Must International Studies Be a Science?

International Studies

Grammatically speaking, ² it is not possible to answer the question: ‘Must international studies be a science?’ without some notion of what we mean by ‘international studies’. This is a treacherous domain, since there are multiple incompatible understandings of the field/discipline floating around, even using different names for the endeavour. Depending on which authority one consults, ‘we’ are a group of scholars held together by our ‘great debates’, ³ by our concern with the implications of inter-state anarchy, ⁴ by our implication in a (neo)colonial project of establishing European hegemony, ⁵ by a set of so-called ‘paradigms’ which almost no one claims to adhere to any longer ⁶ even though we keep organising our introductory textbooks and courses according to them, ⁷ etc. There is no consensus on whether ‘international political economy’ is part of some larger whole or an autonomous domain, ⁸ on whether the discipline/field even exists outside of ‘the West’, ⁹ or whether the whole project, whatever ‘it’ is, has any life left in it. ¹⁰

I do not propose to resolve this controversy here. Instead, I will circumvent it by simply elucidating what I mean by ‘international studies’ so that my answer to my initial question becomes clearer. I am using a deliberately broad term both because it is no part of my intent to ex ante exclude work quite different from my own from participation in this scholarly endeavour, and because I myself have done work on topics—the philosophy of science, popular culture—that at least some might consider questionable fits with the study of international affairs or world politics or whatever term one prefers. ¹¹ In the absence of a strong consensus about what the field/discipline might contain or what it should even be called, I would suggest that we err on the side of maximal inclusivity, which is why I choose the expansive term ‘studies’ instead of a substantive noun that declares in advance what the subject-matter consists of: politics, relations, or similar notions.

But what of this word ‘international’? The way I understand it, the term ‘international’ picks out those aspects of anything that involves cross-boundary encounters with difference. The international aspect of a military manoeuver or a financial transaction does not simply begin at the moment that a formal territorial border is crossed, but as soon as the existence of some other—the alien, the foreigner, the stranger—is taken into account in the operation. ¹² Representations of otherness, which shape and structure what we come to regard as legitimate or acceptable or appropriate action towards or in reaction to those others, are the common thread connecting all of our myriad substantive concerns, and the ‘return’ of culture and identity to the scholarly agenda is better thought of as a clarification of what we were all already interested in in the first place. ¹³ Collective action problems and tragedies of the commons, the challenges of governance and ‘new wars’, colonialism and neocolonialism, the movements of global capital and the financialisation of everyday social life, even the hoary old ‘traditional IR’ topics like interstate balancing and interstate trade: all of these, and more besides, feature at some level a concern with the maintenance and subversion of boundaries between self and other(s), and with transactions within and across those boundaries. ¹⁴

But doesn’t the word ‘international’ bind us to the sadly misnamed ‘international system’ of sovereign territorial states? ¹⁵ Some have been perfectly happy to be tied to the state, even going so far as to give the state ‘a body’ so that it could function as a genuine ontological primitive in an international theory. ¹⁶ Such an ontology would also cash out boundaries as borders, specifically the territorial borders between states, and draw the line around ‘international’ phenomena as denoting only those that in some way stretch across such borders. But I do not think that this is at all necessary, because ‘international’ the way I am using the term does not pick out a discrete realm or region of social life, and I do not think that we need a definition of ‘the international’ in order to describe our common scholarly endeavour. ¹⁷ Instead, it is sufficient to note that when we talk about the ‘international’ aspect of anything whatsoever, we are in some sense calling attention to issue of cross-boundary encounters with difference, and how those play out and are managed or negotiated in practice. ¹⁸

I would therefore locate the ‘international’ in ‘international studies’ not in the object of study, but in the way that we approach the object of study—which means that virtually everything has an ‘international’ aspect, potentially, depending on how we look at it. ¹⁹ The word ‘international’ also propels our thinking beyond the local, and suggests that it is always in order to embed whatever local concerns we have in a broader global context; this is an especially useful reminder, given the perpetual temptations of parochialism in our thinking. ²⁰ So this is inter-state interactions plus, and there is room in this broad notion of international studies for a plethora of substantive topics and objects of analysis, just as there is in other scholarly fields. After all, ‘physics’ does not name an object of study, but a way of studying objects; why should ‘international’ be any different?

A Science

So: must the study of cross-boundary encounters with difference be a science?

No.

By ‘science’ here I do not simply mean neopositivism, with its emphasis on falsifiable hypotheses and its non-negotiable epistemic goal of generating nomothetic statements that are valid across multiple cases. I have already made the argument elsewhere that ‘science’ is a pluralist endeavour, encompassing at least four distinct ways of being-scientific: neopositivism, critical realism, analyticism, and reflexivity. ²¹ These methodologies can be organised according to two philosophical-ontological wagers about the mind-world hook-up: mind-world dualism vs. mind-world monism, and the phenomenalist limitation of knowledge to experience vs. the transfactual notion that knowledge can transcend all possible experience:

OPEN IN VIEWER

	phenomenal	transfactual
dualism	neopositivism	critical realism
monism	analyticism	reflexivity

These diverse methodologies have different approaches to causation, to case comparison, and to explanation in general; those differences, in turn, mean that different scientific methodologies generate different kinds of valid claims with different epistemic statuses, and should not be regarded as poor approximations to or deficient forms of one another. While neopositivists look for cross-case covariation as the truest mark of causation, critical realists look for dispositional causal powers, analyticists apply ideal-typical models to disclose the specific features of individual cases, and reflexive scholars ground their claims in their own social locations. There is no reason why this plurality has to lead to relativism, but neither should it be misunderstood as creating a simple, homogenous account of the world; translation challenges persist, and the result of a pluralist science is a variety of warranted knowledge-claims. ²²

