Interpretivism

Philosophy

c= ALEX BYRNE Interpretivism 1. Interpretivism introduced In the writings of Daniel Dennett and Donald Davidson we find something like the following bold conjecture: it is an a priori truth that there is no gap between our best judgements of a subject's beliefs and desires and the truth about the subject's beliefs and desires. Under ideal conditions a subject's belief-box and desire-box become transparent. To make this picture more vivid, let us introduce the familiar device of the Ideal Interpreter: an idealisation of a human being. The Ideal Interpreter, according to the bold conjecture we are considering, is capable of discovering exactly what you believe and desire. For now, let's be silent on the details of the Interpreter's knowledge and powers-with the following exception. The Interpreter's stipulated initial stock of knowledge had better not include knowledge of your propositional attitudes, else the conjecture will be trivialised. Is this a kind of behaviourism? It does not have to be. For it may be that we wish to make our Interpreter take into account various non-behavioural facts when determining what someone believes or desires. For example, perhaps the discovery that someone is a hollow shell controlled from Mars would lead us to reject the hypothesis that he is a believer and desirer, no matter how convincing his behaviour. Very well, if there are such defeaters of the hypothesis that someone is a believer and desirer (or any other relevant inner facts), we can let our Interpreter know if any of them obtain in a par199 200 European Review of Philosophy ticular case.' But both Dennett and Davidson think that the Interpreter does not need to open up the subject's head, and I shall not dispute this. This intriguing picture of the mind-that, as an a priori matter, the facts about mental content are precisely captured by the judgements of some Ideal lnterpreter-I shall call interpretivism/: It is important to note that the Ideal Interpreter's presence (equivalently, the reference to our best judgements) is an indispensable component of interpretivism. Suppose it is (implausibly!) claimed that believing that snow is white is a priori equivalent to being disposed to produce the string 'snow 1. The Mars example is taken from Peacocke 1983, p. 205. Peacocke imagines "The Body"-a debrained human body controlled by a computer from Mars which "has been given the vast but finite number of conditionals specifying what a typical human would do with given past history and current stimulation; so it can cause The Body to behave in any circumstances exactly as a human being would" (p. 205). Peacocke's Body, according to him, "does not have propositional attitudes at all: it is just a Martian marionette" (p. 205). I think Peacocke's verdict on the case debatable, but the important point is that even if Peacocke is correct, this does not spell disaster for the view which is the topic of this paper. It would spell disaster if the Martian puppeteers, with their evil intentions, were an essential component of Peacocke's example. For then any Ideal Interpreter would need to know whether her subject was controlled by thinking puppeteers, and this means that the Interpreter's database includes intentional facts. This problem cannot be avoided by taking the Interpreter to deliver the facts, with no intentional initial data, about whether the subject is controlled by thinking beings. The Interpreter might then be off on an infinite regress: the Martians themselves might appear to he Venusian marionettes, who in turn might appear to be Plutonian marionettes, and so on. In such a case, the Interpreter can have no final opinion whether the Martians are genuine thinkers, unless she knows whether the Vcnusians are genuine thinkers, and she cannot know that unless she knows whether the Plutonians are genuine thinkers ... Fortunately, the Martians with their evil intentions, and even the fact that the computer is distant from The Body, are surely dispensable (and misleading) parts of Peacocke's story. If the computer is shrunk to the size of a human brain, and placed in The Body, this ought to make no difference to our considered opinion about The Body's mental life. Or so I think. 2. I borrow the term from Johnston 1993b. Interpretivism should be distinguished from what Dennett calls interpretation ism,which "likens the question of whether a person has a particular belief to the question of whether a person is immoral, or has style, or talent, or would make a good wife" (1979, p. 15). Dennett takes interpretationism (avowedly not his own position) to involve some sort of relativism. lnterpretlvlsm 20l is white' (and likewise for other beliefs). This theory could be expressed to sound superficially like interpretivism, using an Ideal Interpreter who has as initial data the subject's dispositions to produce strings of symbols, and the relevant alleged a priori equivalencies. But here the Interpreter is otiose: she could be eliminated if desired, and so this theory is not a version of interpretivism. It is worth noting that interpretivism holds the promise of elegantly vindicating the supervenience of intentional states on matters physical, with no reductionist assumptions. No commitment to reduction, because the Interpreter (a believer and desirer herself) is an essential part of the story. But a vindication of supervenience, because surely the Interpreter would not interpret differently without a physical difference in the subject of interpretation, or a physical difference in the subject's environment. 3 And as the Interpreter delivers the facts, this means there could be no difference in beliefs or desires without a physical difference. (This argument for supervenience should not be attributed to either Dennett or Davidson.) Fodor and Lepore have, unfortunately, appropriated 'interpretivism' to label the thesis that "[tlhere is an 'element of interpretation' in content ascription" (1992, p. 259). (The phrase 'element of interpretation' is taken from Dennett 1987b, p. 342.) But this is so imperspicuous as to be hardly worth naming. After this paper was completed, I discovered that William Child (994) discusses at length something similar to interpretivism as I formulate it (he calls it 'interpretationism'). But Child's interpretationist-c-who comes in a bewildering variety of guises-never quite becomes my interpretivist. The reader should consult Child's book for a different and more sympathetic way of approaching these issues. 