Aide memoire for 21 January

(Too sketchy  to put on the web; too profound to forget ;)

The field, according to H&S.  (Who are H&S?)

    Levels of analysis; explanation entails cross-level claims

        Waltz: man, state system

        H&S: invididual, bureaucracy, "nation-state" (Ouch!), international system

        You: whatever you want: note interplay between aggregation and abstraction.

    Realism (and neo-Realism[s])

    Idealism (Woodrow Wilson!, British Realist Edward Hallett's Carr's Utopianism is a  variant of Liberalism),

    Behaviouralism (aka Behaviorism): more a methodological approach than a paradigm

        Note that a behaviorist, unless she's a neurophysiologist, can't ask "Why did X do something," unless

       she means (a) "What caused X to do that something?" or

        (b) "What reasons did X give for doing that thing?" -- both of which offer evidence available to replicable observation.

    What's omitted? ...  Lots, although this course will address only Marxism (currely in eclipse) and (social, or radical) constructionism (currently a fad in the US which is fading).

(Recall that Waever says there has been no adequate 'sociology' of IR; others might say with the same intent that there has been no adequate philosophy of inquiry applied to IR.  Recall his 3 levels of Table 1)

Explanation: the scientific enterprise,

    Positive science; positivism.

        As time permits: objections and extensions to positivism: namely Popper's falsificationism; Kuhn's emphasis upon distinction between 'normal' and 'revolutionary' science, and the conditions for 'paradigm shift'; Lakatos extensions (to Popper?) on 'progressive research programs' (as succession of logically closely related theories plus the methods used to support them), and on "auxiliary hypotheses" as the set of experimental methods which obstruct falsificationism and which offer a dynamic to any research program.

    What are the limits of explanation?

Understanding: Weber, Winch-Wittgenstein

    Can we understand distant figures?

    How about "understanding" historical figures?

        Tekemthe

        Diocletian

        Hongi Hika

        Gertrude Bell

    Are understandings interpersonally transmissible?

Can we properly speak of {explanation, understanding} at all levels of analysis?

Marxist approaches to explanation: the Natchez as an illustration or a style of analysis that has spread to other theory families from Marxism.