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Original Papers
Should constructivist research engage empirical debates with other approaches, especially from non-constructivist social science? A recent wave of calls for 'eclectic', 'post-paradigmatic', and 'pluralistic' scholarship seems to encourage engagement, including across the epistemological divides many constructivists have long perceived between 'explanation' and 'understanding', 'constitutive' and 'causal' claims, or 'foundationalist' versus 'anti-foundationalist' commitments (such as Jackson 2011; Sil and Katzenstein 2010; Checkel 2013; Jackson and Nexon 2013; Dunne, Hansen and Wight 2013; Guzzini 2013; Reus-Smit 2013). On closer inspection, however, the engagement portrayed in the 'eclectic turn' has a curious quality. This literature largely overlooks competition between approaches (whether constructivist versus non-constructivist or otherwise). Instead, it emphasizes that they answer different parts of our questions - with the implication, seemingly, that the approaches mainly exist alongside each other rather than competing. Overall, as currently phrased, the eclectic turn ironically strengthens a sense that theoretical approaches occupy distinct spaces. Especially for the theorists who already had the most reasons to see themselves in separate space - constructivists - debate with alternatives seems less necessary than ever.
This article offers a sympathetic corrective to the eclectic turn, as well as to common accounts of these older epistemological divides. Its core argument applies to all approaches, constructivist or non-constructivist: before eclectic combinations, empirical work necessarily begins with the assertion of contrasting accounts about the world. Only a naïve positivist imagines that meaningful scholarship tests solitary hypotheses against reality. Today's scholars vary in how far they move from naïve positivism to more socially based epistemologies, with constructivists moving furthest in these directions - and the further we move, the more we should see the shape and significance of our worldly accounts as defined from the outset by contrasts to other interpretations of the same terrain. At a postmodern extreme, all of the meaning of scholarly claims derives from positioning vis-à-vis other accounts. Thus all scholars should be concerned with contrasting their accounts directly to others - especially constructivists.
After making this broad point, the article unpacks how it has been obscured by four epistemological arguments that limit competing alternatives, each championed by different strands of constructivism.1The divide between 'constitutive' and 'causal' claims is narrowest and most...