I found this article quite difficult to follow. While positivism is defined, post-positivism is not, and there aren’t examples of how either of them work with respect to international relations....
I found this article quite difficult to follow. While positivism is defined, post-positivism is not, and there aren’t examples of how either of them work with respect to international relations. It’s unclear to me how this theorizing connects to something real.
The audience of this article is scholars who keep up with technical literature in the space; I agree that it's dense for the rest of us. I would interpret post-positivism as a modernist or...
The audience of this article is scholars who keep up with technical literature in the space; I agree that it's dense for the rest of us. I would interpret post-positivism as a modernist or postmodernist iteration of positivism.
Positivism is an approach that views the world as ‘out there’ waiting be observed and analysed by the researcher. Theories that are built on positivism see the world ‘as it is’ and base their assumptions upon analysing physical elements such as states and international organisations, which they can account for and ascribe values to. Positivism is therefore based on the study of facts and the gathering of physical evidence. It is related to the scientific view of the natural world as being one that operates via laws (such as gravity) that can be revealed by careful study and observation. Positivists assert that equivalent laws can be revealed about the social world.
Postpositivism rejects the positivist approach that a researcher can be an independent observer of the social world. Postpositivists argue that the ideas, and even the particular identity, of a researcher influences what they observe and therefore impacts upon what they conclude. Postpositivism pursues objective answers by attempting to recognise, and work with, such biases with the theories and knowledge that theorists develop.
Interpretivism (sometimes called ‘anti-positivism’) takes things yet further by arguing that objectivity is impossible. As an approach, this leads researchers to focus on gaining subjective knowledge through approaches where individuals, or smaller groups, are analysed in depth through detailed observations and discussions. This harnesses a broader framework of ‘qualitative analysis’ in which deeper sets of data are sought from smaller numbers of participants – such as through detailed interviews. This is a different approach to gathering data than the more positivist inclined ‘quantitative analysis’ where larger datasets are sought to gain broader insights – such as polls of hundreds or thousands of people asking them a small number of questions with only yes/no/maybe-type options for answers.
These are sociological definitions. Applied to international relations, positivistic discourse may be related to numeric observations/analyses, like political inferences about cross-border cultural and linguistic exchange based on data collected annually by a particular government. Diplomats may propose that such data indicates cultural similarity (or dissimilarity), and politicians may advocate for a new approach to borders, governance, trade, or something else. The takeaway could be good or it could be nefarious.
The post-positivistic version of that discourse may contain caveats about the nature of the data itself, probably with some critical theory, to highlight systemic problems with research conducted by any particular entity. For example, maybe the only country interested in that sort of data is one that's looking for a reason to colonize a neighbor. A researcher in a post-positivistic paradigm might be skeptical of structurally one-sided analyses of this data, even if the methodology was legitimate and the data is sound. Diplomats and politicians may have an incentive to ignore or highlight power dynamics that are hard to see in data.
The interpretivist version may present narratives about culture and language without specific or direct reference to data, finding the quantitative approach too computational, distant, and disconnected from the experience of living in either culture. Researchers, or perhaps documentary filmmakers, may learn about cultures through extremely thorough investigations of lived experience. Interviewing a grandmother about her language, following her son as he goes throughout his workday in a modernizing world, and asking questions about the old arts and music that are impractical in a population-wide survey. The kind of information you get from this is totally distinct from positivistic, quantitative analyses, and at least equally useful. In our IR example, peace advocates may use excerpts from such interviews to comment on political tensions; or politicians may quote them in proposals for or against some sort of border policy.
Thanks. I’m a bit unclear on what “international relations” even is. Would it be fair to say that this is about the use of supposed facts and various forms of data by governments and diplomats...
Thanks. I’m a bit unclear on what “international relations” even is. Would it be fair to say that this is about the use of supposed facts and various forms of data by governments and diplomats during negotiations with other countries? Or is it about the use of data by researchers attempting to understand foreign relations? Maybe both, since research can be used by governments.
