, something more has to be said on those points. It seems that being enthralled with theory, or with method, or with recording apparently successful practices, we tend to forget – or leave unexplored – that some characteristics of action call into question the assumption “one world”.

If we are engaged in praxis, we are unfortunately, not moving within but are transcending the realm of nature. Thus, just for starters, in the social world we have to deal with “mind-dependent” and not with “natural” facts, a problem that make transitions between the physical world and that of praxis tricky. True, the dissent within the IR fraternity to the modus operandi of the “mainstream”, which wants to build grand theories has become more vocal over the years, as exemplified by the second and third “great debate”. But it is questionable whether the ensuing debates can lead us out of the cave, since much attention is being paid to indicators, measurements and data for logical inferences, while important conceptual issues are neglected. This explains perhaps why many of the new departures, announcing a new debate, are quickly re-grooved into the old song and dance, whose steps and melodies we already know. In a way, this saves us perhaps from venturing into the empty spaces of the unfamiliar, but it also prevents us from discovering something different.

As a quick illustrative example, I just point to the long debate on whether the logic of appropriateness or the logic of consequences is the better “predictor” of outcomes.¹ Most of the various champions for espousing one logic did not seem to realize that they had just rediscovered the wheel, since the controversy between deontologist and consequentialists has been with us for a very long time. But the real issue of whether prediction and explanation are really the two sides of the same coin, and whether reasons are causes was hardly addressed. Interestingly, few people in the IR community² seemed to have understood that these problems could not be solved by some tests, as the most crucial analogy between reasons and causes is conceptually more demanding. Consequently, the issues are not simply empirical – which a test could solve – but the very question what could count as a “test” for answering this question is raised, and here it appears we encounter paradoxes which we can only circumvent by not going down certain traditional garden paths which lead to nowhere.

Or take the endless and essentially mistaken discussion about whether norms are only intervening variables³ rather than causes, which explains the “play” we see when comparing the actually obtained compliance with what we would have expected when reading the rules. Of course, there is here an additional erroneous assumption that all norms work in the same way – perhaps with the exception of values and principle – because the latter are fuzzy and can be stated only in general terms (such as: do good) and thus do not provide firm guidance. So the remedy seems to be: state the norms as clearly as possible – which is precisely what also a theory would tell us; in doing so it also follows that the terms we use have to be clearly operationalized and that we also must observe the taxonomic principles of exclusive attribution.

While one can hardly be “against” clarity of expression, things are a bit more complicated. Both underlying assumptions are obviously in need of considerable repair (or must be rejected outright). First, no rule “makes” you behave in a certain fashion, analogous to the way in which a solid body hitting another makes the latter move according to Newton’s law of actio est reactio. As Wittgenstein remarks: “A rule stands there like a signpost. Does the signpost leave no doubt about the way I have to go?”⁴ Obviously not, there might be two or more ways of “getting there” with different demands on time, skill or by offering spectacular vistas as opposed to short cuts. In addition, I can change my mind and decide to call it a day, and not even come back later as other matters preoccupy me.

Second, not all norms are of the same order: the norms of criminal law or tax law do not leave it up to us to decide to comply. On the other hand, the enabling norms of contract law leave it up to us and might make a contract voidable if some of the formal prescriptions were violated. So prohibitions (not to do something), demands (to do something), and liberties (allowing you to do something) have overlapping but different logics, which exceed the paradigm of efficient cause prevalent in science.⁵ Third, we have to realize that neither of the problems can be cured by a “clear” formulation – according to the old notion that reality has to be adequately captured by our terms. The simple rule “no vehicles in the park” is as clear as it can be, but its potential indeterminacy has nothing to do with how norms affect my will, nor with the notion of precision, which norms allegedly lack since they are not statements of fact. Is a skateboard a vehicle? Is it a vehicle if the contraption it has an engine, even if the latter is battery-powered? But why can a diesel truck of the fire brigade enter the park in order to take a short cut to a fire? Finally, if it turns out that such seemingly empirical rules do not much better than complicated principles, such as “free speech” or “due process” – which lead to endless controversies because their generality and/or imprecision – what should we make of such explanations? Should they not make us wonder instead why we think that making rules as simple and “empirical” as possible – in ways that are similar to the protocols outlining the necessary steps for lab procedures and experiments – could serve as templates? Should we then not – by extension – wonder why the stories which provide us with the data of the social world are not such “lists” and the data they record are not like the rocks we use for “building” houses, and that even the analogy of a “practice” to a recipe (not only listing the ingredients but specifying also a sequence of actions) is still grossly misleading?

I want to leave those questions, raising “philosophical” issues for now in abeyance, as we will consider them from different angles throughout the book. For the moment I just want to alert the reader to the fact that decreasing popularity of grand theorizing even among mainstream scientists – instead of “getting on with one’s work” is not convincing as long we believe that the real race is still on for getting via a different epistemological strategy a good theory that lets us build a better mousetrap. What we should be questioning is whether we should be building mousetraps in the first place – to stay with the metaphor – rather than learn how to sail and navigate, so that we can make new voyages to get to know the unknown.

