Explanation and Progress in Security Studies: Bridging Theoretical Divides in International Relations

By Fred Chernoff

Explanation and Progress in Security Studies asks why Security Studies, as a central area of International Relations, has not experienced scientific progress in the way natural sciences have—and answers by arguing that the underlying reason is that scholars in Security Studies have advanced a range of different notions of "explanation" or different criteria of "explanatory superiority" to show that their positions are better than rival positions.

To demonstrate this, the author engages in in-depth content analysis of the generally recognized exemplars of explanation and explanatory superiority in three of the core debates in the disciplines: Why do states pursue policies of nuclear proliferation? Why do states choose to form the alliances they do? And why do liberal democratic states behave the way they do toward other liberal democracies?

The book reveals that authors in the debates that have shown the most progress use similar criteria in arguing for and against the key explanations. In the nuclear proliferation debate, there is wide divergence in the criteria the most visible authors use, and there is wide divergence in the explanations offered. In the alliance formation/balance-of-power debate, there is some overlap of criteria the most important authors use, and there has been some limited movement toward consensus. In the democratic peace debate there has been much more overlap of criteria the most prominent authors use, and there is agreement on both some positive and negative conclusions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
• Release date: Aug 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9780804792295

Book preview

Preface

DOES THE STUDY of international relations (IR) and security lead to knowledge? If so, why has there not been more progress in the ways that we ordinarily associate with the natural sciences? Progress has several elements, including the cumulation of knowledge over time, predictiveness, and, when disputes arise, patterns of approach-to-consensus on the best theoretical explanation. This book asks about scientific progress by focusing specifically on the latter, approach-to-consensus.

A clear obstacle to this sort of progress in the social sciences is that, for disputing scholars to approach a consensus, some of the disputants will have to accept that they were wrong. Given that academics, no less than civilians, would rather be right all the time, a crucial question is whether, at some point after sufficient debate, one side will be shown to have the better answer, or whether those on all sides of an issue can just continue to insist that they’re right. In other words, is there a point at which social scientists ever have to admit that they’re wrong?

Some of the central questions in IR and security studies have been debated for centuries without agreement as to the best answer. In contrast, natural scientists over time come to agree on facts and explanations; we do not find natural scientists continuing to claim that fire is better explained by phlogiston than oxidation or that Earth is flat rather than oblate ellipsoidal. One of the reasons we regard the natural sciences as producing genuine knowledge is the very fact that those on the losing sides of the debates eventually adopt the winning position, or at the very least, cease claiming that they were right. Although this pattern of approach-to-consensus is not the norm in IR and most social sciences, it is important to know if it is at least possible, with some improvements, to approximate more closely the natural sciences. To that end, this book asks, Is it possible that one of the reasons consensus explanations have been so hard to come by in security studies is that researchers evaluate their explanations using criteria different from that of their opponents? If so, then we must ask, Is it possible that closer attention to which criteria scholars use will improve scholars’ ability to engage directly with one another and to reach agreement on the best explanatory answers? The chapters that follow argue for an affirmative answer to both questions.

This book defends three closely related observations. First, natural scientists have recourse to a variety of criteria of evaluation when they argue about which explanatory theory is best (Chapter 2). Second, within criteria that are generally accepted in the natural sciences, there are disagreements among scientists and philosophers as to which criteria are more important than which others (Chapter 2). Third, in advancing their positions, security studies authors rarely identify the criteria they use, and they never identify the criteria their opponents use (Chapters 3–5). From these building blocks, the book argues that if scholars were to adopt the practice of explicitly acknowledging the criteria they use to advance their explanatory answers, significant improvements would be possible in their ability to move toward the best available explanations.

An inquiry into whether the study of international security produces genuine knowledge, and whether that knowledge advances over time, has consequences for policy as well as theory. The ability to develop better explanations of international politics provides us with an enhanced ability to identify which causal factors are most strongly connected to which effects. This is essential for effective policy making, since policies based on flawed or inadequate understandings of key connections are unlikely to bring about the hoped-for outcomes. Furthermore, if current methods of study do not produce real knowledge, then it is important to explore whether there are better ways to go about studying IR.