But for all of this internal diversity, there are important commonalities among these varieties of scientific methodology that serve to distinguish them, as a group, from other forms of knowing. Following Max Weber, we might characterise all four of these scientific methodologies as aiming at a ‘thoughtful ordering of empirical actuality’, ²³ or, to put it another way, as participating in a form of knowing that emphasises systematic claims, public criticism intended to improve those claims, and a specific kind of ‘worldliness’ that excludes references to divine commands and magical forces. This is not to say that a claim has to achieve some specific level of systematicity, publicity, and/or worldliness in order to be regarded as ‘scientific’; the commonality I am highlighting here is not a candidate for a demarcation criterion that would allow us to distinguish science from non-science in any kind of definitive fashion. ²⁴ Instead, I am suggesting that in the space marked out by these methodologies, questions about a claim’s systematicity, its susceptibility to public criticism, and its worldliness are in some sense appropriate questions to ask. In effect, to regard ourselves as being engaged in scientific inquiry is to invite these questions, and to submit our claims to evaluation in terms of these criteria.

The kind of knowledge that is supposed to be produced by efforts to be as systematic, public, and worldly as one can be is knowledge of a particular kind: factual, propositional knowledge, or what we might call ‘knowing-that’. ²⁵ This is the kind of knowing that Wittgenstein had in mind when he suggested, in the opening sections of the Tractatus, that the world ‘is all that is the case…the totality of facts, not of things’. ²⁶ It is what Aristotle called epistemic knowing: ‘universal, invariable, context-independent’ and ‘based on general analytical rationality’. ²⁷ It prizes relative impersonality in connecting claims to their warrants, in that the validity of a claim is not subject to idiosyncratic impressions but is instead articulated in a way that is understood as generally established. ²⁸ In Weber’s formulation, the goal of this kind of knowing is to produce a set of factual claims that even someone who did not share our values would find compelling. ²⁹

Here again it is important to note that this is not some kind of absolute standard that these methodologies necessarily meet. It is unclear to me that we ever have perfectly impersonal knowledge, or that any claim whatsoever achieves anything like universal generality. But this is not the point. Instead, the point is that epistemic claims advanced in the methodological modes of neopositivism, critical realism, analyticism, and even reflexivity are accompanied by standards of validity that purport to be something other than an arbitrary whim binding only on the speaker. The logical condition of possibility for Sandra Harding’s suggestion that the accumulated body of what we call ‘scientific knowledge’ is thoroughly marked by cultural particularity and a colonial past, and her call for a ‘strong objectivity’ that brings previously marginalised perspectives back into the conversation, is precisely the notion that there is something illegitimate and untenable about this unacknowledged partiality. ³⁰ And the claim that some account of things is Eurocentric or androcentric is no more and no less reliant on similar definitions and procedures shared by a community of speaker and audience than is the claim that dyadic democracy and war frequency are inversely correlated—and as such, the very form of the claim opens the possibility of questioning just how impersonally, epistemically valid it is. ‘Epistemically valid for me/for us’ does not make any sense, because the very idea of epistemic knowing implies validity independent of any conceptual scheme, even if the vocabulary within which the claim is made is itself local and contingent. ³¹

An example might help. To treat a claim about US foreign policy—for instance, that it is simply taking the course that we would expect from a hegemonic or imperial power—as an epistemic knowledge-claim is to suggest that the claim is doing something other than expressing a perspective on US foreign policy, something other than providing a working practical assumption on which to base effective policy, and something other than judging the US and its actions on the global stage. If we take the claim to be an epistemic one, then it means something like: given particular definitions of notions like ‘hegemonic’ and ‘imperial,’ definitions that among other things specify the kinds of things that a hegemonic or imperial power ordinarily does, US foreign policy is properly described and/or explained by the US’s position in the global system. Not: ‘we regard US foreign policy as hegemonic or imperial foreign policy’, unless that were to be followed with a set of grounds or reasons for accepting the claim as valid and thus expanding the ‘we’ to include everyone sharing those definitions. Impersonal validity is built into an epistemic knowledge-claim.

Like most categorical distinctions, however, the impersonality of an epistemic knowledge-claim is both indexical and relative: the impersonal standards of validity for an epistemic knowledge-claim generally only appear as such when contrasted to other kinds of knowledge-claims. ³² Much depends on the intention with which a knowledge-claim is advanced, which is to say, on the future state of affairs that the advancing of the knowledge-claim is supposed to bring about. ³³ Fortunately, as Elizabeth Anscombe reminds us, an intention is ‘not so private and interior a thing’ that an individual actor or claimant ‘has absolute authority in saying what it is’; intentions are not a matter of a ‘private language’, but are instead publicly discernable and at least generally determinable from context. ³⁴ A claim that US foreign policy is ‘imperial’ appearing in a peer-reviewed social-scientific journal is presumably intended as an epistemic claim, but the same words appearing in a training manual or a popular song or a sermon likely have quite different intentions. And the epistemic validity of the claim—whether the claim was appropriately produced through the application of systematic, public, worldly methodological procedures—has basically no bearing on how well the claim does at fulfilling those different intentions.

