Pasantes

Review of International Studies (2008), 34, 129–153 Copyright  British International Studies Association

doi:10.1017/S0260210508007948

Foregrounding ontology: dualism, monism,
and IR theory
PATRICK THADDEUS JACKSON*

Abstract. While the recent proliferation in philosophical discussions in International Relations
indicates a welcome increase in the discipline’s conceptualsophistication, a central issue has
gone relatively unremarked: the question of how to understand the relationship between
scholarly observers and their observed objects. This classical philosophical problem has a
number of implications for the conduct of inquiry in the discipline, and raises particular
challenges for the status of knowledge-claims advanced by constructivists. I clarify these issues
andchallenges by distinguishing between ‘dualist’ and ‘monist’ ontological standpoints, in the
hope of provoking a more focused philosophical discussion.

Recent years have seen a marked resurgence of debate about the philosophical
foundations of empirical inquiry throughout the social sciences. From efforts to
clarify the status of comparative case studies1 to sustained arguments in favour ofstatistical2 or critical3 research, the conceptual sophistication of the study of politics
has certainly been on the increase. Within International Relations (IR), this increased
sophistication is perhaps most visible in the debate surrounding Alexander Wendt’s
efforts to merge an ontology of social construction with the epistemological practices
of so-called ‘positivist’ science, drawing onBhaskarian notions of scientific realism in
his efforts.4 Although generally taking place at a very high level of abstraction, these
debates hold the potential for fundamentally reshaping the epistemological and
ontological foundations on which empirical work in IR rests.

* Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2004 Midwest Political Science Association
annual meeting, the 2004American Political Science Association annual meeting, and the 2004
Standing Group on International Relations conference. For helpful comments on those papers, and
on this version, I would like to thank Dvora Yanow, Micheal Giles, Janice Bially Mattern, Michael
Shapiro, Vincent Pouliot, Kiran Pervez, Rom Harre, Nicholas Rengger, and two anonymous
reviewers.
1
James Mahoney and Gary Goertz,‘The Possibility Principle: Choosing Negative Cases in
Comparative Research’, American Political Science Review, 98 (2004); Charles C. Ragin, Fuzzy-Set
Social Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
2
Gary King, Robert O. Keohane and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in
Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
3
BentFlyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
4
Alexander E. Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999); see also Heikki Patomaki and Colin Wight, ‘After Postpositivism? The Promises of
¨
Critical Realism’, International Studies Quarterly, 44 (2000), and Fred Chernoff, ‘Scientific Realism
as a Meta-Theoryof International Politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 46 (2002).

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Patrick Thaddeus Jackson

But through almost all of this debate, a vital issue that cuts to the heart of any
robust account of the status of social scientific findings has been all but ignored: the
issue of whether the knowledge that academic researchers produce is in some sense a
reflection of the world, orwhether it is irreducibly a perspective on the world.
Virtually all of the IR discussions of these issues have presumed, whether explicitly or
implicitly, that the goal of social science is to make descriptive and causal inferences
that portray the world ‘as it really is’, and that IR should thus seek to mirror the
world by deploying analytical and conceptual tools that correspond, in...