3. Both Dennett (e.g., 1987a, p. 41) and Davidson (e.g., 1979) accept versions of Quine's indeterminacy thesis. They hold (at least) that it is sometimes indeterminate exactly what a subject believes or desires. Consider two physical doppelgangers 51 and 52, in physically identical environments. Given indeterminacy, might not an Interpreter permissibly interpret 51 as believing that p, and 52 as not believing that p? If so, it's wrong to say that the Interpreter would not interpret differently without a physical difference. However, the answer to the question is "no". What we should say instead is that the Interpreter interprets both 51 and 52 as indeterminately believing that p. Hence, even given indeterminacy, 5l and 52 are interpreted alike, and the argument for supervenience goes through as before. (NB: for simplicity, in what follows r shall assume that there are no cases of indeterminacy) 202 European Review of Philosophy 2. Textual evidence I suggested that Daniel Dennett and Donald Davidson are both interpretivists. More cautiously, there is a strong dark thread of interpretivism funning through their views. Let us briefly survey the textual evidence. As is well known, Dennett distinguishes three "stances", or predictive strategies, one might adopt towards some system-a chess-playing computer, to take Dennett's example." First, we might adopt the design stance, and predict the computer's behaviour on the basis of what we know about its design. Second, we might adopt the physical stance, and base OUf predictions on the physical makeup of the machine. However, as Dennett observes, when it comes to predicting the moves a chess-playing computer will make, neither one of these stances will be of much use in practice-such machines are far too complicated. There is a third predictive strategy: one may view the machine "rather like an intelligent opponent" (1971, p. 5), treating the system as ilit had propositional attitudes. And certainly, whether or not it is a mere [aeon de parler, the language of beliefs and desires becomes almost irresistible in such cases. For instance, it might be said of the computer that it thinks it ought to get its queen out early (to use an example of Dennett's that is now something of a cliche in the philosophy of minds) and no one would find such mentalistic talk at all odd. This third predictive strategy is the famous intentional stance. It is somewhat obscure, to me at least, just what Dennett's claim was in the 1971 paper, "Intentional Systems". There were hints that it was merely convenient to assume that certain complex systems (including ourselves) had beliefs and desires, even though, strictly speaking, this assumption is mistaken. But in any event, Dennett's position has clarified and developed, and by 1978 we find him saying: x believes that p:= X can be predictively attributed the belief that p6 This schema is elaborated in the 1979 paper "True Believers", which, Dennett says, has replaced "Intentional Systems" "as the flagship expression of my position" (1987, p. 3). There he makes the following self-styled "perverse claim": 4. In the classic paper "Intentional Systems" (1971). 5. The example occurs in Dennett 1977. 6. Dennett 1978, p. 67. See also Dennett 1981, p. xvii. Interpretivism 203 [a]l! there is to being a true believer is being a system whose behaviour is reliably predictable via the intentional strategy, and hence all there is to really and truly believing that p (for any proposition p) is being an intentional system for whichp occurs as a belief in the best (most predictive) interpretation (p. 29). Both this "perverse claim" and the earlier one appear to be clear statements of interpretivism. Dennett shows absolutely no sign of wanting to show how talk of interpretations, interpreters, the intentional stance, and so on, is a mere heuristic device, in principle eliminable from his theory. The failure of reductions in general has in any case been one of his major themes. As to Davidson, one quotation will suffice. In "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge", he says: What a fully informed interpreter could know about what a speaker means is all there is to learn; the same goes for what the speaker believes (1986, p. 315). It is plain that this is intended as a statement of interpretivism, for two reasons. First, Davidson is not making an empty claim. "[F]ully informed" is not an abbreviation for "fully informed about all a speaker's meanings and beliefs" He here has in mind his "Radical Interpreter" (Davidson 1973), of whom more anon. Second, although Davidson's remark is consistent with the idea that some of a speaker's beliefs and meanings are not knowable by an Interpreter, because they are completely hidden, and so unlearuable, and so no part of "all there is to learn", this is not Davidson's intent. For one thing, it is implicit throughout the paper from which the quotation is taken that "]w]hat a fully informed interpreter could know" includes all a speaker's beliefs. But now, in order to make the thesis of interpretivism more precise, we need to take a short detour. 3. Judgement-dependent concepts In recent work, Crispin Wright (1988, 1989, 1992, 1993) and Mark Johnston (l993a, 1993b) have separately investigated judgementdependent concepts (Johnston's terminology).' The idea is this. Take some 7. Definitional epicycles aside, a concept C is judgement-dependent (Johnston) just in case judgements that something falls under C are "extension-determining" (Wright). Judgement-dependence is a species of what Johnston calls "response-dependence': 204 European Review of Philosophy concept C. There is its extension, on the one hand, and our best opinion as to its extension, on the other. The two may coincide-either because we are lucky or skillful, or because their coincidence is an a priori matter. In the latter case-where it is an a priori truth that Cs extension coincides with our best opinion of its extension-we say that C is judgement-dependent. Of course, we must avoid, to use Crispin Wright's phrase, trivializing "whatever