Flavours of Knowing—For Example, Concerning Whisky

To illustrate the diversity of intentions to which a knowledge-claim might contribute, I want to take up an example that is at first glance ³⁵ somewhat removed from the typical subject-matter of international studies: whisky, and in particular, Scotch whisky. According to the 2009 Scotch Whisky Regulations, this has a fairly precise definition: Scotch whisky, whether single malt (‘produced from only water and malted barley at a single distillery by batch distillation in pot stills’), single grain (includes ‘whole grains of other malted or unmalted cereals’), or one of the three types of blends (blended malt, blended grain, and ‘blended Scotch’ which combines malt whisky and grain whisky), has to be distilled and matured in Scotland, and from 2012, single malt Scotch whisky has had to be bottled in Scotland too. ³⁶ These regulations serve to distinguish Scotch whisky from a variety of similar alcoholic beverages produced through distillation: Canadian whisky and Irish whiskey, ³⁷ bourbon and rye produced mainly in the United States, and a variety of other brandies, vodkas, and cognacs.

In fact, one might easily regard Scotch whisky as arising from the intersection of a pair of global processes of diffusion and differentiation. Distillation—the technique of heating a substance enough that it turns into vapour, and then cooling that vapour back down to a liquid form, in order to isolate the ‘spirit essence’ of that substance—is an incredibly complicated practice, the historical origins of which are obscure but undeniably ancient. Maybe invented by the Chinese, maybe by the Egyptians, but certainly by the time of the Roman Emperor Diocletian (around 285-305 CE) we have evidence of alchemists in Alexandria using the technique to investigate the constituent components of the physical world, and to manufacture oils and cosmetics. ³⁸ The technique then spread along trade routes, and was adapted to the production of a variety of drinkable beverages produced from a wide assortment of fermented liquids: fruit saps and juices, mashes of grain and potatoes, molasses, honey, even milk from horses and camels. The technique was probably brought to Scotland by Irish monks sometime before the 15^th century—certainly before 1494, when we find the first officially recorded reference to whisky distillation in the Scottish Exchequer Rolls. ³⁹

In the vocabulary of contemporary chemistry, distillation works because the boiling point of ethanol is lower than the boiling point of water. At sea level, ethanol boils at 173°F, water at 212°F. So heating an admixture of ethanol and water and various congeners—precisely the kind of mixture one produces by fermenting any kind of sugary or starchy substance—can cause the ethanol to vaporise before the water, carrying with it some of the trace molecules that generate the distinctive tastes of the resulting spirit. Cool that vapour back down into a liquid form—and in the case of Scotch whisky, re-distill it, before aging it in wood casks in Scotland for a minimum of three years—and you have a flavourful beverage with a very high alcohol content. In a way, a distillery is ‘a factory, an industrial processing plant for fermenting grain and distilling the result into whisky’, but that does not mean that the people working at the distillery or even the people who designed and built it ‘have to understand molecular biology, yeast enzyme kinematics, metallurgy, or the organic chemistry of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons’. ⁴⁰ The ‘scientific’ understanding of fermentation and distillation and aging comes after the technical practice, both historically and conceptually; people had been making whisky for centuries before the contemporary physical sciences got involved, and there are still aspects of the process (notably, the issue of just what happens to twice-distilled spirit while it sits in a wooden cask for many years) that elude ‘scientific’ explanation.

The same pattern is apparent in the organisation of the broader socio-political environment within which whisky was and is produced. Much as was the case in production of different varieties of wine, the creation of the product that we now know as Scotch whisky was profoundly shaped and influenced by the political and economic climate, including ties between exporters and importers, the relations between smaller and larger producers, and their ties to state authorities. ⁴¹ A significant difference between whisky and wine was the tax regime imposed on these different varieties of alcoholic beverage. During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the whisky tax regime was driven in important ways by the British government’s war and colonial expenses, and the consequent demand for increased revenue. ⁴² Before the 1822 Scotland Act and the 1823 Excise Act, financial incentives propelled most Scottish distillers in the direction of illegal production and local smuggling. But after those regulatory changes, which were themselves driven by a campaign to curb smuggling and to try to bring the Highland areas of Scotland more firmly under the control of the central British government, becoming a certified legal distillery made more sense. Dozens of producers became registered, legitimate entities, and began to export their product to England and beyond. ⁴³

The invention of the continuous-production Coffey still in 1830, and its approval for licensed whisky production in 1832, further expanded opportunities for increased production. A Coffey still can produce spirit in greater quantities than that which is possible when using the pot stills that illicit producers had used for centuries before and continued to use after their businesses became legal—and it can produce spirit from grains other than malted barley. ⁴⁴ As a result, a series of large firms in the Lowlands areas of Scotland built massive plants designed to produce neutral grain alcohol destined to be blended with smaller amounts of malt whisky to create ‘a drink with an altogether lighter character’ and thus take advantage of ‘great opportunities to expand sales beyond the traditional Scotch whisky markets’. ⁴⁵ The blending of whiskies was encouraged by a legal change in 1853 that allowed merchants to carry out the ‘vatting’ of whiskies from different distilleries and of different ages ‘under bond’, and thus avoid having to pay taxes on stock that was still being aged. ⁴⁶ But smaller and larger producers continued to clash, each arguing that their preferred method of production was the real, authentic ‘Scotch whisky’, until a Royal Commission in 1908–09 rejected the argument that pot still distillation was essential to the product, and decided in favour of the larger producers’ more expansive definition of ‘whisky’. ⁴⁷ This in turn set the stage for the dominance of the global whisky market by blended Scotch, which in 2012 accounted for 71% of Scotch whisky exports by volume, and 76% by revenue. ⁴⁸