I have the sense that the author is interested in broad applications of post-positivistic discourse rather than exclusively commenting on a narrow or specific aspect of inter-governmental...
I have the sense that the author is interested in broad applications of post-positivistic discourse rather than exclusively commenting on a narrow or specific aspect of inter-governmental communication. She's clearly talking about the application of academic philosophical research to IR, but that's something anyone can do in some sense: politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, media, scholars, voters, advocates, educators, etc. Informally, we can think about IR as the sum of the relationships between all entities that interact directly or indirectly across borders, including our leaders and conglomerates and ourselves.
As a discipline, IR is the sub-field of political science mainly concerned with the intersection of world politics, macroeconomics, and sociology, especially in the context of multi-national organizations who have complex dependencies. (Perhaps some IR experts would dislike being classified within a field of political science rather than sociology.) There's also some game theory (mathematics) in there, but my feeling is that IR tends to be a little less concerned with strict models and more with personalities or personas (individual or group). There's history in there too, but my feeling is that IR tends to be relatively applied rather than theoretical. Very inter-disciplinary. It's a little hard to define and I suspect everyone in the field has their own definition. As a field of academic research, IR is concerned with the observations of cross-national entities rather than acting directly upon them, although as the author has commented, this can be fraught or paradoxical. Some people who engage with IR outside of academia are definitely more interested in doing than knowing.
Even as an applied field, I think IR's diversity gives it relatively wide relevance, including out of context. Obviously the individuals with the most direct influence over international relations are the people literally signing treaties and enacting tariffs. However, the culture and expectations of a society inform those decisions.
As individuals, we make positivistic statements and assumptions all the time. Anyone who's received any formal education will have been taught a little bit of statistics, a field which is concerned with numerical representations of the world and almost entirely unconcerned with qualitative analysis (by definition). This is useful because it can help us reach conclusions that would be difficult to ascertain anecdotally and presents an air of neutrality in contexts that may otherwise be emotionally charged. Segments of our society are extremely interested in data to the point that they neglect other modalities of living; some authors have pointed out the hypocrisy of the supposed "[popular] religion of science" in that treating data as the Word of God violates epistemological tenets of uncertainty and unknowability in scientific systems of reasoning.
But positivism isn't necessarily exclusive to formal scientific observations: one could argue that our current quantitative system of voting for candidates to hold elected offices, for example, is positivistic because it's designed in theory to give authority based on a straightforward numeric calculation that reflects "the will of the people," regardless of what segment of the population is voting in practice or how they prefer to express their sentiments. Or, more simply, it's inherently and purposely a system that defines qualitative expressions of self as invalid data and subsequently ignores them. You can't vote by writing an essay, you vote by checking a box. Arguably this is positivistic in the sense that it idolizes a quantitative, empirical, falsifiable method of knowing and assumes that input is provided rationally. Decision-making in general can be done positivistically, whether or not it's in a formalized voting system, including in everyday interactions like deciding where to go for lunch.
As individuals, we also make post-positivistic and interpretative statements often. I would find that post-positivism tries to work with postivistic methodologies to some extent, recognizing at least occasional value in objective analyses but assuming them to be incomplete and so painting them with subjective colors to "fill in the gaps" with critical theory and ideas about positionality, intersectionality, and some other epistemological concepts. My understanding is that post-positivistic scholars tend to be skeptical of exclusively data-driven analyses because they systemically omit minority viewpoints, but said scholars are not opposed to quantitative research generally. Consider our applied example of voting: a post-positivistic system might be restructured to specifically accommodate minority or disenfranchised viewpoints, perhaps with a dedicated process for evaluating qualitative ideas alongside quantitative voting, or simply by mandating that some administrative (unelected) roles represent minority viewpoints. But interpretivism is a wholly different kind of knowing. It relies on purely subjective or qualitative reasoning. Interpretivism might use data indirectly, but doesn't consider it a legitimate source of knowledge; in this line of thinking, objective methodologies necessarily produce falsehoods for some subjects. Religious inspiration and interior knowledge are maligned as a decision-making process in the secular, rationalistic, empirical world. However (and I'm not a neutral party here), I find that faith-based, spirit-led group reflection can be valuable precisely because such thoughts can be felt rather than observed, and because they can be holistic and may encompass more than just the subject. Positivism rejects the spiritual, the ethereal, the incorporeal, the mental altogether. I find that to be unwise. Whether or not one agrees, one must admit that billions of people in the world have fundamentally interpretivistic perspectives of life and indeed that even "rationalistic" people often have such thoughts too. If nothing else, this recognition is still useful in positivistic and post-positivistic analyses (more so the latter).