it takes" specifications of "our best opinion": if our best opinion is characterised as the true opinion, then trivially all concepts will turn out to be judgement-dependent. Let us have an example. There is something fishy, many would say, in the idea that the moral facts could outrun our idealised dispositions to make moral judgements, There couldn't he moral facts that we are forever unable to discover. So perhaps something like the following biconditional is a priori: A state of affairs A is morally good iff the Impartial Observer would be disposed to judge that A is morally good. This-understanding the Impartial Observer to be an idealised impartial human being-is a judgement-dependent account of moral goodness. If the Impartial Observer would not judge two stales of affairs differently unless they differed descriptively-which seems plausible-then it follows that the moral supervenes on the descriptive. Note three features of judgement-dependent accounts. First, they are not reductive: the concept in question-moral goodness in this case-appears on both sides of the biconditional (although a judgement-dependent account might be used as a stepping stone to a genuinely reductive account''). Second, a judgement-dependent account of 'x is P is not happily formulated as an account of what makes it true that x is F, or of what constitutes the fact that x is F. Vvehave a biconditional, for one thing, and no obvious motivation for taking one side of it to be any more basic than the other," Third, judgement-dependent accounts are not necessarily relativistic. To 8. That is, a reductive account of the concept C. Take it as a stipulation on judgement-dependent accounts that the idealisations of ourselves mentioned in the biconditionals cannot themselves be reduced away. 9. 1here draw on Appendix 3 to Johnston 1993a. Dennett himself mistakenly takes a judgement-dependent account of qualia to imply that they are "logical CO!J~ structsout of subjects' qualia judgements" and so "akin to theorists' fictions" (1988, p. 55). Interpretivism 205 take the above example: if some other moral observer-perhaps from a society quite different from ours-s-disagrees with the Impartial Observer, then he is, according to the account, simply mistaken. And by understanding the Impartial Observer to be an idealisation of human beings as they actually are, we can say that even if our moral judgements had been different, the moral facts would have remained the same. Interpretivism in general is the thesis that mental content is judgementdependent: the facts about what propositional attitudes someone has are exactly captured by the (potential) judgements of some Ideal Interpreter (or Interpretersj.l" Dennett's and Davidson's versions of interpretivism are third-personal: the Interpreter is someone who interprets someone else. But there are also first-personal accounts, where the Interpreter is taken to be the subject of interpretation, perhaps made ideally introspective. I] But such accounts will not be our concern here.12 We now need an initial formulation of interpretivism that at least captures the spirit of Dennett's and Davidson's claims. Although the Interpreter is supposed to have knowledge of the contents of all your attitudes, for definiteness let us concentrate on belief. Let our initial formulation be the thesis that all biconditionals of the following form are a priori: x believes that p iff if there were an appropriately informed Ideal Interpreter, she would be disposed to attribute to x the belief that p. where Wright's strictures against a trivializing "whatever it takes" reading of the right hand side apply (so we do not, for instance, take the Ideal Interpreter by stipulation to be omniscient and infallible with respect to x's beliefs). We will fill in some gaps a little later. For now, there is one unique feature of interpretivism to note-not only does the concept expressed by 'believes that p' occur on the right hand side, but facts about belief are expressed by both sides. For in appealing to the Interpreter's judgements, we 10. As Johnston puts it: "the truth about meaning or content cannot outrun our idealized dispositions to grasp that truth" (1993a, p. 126). II. For an example of a first-personal account, applied to intention, see Wright 1989. 12. For criticism of Wright's first-personal account (see above note), see Holton 1993; for a response to Holton, see Divers and Miller 1994. 206 European Review of Philosophy are assuming that the Interpreter has beliefs. Interpretivism presupposes facts about mental content: namely facts about what an Interpreter would believe or, equivalently. facts about what we would believe under ideal conditions. So we have a reason specific to interpretivism (as opposed to general considerations about judgement-dependent accounts) to deny that it is a metaphysical thesis concerning what constitutes facts about content. 4. Interpretivism evaluated We are now in a position critically to examine interpretivism. OUf initial formulation was this: x believes that p iff if there were an appropriately informed Ideal Interpreter, she would be disposed to attribute to x the belief that p. We now cannot put off the question of the Interpreter's knowledge and powers any longer. Who is Dennett's Ideal Interpreter, and is Davidson's Interpreter significantly different? Well, despite Dennett's attempt (1987b) to reconcile his views with Davidson's, it seems to me that they have substantial disagreements.P Dennett's Interpreter employs the intentional stance-s-and so do we, although not as well. Dennett's Interpreter employs whatever tacit methodology we 13. Here is as good a place as any to mention two other philosophers who have made use of the device of an Interpreter (or something like it)-Quine and David Lewis. Lewis is certainly not an interpretivist. As he puts it, "my problem of radical interpretation is not any real-life task of finding out about Karl's beliefs, desires, and meanings. I am not really asking how we could determine these facts. Rather, how do the facts determine these facts?" (I974, p. l lO). Quine's relation to interpretivism is more complex. Quine's (1960) device of the radical translator is supposed to show that facts about meanings are not determined by facts about behavioural