So in one sense we know what led to whisky as we know it today: a combination of political and economic arrangements and forces shaped the industry and its product. But this knowledge—epistemic knowing, knowing about the production of whisky—is as little a substitute for the actual practice of creating whisky as is knowledge of the chemistry of distillation. Just as chemistry came after the practice of distilling, and systematised what had already been worked out in practice, our social-scientific knowledge of what produced whisky came after the practice of numerous entrepreneurs, brokers, and politicians in successfully establishing the legal regimes and economic arrangements that made whisky production viable. Actually accomplishing all of this takes a kind of knowledge that is more akin to that of the master distiller than it is to that of the scientific chemist: not epistemic knowing, but technical, practical knowing that helps bring about a desired end. John Dewey called this ‘intelligently conducted doing’, and suggested that the import of such knowledge is that it represents ‘intelligently thought-out possibilities of the existent world which may be used as methods for making over and improving it’. ⁴⁹ To advance a claim intended to expand such knowledge is to contribute to the practical training of the listener: the apprentice distiller, the novice politician, and so on.

So we have at least two kinds of knowledge of or related to whisky: epistemic knowledge that gives us facts about whisky, and practical or technical knowledge that actually gives us whisky. Epistemic knowledge is knowing-that: understanding the impact of excise regulations on whisky production, or explaining how distillation works. Technical knowledge, on the other hand, is skilled ‘know-how’: given some water, some barley, and a pot still, and perhaps some peat to use when malting the barley, how to actually produce distilled spirit suitable for maturation. Alternatively, how to get a piece of legislation through Parliament, or how to market a flavourful Scotch whisky to drinkers more used to white or clear spirits with more neutral tastes. ⁵⁰ The technical know-how associated with legislating or marketing, involving the assembling of plausible and compelling reasons for a course of action, is what William Riker referred to as ‘heresthetic’, but most scholars would simply refer to as ‘rhetoric’, and in most accounts (including Riker’s) it defines the limit of purely rational, rule-governed action: there is precisely no way to determine what kinds of political arguments will work in practice except by making them and observing the results. ⁵¹ Here again, it is skilled know-how, not epistemic knowing-that, that leads to effective practice. ⁵²

But these two forms of knowing do not exhaust the ways in which we use the term ‘know’ when speaking of whisky. Indeed, I would wager that the most common use of a phrase like ‘knowing whisky’ comes in the context of referring to someone who appears conversant with different varieties of whisky, can distinguish between them, is the person you want to go to the whisky shop or bar with because she or he selects things to buy that taste good, etc. This is certainly not epistemic knowing, because ‘nobody understands, exactly, why booze tastes the way it does, and why people like it’. ⁵³ Attempts at relating the chemical composition of whisky to the various terms that are typically used to describe how that whisky smells or tastes have proven to be failures, and attempts by the industry as a whole and by particular organisations within it (such as the Scotch Malt Whisky Society) to generate a common vocabulary have only been partially successful. So the best we have are the ‘tasting notes’ that accompany bottles of whisky, such as this example from a single-cask Laphroaig:

Immediately clean and fresh—we were transported to a Turkish barber’s shop, then a swanky spa by the seaside (bath salts, sauna bath, water wings, bouncy rubber ball), with traces of emulsion paint and allspice. No smoke, until you taste, when this emerges shyly after a sweet and salty start (with toffee and heather flowers). Water increases the mineralic elements—body scrub, bath salts, almond oil: fresh and clean—and balances the taste between sweet and barbeque-charred meat. A well-mannered example of Islay’s most uncompromising malt. ⁵⁴

What kind of ‘knowing’ is this? The experience of tasting a good whisky accompanied by such a ‘tasting note’ is thoroughly intriguing, because a good tasting note gives voice to a set of flavors that the drinker herself might not have thought of. The important thing is that the experience is captured and expressed, not that the words chosen are in any literal sense correct as ‘objective’ descriptors of the taste of the whisky. One whisky writer comments sardonically that ‘it has been said that Islays [Scotch whiskies from the island of Islay] can taste like TCP or hospital gauze, though quite why anyone should have tasted hospital gauze in order to make the comparison remains obscure’, ⁵⁵ but this bit of humorous whimsy misses the point: whether something really tastes like hospital gauze is less important (and less decidable) ⁵⁶ than the fact that the invocation of hospital gauze captures something that a certain group of drinkers find authentic and illuminating. The composition of a tasting note can then be compared to any other sort of artistic depiction: it succeeds if it provides a recognisable account of an experience.

Obviously the vocabulary in which an experience is narrated and depicted is not transhistorical or devoid of context; over time, that vocabulary shifts and changes, so that what ‘counts’ as an elegant depiction of an experience in one era may be almost literally nonsensical in another. We make a mistake if we regard the creative expression of an experience as though it were ‘the objectification of contents of meaning which are already present in finished form in the inner world of the creative subject’, since the key feature of a compelling expression is precisely that it is ‘situated’—in a social context, in a historical period, in a set of contingent and conventional meaningful practices. ⁵⁷ Wittgenstein’s comment that ‘to describe a set of aesthetic rules fully means really to describe the culture of a period’, ⁵⁸ picks up on exactly this spirit: because a vocabulary in which we articulate and express experiences is first and foremost the vocabulary of a specific era, we cannot make sense of that vocabulary without entering into that era to the extent possible. ⁵⁹ In this sense, ‘knowing whisky’ and being able to describe it poetically is akin to having an ‘appreciation’ of style:

If a man goes through an endless number of patterns in a tailor’s, [and] says: “No. This is slightly too dark. This is slightly too loud,” etc., he is what we call an appreciator of material. That he is an appreciator is not shown by the interjections he uses, but by the way he chooses, selects, etc. Similarly in music: “Does this harmonize? No. The bass is not quite loud enough. Here I just want something different.…” This is what we call an appreciation. ⁶⁰

