Why Natural Science Method IsInappropriate for Political Science: The Problem of Self-DisconfirmingAnalysis.

Paper proposed as part of panel 031015: Questioning the Applicability of the Natural Science Model to Political Science For over a century, hermeneutic-phenomenological thinkers such as Dilthey, Gadamar and Charles Taylor have been pointing out a critical difference between the natural and social sciences, which renders the methods of the first inappropriate for the latter. Natural objects exist independently of what the researcher thinks about them; they cannot, in Anthony Giddens’s words,answer back to the investigator. In the social sciences, however, the facts may be changed by the desire to change [them]; and this desire, already present in the mind of the investigator, may be extended, as the result of this investigation, to a sufficient number of other human beings to make it effective. The purpose is not, as in the physical sciences, irrelevant to the investigation and separable from it: it is itself one of the facts (E. H. Carr). The mainstream of American political science ignored this hermeneutic critique and had increasingly become committed to a positivist epistemology patterned after the model of the natural sciences. Interestingly, the discipline’s continuing aspiration to become a science coincides with a growing aspiration to become relevant to public debates and policymaking. For example, recent APSA president Robert Putnam launched an initiative to enhance the public presence of political science. The putative contradiction between these aspirations -- to be detached from the politics we study while seeking to influence these politics -- is rarely discussed. I seek to (re)open such a discussion through a critique of three important books in IR: Jack Snyder’s Myths of Empire, Yuen Foong Khong’s Analogies at War, and Fareed Zakaria’s From Wealth to Power. All three books were written in the idiom of science, and all of them offer generalizations claimed to apply across time and space. All three books empirically observe a pathology in the international body politic; and all of them have normative implications that, if acted upon by their readers, would cure the pathology. Herein lies the tension: if the policymakers to whom the books are partly addressed were to modify their behavior according to the lessons implicit the books, the empirical generalizations elaborated in these studies would cease to be valid. For example, if national leaders learned that the belief in security through expansion is a dangerous myth (Snyder), they might avoid expansionary policies in the future. If they do so, the empirical regularity documented by Snyder’s analysis -- the striking proclivity of great powers for over-expansion -- would no longer hold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]