I recently got a hold of the syllabus for a seminar I am taking this semester on international conflict. The professor is making us do an empirical quantitative analysis in our research paper for the course in order to prove or disprove our theoretical contention. First of all, you can’t prove a theory or hypothesis in the so-called empirical sciences. Any political scientist should know better. All you can do is disprove or refute theories and hypotheses, mainly hypotheses, and due to pesky little problems like underdetermination (a really huge problem in the social sciences) one is hard pressed to do even that.
As I have written in an unpublished working paper entitled “Toward an Austro-Athenian Philosophy of Science,” the types of phenomena that the natural sciences and the social sciences seek to study are fundamentally different.
Natural phenomena are causally determined. Raw “facts” are known or knowable, but we cannot know anything directly of the explanatory laws or causal factors. The facts of the natural sciences can be isolated and controlled. Therefore it is necessary and possible to formulate hypotheses and test them via experimentation. In contrast to the natural sciences, the reverse is the case in the social sciences. Man is a volitional being and is not causally determined (in the mechanistic sense). Action is purposive (teleological), i.e., it is consciously directed towards goals. Even if the immediately prior statements about human beings are rejected, it still holds that social phenomena are far more complex than the phenomena studied by the natural sciences and especially physics.
It is impossible to test theories of social phenomena. All social phenomena have a multitude of causes and are densely interrelated. And we simply cannot perform controlled experiments to isolate causal factors. The objects of our study (other human beings) can become aware of our observations and our theories and change their behavior accordingly. Moreover, there are the ethical considerations of experimenting on human beings. More importantly, however, the ultimate assumptions that form the basis of explanatory laws of human action are and can be directly known by the human mind.
The proper method of the social sciences is praxeology, the general science of human action. It is a system of synthetic a priori propositions. Testing of these propositions is not only undesireable and impossible for the reasons given above; it is unnecessary, because, though the discovery of synthetic a priori propositions is a difficult theoretical task, once they are successfully discovered they are self-evident and apodictically true, and all empirical science must necessarily be founded on and guided by them. (See here for more information.)
So…unless I can convince my professor that the most one can do with an empirical quantitative analysis in international conflict is to illustrate one’s theory, then I will have to write some crap paper to get a good grade in the class, some part or all of which I will have to throw out afterwards.
Geoffrey is an Aristotelian-Libertarian political philosopher, writer, editor, and web designer. He is the founder of the