So the knowledge that a person who knows whisky in this way can be said to have is neither factual knowledge about why whisky is the way that it is, or skilled knowledge of how to actually produce whisky, but something else: a familiarity with contextually-sited experience that shows itself not in a blind repetition of the rules, but in the versatile use of those conventional rules to produce a compelling expression or performance. Lest this kind of knowing be thought of as merely parasitic on facts and skills, consider for a moment what whisky would be absent the whole cultural panoply of whisky commentary, the poetic efforts to capture ineffable flavours in words, the Ardbeg Committee’s solemn declaration that a member will be expelled if he or she ‘is directly or indirectly connected with the dilution of any dram of Ardbeg Islay Single Malt Whisky with any substance other than water’, ⁶¹ firm admonitions that a good single malt whisky is to be sipped, not gulped or downed in a shot like vodka or cheap bourbon…all of these are part and parcel of the whole experience of drinking whisky, and one can be a knowledgeable participant in that experience without having any factual or skilled knowledge about the product. And the knowledgeable appreciation of whisky is causally efficacious as well, as anyone who has ever attended a professional whisky tasting can attest: it is a different experience to taste whisky with someone knowledgeable in this way than to simply consume an alcoholic beverage.

There is yet a fourth kind of knowing associated with whisky, something different from factual knowing-that, skillful know-how, and creative appreciation. This is the kind of knowing that goes into the peculiar excise tax regime that has always accompanied whisky and other distilled alcoholic beverages—not into the motivation for such a tax regime, which probably has more to do with financing the government and preserving profits among beer and wine producers and importers, but into the notion that there was and is something distinctive about distilled spirits that merited and legitimated such special consideration. ⁶² The very categorisation of distilled liquor, and its separation from other forms of alcohol, is difficult to fathom without recalling the history of distillation and its roots in ancient alchemical practice. To distill is, after all, to manipulate the world in a specifically instrumental way; fermentation happens more or less spontaneously, but distillation takes effort. ‘To distill, literally or metaphorically, requires the hubris to believe you can change the world’, ⁶³ and in particular, to believe that you can make the world give up its essential secrets by boiling and condensing various substances.

Applied to the production of alcoholic beverages, distillation carries some of the same presumed mystical powers, and many of the earliest recorded uses of distilled alcoholic drinks were as medicine—the word ‘whisky’ itself derives from the Gaelic usque baugh, literally ‘the water of life’. ⁶⁴ So we have here a distinct kind of knowing, a normative knowing that encompasses the distinct status of distillation and marks it off as something constitutively separate from other means of producing alcoholic drinks. This in turn makes it possible to argue for a different tax regime, to attribute social ills to distilled alcohol in particular, ⁶⁵ even to support the practice of encouraging producers to hold distilled spirits in casks for longer periods of time in the belief that this would somehow mellow the distilled essence and make the resulting drink less potent. ⁶⁶ This is not factual knowing, because it does not depend on systematic investigation, but instead precedes any such investigation and structures its categories. It is not skilled knowing, because it is not related to the production of any outcome, but is instead a taken-for-granted part of the social and political context within which outcomes are produced. And it is not creative appreciation, although it forms part of the context that may be creatively seized upon—say, by someone looking to express the distinctiveness of whisky.

But it is a kind of knowing, I would argue, which ordinary people in their everydayness (ourselves included, of course!) draw on in navigating social relations ‘from within’, so to speak.

It is knowledge of a moral kind, for it depends upon the judgments of others as to whether its expression or its use is ethically proper or not—one cannot just have it or express it on one’s own, or wholly within one’s self. It is the kind of knowledge one has only from within a social situation, a group, or an institution, and which thus takes into account (and is accountable to) the others in the social situation within which it is known. ⁶⁷

To refer to this as normative knowledge is to highlight the extent to which we don’t actually inhabit meaningless worlds of material and ideal interests governed by instrumental means-ends calculations except as a deliberate, artificial construction. The world discloses itself to us as populated by purpose-full objects connected to meaningful totalities: chairs as equipment for sitting, glasses as equipment for drinking, and so on. ⁶⁸ Navigating that world requires knowing—but not in an epistemic sense, not in a skilled sense, and not in an aesthetically appreciative sense, but in an ‘everyday theory’ sense ⁶⁹ —the ways that things hang together, and at the same time, the ways that things should hang together but perhaps presently do not. Should distillers be taxed on the amount of spirit that they produce, or should consumers pay taxes on the product purchased, or both? There is no way to even have that debate outside of the already-existing normative context within which the question makes sense in the first place.

To be perhaps overly schematic, and to indulge my fondness ⁷⁰ for ideal-typical 2x2 matrices, we might arrange these forms of knowing on two axes. One axis would distinguish between knowing that explicitly and self-admittedly expresses a value-laden perspective on things, and knowing that prizes a relative impersonality and strives to see things in a more ‘objective’ way. The other would distinguish between knowing that is engaged with an ongoing stream of events and explicitly advances an evaluation of what it finds in the world, and knowing that refrains as much as possible from such an evaluation, seeking instead to confine itself to depicting and representing what it finds, in a more detached manner. Thus we would produce an arrangement like this:

OPEN IN VIEWER

	detached	engaged
impersonal	epistemic	technical
value-perspectival	aesthetic	normative

