| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This contribution investigates in some more depth a limited set of the premises on which Wight's argument for a 'scientific realist' approach to the study of International Relations (IR) rests, an approach, which, according to him, raises the hitherto unacknowledged centrality of ontological premises to all forms of knowledge and human action. Positing 'Politics as Ontology' (the book's subtitle) permits, so Wight's argument goes, the conduct of social science in a way which renders most epistemological and methodological disagreements obsolete, since the latter can be shown to be enabled only by competing, mutually exclusive, relatively incompatible, or unreflectively fragmentary ontological commitments. On this view, clarifying the respective ontological commitments, which underpin - tacitly or explicitly - competing theories yields the prospect of demonstrating relatively precisely what it is that enables disagreements at the levels of epistemology and methodology to arise in the first place. Programmatically, Wight seeks to establish the scientific realist account as a consistent, critical, fallibilist, unified account of scientific practice, reintegrating social and natural sciences in a reconceptualised naturalist scheme.
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