| Chapter 1: | The Domestic Analogy |
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Words are accordingly important. Yet though I begin this book on the semantic level, it is empirical reality that draws most of my attention. This may seem obvious: are not all social scientists interested in reality? In the end, yes, all of them probably are. Yet recent decades have seen a great debate, particularly intense in the field of international politics, on the question of reality’s nature.
According to those known as social constructivists,14 reality is not what it seems to be. Scholars of this stamp argue that the positivist approach with its methodological individualism, its orientation to empirical observation, and its focus on quantitative data is capable only of generating a superficial (or even downright mistaken) picture of reality. Constructivists see the world as under construction—as becoming rather than being. The world does not display itself to the researcher already classified. Rather, the image of the world is a social construction; it emerges when one imposes, à la Kant, the a priori forms of one’s mind upon the structure of the outer world. Positivists see reality as reducible to interacting parts; constructivists, by contrast, embrace a holistic ontology in which the part exists only in relation to the whole. As a result, the concept of objective knowledge becomes problematic. Especially since the end of the Cold War, when world politics seemed to lose its black-and-white character, the associated perspectives of constructivism, postmodernism, and relativism have attracted great interest. The scholarly debate is thus transformed into a conversation. Agreeing on what constitutes sufficient evidence is not possible. The analysis of language becomes the central task. For radical constructivists it is naive to believe that it is possible to ever move beyond this stage.15
As I see it, however, this simply amounts to an incomplete research project. Constructivist conceptual analysis is indeed helpful—as is the positivist orientation to empirical evidence. My point here, however, is that the substantive problem is what makes a research project in political science ultimately worthwhile.