The impersonal/value-perspectival axis catches up the difference between a point of view and transferrable set of procedures or possessions: while the former is irreducibly rooted in and exemplary of some particular way of seeing or grasping the world, the latter consists of relatively autonomous facts and skills the value of which do not depend on the knower inhabiting any particular location. ⁷¹ The epistemic validity of facts and the technical effectiveness of skills are, in principle, separate from any value-orientation that we might have towards them. We might not care for the product of a continuous Coffey still distilling grains other than malted barley, and we might disagree with the legislation that defines bottles containing it as ‘whisky’, but this does not change the fact that it is so defined or the fact that the definition in question is causally connected to the wealth and influence of large commercial distilleries, nor does it alter the ability of skilled practitioners to distill alcohol in this way rather than using pot stills. Relatively alienated from their contexts, facts and skills can be passed on to others more easily than perspectival expressions or normative orientations—which is, perhaps, why it is sometimes easier to get Grandpa to learn to use a computer than it is to get Grandpa to accept the legitimacy of same-sex marriage.

The engaged/detached axis, by contrast, catches up the difference between a knowing that seeks to modify the world in an ongoingly participatory manner, and a knowing that tries to only depict or represent it. Technical skill and normative ‘knowing from within’ are both parts of an ongoing stream of activity in which things are getting done, so to speak; both the skilled practitioner and the everyday theorist are actively moving though the world, navigating obstacles, participating in the flow of events. But the epistemic and aesthetic knowers, inasmuch as they are attempting to produce facts and expressions, are relatively removed from that flow, positioning themselves someplace outside of it in order to apprehend and represent it differently. ⁷² It is difficult to be poetic about the taste of whisky or systematic about the history of whisky while actively engaged in distilling or debating; ‘detached’, in this sense, has something akin to ‘contemplative’ about it, a stepping-back from engaged practical activity in order to think about it.

Lest I be misunderstood, I need to immediately clarify that because these are ideal-typical distinctions, actual actions and processes and relations don’t generally fit into any one box, but display aspects of different boxes—often in tension with one another. It is a fact that the continuous Coffey still is a more efficient way of distilling alcohol from grain than the pot still method, and this efficiency can be precisely calculated in the terms of contemporary chemistry. But it is far from clear that this extra efficiency mandates a whole-scale abandonment of the pot still, and it is also the case that operating a Coffey still is just as much a skilled practice (albeit a different set of skills) as operating a pot still is. Similarly, actual campaigns to promote or decrease whisky consumption oscillate between moments of appreciative expression and moments of normative shaping, and frequently invoke facts about whisky as part of their train of claims-making—with the effective balance of these different speech genres being best ascertained in a local context by a skilled rhetorician. But it matters a great deal how we choose to treat the claims that arise in the course of such actual processes, precisely because the standards associated with distinct forms of knowing are different from one another. A fact invoked in the course of a campaign might not be epistemically valid, but a skilled campaigner might know that she can use it to achieve a desired outcome, or an everyday theorist might know it as ethically correct—and that supposed fact might do some valuable expressive work as part of an artistic account. My ideal-typical typology responds to the ambiguity of the world by providing a set of questions about what is going on here that help us make sense of the situation, and the answer might be that several things are going on here at once.

In other words, my categories here do not name actual actions, but instead—if I may be permitted the pun—the distilled essences of actual action. As such, they pick out discrete intentions that actually occur all jumbled up and conflated and probably not even explicitly acknowledged by participants, and allow us to clarify the different goals that different ways of knowing aim to achieve and the logical relationships among them. What I am interested in here is the speech act of making a knowledge-claim, and the typology sketches four different purposes for which one might make such a claim, and four different kinds of knowledge to which a claim might contribute. Claims might aim at expanding our store of facts, or they might aim at training the listener to help them become more skilled, or they might aim at deepening our appreciation, or they might aim at our regard for something. It makes a difference which of these we think is going on. ⁷³

Accordingly, when I refer to such figures as the ‘skilled practitioner’ and the ‘everyday theorist’ I am not talking about concrete individuals, but about actors to the extent that they participate in these different modes of knowing. Whether the author writing about whisky intends to contribute to epistemic knowledge about whisky, to practical knowledge of how to make whisky, to aesthetic knowledge that helps us appreciate whisky, or to normative knowledge of the value of whisky is an open question, to be addressed in each concrete case by discussions among the author and her community of readers—and given the ambiguity of actual situations, is not likely to be definitively settled through such discussions. But given the logical distinctions between these ways of knowing, and the different standards of evaluation that are appropriate to each (e.g. what makes for an epistemically valid claim does not necessarily make for a normatively compelling claim), some characterisation of the intention of an action must accompany an evaluation of that action. ⁷⁴ Making a claim about whisky, whether in writing or in speech, is therefore not always the same thing, but can be cashed out in at least four different ways, and evaluated accordingly.

The condition of possibility for this plurality of evaluations, however, is that all four of these kinds of knowing have to be in some sense ‘in play’, or what William James would have called ‘live possibilities’. ⁷⁵ In practice, of course, this is rarely if ever the case; the logical independence and distinctiveness of these four does not guarantee that they will all be equally acknowledged in a particular setting as legitimate ways of knowing. Indeed, we might rethink the notion of ‘science’ as a call to unequivocally privilege epistemic ways of knowing, a sort of operational instruction to always prefer impersonal, detached ways of knowing—and then we might note that, both in our ‘disenchanted’ age ⁷⁶ and in academic settings still largely enraptured by the European Enlightenment project and funded in part by corporations looking to derive profit from increased production efficiencies, ⁷⁷ this kind of factual knowing enjoys a privilege that cannot be defended on purely logical or philosophical grounds. ⁷⁸

