Analyticism and the possibility of causal explanation in poststructuralist

Patrick Jackson develops four different ideal-types of approaches to (social) science. He distinguishes these approaches along two dimensions: First, the dimension of philosophical ontology, i.e. the relationship between the researcher and the world. And second, the dimension of the kind of knowledge that the researcher has access to (cf.

Jackson 2011).

Philosophical ontology refers to the relationship between the researcher and the world, that is, to our ‘hook up’ to the world. Jackson distinguishes between what he calls

‘mind-world dualism’ and ‘mind-world monism’. The former specifies the relationship between researcher and world in the way that “the objects of study have a more or less determinate essential character that is separate from the researcher’s activity” while the latter specifies this relationship as deeply intertwined in a way that “the process of research in some sense constitutes the object of study en passant, in the course of gathering and assembling data” (Jackson 2011: 35).¹³ These conceptualizations have implications for the processes of knowledge production: In a mind-world dualist setting,

“research has to be directed toward properly crossing that gap, and valid knowledge

13 I guess the accusation of running the risk of being ‘idealist’ cannot be countered too often in this context. As Jackson puts it: “[...] mind-world monism is no more ‘idealist’ (in the sense of privileging ideas about the world) than mind-world dualism is ‘realist’ (in the sense of privileging the world); it is not the privileging of one or the other side of a mind-world dichotomy that makes a position monistic, but the rejection of the very distinction in the first place” (Jackson 2011: 36).

must in the end be related to some sort of accurate correspondence between empirical and theoretical propositions on the one hand and the actual character of a mind-independent world on the other” (ibid.). In a mind-world monist setting, “the researcher is a part of the world in such a way that speaking of ‘the world’ as divorced from the activities of making sense of the world is literally nonsensical” (ibid.: 35f.). Knowledge claims are based on “a disciplined ordering of the facts of experience” in order to generate useful or plausible accounts of these facts (ibid.: 114).

Jackson combines this distinction between mind-world dualism and mind-world monism with a second dimension concerning the type of knowledge about the world.

That is either super-empirical, transcendental knowledge or knowledge that is confined to the empirical, observable and experimental sphere (Jackson 2011: 35). He calls the former understanding ‘transfactualism’ and the latter one ‘phenomenalism’ (ibid.: 36).

The result of the combination of the two dimensions is four ideal-typical philosophical-ontological commitments or approaches to (social) science. The approach that combines mind-world dualism and phenomenalism he calls ‘Neopositivism’. This approach represents the ‘standard’ approach to social sciences which aims at testing and confirming (or falsifying) law-like hypothesis. ‘Critical Realism’, which is the approach signified by the combination of mind-world dualism and transfactualism, regards

“knowledge-claims as attempts to approximate the mind-independent world by disclosing the deep dispositional properties of the objects within it and regard our knowledge to be the best current approximation that we have” (ibid.: 198). The combination of mind-world monism and transfactualism is called ‘Reflexivity’. From this perspective, “knowledge is also instrumentally valuable, but only insofar as it provokes greater self-awareness and self-reflection on the part of the producers and consumers of such knowledge; from this follows the notion that the validation o f a knowledge claim start out, of necessity, with the theorizing of the social conditions of its own production” (ibid.: 198). And finally, the combination of the mind-world monist philosophical ontology and a scientific ontology that limits itself to “things that can be experienced and empirically observed” results in an approach to scientific research that Jackson labels ‘Analyticism’ (Jackson 2011: 36). In this understanding, ideal-typical accounts of causal factors, processes and mechanisms are used to form an analytical narrative. Knowledge is understood as a useful account of the empirical world (cf.

Jackson 2011: 198f.).

Jackson underlines that there is no reason to privilege one approach over the others,

because the philosophical-ontological commitments are arbitrary decisions. Once a decision is made, however, it does have consequences for the way knowledge is generated, i.e. for epistemological questions (for example: It would not make sense at all to test anything against an independently existing world in a mind-world monist approach).

I will now compare Analyticism and poststructuralist discourse theory and show that they share their basic meta-theoretical commitments.