dispositions, and since Quine thinks that meaning-facts must supervene on behavioural dispositions, he condudes that there arc no meaning-facts (see Van Cleve 1992). However, Quine need not appeal to some a priori connection between the deliverances of an idealised human translator and facts about synonymy to reach his conclusion. The radical translator could be God, and the argument would be unaffected. (And if the radical translator is God, Quine is simply asking how "the facts determine these facts") But there is a taint of interpretivism in Quine's reason-namely, verificationism-for thinking that behavioural dispositions are the only candidates for the meaning-determining facts. Interpretivism 207 employ when determining what someone believes. We can think of her as an invisible onlooker, carefully observing your movements, your interactions with your environment, and so on, and following the interpretive practices-whatever they may be-that we human beings follow when deciding what someone believes. Let's call her the Homely Interpreter. 14 Unlike most of us, however, the Homely Interpreter never misapplies the tacit rules of interpretation, has unlimited concentration, is not perceptually defective, is never mistaken about the non-intentional facts, and so on. Anything which ordinary folk would take to be (non-intentional) evidence relevant to discovering what you believe, is part of the Homely Interpreter's database. A reminder: we can't allow the Interpreter by stipulation to have knowledge of alJ your thoughts, or beliefs, or actions (intentionalJy described), and the like. The Homely Interpreter is supposed to find out exactly what your propositional attitudes are, not be handed them on a definitional plate. But if sweating, reddening of the ears, blinking, whether you are drinking H20 or XYZ, or whatever, are deemed relevant by the folk, then we wilJ let the Homely Interpreter know these facts. We could think of the Homely Interpreter aided in her task by hidden high resolution cameras, shooting you from all angles; the Interpreter then views the resulting films in the comfort of her own home, aided by her compendious memory of what she saw herself. Davidson's Ideal Interpreter is quite different, however: she is a Radical Interpreter, employing a methodology alien to the one we use in everyday life when determining what someone believes (Davidson [973)15 Such an Interpreter is one who begins the task of interpretation as might a scientifi14. Not to be confused with Blackburn's "homely interpreter", whom he contrasts with the "bleak interpreter': The former uses the "principle of humanity"roughly, maximise intelligibilitywhen interpreting; the latter, the "principle of charity"-roughly, maximise truth when interpreting (1984, pp. 277-81). This distinction is independent of the one being made in the text. IS. What about children learning their first language? Are they-according to Davidson-approximations to Radical Interpreters? Even if they are, it remains true that wewho have learnt language do not employ the methodology of radical interpretation in our ordinary interactions with others. However,Davidson's position appears to be, not that children are Radical Interpreters, but rather that any Radical Interpreter would learn just what a child learns, given the same initial data (see Davidson 1994, p. 124). For more on language learning, see the Third Objection in section 4 below. 208 European Rev;ewof Philosophy cally-minded visitor to an utterly strange land. The Radical Interpreter's data will be of this austere kind: system K produced the inscription 'es regnet' in circumstances of precipitation. (Here, for three paragraphs, I interpolate a tricky question of Davidson exegesis, that I shall for the most part set aside in what follows. The Radical Interpreter's official data includes, according to Davidson's 1973 and elsewhere, intentional facts-concerning what uninterpreted sentences the subject "holds true". But since Davidson's interpretivism seems to be at least in part motivated by Wittgensteinian "publicity" considerations-see the Third Objection below-he ought to hold that the Radical Interpreter's official data, at least in the final analysis, is purely non-intentional. For Davidson evidently thinks that it is not good enough, to answer worries about the public accessibility of meaning, to reply simply that we directly observe that someone believes that p, or utters a sentence that means that q. And he also evidently thinks that an adequate answer would be that by directly observing bodily movements, the production of certain sounds, and suchlike, we can recover just what a subject means and believes. But then Davidson ought not to rest content with "holdings true" as part of the Ideal Interpreter's initial database, Why should we fmd the intentional "holds true" epistemically unproblematic if belief contents and sentence meanings are disallowed as initial data? Surely these three categories should be in the same leaky boat, But although I sec no compelling reason to be this charitable, I will assume that "holdings true" are part of the Radical Interpreter's database.) Bearing this exegetical digression in mind, let us return to the main thread. For our purposes, the important difference berween the Homely and the Radical Interpreter is this: the Homely Interpreter needs to be in perceptual contact with the subject of interpretation (understanding this broadly enough to allow the Interpreter to use hidden cameras and similar devices). For there is little prospect of characterising, in non-intentional terms, information sufficient to enable us-without the benefit of perception, and using our ordinary methods-to work out what someone believes. That would be rather like giving a person a description of the distribution of color patches on a canvas, and expecting him to tell us whether the description is of a beautiful painting. Using ordinary methods of art appreciation, she will be at a loss: she needs to be confronted with the painting itself, not a description Interpretivism 209 of it.I6 And similarly in the case of interpreting others: we can only say that, confronted with some subject, we manage (here might follow a detailed account) to come to an opinion about what he believes. But the Radical