So the call for ‘science’ enjoys a certain social power that can be used, and has often been used in our field, to silence alternatives, or to demote them to the status of providers of raw materials on which the real knowers can operate. ⁷⁹ This despite the fact that ‘doing science’ is itself a highly skilled practice, requiring a not insignificant amount of technical skill to manipulate the physical and conceptual equipment used in systematic investigation. ⁸⁰ And also despite the fact that aesthetic and normative considerations not infrequently play critical roles in shaping scientific research agendas, as investigators define problems and refine solutions by drawing on notions of elegance, balance, and order that are in no way inevitable logical consequences of the call to be systematic, public, and worldly. ⁸¹ The playing-field is slanted, and even though all four of the kinds of knowing I have sketched play a role in the actual practice of scientific work, the idea of ‘science’ as a purely epistemic mode of knowing functions so as to subordinate the other three ways of knowing—at least in those parts of the field that consider themselves to be engaged in ‘scientific’ inquiry. ⁸²

Must…be…? ⁸³

So: must the study of cross-boundary encounters with difference privilege epistemic ways of knowing?

No.

Just as is the case with whisky, there are a variety of different kinds of knowledge-claims one can make about the international aspect of things, not all of which conform—or need to conform—to the standards appropriate to epistemic claims. In fact, although most of the top 20 IR journals as reported by the 2011 TRIP survey ⁸⁴ are venues for the publication of epistemic claims, two of those journals (Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy) frequently feature policy commentary, expert opinion, and outright political positioning of the sort that likely would not make it past peer review in the other outlets on the list. Applying the standards of epistemic validity one might apply to an article published in International Organization or the European Journal of International Relations to something published in Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy would be in a certain sense inappropriate, because those latter two journals are more arenas for the promulgation of technical, applied knowledge than for the production of novel epistemic claims—a kind of mediated skill-training, rather than an increase in the storehouse of epistemically valid facts. And once one gets outside of the TRIP top 20, the number of international studies journals devoted to publishing advice from one skilled practitioner to another expands, as do various agency reports, white papers, strategic planning documents, and training and facilitation guides. ⁸⁵ All of these, I would suggest, are arenas in which knowledge-claims are put forth and evaluated and communicated, albeit not by epistemic standards that are familiar to academic international studies scholars who regularly read theoretically-sophisticated journals like Millennium. The worlds of policy and on-the-ground practice are not the same as the world of the academy, as anyone who has ever tried to bridge that particular gap has quickly learned. ⁸⁶

Beyond facts and skills, there are obviously also aesthetic and normative knowing about the international aspects of things. Although much of the scholarly turn to ‘narrative knowing’ that has started to surface in ‘mainstream’ journals highlights the ethical implications of an autoethnographic approach, ⁸⁷ it is not necessarily the case that such a focus on emplotment and narration demands or advances normative knowing. Once we get out of our professional scholarly journals and think more broadly about artistic works that aim to portray or depict international events and situations in a compelling and authentic manner, we find novels, ⁸⁸ graphic novels, ⁸⁹ films, ⁹⁰ and television shows ⁹¹ that depict cross-boundary encounters with difference in subtle and profound ways. ⁹² These are distinct from the kinds of critical writings that aim to dislocate the knowing subject and decenter authority claims; in those latter contributions, the intent is explicitly to provoke ethical reflection and to engender shifts in the everyday normative knowing that shapes daily life. ⁹³ And although a particular novel or film could be doing both things at once, it makes a difference whether we evaluate a claim made in the course of the unfolding of the plot in aesthetic or normative terms: a claim might be inelegant or clumsy at the same time as it serves to provoke ethical reconsideration, or poetically beautiful at the same time that it is normatively problematic. ⁹⁴ The very fact that we can and do entertain such dualities underscores my point, which is that the normative and the aesthetic are logically and philosophically separate registers, however closely they might be related. ⁹⁵

Four different kinds of international knowing. Some might suggest that the proper response to such diversity is to define the field of international studies as uniquely devoted to one of these kinds of knowing, or to claim that we have already had this discussion (or ‘second great debate’) sometime in the last century and collectively decided to be ‘a science’ and thus to privilege epistemic ways of knowing. But reports of the ‘second great debate’ actually happening, let alone being definitively settled, are quite overblown. ⁹⁶ Ever since the beginnings of the field, scholars have wrestled with at least the relative importance of epistemic and technical knowing, although they often did this under the generally unhelpful headings of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ and fudged the all-important issue of how these two forms of knowing were to be related. ⁹⁷ Over time the ‘scientists’ claimed the dominant Anglophone academic places, declared the dominance of epistemic knowing, and only belatedly realised that their work was becoming increasingly irrelevant to practitioners—further evidence of the constitutive separateness of these two kinds of knowing. Ethical knowing was also present from the field’s outset, although its relationship to either epistemic or technical knowing was even more unclear; a tradition of international ethics thus grew up somewhat in parallel to the field’s epistemic ‘mainstream’, and continues in a robust manner today. ⁹⁸ As for aesthetic knowing, although this may be the most recent newcomer to the field, scholars are certainly starting to explore it in detail, ⁹⁹ including by founding a new organised International Studies Association section on ‘Science, Technology, and Art’. ¹⁰⁰

So we clearly have these different forms of knowing in the field broadly understood. Should we continue to? Although partisans of epistemic knowing suggest otherwise, I would argue that we would be quite impoverished if we were to discard other forms of knowing from our scholarly endeavour. After all, epistemic knowledge of whisky in important ways supervenes on other knowledges: technical knowledge of distilling and maturation, aesthetic knowledge of the diverse experiences associated with consuming whisky, normative knowledge of distilled spirits as a separate category. Indeed, this is perhaps inevitably the case with epistemic knowing, which strives to be doubly separate from things: detached from the flow of events, and impersonally removed from individual perspectives. Detached, impersonal knowing—itself made possible, as Sandra Harding reminds us, by the power of the (colonial) knower to both expand its empirical grasp and to borrow from local knowledges as it sees fit ¹⁰¹ —does achieve distinctive results through its pursuit of a systematic, public, and worldly factuality. But those results do not mean that every other mode of knowing ought to be subordinated to epistemic knowing, any more than the results of technical or aesthetic or normative knowing ought to necessarily dominate the field.

