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246

Peter Hall, “Aligning Ontology and Methodology in Comparative Politics,” in James Mahoney and Dietrich Reuschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Hall directs his argument toward the field of comparative politics, but it is also relevant to other fields in political science and to other social sciences.

247

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 91-196. The term “constructivism” and the group of scholars and ideas to which it applies remains more amorphous than the terms neoliberalism and neorealism (though these too are subject to debate), and some interpretations of constructivism are consistent with our own view of causal explanation and our emphasis on causal mechanisms. See, for example, Jeffrey Checkel, “The Constructivist Turn in International Relations Theory,” World Politics, Vol. 50, No. 2 (January 1998), pp. 324-348.

248

For discussion of these schools of thought in a Lakatosian framework, see Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, “How Not to be Lakatos Intolerant: Appraising Progress in IR Research,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 2 (June 2002), pp. 231-262, and these authors’ edited volume, Progress in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). As the Elmans note, a key problem for efforts to render schools of thought as Lakatosian research programs is that Lakatos and his successors have not devised any defensible distinction between the untestable “hard core” assumptions of a research program and its testable “outer belt” theories.

249

Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1957), pp. 36, 41, 45-46, 51-53, 68-69.

250

For an overview of constructivism and variants within it, see John Gerard Ruggie, “What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge,” International Organization, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Autumn 1998), pp. 855-886.

251

David Dessler, “What’s at Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?” International Organization, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Summer 1989), pp. 441-474.

252

We set aside here the debate over the ways in which social power can be oppressive and those in which it serves useful purposes such as overcoming collective action problems.

253

Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).

254

David Dessler, “Dimensions of Progress in Empirical Social Science: Toward a Post-Lakatosian Account of Scientific Development,” in Elman and Elman, eds., Progress in International Relations Theory, pp. 381-404.

255

Clayton Roberts, The Logic of Historical Explanation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).

256

Dessler, “Dimensions of Progress,” pp. 381-404. On the other hand, the effort to build theories on the basis of individual-level causal mechanisms, whether these mechanisms are rational choice, cognitive, or socio-biological, does attempt to move toward more universal generalizations.

257

Dessler, “Dimensions of Progress,” p. 386. This section draws heavily on Dessler and on Wesley Salmon, Four Decades of Scientific Explanation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). See also Wesley C. Salmon, “Scientific Explanation: Causation and Unification,” in Wesley C. Salmon, Causality and Explanation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 68-78.

258

A third problem with the D-N model is that it does not offer an explanation of laws themselves, as Hempel and Oppenheim acknowledged in an infamous footnote (note 33); Salmon makes this point in his “Scientific Explanation” (p. 69) and notes that Hempel