3.2.1.1. Analyticism

Jackson chooses the designation ‘Analyticism’ to point out the connection of this approach with “the tradition of analytical philosophy out of which some of the most important monist and phenomenalist thinkers (especially those focusing on language-in-use, following broadly in the footsteps of Ludwig Wittgenstein) come”¹⁴ (Jackson 2011:

142). As already mentioned, the basic meta-theoretical commitments of this approach are a mind-world monist stance and the restriction of knowledge on empirically observable phenomena. This has consequences for the conduct of scientific inquiry and the kind of causal claims.

The researcher in an analyticist understanding does not stand outside the world that he or she is studying and thus cannot objectively describe or record or explain what is going on there. Instead, the researcher is inextricably tied to the world that he or she is studying. As Jackson puts it:

[...] the researcher is part of the world in such a way that speaking of ‘the world’

as divorced from the activities of making sense of the world is literally nonsensical: ‘world’ is endogenous to social practices of knowledge-production, including (but not limited to) scholarly practices and hence scholarly knowledge-production is in no sense a simple description or recording of already existing stable worldly objects. (ibid.: 35f.)

This is not to say that the mind-world monist position of the Analyticist approach

14 While Jackson chooses the designation ‘Analyticism’ for his ideal-typical approach to science in order to point out the connection to the tradition of analytical philosophy, this ideal-type is not to be confused with the latter. Analytical philosophy is an umbrella term for a variety of philosophical traditions, comprising – for example – the mathematical-logical works of Wittgenstein and Russell, the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle or the philosophy of language (‘linguistic turn’) (cf. Störig 2004: 768-774).

privileges the ‘mind side’ over the materially constituted ‘world side’; the point is that the mind-world dichotomy is rejected as such in the first place. This has as consequence that “the process of research in some sense constitutes the object of study en passant, in the course of gathering and assembling data” (ibid.: 35). Therefore, the ‘usual’ scientific procedure of deriving hypotheses from laws or theories and then testing them against empirical data (and, in the end, finding general laws) is not a valid method in this understanding. Instead, the notions of ideal-types and singular causal analyses are crucial. According to Jackson, Analyticists

are not bound to the kind of covariation-causality that emerges from neopositivist commitments, since for analyticists there simply is no need to distinguish between systematic causal relations characteristic of the external world and idiosyncratic relations characteristic of the accidents of specific cases. For analyticists, it is simply meaningless to speak of ‘the external world’ in the first place. So analyticists offer the notion of ‘singular causal analysis’, wherein scientific researchers trace and map how particular configurations of ideal-typified factors come together to generate historically specific outcomes in particular cases. (ibid.:

114)

Ideal-types within these singular causal analyses help “to organize the empirical material of specific cases into a coherent story that differentiates between analytically general and case-specific factors responsible for bringing about an outcome and details their sequential interaction and concatenation over the time frame of the analysis” (ibid.:

154). Therefore, for each specific case, the researcher needs to identify the ‘adequate’

and the ‘coincidental’ causes of the effect. Adequate causes are those causes without which we cannot imagine the outcome having occurred. Coincidental causes are unique, idiosyncratic factors which are important for the outcome in a particular situation but which are not part of an adequate causal configuration (ibid.: 149; cf. Weber 1988b:

286ff.). I will come back to adequate and coincidental causes again later in the discussion when I discuss Kurki’s concept of causality.

Ideal-types are deliberate oversimplifications of phenomena and processes and thus are a means to comprehend what happened in a particular case. They are analytical constructs which are formed by a one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view

and through bringing together a great many diffuse and discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual events which are arranged according to these emphatically one-sided points of view (Jackson 2011: 143; cf. Diez 1999: 63-66;

cf. Weber 1988a: 191).

For this reason (i.e. their analytical nature), ideal-types cannot be tested against

‘empirical evidence’ to see whether they are ‘true’ or not. The validity and usefulness of ideal-types is revealed by their successful (or unsuccessful) accomplishment of the pragmatic explanatory goals for which they were crafted (cf. Jackson 2011: 143). Or as Weber put it: “Indeed, whether they are pure intellectual game or a valuable scientific instrument cannot be decided a priori; there is only one criterion: the success for the comprehension of specific phenomena in their specific contexts, their causal condition and their wider meaning”¹⁵ (Weber 1988a: 193). Or as Jackson put it: Ideal-types thus serve to order the facts of our experience and the only way to evaluate the usefulness of an ideal-type is to examine whether the ideal-type is “efficacious in revealing intriguing and useful things about the objects to which it is applied” (Jackson 2011: 146).

