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The Ontological Fallacy: a rejoinder on the status of scientific realism in international relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2009

FRED CHERNOFF
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Abstract

This article argues that scientific and critical realism have embraced several mistaken claims, among them that social science enquiry cannot proceed unless the theoretical objects of study are specified in advance. The article argues, rather, that although pre-scientific, observable objects and events must be specified from the outset, theoretical objects come to our attention only in the course of formulating theories. The article advances an alternative to scientific realist and critical realist foundations, namely, causal conventionalism, which is an adaptation to the social sciences of several elements of Pierre Duhem's conventionalist account of physical science. The article argues that major goals of theorising that scientific realism and critical realism seek to fulfill are better satisfied by the conventionalist alternative. In an effort to clarify some important issues, the article identifies and responds to a series of related criticisms of my views offered by Colin Wight in his recent article ‘A Manifesto for Scientific Realism in IR: Assuming the Can-Opener Won't Work!’ in ‘Millennium’, and in his book, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology.1

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , April 2009 , pp. 371 - 395
Copyright
Copyright © © British International Studies Association 2009

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References

1 Colin Wight, ‘A Manifesto for Scientific Realism in IR: Assuming the Can-Opener Won't Work!’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35 (2007), pp. 379–98, and Colin Wight, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

2 Wight, Agents, Structures; Heikki Patomäki, After International Relations: Critical Realism and the (Re)construction of World Politics. (London: Routledge, 2002); and Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

3 Wight, ‘A Manifesto’, p. 388.

4 According to the epistemic fallacy, ‘what is known is what can be … observed and what “is” is what can be known’, Heikki Patomäki and Colin Wight, ‘After Postpositivism: The Promises of Critical Realism’, International Studies Quarterly, 44 (2000), p. 217.

5 Wight, ‘A Manifesto’, p. 388.

6 Fred Chernoff, ‘Scientific Realism’ and The Power of International Theory: Re-forging the Link to Policy Making through Scientific Enquiry (London: Routledge, 2005).

7 Wight, ‘A Manifesto’ and Agents, Structures.

8 The objects may be construed as sense-data, concreta, social constructs, etc. We may even have a ‘socially constructed’ conceptual framework to pick out ordinary objects. (Though it is not clear why humans need such, if orang-utans do not.) But these are not scientific theories.

9 It is hard to imagine a philosophical view that does not acknowledge that human beings, and/or perhaps even other primates, were able to recognise what we have specified as ‘ordinary objects’ prior to the rise of science or the acceptance of any set of unobservable, theoretical entities. There are philosophical difficulties distinguishing precisely observables from non-observables. But the account of the development of ontologies here requires only that humans be able to pick out objects in their environment that do not require the use of sometime-contested scientific theories.

This article draws a standard distinction between the ontologies of ordinary experience, which include many objects we observe without mediation and inference, and the theoretical ontologies of sciences. One might push the distinction farther and separate a philosophical ontology from both of the above. That position is entirely consistent with the position taken in this article and the way in which scientific realists and critical realists in IR have argued for the priority of ontology. Philosophers who support a particular set of entia would use the generally accepted philosophical criteria for choosing a superior philosophical account of the domain specified. The arguments advanced in this article pertaining to the choosing a scientific-theoretical ontology would still mutatis mutandis apply. Some would, though, not separate the problem into three parts but would focus on the distinction between pre-theoretical and theoretical objects. The general principles of ontological commitment sketched in this article apply whether we treat a binary or tripartite ontology.

10 There are, of course, huge difference between Newton's mechanics and Keohane's theory of institutions, which point up some of the general differences between the natural and the social sciences. However, these theories share the fundamental features of theories noted.

11 Since it is not possible to defend all of those principles here, the reader may refer to Chernoff, ‘Scientific Realism as a Meta-Theory of International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, 46 (2002), pp. 189–207, and ‘The Study of Democratic Peace and Progress in International Relations’, International Studies Review, 6 (2004), pp. 49–77; and The Power of International Theory.

