RSS01.C7 Analytical Pragmatism: An Introduction to Relational Social Science

For various historical reasons, the social sciences - especially in the English-speaking world- have been dominated by neopositivism for decades. Indeed, neopositivism, with its commitment to the elucidation of nomothetic generalizations through a procedure of hypothesis-testing across multiple cases, is all too often mistaken for “the scientific method,” crowding out other approaches to knowledge production.

The epistemic interests of neopositivist research are then mistaken for the goals of science per se, despite the fact that neopositivism doesn’t capture the actual practice of physical sciences like physics terribly well. At the same time, the English-speaking social sciences are dominated by substantialism: the notion that properties of objects (including actors) considered in isolation from one another can sufficiently explain outcomes of interest.

The result of this methodological-and-ontological monoculture is that although we frequently have criticisms of both neopositivism and substantialism, we much less frequently have systematic explications of how to do empirical research that doesn’t conform more or less to neopositivist and substantialist strictures. Even rarer is such exploration that tries to retain key notions like causation and generality, but doesn’t treat those notions in the conventional manner.

This course will give you a grounding in precisely such an alternative: a non- neopositivist approach to social-scientific inquiry that emphasizes causal explanation and has a significant place for generality, which also prioritizes processes and relations rather than essences and substances.

Building on the work of Max Weber and the tradition of American pragmatism, the analytical pragmatist approach seeks to articulate and refine conceptual tools that can be used to produce relational, case-specific explanations of otherwise-puzzling outcomes.

We will begin with the philosophical foundations of an analytical pragmatist approach, and proceed to consider some examples of work that incorporates this sensibility, and how that sensibility might inform your own work.