1 Any decent political science PhD program will start with a course on the philosophy of science, after which you are pulled aside and the instructor whispers into your ear, “none of this applies to social science.” Of course, neither of these happen today. Why this is true is the subject of a much longer post, but it’s true nonetheless. You could discuss the trajectory of contemporary social science through the language of Kuhnian paradigms and make it superficially sensible. In International Relations, the Realism of someone like Samuel Huntington (his Clash of Civilizations thesis is merely Realism scaled up to a higher unit of analysis, the civilization) represents an older paradigm that formalizes intuitions about Great Power Politics. ‘Normal science’ within this paradigm proceeds as, I don’t know, historical case-study analysis. By the time Clash of Civilizations was published, we saw a turn to a new paradigm: rationalism (in the economic-rationalism sense). A more important change, concurrent with and likely accelerated by the turn to rationalism, was the ‘normal science’ practice of testing all your theoretical implications with regression analysis.
Evil Weekly (10/10/2022)
Evil Weekly (10/10/2022)
Evil Weekly (10/10/2022)
1 Any decent political science PhD program will start with a course on the philosophy of science, after which you are pulled aside and the instructor whispers into your ear, “none of this applies to social science.” Of course, neither of these happen today. Why this is true is the subject of a much longer post, but it’s true nonetheless. You could discuss the trajectory of contemporary social science through the language of Kuhnian paradigms and make it superficially sensible. In International Relations, the Realism of someone like Samuel Huntington (his Clash of Civilizations thesis is merely Realism scaled up to a higher unit of analysis, the civilization) represents an older paradigm that formalizes intuitions about Great Power Politics. ‘Normal science’ within this paradigm proceeds as, I don’t know, historical case-study analysis. By the time Clash of Civilizations was published, we saw a turn to a new paradigm: rationalism (in the economic-rationalism sense). A more important change, concurrent with and likely accelerated by the turn to rationalism, was the ‘normal science’ practice of testing all your theoretical implications with regression analysis.