For making this point explicit I want the reader to reflect in this chapter on three stories, which cast considerable doubt on the “theory project”. They might be disconcerting and also seem unconnected at first, but their connection will become clearer as we go through the subsequent chapters. Here, I just want to do three things: first, trip up the reader by showing how what we consider normal, might be worth a second thought. I do so because any learning presupposes, as a first step the examination of our questions. This might necessitate some “unlearning” (that is the Socratic part of the enterprise). Second, since I do not want to leave the reader with the feeling that he has been tripped up for no purpose, I offer below a mapping exercise, which tries to show the most significant differences between the natural world and the social world, which we can ignore only at our peril (this is the Aristotelian and ordinary language part of the exercise) Third, I offer a Gedankenexperiment – in a way presenting a preliminary balance sheet for those who are still sceptical about my “a-theoretical” take. It consists in taking arguendo the traditional prescriptions for building grand theories of the social realm seriously, and show what following such an advice actually entails. As it turns out, very little of what interests us in the social world could be addressed in such a theoretical straight jacket. This is where the link to pragmatism becomes visible.

Fortunately, hardly anybody’s research strictly follows the traditional canon, and usually chucks much of the “theoretical baggage” in midstream, as Kenneth Abbott has so nicely shown in the case of sociology;⁶ but the same observations could be made in political science or IR. That might be all well, since it makes the actual work more interesting, when “variables” and structures are left behind and actual actors and their choices are introduced in the “cases” discussed. This is not to say, that variable research is beside the point and that’s structures do not matter. The real issue is rather different from such a misplaced dichotomy. After all, we all know that we can only act when certain things can be taken for granted and that the institutions provide us with such a structured environment. The question is then rather how institutions function since they can neither be simply reduced to an intentional action scheme, nor are they well captured by the notion of a “constraint”, as they obviously also enable actions. This was the puzzle which animated Hume’s Inquiry where he unearthed the “conventional” character of social action and which led him in his History of England – dealing with issues of unintended consequences, transgenerational “ongoing concerns” and “settlements” – to clarify some of the problems of the (re-)production of social order. It also puts the problems with which Kant struggled all his life, in perspective. First in the tension between his two Critiques, which were hardly alleviated by his Third Critique where he explicitly dealt with the problem of a teleology, by the introduction of a “cunning of reason” in his social philosophy, a notion that sits, however, badly with his notion of free action and the rigour of his ethics.⁷

With those considerations in mind let us now go to the “three stories”.

The three stories

The first story concerns a straightforward critique of classical variable theorizing that had never assuaged my doubts that the traditional theoretical approach is appropriate for analysing problems of praxis. Praxis always takes place in time and is thus contingent; but, more importantly it takes place in a historical time. which the simple “before” and “after” of the arrow of homogenous time badly captured. Besides, as the laws of nature have to be the same today as they were yesterday or will be tomorrow, they also can be expressed in a time-independent mathematical function which tells you what happens to the other value (or variable) if the value of the first changes. After all, what is true has to be universally and necessarily so. Therefore, there can be events, but no surprises, as everything is captured by the values in the equation.

My misgivings were heightened when I found a standard social science book on change. It honed in on the tension between the – in a way – a-temporal concept of “truth” on which our theories are based, and the question whether such an approach could provide us with useful practical knowledge, as something is “left out” even if we want to analyse only the quite mundane case of “cooking”. True, there are recipes that name all the ingredients and their measures and thus anything resulting from this mix has to be describable in terms of the changed properties or values these elements take on during the process. So far so good, as the analogy to the ex ante specification of the variables, explaining the outcome, seems at first blush to fit. But then again it would be strange if in the cookbook there were not also specific instructions as to when the particular ingredients have to be mixed or added, since getting the timing wrong could result in disastrous outcomes, and “mistakes” in the sequencing might be as severe or even worse than getting the amounts wrong, or not paying attention to the prescribed changes in temperature during the process.

In short, this story articulates a certain unease with the standard methods we use in explaining, as they are remaining largely oblivious to the importance of irreversible timing and sequencing. Things get however still more difficult in the next two stories where we no longer deal with mind-independent elements that an actor uses in producing something, but which are mind-dependent as they are constitutive concepts. Consequently, further conceptual adjustments have to be made, that explode the observational paradigm and standard positivist epistemology. Since the outcome is not governed by the existence or the fitting of pre-given elements but results from contra-factually stabilized norms, their use has to be investigated. Here again the model of applying a norm to some facts as it occurs in the adjudicative context (third party norm application) is not really helpful for illuminating what goes on in actual interactions of actors, although for the participants this does not seem to generate a great p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Three stories to ponder and one Gedankenexperiment
• 2 (Alternative) facts, historical narratives, and the issue of “objectivity” in the social sciences: A conceptual exploration
• 3 Much ado about what?: Some reflections on a theory of practice, identity, and social (re)production
• 4 The view to nowhere and the problem of social ordering
• Bibliography
• Index