Voting or its absence is a micro-level action but it can have macro-level consequences. It's easy to see how something as individual or local as this can be applied to IR. The kinds of decisions being made internationally are going to differ based on the way constituents make decisions: some vote, some don't; some decision-makers are inspired by positivistic, rational arguments, and others are inspired by qualitative, experiential arguments. Narratives that politicians use to provide a mandate for their law or tax or war will fall into some of these categories but not others. The way other parties respond to international decisions has to acknowledge the underlying mindset or else the response may be miscalculated. Thus ways of living and understanding the world on an individual and local level can be applied to IR to make greater decisions, and likewise the applications of positivism, post-positivism, and interpretivism in IR are things we can imitate in other settings for some utility.
Yes, voting radically simplifies a complicated situation and the relationship between an election result and the “will of the people” is rarely so straightforward as politicians will sometimes...
Yes, voting radically simplifies a complicated situation and the relationship between an election result and the “will of the people” is rarely so straightforward as politicians will sometimes claim.
If “positivism” includes any argument made with numbers then I think statements about money also count? This brings in the international use of money, statements about how much things cost, and so on. Summing up costs as one number is a simplification too.
This all seems extremely broad and hard to make useful claims about. The history of the use and misuse of election results would itself be a very broad topic to discuss, and so would the history of statements about costs.
I’m somewhat wary about how useful this vocabulary is for describing people and what they do, to say that someone is acting in a “positivist” or “post-positivist” way when they wouldn’t recognize the term. To pick another word I’m more familiar with, the many meanings over a long history of the word “rational” cause a lot of confusion, and there is also “post-rationalism,” another vague term. Some post-rationalists claim to be people who have gotten more sophisticated about rationalism and to better understand its flaws than naive rationalists, while some people who call themselves rationalists might claim that this isn’t true and they never were that naive about it.
Similarly, it seems like “positivist” is supposed to describe being relatively naive about the relationship between quantitative claims and reality, a sort of naive realism? And then, post-positivist implies more sophistication. And, well, naive and more sophisticated people certainly exist, but I’m not sure it’s all that clear a distinction. I think even people who are relatively comfortable using quantitative arguments will readily admit that numbers and statistics can be biased, faked, or misused, and that the map is not the territory.
Sometimes it’s really true that an earlier time, there were some people who were more naive about something, and with the benefit of hindsight, now we are “post” and know better, but I’m also open to the possibility that they were never so naive as we think. To resolve that, it seems like we have to get specific.
I found this article quite difficult to follow. While positivism is defined, post-positivism is not, and there aren’t examples of how either of them work with respect to international relations. It’s unclear to me how this theorizing connects to something real.
The audience of this article is scholars who keep up with technical literature in the space; I agree that it's dense for the rest of us. I would interpret post-positivism as a modernist or postmodernist iteration of positivism.
An earlier article from this site provides definitions:
These are sociological definitions. Applied to international relations, positivistic discourse may be related to numeric observations/analyses, like political inferences about cross-border cultural and linguistic exchange based on data collected annually by a particular government. Diplomats may propose that such data indicates cultural similarity (or dissimilarity), and politicians may advocate for a new approach to borders, governance, trade, or something else. The takeaway could be good or it could be nefarious.