I am fortunate to have had, and am happy to acknowledge, considerable help in the course of writing this book. John Vasquez of the University of Illinois, Jack Levy of Rutgers University, and Jim Wirtz of the Naval Postgraduate School made very helpful suggestions when this project was taking shape. Ewan Harrison of Rutgers provided generous feedback on a near-final draft. Several discussants and co-panelists at International Studies Association conferences over the past four years, as well as regulars at the weekly Yale IR seminar series, provided ideas on research design. As always, I am grateful to Bruce Russett, who long ago formed for me, and consistently continues to exemplify, the ideal of the knowledge-seeking social scientist. The generosity of Colgate University allowed me leave during the course of this project, and Colgate IR colleagues, notably Ed Fogarty and—going back to graduate school days—Al Yee, have provided stimulating intellectual discourse. The libraries of the Yale Club of New York and the City University of New York Graduate Center were, once again, cooperative and hospitable. Geoffrey Burn of Stanford University Press offered constructive advice on the original prospectus, waited patiently for the completion of the full manuscript, and has been thoroughly supportive throughout. Reviewers for the press made recommendations that improved the final product. A number of Colgate research assistants were valuable. Sarah Titcomb helped collect materials for the rankings of the books and articles in each area of debate. Amy Basu, Annie Hines, Kelsey Paustis, and Elizabeth Sadler proofread early drafts of several chapters. Keith England and Albert Naïm provided much help with references. And Ashley Hill, now at Princeton, read through, and offered advice on, the entire manuscript.

My young goddaughters, Sofie and Josie Song, provide on-demand joy and inspiration. Thanks also to Christina H. for enriching The Many, and for her enthusiasm in sharing the good news of the completion of this project. I appreciate the encouragement of my family, Myrna and Marshall Barth and K. Nastassja Chernoff and cousins, especially Syvia Lady Dhenin; and most of all, my late parents, Naomi and Romo Chernoff—the latter of whom radiated his unique energy for fully one hundred years—from Nicholas the Second to the Obama second term. Finally, I want to thank Vida Behn Chernoff and her small support staff of Montmorency J. and MiaMaria for the wonderful difference they have made in my life.

Grateful for the body of work he created, fortunate to have crossed paths with him the times I did, inspired by the genuine greatness that he achieved—to the memory of PSH.

INTRODUCTION

1. THE CENTRAL QUESTION—WHY HAS THERE BEEN SO LITTLE PROGRESS IN SECURITY STUDIES?

Why do many debates in security studies and international relations (IR) go on for decades, even centuries, without moving toward resolutions or agreements on the best explanation? Is there a way to improve the ability of IR and security scholars to make progress in finding the best explanation for the events and processes we study? This book tries to find at least one factor that will help answer the first question, and it uses that to suggest a change in the way that scholars advance their own positions and engage their rivals’ views. The proposed change is a modest one, but it has the potential to make a significant difference in the way debates progress.

If policy choices are to have a chance of accomplishing their intended purposes, then it is of paramount importance for decision makers to draw on the best possible theoretical understanding available (Walt 1998). If a policy is based on a flawed theory, it will succeed only by luck. If scholarly debate is in disarray, arriving at the best policy choices—which sometimes are matters of war and peace—will be difficult for decision makers. This book looks at what might be more effective ways that scholars can reach conclusions about the best theory.

The natural sciences manage to progress over time, no matter how progress is defined. From time to time natural scientists have to debate a new theory. In those instances, the history of science shows that scientists eventually move toward agreement on the best theoretical explanation. Of course, what the natural sciences study is very different from the human affairs and relationships that the social sciences study. But since both claim to produce knowledge, it is worth considering whether social scientists may be able to make more progress if they were to apply some aspects of natural scientists’ methods. Thus, this book begins by considering the possibility that some aspects of what natural scientists do that enables them to make intellectual progress and build structures of knowledge might be applicable to the social sciences.

Perhaps what the natural sciences have that IR and security studies lack is a set of well-established criteria that are used to evaluate theoretical explanations. And if that is so, then an increased degree of clarity on criteria will enable authors to deal more directly with, and to respond to, one another’s explanatory arguments. Success in dealing directly with opposing arguments could lead to greater success in finding the best explanations. No studies of IR have previously explored whether the use of different explanatory criteria may be one of the reasons that debates do not more often move toward resolution. The book thus investigates the hypothesis that progress in security studies has been slowed because of different scholars’ use of different notions of explanation and different criteria of explanatory superiority.

