Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences: A Pluralistic Framework

This course is a broad survey of epistemological, ontological, and methodological issues relevant to knowledge production in the social sciences. The course has three overlapping objectives:

• To provide you with a grounding in these issues as they are conceptualised and debated by philosophers, social theorists, and intellectuals more generally
• To introduce some of the ways in which these issues have been incorporated (all too often incompletely or inaccurately) into the social sciences
• To promote reflection on how these issues relate to your own empirical research

This is neither a technical research design nor a proposal writing class, but is pitched at a more philosophical level. As we proceed through the course, however, you should come to appreciate the consequences of philosophical debates for the design and conduct of empirical research in the social sciences. You are encouraged to approach this course as an opportunity to think critically, creatively, and expansively about the status of social scientific knowledge, both that which you have produced and/or will produce, and that produced by others.

The 'science question' rests more heavily on the social than the natural sciences, for the simple reason that the successes of the natural sciences in enhancing the human ability to control and manipulate the physical world offer an effective rejoinder to scepticism regarding the scientific status of fields such as physics and biology. The social sciences have long laboured in the shadow of these successes. One response has been to try to model the social sciences on one or another of the natural sciences, or more specifically, on one or another philosophical account of knowledge production in those sciences. This naturalism forms one of the recurrent moves in the philosophy of the social sciences. We will engage it, both in its incarnation in the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle, and in the more widespread embrace of falsification as a demarcation criterion for science. Problems generated by the emphasis on law-like generalisations in these naturalistic approaches to social science subsequently informed both the reformulated naturalism of critical realism, and the rejection of naturalism by followers of classical sociologists like Max Weber. Finally, we consider the tradition of critical theory with its commitment to reflexive knowledge.

While not an exhaustive survey of issues in the philosophy of the social sciences, the course offers an opportunity to explore perennial issues of great relevance for the conduct of social science research, the methodological training of new social scientists, and the aspirations of many social scientists to receive some of the public attention, respect, and funding that natural scientists routinely enjoy. The course should thus serve as a solid foundation for subsequent reading and reflection.

This course centres on the survey of philosophical issues, typology of alternate stances, and argument for methodological pluralism advanced in Patrick Jackson’s The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2011). We will also read short articles from other political scientists treating the same issues as Jackson in different ways to better situate Jackson’s approach. The course sessions will be seminars that combine framing presentations by the instructor with extensive class discussion. The goal of these sessions is not only to help students understand Jackson’s terminology, assumptions, and arguments, but also to spur the clarification and articulation of their own philosophical judgments and stances, which may well diverge to a greater or lesser extent from that of Jackson.

This course presumes no prior detailed familiarity with philosophy of science or social science. The course does, however, presume openness to thinking of social science as a philosophy in addition to a more technical endeavour. A course in twentieth century philosophy during one’s university training would be a plus, and reading good survey books like Richard Bernstein’s The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976) or Peter Godfrey Smith’s Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2003) would serve as a refresher. The course will centre on Patrick Jackson’s The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2011) and students are encouraged to purchase the book and read it fully before coming to the Winter School, so that their reading of it while in Bamberg is for review and reflection to prepare for discussing, analysing, and debating it together, rather than an entirely first encounter with it.