The post-positivistic version of that discourse may contain caveats about the nature of the data itself, probably with some critical theory, to highlight systemic problems with research conducted by any particular entity. For example, maybe the only country interested in that sort of data is one that's looking for a reason to colonize a neighbor. A researcher in a post-positivistic paradigm might be skeptical of structurally one-sided analyses of this data, even if the methodology was legitimate and the data is sound. Diplomats and politicians may have an incentive to ignore or highlight power dynamics that are hard to see in data.
The interpretivist version may present narratives about culture and language without specific or direct reference to data, finding the quantitative approach too computational, distant, and disconnected from the experience of living in either culture. Researchers, or perhaps documentary filmmakers, may learn about cultures through extremely thorough investigations of lived experience. Interviewing a grandmother about her language, following her son as he goes throughout his workday in a modernizing world, and asking questions about the old arts and music that are impractical in a population-wide survey. The kind of information you get from this is totally distinct from positivistic, quantitative analyses, and at least equally useful. In our IR example, peace advocates may use excerpts from such interviews to comment on political tensions; or politicians may quote them in proposals for or against some sort of border policy.
Thanks. I’m a bit unclear on what “international relations” even is. Would it be fair to say that this is about the use of supposed facts and various forms of data by governments and diplomats during negotiations with other countries? Or is it about the use of data by researchers attempting to understand foreign relations? Maybe both, since research can be used by governments.
I have the sense that the author is interested in broad applications of post-positivistic discourse rather than exclusively commenting on a narrow or specific aspect of inter-governmental communication. She's clearly talking about the application of academic philosophical research to IR, but that's something anyone can do in some sense: politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, media, scholars, voters, advocates, educators, etc. Informally, we can think about IR as the sum of the relationships between all entities that interact directly or indirectly across borders, including our leaders and conglomerates and ourselves.
As a discipline, IR is the sub-field of political science mainly concerned with the intersection of world politics, macroeconomics, and sociology, especially in the context of multi-national organizations who have complex dependencies. (Perhaps some IR experts would dislike being classified within a field of political science rather than sociology.) There's also some game theory (mathematics) in there, but my feeling is that IR tends to be a little less concerned with strict models and more with personalities or personas (individual or group). There's history in there too, but my feeling is that IR tends to be relatively applied rather than theoretical. Very inter-disciplinary. It's a little hard to define and I suspect everyone in the field has their own definition. As a field of academic research, IR is concerned with the observations of cross-national entities rather than acting directly upon them, although as the author has commented, this can be fraught or paradoxical. Some people who engage with IR outside of academia are definitely more interested in doing than knowing.
Even as an applied field, I think IR's diversity gives it relatively wide relevance, including out of context. Obviously the individuals with the most direct influence over international relations are the people literally signing treaties and enacting tariffs. However, the culture and expectations of a society inform those decisions.
As individuals, we make positivistic statements and assumptions all the time. Anyone who's received any formal education will have been taught a little bit of statistics, a field which is concerned with numerical representations of the world and almost entirely unconcerned with qualitative analysis (by definition). This is useful because it can help us reach conclusions that would be difficult to ascertain anecdotally and presents an air of neutrality in contexts that may otherwise be emotionally charged. Segments of our society are extremely interested in data to the point that they neglect other modalities of living; some authors have pointed out the hypocrisy of the supposed "[popular] religion of science" in that treating data as the Word of God violates epistemological tenets of uncertainty and unknowability in scientific systems of reasoning.
But positivism isn't necessarily exclusive to formal scientific observations: one could argue that our current quantitative system of voting for candidates to hold elected offices, for example, is positivistic because it's designed in theory to give authority based on a straightforward numeric calculation that reflects "the will of the people," regardless of what segment of the population is voting in practice or how they prefer to express their sentiments. Or, more simply, it's inherently and purposely a system that defines qualitative expressions of self as invalid data and subsequently ignores them. You can't vote by writing an essay, you vote by checking a box. Arguably this is positivistic in the sense that it idolizes a quantitative, empirical, falsifiable method of knowing and assumes that input is provided rationally. Decision-making in general can be done positivistically, whether or not it's in a formalized voting system, including in everyday interactions like deciding where to go for lunch.
