Analyticism and Pragmatism as Research Strategies

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.