To answer the central question of whether divergent uses of criteria inhibit agreement and progress, this book must address several prior questions, including the following: What do political scientists actually do when they claim to be explaining? And what is it about one explanation that leads scholars to regard it as superior to its rivals? The book begins by examining the core differences in debates over what science is and how it should ideally be conducted. Some authors who examine scientific practice focus on the descriptive task of finding out what scientists in fact do. Others focus on the prescriptive task of what makes empirical knowledge valid, true, useful, and/or reliable, since they develop principles about how scientific inquiry should be conducted. Chapter 1 offers a discussion of the relationship between the two. It asks whether improvements in explanatory practice must take account of existing practices, however justifiable or deficient they may be. The book does not assume that there is a single, univocal meaning that IR theorists attach to the term explanation; rather, it aims to determine which meaning(s) is used in the field.

Anyone who offers an explanation in security studies or IR should be able to specify what he or she means by that term and which factors or criteria qualify an explanation as a good one, even though books and journal articles in IR do not often present explicit definitions. The literature on IR methodology and metatheory offers several competing accounts of explanation. Because authors of substantive work in IR rarely identify any of these as the basis for their approaches, the foundation for each approach remains implicit rather than explicit. While not minimizing the difficulty and fallibility of the task, this book attempts to identify the implicit ideas of explanation and good explanation in the writings of security studies scholars.

Further, the book attempts to determine how authors judge good explanations by examining three of the core debates in security studies: (1) Why do states pursue policies of nuclear proliferation? (2) Why do states choose to form the alliances they do, especially with regard to the role of power balancing? (3) And why do liberal democratic states behave the way they do toward other liberal democracies? The descriptive element of the book will select ten to twelve of the most influential and widely cited works on each of the three questions and will examine them with an eye toward extracting, as well as is possible, the notion or notions of explanation embodied in each. This requires a good deal of interpretation for most of the publications included. The initial goal was to find the ten most influential works. But since the ranking process was not purely formulaic or mechanical, and since some works ranked quite closely, there was an attempt to avoid an arbitrary cutoff point. In the alliance formation debate, two works ranked very close together; rather than choose one arbitrarily, both were included. In the democratic peace debate, three ranked so closely that all were included, for a total of twelve.

This book begins with the presumption that there is merit in Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) view of how scientists come to learn how to conduct inquiry; that is, scientists in a particular question area conduct research in ways that fit with the paradigm or disciplinary matrix in which they were trained. They are taught which works are the key works, or exemplars, in the field. As they enter a field, researchers absorb both the substantive theories and the implicit standards of how to contribute to the debate. From these works they learn what constitutes good defense of a theory, what kinds of evidence are expected, what kinds of mathematical or logical methods are appropriate, and so on. Students internalize the methods and assumptions of exemplar works and then carry them forward in their own studies. If this account is correct, then it will be useful to look at works that appear to be such exemplars of high-quality security studies.

2. POSSIBLE ANSWERS

Is there a unified concept of good explanation—or best available explanation—used by political scientists in the field of security studies, and thus a single set of criteria by which they choose explanatory theories? There are three possible answers. First, we may find that there is a clear notion of good explanation that spans the various discourses in security studies with a consistent set of criteria used by all. A second is that we may find that each of the substantive debate areas has a unified notion and unified set of criteria that are used by all authors in that debate, but those differ from one debate to another—perhaps because of systematic differences arising from methodological peculiarities of each area (e.g., proliferation studies tend to be small-N and others tend to be large-N). Third, we may find that there is no unified notion of explanation or pattern of criteria at all; in this case, different authors within a single debate area use different notions of explanation and/or different criteria of explanatory superiority. This book argues for the third, which in turn raises the question of whether divergences in the criteria do or do not have an effect on the differences in the explanations offered by different theoretical schools.