Interpreter, although Davidson normally situates her in the field, observing the subject with notebook in hand, need not be there. For there is supposed to be some complete characterisation of the Radical Interpreter's initial data, and hence we could simply take the Radical Interpreter simply to be supplied with it, never leaving her laboratory at all. Indeed, we can even take the Radical Interpreter to be entirely alone, off in some other possible world. (At any rate, I will assume that the preceding part of this paragraph is correct. k I shall go on to raise a problem for any version of interpretivism that requires the Interpreter to be in perceptual contact with the subject of interpretation, this assumption is a concession to Davidson.Vl Before we get on to some objections, two minor and two major preliminary points. The minor points: let us take the necessary reference to the time period during which the subject has a particular belief to be implicit, and let us not fuss about the alleged influence of the subject's social milieu on his mental content (see Burge 1979). The major points. First, although placing some knowledge of the subject's beliefs and desires, or knowledge of a theory of meaning for his language, in the Interpreter's initial endowment would not thereby trivialise interpretivism, I shall not consider these possibilities. Insofar as Davidson and Dennett are interpretivists, their interpretivism is of the stronger, more 16. Well, no doubt being confronted with a physical duplicate of the painting would be sufficient, which she might construct from a description. Similarly, the Homely Interpreter would not be impaired if she were confronted with a physical duplicate of the subject of interpretation (in a duplicate environment). So, strictly speaking, the Homely Interpreter need not be in perceptual contact with the subject of interpretation, just in perceptual contact with a duplicate of the subject of interpretation. But this qualification does not affect any of my objections, and so Twill ignore it henceforth. 17. And in fact it seems that even if Davidson would accept the concession that the Radical Interpreter does not need to be in perceptual contact with the subject of interpretation, he thinks that someone must be. 1n his 1992 he gives what amounts to a transcendental deduction of the existence of next-door neighbours. He argues that someone could not "satisfy all the conditions for being interpretable-without actually being interpreted" (p. 260). 210 European Review of Philosophy exciting kind. Second, a point that I have already touched on, and which cannot be stressed enough. None of my objections will assume the falsity of, or be objections to, supervenient behaviourism: the metaphysical thesis that facts about a subject's mental states supervene on facts about his behavioural dispositions. Interpretivism is the target, not behaviourism. Here, then, are three objections to interpretivism. The first is only an objection to taking the Interpreter to be Homely. The other two are objections to interpretivism simpliciter. When we are through with these, 1 shall briefly examine whether a weakened version of interpretivism might fare any better. First Objection: the curious case of the strange believers The following examples are related to some that are familiar from secondary quality accounts of color (they are more readily dealt with in the color case, howeverl.l" His argument for this truly extraordinary conclusion runs as follows. Suppose we interpret a child's use of 'table' as referring to tables. How do we do that? We need to find the salient cause of the child's utterance of 'table'. And "[i]t is the common cause of our response and the child's response" (p. 263). [This] kind of triangulation ... while not sufficient to establish that a creature has a concept of a particular object or kind of object, is necessary if there is to be any answer at all to the question of what its concepts are concepts of. Ifwe consider a single creature by itself, its responses, no matter how complex. cannot show that it is reacting to, or thinking about, events a certain distance away, rather than, say. on its skin. The problem is not, I should stress, one of verifying what objects or events a creature is responding to; the problem is that without a second creature responding to the first, there can be no answer to this question ... So we can say ... that if anyone is to speak a language, there must be another creature interacting with the speaker (p. 263). If I understand this argument, a corollary of it is that if no one ever overhears me saying 'chair', then there can be "no answer" to the question of what I use this word to refer to. To reply that this is mistaken, because if an interpreter /tad been interacting with me, then he would have believed that 'chair' in my mouth refers to chairs, is obviously to undercut the entire argument. 18. See Johnston 1992, to which I am indebted. The present objection convicts our initial formulation of interpretivism of the "conditional fallacy" (Shope 1978). Interpretivism 211 First, there might be a believer who emitted rays capable of confusing any Homely Interpreter in the vicinity. The Homely Interpreter will then be ignorant of (many of) the subject's beliefs. Could we not say that the Interpreter interprets the believer as he would have been had he not produced the rays?Not obviously: the believer might live in a world where, as a matter of law, the rays are produced by certain belieft. So if the believer had not produced the rays, he would have had different beliefs, ifhe had beliefs at all. Or perhaps one such believer believes on good evidence that he does produce these rays. And if the believer had not produced the rays, he would not have had this belief. 