12 This is explored further in the next section. Other conventionalists, following Poincaré, would say that they are arbitrary.

13 See James Lee Ray, ‘A Lakatosian View of the Democratic Peace Research Program’, in Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman (eds), Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2003), pp. 205–44.

14 The admission that that all meta-theories are equally valid, warrants equal acceptance of a meta-theory that rejects methodological pluralism. See also Chernoff, ‘Methodological Pluralism and The Limits of Naturalism in the Study of Politics’, in Richard Ned Lebow and Mark Lichbach (eds), Theory and Evidence in Comparative Politics and International Relations (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007).

15 For a fuller defence of these see Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 2, Elements of Logic, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds), (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932) and Christopher Hookway, Pierce (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).

16 Examples abound. Newton's theory was taken as certain beyond doubt from the late 17th century onward. In the 20th century, the prestigious Leconte Prize was awarded to René Blondlot in 1904 for his ‘discovery’ of n-waves. But later theories rejected the n-wave. Arthur Fine argues that the emphasis on scientific success sometimes obscures the many failures; he puts it by saying that each breakthrough in scientific progress is the peak of a mountain otherwise composed of failure; see Arthur Fine, ‘Unnatural Attitudes: Realist and Instrumentalist Attachments to Science’, Mind (1986) 96, pp. 149–79.

17 See Fred Chernoff, ‘Critical Realism, Scientific Realism and International Relations Theory’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35 (2007), pp. 401–9.

18 Wight, ‘A Manifesto’, p. 396.

19 Suppose we were to learn that a child, who said that ‘2+2=5’, was criticised by Mussolini, who insisted, rather, that the sum is four. The logic of Wight's criticism is exactly parallel to accusing someone who upheld the claim that 2+2=4 of ‘siding with fascism’.

20 Wight, Agents, Structures, p. 38.

21 Agents, Structures p. 29, note 63.

22 Wight, Agents, Structures, p. 59.

23 See Wight, ‘A Manifesto’, p. 385, note 23 and Chernoff ,‘Critical Realism’, p. 407. There is certainly no consensus among philosophers of science as to any difference that adoption of SR makes to practice. Authors like Fine and Kukla have argued that it does not make any practical difference whether one is or is not a scientific realist; see Fine, ‘Unnatural Attitudes’ and André Kukla, Studies in Scientific Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). It makes a difference for philosophers whether some version of scientific realism is right or whether the anti-scientific realist position is right – because they want the right answer. But it is a completely different question as to whether it makes any difference for practice. I am not asserting that one cannot make the case that adoption of scientific realism affects practice. Rather, the conclusion here is that it is difficult to see how; neither is the difference self-evident nor does Wight (or others) provide clear examples of how it could – despite claiming to have done so.

24 Wight, ‘A Manifesto’, p. 381.

25 Ibid., p. 383.

26 Ibid., p. 383, note 16.

27 Ibid., p. 383, emphasis added.

28 Ibid., p. 395, note 63.

29 Ibid., p. 398.

30 Ibid., p. 395.

31 For example, Chernoff, ‘Scientific Realism as a Meta-Theory’, pp. 201–2 and 204.

32 The quote Wight offers is, ‘the question of which theory should be adopted is precisely a matter of determining which theory is predicatively the best theory’; Chernoff, ‘Scientific Realism as a Meta-theory’, p. 195, cited by Wight, ‘A Manifesto’, p. 395.

33 Chernoff, ‘Scientific Realism as a Meta-Theory’, p. 203.

34 While Duhem (1954) himself did not endorse ‘causality’, there is no inconsistency between his principle of conventionality of science and causal explanation. In The Power of International Theory, p. 112–3, I note that the addition of a causal component is parallel to the effort by Patomäki (a co-author of Wight) to add a causal component to British Institutionalist theories that were developed without such a component; see Patomäki, After International Relations: Critical realism and the (re)construction of world politics (London: Routledge, 2002).

