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Realism
About: Realism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10799 publications have been published within this topic receiving 175785 citations.
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43 citations
TL;DR: The editors of the Review of International Studies have posed a timely challenge to what they term American realism as mentioned in this paper, arguing that realism has lost its relevance to current international policy and that realism does a poor job of explaining the behaviour of the world's major powers.
Abstract: The editors of the Review of International Studies have posed a timely challenge to what they term American realism. In broad terms, their editorial makes two points: first, realism has lost its relevance to current international policy; and second, realism does a poor job of explaining the behaviour of the world's major powers. In this brief essay I argue that both of these points are greatly overstated, if not simply wrong. At the same time, I accept that realism provides less leverage in addressing the full spectrum of issues facing the major powers in the post-Soviet and now the post-9/11 world than it did during the Cold War. However, this is neither surprising nor a serious problem, because scholars who use a realist lens to understand international politics can, and have, without inconsistency or contradiction also employed other theories to understand issues that fall outside realism's central focus.
43 citations
TL;DR: The realist in us wants to hold to a certain sort of very general view about our place in the world, a view that, as I have put it elsewhere, mixes modesty with presumption as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: It is, as is familiar, difficult to be precise about what is involved in realism. The realist in us wants to hold to a certain sort of very general view about our place in the world, a view that, as I have put it elsewhere, mixes modesty with presumption.' On the one hand, it is supposed, modestly, that how matters stand in the world, what opinions about it are true, is settled independently of whatever germane beliefs are held by actual people.2 On the other, we presume to think that we are capable of amving at the right concepts with which to capture at least a substantial part of the truth, and that our cognitive capacities can and do very often put us in position to know the truth, or at least to believe it with ample justification. The unique attraction of realism is the nice balance of feasibility and dignity that it offers to our quest for knowledge. Greater modesty would mean doubts about the capacity of our cognitive procedures to determine what is true-or even about our capacity to conceptualize the truth-and, so, would be a slide in the direction of skepticism. Greater presumption would mean calling into question, one way or another, the autonomy of truth, and, so, would be a slide in the direction of idealism. To the extent that we are serious about the pursuit of truth, we are unlikely to be attracted by either of these tendencies. We want the mountain to be climbable, but we also want it to be a real mountain, not some sort of reification of aspects of ourselves. It is a remarkable phenomenon that an issue of this degree of abstractness, whose proper formulation is unclear to the point where it is prima facie hazy what shape a relevant debate about it might assume, can so command intellectual curiosity. The conviction that a real issue is being presented is the conviction that metaphysics, in the most traditional sense, is possible: that there are genuine questions about the objectivity of human intellectual endeavor, and about the constitution of reality, which it falls to the traditional philosophical methods of critical reflection
43 citations
TL;DR: Both Gideon Rose's neoclassical realism and Andrew Moravcsik's liberalism attempt to solve the problem of how to incorporate domestic factors into international relations theory as mentioned in this paper, and they do so in very...
Abstract: Both Gideon Rose's neoclassical realism and Andrew Moravcsik's liberalism attempt to solve the problem of how to incorporate domestic factors into international relations theory. They do so in very...
43 citations
TL;DR: This paper argues that scientific realism can happily co-exist with models qua abstracta and that fictionalism towards scientific theories inevitable is inevitable.
Abstract: A natural way to think of models is as abstract entities. If theories employ models to represent the world, theories traffic in abstract entities much more widely than is often assumed. This kind of thought seems to create a problem for a scientific realist approach to theories. Scientific realists claim theories should be understood literally. Do they then imply (and are they committed to) the reality of abstract entities? Or are theories simply—and incurably—false (if there are no abstract entities)? Or has the very idea of literal understanding to be abandoned? Is then fictionalism towards scientific theories inevitable? This paper argues that scientific realism can happily co-exist with models qua abstracta.
43 citations