Ontological and Epistemological Pluralism in the Evaluation of Scientific Arguments.

Over the past decade and a half, qualitative methods have been the subject of renewed analytical attention by researchers working within the field of international relations. In response to the frequent criticisms—from both within the paradigm and without—that they were only interested in metatheory, constructivists responded with a slew of empirical studies documenting the causal and constitutive role of norms and ideas. Ranging from process tracing to discourse analysis, almost all of these works employed qualitative methods exclusively. The relative success of constructivist labors to move beyond the initial philosophy of science debates that framed the paradigm have ensured that constructivism is now one of the primary approaches in IR. Yet amidst this mainstreaming of the "middle ground" as Emmanuel Adler presciently termed it, in one sense constructivists have effectively punted on the question of the ontological and epistemological importance of such concepts as the counter-factual nature of norms, the double-hermeneutic, and the reflexivity of all social actors. Emerging in International Relations (IR) from a protracted attack upon the unreconstructed positivism espoused by Waltzian neorealists and neoliberal institutionalists, constructivists argued for the primacy of ideas over material factors and interests in the international system. From its origins in work external to IR in the structurationist sociology of Giddens and the sociology of knowledge of Berger and Luckman, constructivism has always had a problematic relationship with positivism. It should thus come as something of a surprise that much work in contemporary constructivist theory advances a more traditional positivist methodology. In this essay I challenge the claims by many "liberal constructivists" that the Wendtian blend of scientific realist ontology and positivist epistemology is the best approach for the study of international politics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]