35 Chernoff, The Power of International Theory, pp. 111–3. These defences of social causation aremost explicit in the section in chapter 4 entitled ‘convention and causation’, and the lastthree sections of chapter 4, where I defend my view from charges that social causation is impossible.

36 See Bas C. van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

37 Wight, ‘A Manifesto’, p. 394, note 57.

38 See Sumit R. Das, ‘Hawking Radiation in String Theory’, Journal of Astronomical Physics 20 (1999), pp. 131–48. Scientists similarly generally suspend belief regarding why the principle of least action holds. I thank Lee Arnold for suggestions on this point.

39 Wight may be conflating ‘unobservable objects’ with ‘theoretical objects’. As noted in section I, there are non-theoretical objects that are unobservable, such as ideas, love, anger, and for some philosophical views, universals (apart from their instantiations).

40 It is possible though unlikely that the superior theory that is adopted in the future will postulate the same theoretical entities.

41 Wight, ‘A Manifesto’, p. 388. We should note that an emphasis on the importance of ontology does not require the fallacious inference that this article explicates. Patrick Jackson has made a strong case for inquiry into a philosophical ontology, and argues that such an inquiry will lead to a different sort of social enquiry that we otherwise would embrace. See Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, ‘Foregrounding Ontology: Dualism, Monism, and IR Theory’, Review of International Studies (forthcoming).

42 Wight, Agents, Structures, p. 18.

43 Putnam says, ‘A realist (with respect to a given theory or discourse) holds that (1) the sentences of that theory or discourse are true or false; and that (2) what makes them true or false is something external – that is to say, not (in general) our sense data, actual or potential, or the structure of our minds, or our language, etc.’;

Hilary Putnam, ‘What Is Mathematical Truth?’ Mathematics, Matter and Method: Philosophical Papers,1, pp. 60–78. (London: Cambridge University Press), pp. 69–70.

44 Richard Boyd's characterisation of SR is, ‘the doctrine that the sort of evidence that ordinarily counts in favour of the acceptance of a scientific law or theory is, ordinarily, evidence for the (at least approximate) truth of the law or theory as an account of the causal relations obtaining between the entities quantified over in the law or theory in question’; Richard N. Boyd, ‘Realism, Underdetermination and a Causal Theory of Evidence’, Noûs 7 (1973), p. 1.

45 Agents, Structure ch. 1.

46 One of the first to note this was John Worrall, ‘Scientific Realism and Scientific Theory Change’, Philosophical Review, 32(1982), for example, pp. 225–9. Another important scientific realist, Jerrett Leplin soon thereafter observed that scientific realism is a majority position whose advocates are so divided as to appear a minority; see Jarett Leplin, ‘Introduction’, in Scientific realism, Jarett Leplin (ed.), (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 1.

47 In the next and final section in the chapter, where Wight applies his version of realism to the social sciences, half of all the footnotes (22 out of 44 that have references to publications) cite Bhaskar and another six cite Collier. Put another way, there are 42 references to Bhaskar (and six more to his disciple and interpreter, Collier) in the 39 pp. of the sections on scientific realism and social scientific realism (Wight, Agents, Structures, pp. 23–61). This is but one indication of the heavy reliance on Bhaskar.

48 Wight, Agents, Structures, p. 18.

49 Ibid., note 23.

50 Chernoff, ‘Scientific Realism as a Meta-theory’, p. 191. For a concise and insightful description of the genesis of critical realism in IR, see Chris Brown, ‘Situating Critical Realism’, Millennum: Journal of International Studies, 35 (2007), pp. 409–16.

51 This is precisely the argument of Karen Darling in ‘Motivational Realism: The Natural Classification for Pierre Duhem’, Philosophy of Science, 70 (2003), pp. 1125–3.

