Research Methods in International Relations Week 4 12/03/2013 Why do we need theory, we had two reasons for them; one

e is pragmatic and the other is ontological. We are receiving an ontological reason, knowledge from lectures, textbooks. Examining knowledge is one in fact elevates someone who has been trained international relations a rank above a level of a journalist. Journalists are on purpose because there is an almost hidden tension between those who are gonna shaped international relations even IR academics and journalists. Journalists see knowledge and academics receive a kind of training what you are received should see not only the knowledge but also the matrix behind knowledge. Knowledge in any form inevitably has behind it and element of theory. Today, our discussion is about historical knowledge. Historical knowledge is something that we come across in history books. By books we mean at least history books at schools. There is an account of events that took place in the past and those accounts are sometimes refer to historical narratives. It is an historical account of what took place in a specific time in the past. Historical narrative often assumed to be the construction of past, based on evidence. Evidence is formed by cronicals of time, testimonies of individuals or objects of the past. Historical narrative is almost like a mirror of the image of reality. The great historian Braudel wrote a book called Mediterranean. Published firstly in 1949. It is not about battles, wars, kings, warmen; it is about ordinary people. How do people led their knifes, about geography, river, space. In the prefix of this book the guy makes very interesting statement. He said in the prefix that historical narrative is nothing really but a philosophy of history. This is puzzling because normally you wouldnt put those words together. Because history is supposed to be about facts. In this sense, if you have an account of what took place in history, you are going to be descriptive. You are going to have a discription. Because you are going to be descriptive, you are supposed to be objective.
Page | 1

When we come to philosophy we have never heard of anyone demanding objectivity. Because philosophy means ideas. These ideas are perhaps in the direction of speculation. There must be difference between speculation and discription. They should be really subjective if they are speculative. Consider a newspaper that is all about facts and publish to communicate public to the mission. Newspapers prints what happened in the past 24 hours or even earlier. There is no passage of time. There is a dilemma that no matter how large the newspaper is the size is limited, you cant put everything in it. You have to be selective. To include or exclude you have to ask some questions, what is relevant, what is news worthy. Compare to other newspapers there are different answers in terms of editors perspective. This is subjective what you include and exclude. After this, the problem is not over yet. The news coming from agencies has been filtered on the basis of some questions these are philosophical, speculative questions. And then, they have to decide on emphasis, where exactly you are going to use those individual news items. There is a lot of philosophy behind it. Imagine 2 historians, they are studying on French revolution. They would have to decide what to include and what to exclude. For this, they would have to rely on some philosophy. Lets assume these historians have the same set of facts although they are working seperately. For them, some facts are more important and some are minor. But it is not possible to produce same narratives. All the ideas are changing. Therefore, we use philosophy. Dont treat this world as the only world of facts. There is behind this speculations. There is something subjective about it. In televised football match we dont have a mediator. We confronted with the action. It looks like pure fact. There is nothing between you and the action. You need to decide in stadium where you should put cameras and in what perspective. Whatever it is either the task of historian, whether the newspaper editor or broadcasting football match you fing behind what has been

Page | 2

communicated, behind the knowledge, behind the image, you have something reducable. Braudels approach is important for one of the fundamental themes of philosophy of social science. This theme is the distinction between facts and values. History is supposed to be about facts. Facts are themes as they are. Things as they are, self contained. How about values? We just talk about ideas, we are transforming the ideas to values. Value also mean material worth in every day language. In turkish it refers to kymet. Value may also refer to ideas, opinions, feelings, conventions. These are ideas(qualities) which we project on things. The distinction between them is very difficult to distinguish. If we said the piece of cholk is very useful it is value. If we say it is a cholk it is fact. Something that is contingent means something relies on something else. Something that is absolute is autonomous. It is self contained, it is by itself. It doesnt rely on something. Imagine a letter opener, a sharp metalic object. It is sharp and metalic is fact. It is useful is value. If we say this is a letter opener( sharp metalic object) it changes from culture to culture or place to place. It may use for another purpose. It depends on context. In this context, you can accustom to it. In another context, it becomes a contingency. Definitions are culture specific and definitions can change. When we refer to facts that is something that it is in itself, doesnt rely on anything, fully autonomous. If we say weight it is value, because there is a gravity there and it is process of mass. They are subject to gravity. What it means that at first it seems under putting guidelines like being absolute, contingent, self contained, relying on something else but other guidance it may be perhaps distinguish between fact and value. But when we prove further it is not that easy. Behind a knowledge we always have a theory. How exactly we distinguish between knowledge and belief? Belief is an important notion because we really associate belief to value. When we base ourselves to facts, we classify our awaraness on knowledge. Because it is fact. For belief, we often refer to values. There were 2 ancient Greece traditions. One is Socratic tradition. There is also Sophist school. Sophists were philosophers,
Page | 3

