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of each case are possible. Alternatively, a researcher may study a few cases or even one case and uncover a new causal mechanism that proves applicable to a wide range of cases. Single cases can also cast doubt on theories across a wide range of scope conditions, as Arend Lijphart’s study of the Netherlands demonstrates. These extremes of a complete inability to generalize from a case and a warrant for broad generalizations from a single case are relatively infrequent. More common is the opportunity to use case study findings to incrementally refine middle-range contingent generalizations, either by broadening or narrowing their scope or introducing new types and subtypes through the inclusion of additional variables. Such refinements draw on both within-case analyses, which help test historical explanations of cases, and cross-case comparisons, which help identify the domains to which these explanations extend. This interplay among within-case analyses and comparative methods is the hallmark of typological theorizing, a subject to which we return in Chapter 11.

Part III

Alternative Methods and Select Issues

Chapter 7

Case Studies and the Philosophy of Science

Philosophical assumptions are unavoidable in everyday methodological choices at all phases of the design and execution of research. Although scholars can hold similar theoretical beliefs for very different epistemological reasons, once they begin to test, adapt, or change their beliefs, their differing philosophical assumptions often come to the fore. Thus, despite the complexity of the philosophy of science, we address in this chapter the philosophical underpinnings of case study methods.

Practicing social scientists need not continuously concern themselves with the intricacies of the latest “best practices” among philosophers of science—nor can the best practices be established with total confidence or beyond contention. Yet practicing social scientists can be too disengaged from developments in the philosophy of science. Many scholars in the field of international relations, for example, appear to have become too removed from these developments. This has resulted in a gap between our field’s ontological assumptions, or its assumptions about the ultimately unobservable entities that generate the observable social world, and its epistemology, or its ideas about how to develop and model knowledge of how the world works.246 Specifically, much of the discourse in the study of international relations is structured among “schools of thought”—neorealism, neoliberalism, and constructivism—that some scholars have consciously modeled after Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigms” or Imre Lakatos’ “research programs.”247 This parsing of our field into contending “isms” does not fit very well with the emphasis we and many other scholars have placed on causal explanation via causal mechanisms, which often cut across these schools of thought.248 Nor does it address the importance of what Robert Merton termed “middle-range theory.”249 The focus on large schools of thought has usefully clarified our theories and allowed scholars to talk to (rather than past) one another, and it has simplified the task of teaching the field to our students. But to the extent that it has diverted attention from empirical puzzle-solving and problem-driven research, the field has suffered. Thus, introducing new ways of thinking about causal explanation can open up what has become a rather stylized debate among contending schools of thought and create space for research that is driven by local puzzles and recurrent policy-relevant problems as well as grand “isms.”

In this chapter on the philosophy of science, the issues that we focus on bear directly on the pragmatic methodological choices facing social science researchers using qualitative methods. We first address the differences contemporary scholars have identified between the social and physical sciences. Next, we look at the problem of theoretical explanation and critique the “deductive-nomological” model of explanation, which involves explanation