![]() 4 Their work is to be applauded for its conceptual ingenuity and generally rigorous methodological standards, but interpretivists lack the desire to (or even belief in the ability to) speak beyond the particular empirical event they are investigating. Scholars who have been able to employ successfully a new conception of social factors belong primarily to the interpretivist school. 3 While the most scholars have dealt with social phenomena by trying to incorporate them into the field’s dominant approach to theorizing (positivism), the obverse is needed: approaches to theorizing international relations need to be incorporated into a social framework. 2 They are not captured sufficiently by directly causal explanations offered by mainstream positivist scholars. Social phenomena differ in kind from natural phenomena (they are time-space specific, do not exist apart from their social context, and are “a function of belief and action”). Scholars have failed largely to evaluate whether accepted explanatory approaches fit. ![]() There has been significant movement in the field over the past decade to accept and incorporate notions such as identity, culture, and norms, 1 but scholars’ attempts to study them in the same way that they have studied material factors for the past four decades have left the explanatory potential of social phenomena largely unfulfilled. In order to improve scientific explanations of social phenomena, it is important to take a step back and evaluate the way they have been approached in the field in recent decades. The term ‘social phenomena’ includes identity (individual and collective), culture, symbols, ideas, norms, principles, narratives, and collectively held beliefs. ![]() This paper is attempts to construct an epistemological basis for studying social phenomena. Scientific Explanations of Social Phenomena: Overcoming the Positivist-Interpretivist Divide
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