In the end there are no definitive philosophical arguments supporting the claim of any form of knowing to legitimate domination of the field of international studies. Practitioners might like to see more technical knowing; activists and critics might prefer more normative knowing; artists, more aesthetic knowing. This is impossible to settle through discussion, because the knowledge-interests at play are different, and the intention of advancing a knowledge-claim—which tells us how to evaluate that claim—might be one of several options. We commit a category mistake if we insist on treating every knowledge-claim as though it were intended to be a contribution to epistemic knowledge; this is the mistake that fuels the false dichotomy between, for example, evolutionary biology and the notion of the world as having been formed by a divine Creator. No sacred text of which I am aware intends to provide epistemic knowledge about the universe, and Galileo’s famous quip that the Bible tells one how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go, captures the point nicely: these are two different language-games, two different intentions, two different kinds of knowing. There is no conflict here, unless we force one by erroneously presuming that all the claimants are intending the same thing.

So in the end this is a question of meta-methodology: what attitude toward methodological diversity should we adopt? Perhaps unsurprisingly, my answer with respect to the four forms of knowing I have discussed in this essay is much the same as my answer to the four philosophical ontologies I discussed in The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations. In the absence of any definitive philosophical or logical argument for the superiority of any of these ways of knowing, and in light of the global importance of the issues with which we grapple in international studies, I am not convinced that we have any compelling grounds for closing the borders of the field around one form of knowing. The practical knowledge that enables one to navigate a tricky conflict situation is not likely to be contained in general studies of the relative effectiveness of different strategies, and local experience and expertise is needed to implement even a strategy that has worked well elsewhere. Epistemic knowing also, famously, can’t tell us how to live together on the planet, because that’s not its goal; for that, normative knowing is needed. And aesthetic knowing can capture and highlight just those situational particulars and diverse experiences missed by other forms of knowing. So my answer is that the field should contain space for all of these kinds of knowing, and should resist the call to be exclusively a form of aesthetic expression, a mode of technical practice, a normative enterprise—or an epistemic science.

Instead of intending to produce one homogenous body of knowledge, the field of international studies and we scholars within it should work to become more comfortable with the irreducible plurality, plurivocality, and diversity of knowing. Such an attitude can, I think, best be cultivated not merely by our paying lip-service to the existence of other forms of knowing, but by our actively seeking to position ourselves as scholars in the spaces between these diverse ways of knowing. Which does not mean that an individual piece of scholarly work can or should inhabit those spaces. The logical distinctions between ways of knowing, and the dynamics of academic knowledge-production, virtually guarantee that whatever we write, whatever claims we make, will be read as contributions to the advancement of one or another knowledge-interest, and evaluated accordingly. ¹⁰² And if we are honest with ourselves, we do have particular ends and aims for which we advance knowledge-claims, a heading which we may not have deliberately chosen ourselves but which is always and already given in our very ways of going on. ¹⁰³ The logical differences between ways of knowing, just like the logical differences between philosophical ontologies, mandate that a claim can only be judged a good one if we know what standards to apply to it.

So pieces of scholarly work, or particular knowledge-claims made in our scholarly work, ¹⁰⁴ inhabit particular ways of knowing, but that is no reason why we ourselves as scholars need to subordinate everything to one kind of approach. The diversity of styles and flavours of single malt whisky does not, after all, imply that the best thing to do is to dump them all into a vat and consume the resulting ‘multi-method’ product. And in practice, given the uneven playing-field on which such ‘multi-method’ blends are conducted, we are more likely to end up with blended Scotch that is mostly composed of neutral grain spirit, which further diminishes the distinctiveness of any individual contribution. What we need instead is the attitude of a participant in a whisky tasting, who can appreciate the distinctiveness of particular single malts in their singularity, but is not unequivocally and for all time wedded to any one of them. The trick is to understand each claim in its appropriate intentional context, where appropriateness is a matter of discussion and debate with reference to the form and content of the claim itself: multiple readings of a claim may well be possible, but that does not absolve us of the difficult work of producing a compelling reading. And then we should not apply a single standard of knowing to all knowledge-claims, but instead should accentuate the differences between ways of knowing instead of dissolving them into a flavourless mess or incoherently eclectic grab-bag.

The actual world may be made up of hybrid mixtures of all sorts, and our contribution as scholars may well be to call attention to that mixing and hybridity, but it is difficult to do this if we aren’t operating with clear and distinct conceptual instruments that can make plain where and how hybridisation and mixing occurs—and it is virtually impossible to do this if we have, in advance, limited ourselves and our whole field to one and only one way of knowing. The study of the encounter with difference across boundaries deserves nothing less than a full spectrum of whisky styles, maintained in their separateness precisely so that they remain available for tasting at different moments. So in conclusion, to all of us as scholars grappling with the international aspects of things, as to the diverse forms of knowing characteristic of the field, I say: slàinte mhath!