19 Second, there might be an unobservable believer: perhaps invisible, perhaps of sub-microscopic size, or perhaps so large that only small parts of him can be observed. Again, the Homely Interpreter will be ignorant of (many of) the subject's beliefs. Could we not idealise the Homely Interpreter so that she has astonishing perceptual powers, sufficient to observe such believers? Perhaps. But the Homely Interpreter is a believer too, and once we allow believers to have astonishing perceptual powers, the following third problem arises. There might be a believer, with astonishing perceptual powers, who believes on the basis of overwhelming evidence that he is not being perceived, and hence not interpreted by any Homely Interpreter. If a Homely Interpreter were to interpret him, no matter how subtly, he would no longer believe he was not being interpreted. So this believer has a belief that no Homely Interpreter can discover. These problems are of no force against Davidson's vision of the Ideal Interpreter.r'' But they appear to raise serious difficulties for Dennett's account. It might be suggested that these problems can be overcome by reformulating interpretivisrn in the style of Wright's "provisional equations", yielding: If there were an Ideal Interpreter appropriately informed vis-a-vis x, then: x would believe that p iff the Interpreter would be disposed to attribute to x the belief that p.2l 19. The counterpart of this character in the case of color is "killer-yellow", due to SaulKripke in lectures. 20. Under my concessiveassumptions, anyway.But cf. note 17above. 21. SeeWright 1992,p. It9, 1993.Here I am indebted to an anonymous referee. 212 European Review 01 Philosophy Here the idea is that the Interpreter now only delivers a verdict on the subject's beliefs as they would be when he is being interpreted. Hence if the process of interpretation itself affects the subject's beliefs-as is the case in the last problem mentioned above-this does not matter. There are two obvious points to be made in response. First, as Wright notes22, this kind of thesis lacks generality: nothing is said about the beliefs of a subject who is not being interpreted. Second, the reformulation does not help with the problem of the believer who induces confusion in the Interpreter. If there were an Ideal Interpreter appropriately informed vis-a-vis OTIe of these believers then she would be disposed to judge mistakenly. Second Objection: the problem of actuality Suppose you are out walking alone. On a path through a forest, you glimpse a rabbit ahead, motionless in some tall grass. You think to yourself: La, a rabbit. You believe, at that moment, that there is a rabbit ahead. Preoccupied with your ruminations on Word and Object, before the end of your walk you completely forget about the rabbit. You definitely believed at the time (I, say) that there was a rabbit ahead. There is nothing unusual about this sort of case-it is utterly commonplace. But how do we get the Ideal Interpreter to deliver the right result? We can suppose that the rabbit is not clearly visible to you, and although you look straight at it, you give no visible sign that you see the animal (you have seen enough rabbits to last a lifetime). To the Tnterpreter, you behave in just the way you would have had the rabbit slipped your gaze. So if the Interpreter just knows of your actual movements, at best she will be of two minds about whether you have this belief (or perhaps two acceptable choices of Interpreter will disagree about whether you have it). This will then be a case of indeterminacy. At worst, she might be of one mind, and just not affirm that you have this belief-for perhaps you sincerely say later that your walk was entirely rabbit-free. In which case, according to interpretivism, you definitely do not have this belief. Will going inside the head help? Not necessarily. For suppose the Interpreter knew that there was a rabbit-image on your retina at t,and even that a light-bulb marked 'rabbit' illuminated in your brain at that time, and such22. Wright 1992,p. 120. Interpretivism 213 like.Whether or not in fact this guarantees that you have the rabbit-belief, it is surely not an a priori matter that an Interpreter with access to such actual inner goings-on will be able to find out just what you believe (remember that an a priori reduction of beliefs to, say, inner light-bulbs, is not an option in the present context: reduction renders the Interpreter redundant). This result-the missing rabbit-belief-is not acceptable. You definitely had that helief, if only for the reason that it might have influenced your action (although in fact it did not). Suppose you have a helpful disposition, and dislike rabbits. Had you met a rabbit hunter on the path a little after time t, you would have reported the rabbit sighting. The point here could apply equally to your ruminations on Word and Object-perhaps you come to believe during your walk that Quine is seriously mistaken, and out of embarrassment never give any indication then or later that this is what you believe. Our initial formulation of interpretivism cannot be correct. The Interpreter must know, or be able to know, what the subject would have done, not just what he actually did. Clearly, what would have happened had you met a rabbit hunter is relevant here. Could we perhaps equip our Interpreter with knowledge of a vast set of counterfactuals of the form: if so-and-so had happened, then you would have done such-and-such? There are two immediate problems with this suggestion, apart from the obvious difficulty of specifying just what counterfactuals are supposed to count. First, we cannot allow the counterfactuals to be couched in terms of belief and desire. It is sufficient to note that this suggestion is quite unmotivatedwhy should we allow the Interpreter to freely help herself to beliefs you would have had, but not to beliefs you do have? It is often harder to divine a subject's counterfactualbeliefs than to find out what he actually believes. Second, irrespective of the vocabulary in which the counterfactuals are supposed to be couched, giving the Interpreter such knowledge is to firmly distance her from all examples of the process of interpretation that are given in the literature. Note that problem of actuality arises because knowledge of how the subject actually behaves-both inside and outside the head-will not deliver the right results. Therefore we have to give the Interpreter knowledge of counterfactuals that cannot be known on the basis of how the subject actually behaves. But the ordinary person adopting the intentional 214 European Review of Philosophy stance, or the anthropologist approaching a totally alien tribe, are simply not in possession of enormous quantities of counterfactual knowledge that