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Ontologies, depth, and otherwise: critical notes on Wight's meta-theoretical proposal of a scientific realist IR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2012

MARTIN WEBER
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Extract

This contribution investigates in some more depth a limited set of the premises on which Wight's argument for a ‘scientific realist’ approach to the study of International Relations (IR) rests, an approach, which, according to him, raises the hitherto unacknowledged centrality of ontological premises to all forms of knowledge and human action. Positing ‘Politics as Ontology’ (the book's subtitle) permits, so Wight's argument goes, the conduct of social science in a way which renders most epistemological and methodological disagreements obsolete, since the latter can be shown to be enabled only by competing, mutually exclusive, relatively incompatible, or unreflectively fragmentary ontological commitments. On this view, clarifying the respective ontological commitments, which underpin – tacitly or explicitly – competing theories yields the prospect of demonstrating relatively precisely what it is that enables disagreements at the levels of epistemology and methodology to arise in the first place. Programmatically, Wight seeks to establish the scientific realist account as a consistent, critical, fallibilist, unified account of scientific practice, reintegrating social and natural sciences in a reconceptualised naturalist scheme.

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Forum
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Review of International Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 223 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2012

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References

1 Wight, Colin, Agents, Structures and International Relations-Politics as Ontology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (2006), pp. 23–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Part of the problem in writing critical response to Wight's programme of scientific realism, is to do with the relative difficulty of working out whether to respond to his exposition, or to Bhaskar's work (mainly A Realist Theory of Science, and The Possibility of Naturalism), which underpins so much of it. In what follows, I screen out Bhaskar's contributions as much as possible. Insofar as the problems I register with Wight's scheme may or may not be alive for Bhaskar's thought as presented in his two earlier works, this would have to be shown and discussed in its own right.

3 I can't really get into the question of ‘competing theories’ here (such as ‘the world sucks’), something which would be quite fruitful with regard to the kind of realism Wight seeks to defend in his book. The exchanges between Putnam and Davidson, for instance, raise the problem of the relativism of conceptual schemes, something Wight avoids more or less simply by invoking the postulate of science as a unified practice animated by progressive fallibilism. As Putnam, for instance, shows, by no means all disagreements have the structure of the ‘phlogiston’/‘oxygen’ juxtaposition of assumptions. A reconstruction of the ‘conceptual schemes’ problem could for instance allow us to argue that the way Wight uses the internal/external distinction to problematise both, voluntarism on the one hand, and empiricism on the other (and much in between), shows that he himself is committed to an ‘internal’ conception of a conceptual scheme he denotes as ‘scientific realism’. I think this could lead to potentially productive and interesting disagreements and debates, but won't pursue this here, concentrating instead more directly on immanent problems in the conceptualisation of ‘social kinds’ in Wight's exposition of scientific realism.

4 The puzzle could (and probably should) be expanded here, potentially with a view to raising an inquiry into what ‘conceptualizing’ may mean. It would seem, for instance, to make a huge difference whether to conceptualise ‘gravity’ must involve naming ‘it’, or whether other forms of symbolic representation could or would work (circumscriptions in mythical terms, for instance, closer to a ‘story-telling’ account of what makes the world the way it is experienced). I can't pursue this line of thought here, but want to flag up at least that this would be one way of inquiring into ‘the practice of science’, which stands crucially as a reference point for Wight's argument. Below, we will get to this via a different route.

5 Just to be clear, this does not mean that ‘money’ (coins, notes, debt obligations on paper) could not be exchanged in such a situation, but that this exchange would drop out precisely what makes ‘money’ (coins, notes, debt obligations on paper) money, in its capacity to serve as a (quasi) universal medium of exchange.

6 Wight, Agents, p. 98.

7 Ibid., p. 21, emphasis added.

8 Wight, Colin, ‘Manifesto for Scientific Realism in IR: Assuming the can-opener won't work’, Millennium Journal of International Studies, 35:2 (2006), pp. 379–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 I've taken this, marking amendments and omissions, from Wight, Agents, pp. 296–7.

10 Structuralist linguistics can be drawn upon for an analogy here. The pursuit of a ‘general grammar’ (of which Chomsky's work was a crucial component), sought to establish matrices common to all human language, and, as a result had to deal with empirical variances among different spoken languages by developing ‘zero-marker’ concepts. The general grammar was thought of as a finite (but infinitely differentiable) deep structural resource, which would allow phenotypes (individual languages) to emerge without realising all of its aspects. The absence in a particular language of, for instance, morphemes for expressing subjunctive mood, can mean that it is expressed through phrasals, rather than morphological elements; however, where a language does not provide evidence of either, and the subjunctive mood is unrealised, it would have to be, at least in principle, possible to construe it counterfactually. The empirical absence of a grammatical feature hence would not be seen as making a dent on the robustness of the pursuit of a general grammar of human language. I think this model provides one of the strongest cases in support of the position I just sketched as a strategy for salvaging the account of structures we get out of Wight's discussion. The project of a universal grammar, however, has been abandoned, not least because it collapsed under the weight of complexities, which could not be ex post facto deduced from a consolidated body of linguistically primitive structural features. In any case, it would not have helped us much with our task of getting to grips with the question of the ontological status of money.

11 Marx, Karl, Capital – A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983), p. 131Google Scholar.

12 Bhaskar, Roy, The Possibility of Naturalism. A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 52Google Scholar.

13 Marx, Capital v. 1, pp. 93–4.

14 See, for instance, Lawson, Tony, Economics and Reality (London: Routledge, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 See Ingham, Geoffrey, ‘Money is a social relation’, Review of Social Economy, 54:4 (1996), pp. 507–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Thanks to an anonymous referee for reminding me of this article.

16 Lawson, Economics, p. 32.

17 I think over this point a rather large gulf opens between Critical Realist attempts to resuscitate Marxism, and the critical theoretic attempts at salvaging some of his project in the context of the Frankfurt School; the critique of instrumental reason, though much maligned, and in its more hyperbolic form also the subject of criticism within the FS (see, on this, Honneth, Axel, ‘Critical Theory’, The Fragmented World of the Social (New York: SUNY Press, 1995)Google Scholar moves to an inter-subjectivist framework much more comprehensively than usually acknowledged.

18 Lawson, Economics, p. 38.

19 It is with regard to such questions that, for instance, Foucault's work offers some excellent substantive as well as methodological insights, which stand irrespective of where one comes down on questions of contingency and the supposedly so problematic relativism, which is often rather too casually used to keep his work at arm's length.

20 If IR constructivists were interested a little more in the history of social and political thought, they would by now have started to work with the legacy of Giambattista Vico, who in Scienzia Nuova performed a jiu-jitsu move on the ‘Maker's Knowledge’ paradigm, which, among other things, articulates the differences in ‘knowability’ between social and natural worlds. The account Vico gives is constructivist, while giving material dimensions of socio-cultural development their due (this is one reason why Robert Cox draws on his framework for his attempts at reformulating historical materialist analysis). What Vico's text already makes clear, though, is that social ontology and the natural world, while intersecting, do so without there extending much determinacy from the latter to the former (at least not in a non-trivial sense). See Vico, G., The New Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

21 Wight, Agents, p. 298.

22 Sahlins, Marshall D., Stone Age Economics (London: Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar. This notwithstanding the quite appropriate criticisms of Sahlins's tendency towards functionalist arguments, which are difficult to sustain (thanks to Robbie Shilliam for the reminder).