teachers, but they were conducting the constant battle of ideas with the Socratic people. These people were like Plato, Aristotle and so on as the source of western civilization. Socratics were excluded women in the community. Because in their viewpoint women were inferior. Sophists were defending womens rights, rights of slaves, rights of barbarians. Plato and Aristotle thought that the ideas are not bound by time and space. We need to find and chase these ideas and we need to organize around all these ideas. Human person is the measure of what is right and what is wrong. Platos cave and shadow theory, what we see around us they are all shadows, we dont see them because we live in a cave. What is real is formed by the outside ideas. We always see shadows and we are forgetting about real life. All these things according to sophists they are human conventions. People decide what is just and what is not. These guys were heretics. Sophists said there is no such thing as a knowledge. Knowledge is belief plus good reasons for believing. If you have a good reasons for believing then you have a knowledge. This was a scandal for Plato. Plato said that knowledge is transcendental, universal, belief is subjected to change. It is going to be same in all ages, all places. This is what trabscendental is. Knowledge is transcendental, belief is local. According to Enlightenment philosophers like Immanuel Kant there is knowledge and there is belief. What is more, belief is pseudo knowledge. It is primitive knowledge. It is something pretends to be knowledge. Pseudo that is not knowledge but pretend to be knowledge. According to the Sophist view, knowledge doesnt exist. This view reduces knowledge to belief, there is only one category. When we come to the 18.cc Europe, there is a tradition that found its way from Ancient Greece from Socratic tradition. n the Enlight enment belief doesnt exist. There is knowledge. We have belief, because we have primitive knowledge. As soon as we have right knowledge we need discard. In the first definition there is no knowledge, in the second Enlightenment definition or the modernist definiton, there is no belief, there is knowledge.
Page | 4

We have list of three views. The first is sophist view. If you put doomsday and some burning serial to a sophist and ask a sophist which is more convincing, he would ask burning serial. Because he says it is more convincing belief. The second view is that belief is local and knowledge is universal, transcendental. Belief is culture specific, local. According to third view, they may be apples and oranges. Belief and knowledge are not necessarily connected. They may occupy different positions in human practice. They dont have anything in common. They are different human needs. Consider a distinction between folk dances and physical education(PE). Folk dances have been here for a very long time. PE is something new. People engaging in folk dances for fun, they have fun, solidarity. In folk dances there are figures and they are rigid, you dont change them. In PE there are figures but they have to change. You are doing it for a purpose and you can improve the practice time to time. You can eliminate something and revise it. It is not convincing that folk dances are primitive forms of physical education. They relate to different needs of human beings. This is the third belief. Belief and knowledge are not competitors. Another important topic is truth. Truth in turkish is doruluk, hakikat. In the philosophy of social sciences there are 3 views for truth. The first view is called the correspondance view of truth. The assumption is that somebody makes a statement and this statement is about branch of facts and we are able to observe or access to these facts and put them together. If we say there is a bottle of water on the desk this is a statement, to find out whether it is true you simply look at the desk and see whether there is a bottle of water. If there is a correspondance between the statement and what the statement is about then it is true. But it is very limited, it is not much used when you are dealing with high levels of truth testing. We dont see facts, we are only assuming so, correspondance theory is very basic concept of truth, it is very limited. The second theory is the coherence theory of truth. According to this, a theory, a unit of knowledge is true if it forms a coherence part or already established system of truths. We
Page | 5

already have an established system of truth and there is a new statement, a new theory. We are testing this whether this one is true. If this new theory, new statement fits in, forms a coherent part what is already there on which we have already agreed then it is true. Because of coherence, you cant measure an accurate picture of facts because we dont have access to the facts but we can see whether it is coherent. A good example of it from daily life is theory of gravity. If you let it go, it will move. This object is going to have a downward road. We dont have the access to all the facts about gravity, we just assume this is the case. The third view is the pragmatic theory of truth. According to this view, a statement, a unit of theory, a knowledge something claimed to be a true is true if it produces a results, if it will works. It is pragmatic because one of the catch phrases while we define pragmatism is nothing succeeds like success. There is a theory and there seems to be working, producing results. This was the case with Newtonian case of physics. Newton have idea about the mechanics of universe. For hundreds of years it works, it produces results. According to some, this theory still being used in this dnage in navigation. Even though we know that the theory was completely false. It was wrong but it worked, it produces results. From a pragmatic view point it was true. According to Newton, it would be the same passage of time on the moon, on the sun, on the other stars, planets. Nowadays, we know that beyond the dispute, time is local, time is not really universal, time depends very much on your movement on space. According to Newton, we have 3 dimensions: breadth, height, length. But there was no mension of time. Space time, space time contuniuing is a fourth dimension. Space and time are intervolving as the fourth dimension. I can rotate the time and change the space.

J
Page | 6

u D n eto

i n i j kag