My views on the role of assumptions are no secret. Â Nor are they without detractors. Â In hopes of advancing the debate, I invite anyone who disagrees with me to enrich themselves while proving me wrong.
Pick any scholarly paper you have written, published or not. Â If I cannot identify three patently false or fundamentally unfalsifiable assumptions in the paper, as judged by a mutually agreed upon third party, I will pay you $1000. Â If I can, I ask only that you admit publicly that your view about the role of assumptions is untenable. Â You won’t owe me any money.
I’m completely serious about this. Â If you are interested, email me (parena at buffalo dot edu).
EDITED: this offer only applies to scholarly papers in political science and/or international relations, and only those purporting to explain some aspect of international relations (as opposed to review pieces or calls for reflection or whatever).
EDITED II: What’s the point of this?  Though this won’t by any means settle all debate about the proper role of assumptions, I think it has the potential to be informative. I believe it is impossible to avoid making false and/or unfalsifiable assumptions, and that it is therefore inappropriate to criticize someone for having done so. Many disagree with me.  There are those in this field who think that committing the sin of including a single false/non-falsifiable assumption is immediately disqualifying; who don’t distinguish between implausible assumptions that are only there to simplify and thus are ultimately innocuous, and implausible assumptions that are critically responsible for the substantive results and thus are deeply problematic on the other.  If someone agrees to the challenge, and I fail to do what I’ve proposed, my position will look a lot less tenable. If those who believe that no one should make assumptions are forced to realize that they have done so, even in a paper they were confident was free of sin, the contrary position will look less tenable.
What is the point of this?
Obviously this isn’t going to put the debate to rest once and for all, but I think it has the potential to be informative. I believe it is impossible to avoid making false and/or unfalsifiable assumptions, and that it is therefore inappropriate to criticize someone for having done so. Many disagree with me. If someone agrees to the challenge, and I fail to do what I’ve proposed, my position will look a lot less tenable. If those who believe that no one should make assumptions are forced to realize that they have done so, even in a paper they were confident was free of sin, the contrary position will look less tenable.
Does anybody really think this? Critiquing rational choice for putting untenable assumptions at the core of their theory- i.e. take them out and *everything* collapses- is the problem, not that everybody uses assumptions.
I have encountered people who think that every assumption is problematic, and who claim that their work does not rely on any they can’t point to evidence for, yes. More than a few of them. I’ve also met many people who draw no distinction between assumptions that simplify the analysis without having any impact on the substantive conclusion versus those whose removal would greatly alter the argument.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say that “rational choice” has put untenable assumptions at the core of the theory. There is no single theory known as “rational choice”. The only assumption that unifies all of the work that people refer to with the poorly defined term “rational choice” is that people have acyclical preferences they seek to satisfy. If there’s a critique of this assumption, it’s that it’s nonfalsifiable (which isn’t much of a critique, for a variety of reasons), not that it’s untenable. Are you perhaps conflating Homo Economicus with “rational choice”?
If rational choice truly only is about understanding that people have preferences then that’s pretty worthless, isn’t it? I mean what is insightful about that observation?
You misunderstand. When I say there is no single theory known as “rational choice,” I mean there is no single theory known as “rational choice.” To say that the only thing that a wide body of otherwise distinct work has in common is x is not to say that none of the individual works comprising this non-unified non-entity have anything to say but x.
So then what other assumptions to do rational choice commonly make? We know they only all share one. But what are the others that we see quite often? The critique above seems more aimed at these common assumptions, not the one obvious and uninteresting assumption that they all share, no?
I don’t know what the critique above means. I don’t know what “rational choice” means. What I do know is that every conversation I’ve ever had with someone who thinks “rational choice” makes untenable assumptions very quickly reaches a point where I realize that the person expressing such a concern is arguing against something that basically does not exist. That they are profoundly unaware of what relevant work has been published. Maybe this time is different, but past experiences leaves me rather pessimistic about that.
There is no sense in which “rational choice” scholars, as a collective body, have put *any* assumptions at the core of “their theory”—except for the one assumption that Hillary rightly notes is so bland as to be extremely uncontroversial. Is it true that many individual “rational choice” scholars have put untenable assumptions at the core of their individual theories, such that if you remove the untenable assumptions it all comes crashing down? I don’t know. I guess it depends on what you mean by “many”. I wouldn’t say I’ve never seen work I’d declare guilty of that. But there’s a great deal of work for which I’d say this is not the case. Moreover, there’s bad work of every kind in every field, much of which is made bad by the presence of untenable assumptions upon which the work critically depends (though these assumptions are often implicit), so I don’t know why anyone who knows what they’re talking about would single “rational choice” out in this way.