De la mano entre la cultura y la globalización

This book suggests that our most basic enterprise in the social sciences and history is to build empirically supported claims about how much human actions reflect structural, institutional, ideational, and/or psychological causes. My efforts have focused on giving the clearest possible meaning to the previous sentence, and on overcoming objections to the inclusion of some of these alternatives in the competition. It follows that to proceed with any rigor, we should engage this competition without prejudging the results. Ideally we would craft research that puts these alternatives (and their relevant internal variants, and combined claims) in competition. We would reward scholars who come out with the most convincing and important logical and empirical claims, irrespective of which kinds of causal segments they employ and whether they use them fairly ‘purely’ or in combination.

Unfortunately this conclusion fits poorly with the prevailing standards for progress in the social sciences. Borrowed from the ‘hard’ sciences, today’s mainstream standards basically reflect positivism, the nineteenth- century epistemology that portrayed the discovery of objective general laws of everything as the feasible goal of scholarly work. In principle, most social scientists espouse something like the more nuanced epistemol- ogy of ‘sophisticated methodological falsificationism’ developed by Imre Lakatos. It still prioritizes general theorizing above all, but surrounds the search for laws in intelligent caveats that recognize our ultimate inability to access objective Truth. Although real proof or falsification of any theory

is thus impossible, Lakatos argued that science still advances through pragmatic falsification (reasonable rejection rather than airtight disproof) and increasingly general theories. ‘Progressive’ scholarship occurs either when an existing theory is extended to account for new empirical facts, or a new, broader theory accounts for the empirically corroborated aspects of previous theories and new facts as well. Advancing knowledge requires ever-more-general theory: ‘There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory’ (Lakatos 1970).

Though Lakatos seemed to doubt the viability of such general theoriz- ing in historical explanations of human action, his writings largely define progress in the ‘soft’ sciences today (Lakatos 1971; Elman and Elman 2002). In codifying the standards of political science, King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) make generality the single most important measure of progress, stressing that ‘[g]ood social science attempts to go beyond these particulars to more general knowledge’ and that ‘[t]he question is less whether, in some general sense, a theory is false or not . . . than how

much of the world the theory can help us explain’ (101, their emphasis). They

echo the advice of an earlier methodological landmark, Adam Przeworski and Henry Teune’s Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (1970: 4):

The pivotal assumption of this analysis is that social science research, including comparative inquiry, should and can lead to general statements about social phenomena. This assumption implies that human and social behavior can be explained in terms of general laws established by observation. Introduced here as an expression of preference, this assumption will not be logically justified.

The deepest problem in the social sciences today, however, is that this assumption cannot be logically justified. Przeworski and Teune’s position may be defensible in the physical and mathematical sciences that Lakatos studied, where the alternative to deep general laws may well be just ran- domness. Even where contingencies leave room for particular dynamics in complex natural systems—perhaps with contingent leaps in processes of protein folding, the collapse of stars, or avalanches—the range of possible resolutions to such contingencies might be fairly narrow. The resulting world might be better described as hard-to-predict variations on general themes than in a vocabulary of deep particularity or uniqueness. In such natural subjects, then, it might be plausible a priori that only ever-more- general scholarship represents an improved, organized understanding of what is going on. When we turn to human action, however, we cannot disregard other possibilities between general laws and chaos. Human beings might—just might—have fairly free reign to construct their own

worlds. By accident or creativity they might generate a variety of partly unique arenas and actions that are not the necessary, predictable and explicable results of preexisting conditions. The resultant world could be highly organized, and even predictable to some degree within its confines, but generalizing theories about ‘human action’ might account for very little of its patterns or variations. This would be the particularistic planet imagined by strong institutional or ideational claims.

Besides drawing on weak analogies to the hard sciences, the com- mon identification of progress with generality builds on many of the confusions encountered earlier: that particularistic claims incorporating contingency are not explanations, that ideational claims lie in a separate realm, and that ‘interest’-based arguments enjoy an especially concrete, demonstrable, almost-physical causal quality. Given the number of com- mon oversights that tie into this view and their provenance from revered forefathers—Hume, Weber, and most of the pioneers of postwar social science—its endurance is not surprising. But if we take seriously the goal of engaging a competition between all the plausible ways of accounting for human action, we cannot avoid the conclusion that this view is deeply unscientific. One of the great debates in the social sciences concerns the generality of patterns of action—are there many general dynamics out there?—but prevailing standards presume that we learn something only to the extent that one side wins the debate. They reject some logically plausible, historically well-developed hypotheses about what might be true in the name of what general theorists hope to be true. Certainly many of us share that hope to some degree. The goal of general theory is an attractive one, and the potential for particularistic dynamics forces us to admit that some components of our world may have been highly contingent. Nonetheless, we cannot permit this hope to seduce us into prejudging our answers so severely.

What are better standards for social science progress? We should laud as most valuable and ‘progressive’ the arguments that demonstrate reason- ably specific causal force over the widest range of important outcomes, whether their causes are general or particular. In other words, a valuable contribution has three components. First, it accounts for what many people see as major variation in something important, telling us why one thing happened and others did not. The variation might be factual across multiple cases (why did democracy result here and not there?) or counterfactual (why did China stagnate instead of industrializing first?). Whether the logic is general or particular, accounting for variation can legitimately include the delineation of some contingency. Second, it

accounts for variation in reasonably specific ways. A scholar might speak rhetorically to wide variation without connecting clear mechanisms to concrete, distinct outcomes. This can be taken too far, obviously—we do not need to know many specific details about outcomes—and often this criterion creates trade-offs with accounting for wide variation. But the best arguments do both, spelling out clear causal mechanisms that lead to very different outcomes and justifying how they capture the defining character of the outcomes to a satisfying degree of precision. Third, it must do better than competitors at demonstrating its claims empirically. As almost all philosophers of science now agree, this will always be debat- able. We can only draw provisional conclusions that rest pragmatically on intersubjective truth, trying to convince as many people who are as different as possible that our claims are better than others. Still, some arguments are better than others.