3. EVIDENCE

Just what sort of evidence reveals how security studies authors judge which explanation is best? A survey of works in security studies that focuses on what the authors mean by good explanation would do the job. A comprehensive survey of all major journals and presses would tell us how the term is used, but it is too large a project to be practical. A much smaller survey will suffice, if it contains the most widely read, widely assigned, and widely cited works, since such works must embody the one (or several) most entrenched notion(s) of explanation. If those works did not use the term in these well-understood ways, they would be unlikely to reach the status of most often read, assigned, and cited. In fact, if there were a difference in the meaning used by the most widely read works and the less influential works, we would discover an interesting paradox, and possibly a counterexample to Kuhn’s view of how new researchers learn how to conduct inquiry in a particular field. But because of both the low probability that there is such a split and the limitations of space, this study confines itself to ten-to-twelve published works in each of the three question areas, and so will not explore the popular-obscure divide.

Discounting the small probability that there is a divergence between the influential and obscure works, we may expect that ten to twelve works in each area are enough to show either that there are wide discrepancies in what authors mean by explanation or that there is convergence on a specific meaning—and if the latter, what the meaning is. The highest-profile works both reflect what the field does in the way of scholarship and shape how those who are currently being trained for professional academic careers understand the concept. That is, the most widely read, cited, and assigned works convey the idea or meaning of explanation to the next generation of scholars. As noted already, Kuhn’s account of the history of the natural sciences includes an analysis of how key methodological ideas are conveyed from one generation to the next. The ways these exemplar works convey core questions and methods in the field is discussed in Chapter 1.

4. EXEMPLAR WORKS

The research design of this book requires, as just noted, the identification of a set of works that manifests the concept (or a concept) of explanation, as it is currently understood in security studies, which also transmits the understanding to the next group of students in the field. The selection of works is based on three sorts of considerations. One consideration is a survey of the most cited articles in the five key academic journals that cover international security issues. Two of these are general scholarly journals of IR, namely International Organization and International Studies Quarterly, and the other three are the most prominent journals that focus specifically on security-oriented issues, namely International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Security Studies. A second source is a survey of editors of the top twenty IR journals (as rated by the most recent Teaching, Research, and International Policy, or TRIP, survey of scholars in the field of IR at the time the research design was finalized; see Jordan et al. [2009]). These individuals have unique advantages in gaining a sense of which journal articles and books are the most influential in the three issue areas. The third source is graduate syllabi from courses that deal with international security affairs in the major graduate programs, that is, the institutions most likely to produce the next generation of publishing scholars. The top twenty institutions, as ranked by the TRIP study (Jordan et al. 2009), were contacted and asked to provide course syllabi and reading lists in the fields covered. Approximately fifty course syllabi were collected. Of the three methods used to select works, only the inspection of course syllabi targets books as opposed to journal articles. So there was an additional effort to balance books with journal articles. However, some of the books that appeared had been summarized in widely read journal articles prior to their publication. So the notion of explanation of those articles that are analyzed in this book was checked against the notion in the same authors’ books for any discrepancies.

The works on course syllabi were evaluated for their prominence by counting them only once for appearing on a given syllabus; works that were assigned at different points for the same course were still counted only once. Works that were listed as recommended were not counted. Works authored by the course instructors were excluded from consideration for that syllabus. In a few cases, a specific author was frequently assigned, but there was no single work by that author; rather, there were several different works assigned with more or less equal frequency. Because, in those cases, each author’s concept of explanation would thus seem to be an important one in transmitting the notion to current students, an effort was made to be sure that one of the author’s works appeared on the list of publications surveyed.

Some authors published multiple works in the same substantive area in which they advanced or refined their arguments. For example, in the case of democratic peace, there are multiple works by Farber and Gowa, by Doyle, and by Russett and his various coauthors. Since these did not generally constitute independent positions and did not represent an expansion of the range of concepts of or criteria for explanation, the set of works is considered together as constituting a single position, and one of the works is emphasized in the descriptive analysis. Most attention in the analyses in Chapters 3–5 emphasizes the most prominent of the works, although references to others on the same topic by the same author are referred to when appropriate.

5. STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

This book proceeds in several parts. First, in Chapter 1 it poses the central question of the study, asking whether progress in some areas of security study is slowed by scholars’ failure to use similar criteria in assessing their arguments in favor of competing explanations. It then considers whether such a question can be answered in view of the complex relationship between describing epistemic norms and prescribing new norms in the natural sciences, examines the two traditions of inquiry in IR, and briefly discusses the notion of progress. Second, in Chapter 2, the book examines some of the most serious and widely debated efforts to analyze the notion of explanation and the criteria regarded as showing that one explanation is best. Third, in Chapters 3–5, the book surveys the prominent mainstream works in three selected topical areas of security studies—nuclear proliferation, alliance formation, and democratic peace—and seeks to identify common features, criteria, and patterns of progress. Finally, in Chapter 6, the book offers a broader look at the data in a way that connects the three debates with the notion of progress in social science knowledge. It concludes with an examination of possible alternative answers to the central question, some caveats, and recommendations for improving research in a way that will open up more opportunities for progress and approach-to-consensus about best explanations in security studies.

This book focuses on explanation in empirical-explanatory debates in security studies. As a field, IR encompasses question areas in various other subfields, such as international political economy, international law, and international organization. Furthermore, even within security studies there are different sorts of question areas, and some of the questions within these areas are primarily moral-normative, such as, when is the use of force justified? (For a discussion of the distinction between statements with primarily factual versus evaluative content, see Chernoff [2005, 18–19, 41].) No claim is made here that the analysis and conclusion of Chapter 6 apply beyond empirical-explanatory debates in security studies. There are prima facie reasons to suspect that there are differences, and generalization beyond security studies would require additional case studies. But in debates that are primarily empirical-explanatory, the recommended focus on identifying the criteria that one’s study relies on could significantly enhance the possibility of progress.

1

TRADITIONS OF EXPLANATION AND THE IDEA OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

THIS BOOK SEEKS to determine whether divergent uses of criteria have slowed movement toward consensus explanations in security studies. The central question of this study is whether to accept the hypothesis H1, that progress in security studies has been slowed because different scholars use of different notions of explanation or different criteria of explanatory superiority. The study also considers a directly related second hypothesis, H2, that if progress occurs, then contending explanatory schools use similar criteria.

In the course of finding answers, it will be necessary to see what exactly security studies authors are in fact trying to do when they offer explanations that are better than their rivals, and thus constitute progress over them. To succeed in these tasks, it is necessary to understand what international relations (IR) authors mean by the terms progress and explanation. This chapter offers a brief sketch of some of the important ideas about how progress is understood by some of the major philosophers of science in the past century, and explanation is the subject of the next chapter. This chapter begins the effort of answering the central question of why progress has been so slow by considering arguments for, and criticisms of, the effort to turn IR into a science. To understand the explanatory goals of these efforts, we must consider the overall goals and methods advocated by proponents and critics of the behavioral-quantitative approach to IR.

1. DEVELOPMENT OF IR THEORY AND APPROPRIATE METHODS

People in many cultures have been studying IR for centuries. Some claim to have discovered persistent patterns and even social science laws. Around 430 BCE Sun Tzu developed a set of principles based on observations of multiple cases, from which he derived regularities in the decisions of military leaders. He identified which politico-military methods were successful and which were not, and he then concluded which among them should be adopted. He confidently announced that whoever followed his strategic principles would be victorious, and whoever failed to heed them would be vanquished. Over the centuries, studies of IR have come to include many different topics and questions—examples include the relationship between trade and national wealth; the nature, effectiveness, and possibilities of international law; and the effects of different forms and structures of international institutions. But throughout the centuries, center stage has gone to concerns about the causes and consequences of war, and to identifying the factors that lead to victory once war has begun.

As the behavioral movement in the social sciences gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s, IR scholars collaborated to construct what has become an enormous database, the well-known Correlates of War. As its name indicates, the project focuses on factors that theorists have associated, rightly or wrongly, with the onset of war. The core mission of the project has been to gain a greater understanding of war. While some expected that the quantitative study of IR would eventually dominate the entire field, many other approaches have persisted, including philosophical and legal studies. More recently, IR scholars have applied rational choice and game theory as they try to explain the actions of states.

