As an American living in London, I wake up every morning and check statistics: the number of positive cases reported the prior day in both the UK and US, the number of deaths, hospitalizations and vaccine doses administered, the percentage of the population fully...
This is a guest post by Simon Frankel Pratt. He is a lecturer in the School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies at the University of Bristol. In the social sciences, research and data...
Andrew Gelman provides a nice rejoinder to Nicholas Christakis'Â New York Times op-ed, "Let's Shake up the Social Sciences." Fabio Rojas scores the exchange for Christakis, but his commentators...
Although I have made many of the points I am about to make in comments posted on Phil's and Eric's posts about rational choice theory over the past week, what I want to do at this point is to pull...
This is more of a riff on Phil's post from last week than a direct reply; the post that Dan and I wrote addresses more directly the issue of actor autonomy that we think Phil misunderstood us on we and Phil were clearly on different semantic pages, so I am not going to go back over that ground here. Instead -- and since we all basically agree that rational choice theory, as a species of decision-theoretic analysis, is located someplace in the tension between self-action and inter-action -- I want to pursue a more specific point, the criticism of decision-theoretic accounts on both...
Thanks to the patience of the former EJIR editorial team, PTJ and I will have an article in the forthcoming special issue on the "End of IR Theory?" Only the first 35-40% resembles the working paper (PDF) we posted at the Duck. Even the name has changed. We still argue in favor of thinking about international-relations theory as dealing with "scientific ontologies": "catalog[s]--or map[s]--of the basic substances and processes that constitute world politics." As we note in both the final version and the working paper, this includes: The actors that populate world politics, such as states,...
It may, however, be appropriate to point out that the persisting bipolar conflict in the  field between humanists and behavioralists conceals a lively polemic within both camps  and perhaps particularly among the so-called  behavioralists. Among the modernists neologisms burst like roman candles in the sky, and wars of epistemological legitimacy are fought. The devotees of rigor and theories of the middle range reject more speculative general theory as  non-knowledge; and the devotees of general theory attack those with more limited scope as technicians, as answerers in search of questions....
Chris Blattman links to a paper (PDF) that finds no relationship between oil production and violence. He comments: Regardless what you believe, however, there’s a striking shortage of null results papers published in top journals, even when later papers overturn the results. I’m more and more sickened by the lack of interest in null results. All part of my growing disillusionment with economics and political science publishing (and most of our so-called findings). Sigh… To which I say, "Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes!" If we really care about truth-seeking in the social sciences, let alone...
Because not everyone reads comment threads, in part because of the way that people engage with The Duck via RSS readers, and because think the questions involved are really important ones, I'm going to post my reaction to PM's "Yes, I do envy physicists"as a separate post of its own:Man, I was right with you until your advance response to commenters. Making "data and its analysis central to the undergraduate experience" -- a.k.a. emphasizing undergraduate research, such that one of the primary learning outcomes of a BA in International Relations or Government or Political Science or whatever...
[This post was written by PTJ]One of the slightly disconcerting experiences from my week in Vienna teaching an intensive philosophy of science course for the European Consortium on Political Research involved coming out of the bubble of dialogues with Wittgenstein, Popper, Searle, Weber, etc. into the unfortunate everyday actuality of contemporary social-scientific practices of inquiry. In the philosophical literature, an appreciably and admirably broad diversity reigns, despite the best efforts of partisans to tie up all of the pieces of the philosophy of science into a single and univocal...
Although the majority of the offerings in the European Consortium on Political Research's inaugural Winter School in Methods and Techniques (to be held in Cyprus in February 2012) are pretty firmly neopositivist, at the risk of sound like a shameless self-promoter I'd like to call your attention to course A6, "Knowing and the Known: Philosophy and Methodology of Social Science," which I am teaching. The short description of this course is:"The social sciences have long been concerned with the epistemic status of their empirical claims. Unlike in the natural sciences, where an evident record...
The Canard"All the fake news that's fit to print"--Seattle The American Political Science Association is abuzz with talk about a breakout book by an up and coming star in international relations theory, Patrick T. Jackson. While Jackson had previously had strong indie credentials established through gritty work on the strategic construction of the notion of Western civilization by the United States after WWII, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations looks to give Jackson the broader notoriety in the field that many have long thought he deserved. The book blurb proposes that it...