cannot be gleaned from actual observation of the subject. Now I have been unable to find a clear argument for interpretivism in the writings of either Dennett or Davidson. Their many insights concerning the mind can all be, and should all be, sharply divorced from this epistemological thesis. Be this as it may, if the literature contains any arguments for inrerpretivism, it seems fair to suppose that they depart either from the premise that the Interpreter is an idealisation of an ordinary person adopting the intentional stance, or from the premise that the Interpreter is an idealised anthropologist. But the problem of actuality shows that interpretivism, if the Interpreter wears either of these hats, is false. Therefore if there are any arguments for interpretivism in the literature, they are mistaken. Third Objection: the problem of language Language-using believers do not all use the same language, of course, and this poses an immediate problem for Dennett. For any Interpreter has got to understand the language of those she interprets, and directly building this into the Interpreter's powers amounts to smuggling in facts about the subject's beliefs. But it is quite unclear how else we are to give the Homely Interpreter (who, recall, interprets his subjects as you might interpret me) the resources she requires. There would appear to he little hope of arguing that some idealised version of myself, transplanted to China, must be capable, using everyday interpretive methods, of learning Chinese. Here Davidson is evidently on firmer ground, so let us examine how the Radical Interpreter might fare. Davidson apparently has some general line of thought leading to the conclusion that the Radical Interpreter must be able to learn exactly what a subject's language means. But what this line of thought is, I find very hard to discover. The places in Davidson's writings where the methodology of radical interpretation receives most discussion (1973, 1974b) do not, as far as I can see, contain it. However, in "The Structure and Content of Truth" (1990), Davidson writes: As Ludwig Wittgenstein, not to mention Dewey, G.H. Mead, Quine, and many others have insisted, language is intrinsically social. This does not entail that truth and meaning can be defined in terms of observable behaviour, or that it is "nothing but" observable behaviour; but it does imply that meaning is entirely Interpretivism 215 determined by observable behaviour, even readily observable behaviour. That meanings are decipherable is not a matter of luck; public availability is a constitutive aspect of language (p. 314). The argument is a little terse.23 It does, however, hint at an explicit argument along these lines: Premise (1) As wittgenstein showed, there can be no "private languages". That is, if S speaks some language L, it must be possible for others to come to know (a) that S speaks L, and (b) all truths of the form 'sentence s means (in L) that p' Premise (2) OUf reasons for thinking we have understood a speaker are ultimately based on observation (of him, or those others who speak his language). Premise (3) When we observe a speaker, what we observe is behaviour. Therefore: (4) Any language can be learnt by observing some speaker of that language. Premise (5) If observable behaviour did not determine meaning, then we coold not learn a language by observing some speaker of it. Therefore: (6) The meaning of any language is determined by the observable behaviour of some speaker of that language. (4) gives the desired conclusion about radical interpretation, which is just as well, because the move from (4) to (6) is unwarranted. (5) is dearly false. If the condition which it states were imposed generally, most learning 23. It bears comparison with Dummett's arguments for anti-realism (see e.g. Dummett 1973). For some discussion, see Craig 1982 and Devitt 1991, chapter 14. 216 European Review of Philosophy would be impossible. We have learnt much about the world that is not "determined" by what we have learnt it from. Turn now to the argument for (4). Let us grant the first premise, for the sake of the argument (for what I take to be the correct rebuttal to-what is usually regarded as-the "private language argument", see Craig 1982). Now suppose you and I are both speakers of L. It would seem that I can have good reason to think that this is so, through our complex social interaction (how does it work this well if we speak different languages?). It is, perhaps, harmless to take this reason, as (2) declares, to be "ultimately based on observation". Turn now to the meaning of 'behaviour' in (3). Is this "behaviour described in folk psychological and semantic terms"? It can't be, on pain of giving the Interpreter knowledge of the subject's beliefs and desires from the start. But then (3) is highly contentious. For (3), in conjunction with (2), requires that my reasons for thinking that you speak L are "ultimately based" on observation of mere bodily movements plus "holdings true". That is hardly obvious. When we observe others, we do not only observe "raw behaviour" or that they hold certain symbol strings true-we also observe them acting, or stating something, and so forth. And it is these folk psychologically/semantically described deliverances of observation on which my reasons for thinking that you speak L are "ultimately based". At any rate, no considerations have been offered to make us doubt this natural way of describing matters. Even if the first three premises are granted, (4) does not follow. (4) says that any language can be learnt by observing some speaker of that language. But the first three premises do not even imply that language learning is possible, let alone that all languages are learnable. The first premise, for instance, says that if A speaks L, then it must be possible for some other speaker B to know that A speaks L, and to know what is stated by the translation manual for L. Of course, to do the latter, B must understand L himself. However, there is no obvious reason why B, or anyone else, should have learnt L, or be capable uf doing so. And it is clear at a glance that the second and third premises are equally unconnected with language learning. To be sure, we humans learn the languages we speak, but this seems to be an empirical