To sum up: The key point is that knowledge production – i.e. explanation – in the Analyticist understanding utilizes ideal-types and singular causal analyses to form a “set of analytical claims, which ground the subsequent empirical account and so are never exposed to any sort of ‘testing’ within it, [and] provide the framework and the vocabulary for constructing a deliberately and explicitly non-representational case-specific narrative” (Jackson 2011: 152).

3.2.1.2. Poststructuralism and Analyticism

Poststructuralism shares with Analyticism two meta-theoretical commitments, which are the mind-world monist stance and the focus on observable phenomena, the latter of which in the case of poststructuralism is language and the different ways that phenomena are constructed in language. “To poststructuralism”, Hansen states,

“language is ontologically significant: it is only through the construction in language that ‘things’ – objects, subjects, states, living beings, and material structures – are given meaning and endowed with a particular identity” (Hansen 2006: 18). Language, therefore, cannot be a neutral or “transparent tool functioning as a medium for the registration of data” of ‘reality’ because there is no ‘objective’ or ‘true’ meaning beyond

15 Own translation of the original German text.

the linguistic representation to which one can refer (Hansen 2006: 18). Thus language does not ‘transmit’ information but does ‘construct’ information (cf. Diez 1999: 41).

Discourse in this understanding is a system of linguistic practices or statements which bring into being the objects that are the basis for human action (cf. ibid.: 43; cf. Wæver 2002: 29). Due to the ontological significance of language, discourses are not merely ideational or idealist constructs, but do have a material character (cf. Hansen 2006: 43).

“The power of discourse thus is a definitional power. Trying to escape discourse would mean to be unable to speak or act” (Diez 1999: 43).

This means that we (as researchers) cannot perceive reality outside of discourses because we ourselves are inextricably intertwined in discourses; this does not mean that no ‘reality’ outside of discourses exists – however, it means that we do not have access to it, only to its representations and reconstructions in discourses (cf. ibid.: 43). This is what Diez called “epistemological constructivism”¹⁶ (ibid.: 39).

Such an ontological position impacts on epistemological questions and on the role of the researcher. The mind-world monist commitment is expressed in the assumption that there is no ‘objective’ point of observation for the researcher, therefore she or he has no

‘objective’ access to the ‘real world’ but is intertwined in discourses. Consequently, discourses cannot be treated as ‘reality’ which is to be studied by the researcher (cf.

ibid.: 51). The discourses that the researcher sets out to analyze are themselves (re-) constructions. In this context, Thomas Diez refers to Niklas Luhmann’s conceptualization of observations as active “operations of distinguishing and naming”¹⁷ (ibid.: 52). Observing thus becomes an active practice, the practice of (re-)constructing.

Quoting Luhmann, Diez goes on: “Observation changes the world that is being observed”¹⁸ (ibid.: 52; quoted from Luhmann 1990: 73-75, 82).

The production of knowledge therefore cannot be subject to testing hypotheses or theories against an external reality. Knowledge is being evaluated against its usefulness in a specific context and can only be evaluated by its plausibility in this context (cf.

Diez 1999: 51f.).

Summing up, Analyticism and Poststructuralism share the phenomenalist focus on the empirical and experiential sphere, which in the case of poststructuralism means the

16 Own translation of the German text: Erkenntnistheoretischer Konstruktivismus.

17 Own translation of the German text: Operationen des Unterscheidens und Bezeichnens.

18 Own translation of the German text: Luhmann insistiert, daß das Beobachten die Welt in der beobachtet

sphere of language and the discursive constructions of empirical phenomena (cf. ibid.:

42; cf. Hansen 2006: 18). They also share the mind-world monist stance: While for Jackson “the production of knowledge is itself also and simultaneously productive of the world” (Jackson 2011: 114), for poststructuralists “every theory is simultaneously a socio-political practice because it is not outside of the world and thus not describing the world ‘objectively’ but because it is tied into a discursive context and reproduces specific reconstructions of reality” (Diez 1999: 41; cf. Hansen 2006: 18ff). Based on these commitments, the general feature of knowledge production in both approaches is quite similar.