52 Wight, Agents, Structures, pp. 51–2. See Arthur Fine, ‘Unnatural Attitudes’, p. 156.

53 Some who oppose traditional naturalism in IR have argued that some of the problems, especially with inductive reasoning, can be circumvented by substituting a notion of ‘alternative future scenarios’ from that of ‘prediction’; see Steven Bernstein, Richard Ned Lebow, Janice Gross Stein and Steven Weber, ‘God Gave Physics the Easy Problems: adapting social science to an unpredictable world’, European Journal of International Relations, 6 (2000), pp. 43–76. This is an illuminating and helpful approach that offers insights into how theory may be used by policy-makers. But I have argued elsewhere (Chernoff, 2005, pp. 172–6) that it does not avoid the philosophical problems its authors believe it does.

54 Patomäki says, ‘Qualitative changes and emergence are possible, but predictions are not’, After International Relations, p. 157; cf. also p. 191. Wight says, ‘Criteria for rational confirmation and/or rejection of theories in the social sciences cannot be predictive […] ’ Agents, Structures, p. 52. And although Wendt, in Social Theory of International Relations, offers perhaps the most extensive treatment of meta-theories in the IR literature, ‘prediction’ is nowhere endorsed and is, in fact, barely even mentioned.

55 Wight, Agents, Structures, p. 50–51.

56 That is, the inconsistency arises if ‘human emancipation’ is intended as anything beyond a purely individual, intellectual, or emotional emancipation of the sort that people could enjoy whether they are living under liberal, authoritarian or fascist regime that permits them to read what they want.

57 I have argued elsewhere that community-wide agreement is possible in the social sciences (Chernoff ‘The Study of Democratic Peace’) and there may be theoretical debate where the contending theories postulate the same theoretical entities. But the vast majority of questions debated in IR fit neither category of exception.

58 Wight does acknowledge that current theories may turn out to be wrong (‘A Manifesto’, p. 384.). But he uses two misleading cases in drawing conclusions. The first is his critique of the ‘pessimistic meta-induction on the history of science’, where he defends SR from the charge that it is committed to the claim that all entities ever postulated by scientific theories must exist. No philosopher of science to my knowledge has advanced this claim (though in IR it has been raised). The standard philosophical argument is far stronger, viz., that scientific realists are forced to acknowledge that they have been wrong in drawing ontological conclusions from all previously accepted and now rejected past theories; so the probability is high that they will be wrong about our current theories. The second is that Wight believes that the existence of atoms, postulated by current theories, is very unlikely to be proved not to exist in current theories. But other entia, noted above, which are much less familiar to the reader and which have endured over far shorter time spans are postulated in current theories just as atoms are. So the postulation of atoms is not the most enlightening example in the context of a discussion of the confidence a reader might have in the long-term survival of many of the entities of current scientific theories into the distant future.

59 The ‘sogiston theory’ is specifically offered as an example of a bad theory in order to dramatise some aspects of the problems for SR and CR in IR; but the other aspects of the problem may be dramatised by strengthening the theory to make it less outrageous and more of a serious, but still-losing, competitor vis-ò-vis existing When we look at Wight's own description of the process of falsification, it is clear that he does not involve any recourse to the unobservable theoretical terms. The process is the same whether or not we believe in the ‘reality’ of the unobservable, theoretical, causal mechanisms. The different ways in which SR and anti-SR accounts treat theoretical terms have nothing to do with falsifiability theories of preventative war.

60 Chernoff, ‘Scientific Realism as a Meta-Theory.’

61 Chernoff, ‘The Power of International Theory’, ch. 5.

62 Wight (‘A Manifesto’, p. 394) says, ‘ … we need to move beyond sterile and confused epistemological debate and concentrate on what really divides the various theoretical positions; their competing claims about what the world is like, how it should be, and what the most important causal factors are. Ontology is at the heart of all our disagreements and that is what we should be concentrating our attention on.’ Wight continues, ‘There are important epistemological and methodological issues to be decided, but what is the point of debating these in advance of an examination of what it is we want to study’.