·
A former tenured professor of government at the College of William and Mary, David Dessler has an extensive research background in the international relations sphere. Among David Dessler’s published articles is “Constructivism within a positivist social science,” which appeared in the Review of International Studies in January 1999.
In the article, Dessler delves into positivism as an approach to social inquiry that is rooted in a realist epistemology. In particular, positivism places constraints on the notion of explanation as an endeavor that seeks to establish that a phenomenon must be explained as something “expected in the circumstances where it occurred.” This ties in with scientific explanation, which provides a systemic method of arriving at the causes of phenomena.
Positivism is distinct from other types of empirical realist social science methodology, such as the “interpretivist” approach. The latter defines explanation not in terms of expectability but of intelligibility, with the primary goal being to make the “strange” familiar.
An example is an interpretivist placing 18th century English institutional change under the existing concept of “social revolution.” To positivists, such a categorization would not meet the requirements of explanatory relevance because it does not demonstrate how such a phenomenon came to be expected.