These three points should sound familiar, since the standards I criti- cize also instruct us to seek clear claims that trace to wide variation in reasonably specific outcomes with good empirical support. The crucial difference is that I have left out what they make the first priority. There is no extra credit—let alone the most fundamental credit—for doing these things in a general framework. Since the generality of our phenomena is an open question, we must stop rewarding the scope of a claim separately from its empirical bases. General claims only deserve credit for documented

generality: the range of empirical outcomes for which they have made

precise claims and offer direct empirical support. Particular claims deserve equal credit for documented particularity across similar ranges of outcomes and degrees of precision. Our battles should concern what causal mecha- nisms we claim happened somewhere and what evidence we have for it, not whether or not we can embed our claims in otherwise-unsupported general frameworks.1

A Caveat on Falsifiability

One caveat moderates my heresy. It concerns falsifiability—that obviously desirable quality of an argument that some imaginable evidence could show it to be wrong. Arguments that are clearer about how they can be wrong give us greater confidence when they appear to be right. While we should not insist that our claims be general, we should insist that they be falsifiable. There are some reasons to think that general claims will tend

1 _{For a concrete example and discussion of perverse consequences of Lakatosian standards}

to be a bit more clearly falsifiable than particular ones, and this justifies reinstating at least a small premium a priori on generality in theoretical contributions.

General claims can be falsified in either of two ways. Since they make claims across a number of instances of action, they might be wrong about a ‘cross-case’ pattern. The correlation they expect between certain causes and effects across relevant cases might not show up. Since they also make claims about causal mechanisms in each case, they might be wrong in ‘within-case’ process-tracing (Collier, Brady, and Seawright 2004). The explanatory relationships they posit might not exist even given causes and effects that appear to vary together across cases.

This twofold basis for falsifiability is less present—though not entirely absent—in particular claims. Again, they are ‘particular’ in the sense that their claims about one arena do not imply that even identical conditions would produce similar results (unless by accident they hit upon similar resolutions of contingency). Their limited expectations about cross-case patterns mean that they draw mainly on—and can be falsified mainly by—‘within-case’ process-tracing evidence. This point should not be exag- gerated, since most particular claims generate at least some cross-case implications at both of the logical stages that I discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. In one stage these arguments make negative claims that delineate contingency, arguing that other causes did not select across some range of alternatives. This involves making a general structural and possibly psychological claim of their own—about how certain given conditions do

not shut down reasonable options—that could be evaluated across cases of

similar conditions. In their other stage they invoke fairly standard causal logic to argue that once established, certain institutions or ideational elements oriented people toward certain actions. Unless they claim these institutions or ideational elements to be totally unique, this too generates cross-case expectations—that people who wind up with parliamentary institutions confront certain incentives, that people who believe in com- modified labor build economies with certain dynamics, and so on—that in principle could be supported or disconfirmed in other cases. Still, most attempts to show the effects of certain institutions or ideational elements stress that their N of reasonably comparable cases is small at best.2_{In typ-}

ically generating relatively weak cross-case expectations across relatively

2 _{The most notable exceptions come in organizational sociology, where scholars tend}

to make institutional or ideational arguments based on large quantitative studies of many comparable organizations or arenas (like schools, town councils, firms, and so on). See Powell and DiMaggio (1991) and Brinton and Nee (1998).

small numbers of cases, particular arguments stand or fall more narrowly on within-case support.

This does not mean that particular claims must rely more on ‘interpre- tation’. I see no reason to think that a datum in cross-case evidence is less prone to misinterpretation than one in within-case evidence. But it does mean that particular claims generate fewer (or at least narrower) observ- able implications. At some level this may seem an obvious and trivial point—claims of broader scope make claims over more evidence—but the generation of observable implications is not something social scientists can afford to take lightly. Most advocates of institutional and ideational explanation today spend much of their time discussing how to connect their arguments to at least some cross-case evidence alongside within-case support, wrestling with the challenges of ‘small-N comparison’ (among others, Collier 1991; Biernacki 1995; Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003). The unavoidable difficulties in so doing represent one partial sense in which general theorizing is a preferable way to proceed. General argu- ments stick their neck out with relatively aggressive claims about what has to happen (or is probable) across space and time. If and when general arguments do show us ‘documented generality’ with both cross-case and within-case support over a wide range of variation in a wide range of cases, we will have at least a little more confidence in their claims than we would for particular arguments about a similar range of variation.

Whether or not this turns out to be a crucial caveat about progress in the long run depends on what we find. My personal suspicion, as I have writ- ten more aggressively elsewhere, is that our world is a fairly particularistic one (Parsons 2003: 241). If this were right, then honest generalizers would find that their relatively more falsifiable arguments indeed tended to be falsified a great deal of the time. In this scenario, the light premium this caveat awards them for falsifiability would be outweighed by the empirical victories of particular arguments, even given a light discount to the latter for their slightly lower degree of clear falsifiability. But that is simply my own intuition. If proponents of general arguments can document reasonably specific explanatory claims across great scope in open debate with alternatives, the human sciences will certainly have made a great deal of progress.