SIS Book Launch: Facts and Explanations in International Studies and Beyond

The politicizing of facts and factual claims has led some to abandon all talk of a meaningful distinction between a fact and a strongly held political commitment. This book argues that what we need, instead, are better accounts of facts and their relationship to explanation—ones that take seriously the dependence of facts on communities of practice and on consensus procedures of measurement, but do not abandon the epistemic distinctiveness of facts.

Bringing clarity and order to the discussion by disclosing both key commonalities and significant differences between the ways we talk about facts and explanations, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson argues that although intrinsically more contestable than facts, social-scientific explanations can nonetheless be related to them in ways that allow researchers to evaluate explanations based on whether and to what extent they accord with the relevant facts in each situation. Ardently defending a pragmatist account of knowledge that has no patience with either “alternative facts” or “anything goes” relativism, the author develops a set of concepts that enables tricky philosophical problems to be dissolved. After examining facts, causal explanations, and interpretive explanations, the book culminates in an account of the priority of interpretation in the evaluation of any explanation—and any seemingly factual claim.

Defining the terms of the debate and grounding better conversations about the issues, this book will appeal to all scholars interested in the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences, international studies, international relations, security studies, and anyone teaching or studying research methods.

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Laura Field is a writer and political theorist in Washington, DC. She is a Scholar in Residence at American University, Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center, and an Associate of the Illiberalism Studies Institute at The George Washington University. A scholar of Rousseau and Nietzsche, she has recently done extensive work on the right-wing (“New Right”) intellectuals who rose to prominence under the Trump administration, and is currently finishing up a book on the subject for Princeton University Press.

Sebastian Schmidt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science whose research interests include the historical origins and sociological foundations of security strategies, questions of international order, the modalities of American influence in the world, international monetary relations, and sovereignty. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, West European Politics, Journal of Global Security Studies, and International Studies Review. His current and future work is focused on the elaboration of pragmatist and allied theoretical perspectives on international politics, with a particular emphasis on monetary relations and postwar American security practices. His first book is Armed Guests: Territorial Sovereignty and Foreign Military Basing (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Douaa Sheet is a political anthropologist who works at the intersection of human rights and transitional justice, the temporality of justice models, Islam, and new social media in the Middle East and North Africa. Her first book project, The Politics of Dignity and the Tunisian Truth Commission, is an ethnographic study of the Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission (2014-2018) that examines its mission to secure dignity, reparation, and reconciliation for a “humiliated society.” Her research has been funded by prestigious institutions including the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Human Rights and Cultural Anthropology.

David Waldner teaches Comparative Politics at the University of Virginia. He is the author of State Building & Late Development, Rethinking the Resource Curse, and the forthcoming Qualitative Causal Inference & Explanation. His current book project is Reconstruction in Comparative Perspective. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

American University, School of International Service, Founders Room, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, United States