No single method or methodology has come to dominate the field. Today there are frequent pleas for methodological pluralism. Many who write on the subject of methods and make explicit recommendations are almost universally in favor of pluralism; they oppose the goal of finding the one ideal, all-purpose approach that alone has the potential to add to our knowledge and understanding of IR. The present study seeks to identify what sort of concept of explanation is used in security studies by examining the efforts to explain nuclear proliferation, alliance formation, and the relationship between democracy and peace.

2. THREE CENTRAL ISSUES IN SECURITY STUDIES

The study of IR has historically focused on questions of war, peace, and security. The contemporary field of security studies has a number of most studied issues, one of which is the presence of nuclear weapons. Two specific questions about nuclear arms have gained the most attention. The first concerns causes—why do states become nuclear weapons states?—and is primarily explanatory. The second concerns consequences—how will stability and warfare be affected if more states acquire nuclear weapons?—and is principally about predictions. The emphasis of this book on questions of explanation leads us to focus on the first. The earliest states to acquire nuclear weapons, the United States and Soviet Union in the 1940s, and the United Kingdom, France, and China in the 1950s and early 1960s, were largely seen as doing so for security reasons, which realist theories were able to explain. However, as more states pursued nuclear weapons and a new factor entered the calculations of states, namely the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a wider-ranging debate emerged on why various additional states would want to build nuclear weapons and why various others would resist. Even some of the reasons that the first five nuclear weapons states chose to go nuclear came to be reexamined. Chapter 3 outlines the theoretical background of the contemporary debate and surveys the most influential works of the past several decades.

Another major issue that has been studied for centuries, and is still a major focus of debate, is how and why alliances form as they do. The most common explanations over the centuries have been tied to the realist concept of the balance of power. There are several versions of so-called balance-of-power theory. However, realist views have been challenged by liberals and constructivists, who deny that states, intentionally or unintentionally, seek power balances. In recent decades traditional balance-of-power explanations have also been challenged by arguments that states seek to balance in other ways that do not directly involve the balancing of power or capabilities. Chapter 4 examines the history of the debate and the current state of movement toward consensus on at least certain empirical claims.

A third important area that has risen in prominence in the past quarter century is sometimes called democratic peace (DP) studies. The key claim at issue here is that democracies are somehow different from other sorts of states, and they are most especially different in the way they deal with one another. Realists of course claim that power arrangements determine the stability or instability of international systems and that the maximization of power drives the behavior of states, no matter what sort of internal regimes they have. This fundamental realist claim would be undercut if it were shown that the behavior of democratic states is better explained by reference to the democratic nature of their governance structures. At the end of the eighteenth century Kant argued on theoretical grounds that a world of liberal democracies—specifically republics—would be a world at peace, given certain other conditions. Nearly two centuries later a vigorous debate emerged, with realists energetically attacking those who argued that the liberal democratic nature of some states affected their behavior, especially their behavior toward other liberal democracies. Chapter 5 examines the most influential works on both sides of this question from the 1970s onward.

3. NORMATIVE AND DESCRIPTIVE INQUIRY

Philosophers of science develop accounts of science by taking some cases of theory change as clear-cut instances of progress or advancement: oxidation over phlogiston, Newton over Ptolemy, Harvey over Galen. Anyone who sought to argue that Newton’s theory was not an advance over Ptolemy would have to make a spectacularly original and persuasive argument (see Feyerabend 1975). These universally acknowledged cases of scientific progress may be so widely accepted as such because there are in fact many respects, not just one, in which the new theory was superior to the old. In other instances in the history of science, some newly proposed changes (e.g., when a theory’s entia moved away from observability) have sparked major debates as to whether they truly constituted progress. This leads to the question of which respects are more important than which other respects to produce genuine progress.

If the social sciences can be improved, then the process will most likely proceed in a way similar to that in the natural sciences, that is, only in a piecemeal way that combines interaction between descriptive and prescriptive (or epistemic-normative) elements. Some think that the sciences, whether natural or social, can be improved by a purely normative approach, in which ideas about legitimate knowledge guide the argument. Others hold that the success of science is itself the normative justification of its character and thus argue that the methods and progress of the sciences must be purely descriptive, aiming to identify key or essential practices, which, because they are scientific practices, are justifiable. But there are flaws with arguments for either of the pure approaches (Bohman 1993).