As individuals, we also make post-positivistic and interpretative statements often. I would find that post-positivism tries to work with postivistic methodologies to some extent, recognizing at least occasional value in objective analyses but assuming them to be incomplete and so painting them with subjective colors to "fill in the gaps" with critical theory and ideas about positionality, intersectionality, and some other epistemological concepts. My understanding is that post-positivistic scholars tend to be skeptical of exclusively data-driven analyses because they systemically omit minority viewpoints, but said scholars are not opposed to quantitative research generally. Consider our applied example of voting: a post-positivistic system might be restructured to specifically accommodate minority or disenfranchised viewpoints, perhaps with a dedicated process for evaluating qualitative ideas alongside quantitative voting, or simply by mandating that some administrative (unelected) roles represent minority viewpoints. But interpretivism is a wholly different kind of knowing. It relies on purely subjective or qualitative reasoning. Interpretivism might use data indirectly, but doesn't consider it a legitimate source of knowledge; in this line of thinking, objective methodologies necessarily produce falsehoods for some subjects. Religious inspiration and interior knowledge are maligned as a decision-making process in the secular, rationalistic, empirical world. However (and I'm not a neutral party here), I find that faith-based, spirit-led group reflection can be valuable precisely because such thoughts can be felt rather than observed, and because they can be holistic and may encompass more than just the subject. Positivism rejects the spiritual, the ethereal, the incorporeal, the mental altogether. I find that to be unwise. Whether or not one agrees, one must admit that billions of people in the world have fundamentally interpretivistic perspectives of life and indeed that even "rationalistic" people often have such thoughts too. If nothing else, this recognition is still useful in positivistic and post-positivistic analyses (more so the latter).
Voting or its absence is a micro-level action but it can have macro-level consequences. It's easy to see how something as individual or local as this can be applied to IR. The kinds of decisions being made internationally are going to differ based on the way constituents make decisions: some vote, some don't; some decision-makers are inspired by positivistic, rational arguments, and others are inspired by qualitative, experiential arguments. Narratives that politicians use to provide a mandate for their law or tax or war will fall into some of these categories but not others. The way other parties respond to international decisions has to acknowledge the underlying mindset or else the response may be miscalculated. Thus ways of living and understanding the world on an individual and local level can be applied to IR to make greater decisions, and likewise the applications of positivism, post-positivism, and interpretivism in IR are things we can imitate in other settings for some utility.
Yes, voting radically simplifies a complicated situation and the relationship between an election result and the “will of the people” is rarely so straightforward as politicians will sometimes claim.
If “positivism” includes any argument made with numbers then I think statements about money also count? This brings in the international use of money, statements about how much things cost, and so on. Summing up costs as one number is a simplification too.
This all seems extremely broad and hard to make useful claims about. The history of the use and misuse of election results would itself be a very broad topic to discuss, and so would the history of statements about costs.
I’m somewhat wary about how useful this vocabulary is for describing people and what they do, to say that someone is acting in a “positivist” or “post-positivist” way when they wouldn’t recognize the term. To pick another word I’m more familiar with, the many meanings over a long history of the word “rational” cause a lot of confusion, and there is also “post-rationalism,” another vague term. Some post-rationalists claim to be people who have gotten more sophisticated about rationalism and to better understand its flaws than naive rationalists, while some people who call themselves rationalists might claim that this isn’t true and they never were that naive about it.
Similarly, it seems like “positivist” is supposed to describe being relatively naive about the relationship between quantitative claims and reality, a sort of naive realism? And then, post-positivist implies more sophistication. And, well, naive and more sophisticated people certainly exist, but I’m not sure it’s all that clear a distinction. I think even people who are relatively comfortable using quantitative arguments will readily admit that numbers and statistics can be biased, faked, or misused, and that the map is not the territory.
Sometimes it’s really true that an earlier time, there were some people who were more naive about something, and with the benefit of hindsight, now we are “post” and know better, but I’m also open to the possibility that they were never so naive as we think. To resolve that, it seems like we have to get specific.