The social sciences are different from the natural sciences in many significant ways. Hashing out the exact relationship between them is one of the most important areas of the philosophy of the social sciences. Theorists in IR and elsewhere hold divergent views on the character and methods of the social sciences and their relation to those of the natural sciences. But there are some parallels, and there are some areas in which there is a good deal of agreement about how theories are developed and debated within specific disciplines. One philosophical strategy is to identify practices that are both historically represented and normatively justifiable.

Many philosophers of science make clear that description plays an important role in their normative analyses. Kuhn (1970, 207) notes that his efforts to understand science repeatedly pass back and forth between the descriptive and the normative modes. He acknowledges that the reasoning he uses is circular, but he defends it by arguing that it does not produce a vicious circle. The present study allows for a dialogue between normative arguments about the nature of knowledge and practical arguments about how those norms are pursued by social scientists; it proceeds by examining specific works in the three security studies questions of nuclear proliferation, alliance formation, and democratic peace. It looks descriptively at how security studies scholars offer explanations and, on the basis of the observations it offers in Chapter 6, proposes some simple prescriptions for improving social scientific practice.

4. KUHN AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Most social sciences, according to Kuhn, lack a single paradigm that dominates any particular generation of scholarship. Kuhn (1970, 21) views all sciences as maturing slowly and does not see them as having any clear threshold at which they move from immature to mature. Kuhn does not regard any of the social sciences as having reached maturity, although in his view economics has come the farthest. In social sciences like political science, sociology, and IR there are distinct and competing research traditions; there is no single, dominant paradigm. These disciplines have some parallels to the pre-Newtonian study of optics, which had no single, dominant paradigm about the nature of light. There were competing views. Some held light to consist in particles; some, a modification of the illuminated body; and some, an emanation from the eye. While there have been different theories since then—from corpuscular to wave to photon—one or another paradigm has dominated each generation. Each group emphasized tests that lent weight to its own particular theory.

International relations has long had competing theoretical traditions that seek to explain international behavior, and each has its preferred supporting case studies. Each of the approaches or research traditions in IR has its exemplar works, published in major journals or by major academic presses, which indicate what peer reviewers in that tradition regard as good social science that offers proper explanations. There are also specific works that have such a high profile that they are cited widely by other authors and find their way onto graduate school course syllabi, where they serve as models for the next generation of scholars. Kuhn argues that the exemplar works in physics are exemplars not for the entire field but rather for specific problem traditions, such as optics, mechanics, hydraulics, and the like. Thus, in international security studies, it seems reasonable to start with the belief that there are exemplar works in areas like those examined here: nuclear proliferation, alliance formation, and democratic peace studies.

According to Kuhn, in mature sciences revolutions occur from time to time. But in between the revolutions there are long periods of stability, or normal science, during which each scientific field is unified by a universally (or nearly universally) accepted dominant paradigm. One of the advantages of debates in mature sciences under a unifying paradigm is that each researcher does not have the burden of having to explain every important methodological or theoretical concept that he or she uses. Kuhn (1970, 19–20) says, When the individual scientist can take a paradigm for granted, he need no longer, in his major works, attempt to build his field anew, starting from first principles and justifying the use of each concept introduced. That can be left to the writers of textbooks. Natural scientists’ ability to take these notions of method for granted allows them to put more energy into building on what is thus far accepted in their fields and to add to the accumulated experimental evidence that allows for scientific progress. In specific substantive works in IR, security scholars rarely define any of the key methodological concepts, including explanation. While this appears to parallel what we find in the natural sciences, most IR scholars nevertheless see themselves as operating within one or another of competing research traditions; at least they seem to have no trouble self-identifying when asked to do so (see Jordan et al. 2009).

One of Kuhn’s contributions is an account of how scientists come to learn what science is and, in particular, what good science is. He says that scientists undergo education and professional initiation that is unparalleled in most other fields (Kuhn 1970, 177). In Kuhn’s view, some examples of actual scientific practice—examples which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together—provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research (1970, 10). As just noted, prior to the relatively recent advent of textbooks, scientists were given important works to read that were regarded as examples of high-quality work in their fields. Kuhn says, "Many of the classics of science . . . did what textbooks do today. In physics, classics, such as Aristotle’s Physica, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Newton’s Principia and Optiks . . .