fact, not one discoverable a priori. In any case, (4) is too weak. (4) could at most support: for any language L, L must be learnable by the methodology of radical interpretation. But it does not follow from this that, given any speaker) S, of L, L must be learnable by lnterpretivism 217 radically interpreting 5. Yet that strong conclusion seems to be what Davidson needs. For take some speaker of L, 5, whose language cannot be learnt by radically interpreting 5 (perhaps because conversation is not 5's strong suit). The Radical Interpreter must be able to discover that 5 speaks L, if she is to find out what 5 believes. The reconstructed argument, even if sound, won't allow us to conclude that the Radical Interpreter can find out that Sspeaks L. The line of argument suggested by Davidson's remarks, therefore, does not appear promising; the "problem of language" remains.24,25 5. Interpretivism weakened I took interpretivism to be the a priori thesis that: x believes that p iff if there were an appropriately informed Ideal Interpreter, she would be disposed to attribute to x the belief that p. The Ideal Interpreter, according to Dennett, is a Homely Interpreter; according to Davidson, she is a Radical Interpreter.I raised a number of difficulties for both versions of interpretivism. Jointly, I think them conclusive. But it might be that there is a weaker kind of third-personal interpretivism about mental content, substantial enough to be of philosophical interest, yet immune to the previous objections. That is what I shall now examine. 24. A fourth problem might be called the "problem of anthropocentrisrn" The Ideal Interpreter, recall, is an idealisation of a human being. And if the reference to a human being is taken seriously, then it would seem interpretivism implies that there could not be believers who spoke a language uninterpretable by human beings. And Davidson, of course, has explicitly argued that, indeed, there could not be such believers ("On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme': 1974a). However, I believe that Davidson's paper contains materials which point to the very opposite conclusion (a rare vindication of deconstructionl). (Mark Johnston has expressed similar views in a seminar-see Hurley 1992.) So here we have a potential reductio of Davidson-style interpretivism. 25. In his 1994, a reply to Fodor and Lepore [994, Davidson for the most part says things quite compatible with interpretivism. But there is one glaringly recalcitrant passage. Davidson denies he has "ever argued for the claim that radical interpretability is a condition of interpretability" and says that he has "never argued that every language is radically interpretable': "I do not think", he continues, "that radical interpretation of natural languages must be possible; I have only argued that it is possible" (p. 122). If r understand these remarks correctly, Davidson is claiming simply that, as a matter of contingent empirical fact, human natural languages are radically interpretable. 218 European Reviewof Philosophy With one exception to be consigned to a footnote, my objections to interpretivism were directed at the claim that the interpretivist's biconditionals provide necessary conditions for a subject to believe that p.26 For example, I complained (the Third Objection) that there is no a priori guarantee that the Interpreter could learn the subject's language, and so no a priori guarantee that the Interpreter could find out all the subject's beliefs (in particular, those that are linguistically expressed). But that only shows that the Interpreter might fail to recognise a subject's belief, not that she might be wrong in making a positive belief attribution. So let us weaken interpretivism to provide merely sufficient conditions, as follows: x believes that p if the following conditional holds: if there were an appropriately informed Ideal Interpreter, she would be disposed to attribute tax the belief that p. Here we are allowing that the Interpreter might miss some beliefs, in her final report of what a subject believes. But, if a belief attribution appears in the report, then (according to the weakened thesis), the subject definitely has it. However, there is a fundamental difficulty, afflicting both Dennett and Davidson alike, which can be extracted from the problem of actuality (the Second Objection). Our attributions of belief are, for the most part, defeasible. If we observe what someone actually does) and ascribe beliefs to him on But this is inconsistent, it seems to me, with some of Davidson's other writings. For example, in his 1986, he argues against scepticism roughly as follows. First, he claims that a Radical Interpreter would find the subject of interpretation as holding mostly true beliefs, by the Interpreter's lights. Then he claims that "an interpreter who is omniscient about the world" (p. 317) is one permissible choice of Radical Interpreter. Hence we (possible subjects of an Omniscient Interpreter) have mostly true beliefs by the Omniscient Interpreter's lights, which is to say mostly true beliefs simpliciter. I do not understand how this argu~ ment against the sceptic could get off the ground if it requires a contingent empirical premise about natural languages. 26. The exception is the last problem considered under the First Objection. That example concerned a subject who believes that he is not being interpreted, but who would change his mind if he were being interpreted. Supposing that the Interpreter would interpret the subject as believing that he was being interpreted, the initial formulation of interpretivism gives the result that the Interpreter's judgement is mistaken. Hence the Interpreter's judging that the subject believes that p is not sufficient for the subject to believe that p. But this problem can be overcome, as I discuss, by appeal to Wright's "provisional equations". I ignore this complication in the text below. Interpretivism 219 this basis, we must be prepared to revise our opinion if certain new evidence comes to light. For example, suppose that someone is looking in good light at a cup on a table, affirms that there is a cup on the table, reaches out for it when the tea is ready to pour, and so on. Clearly he believes that there is a cup on the table! But not necessarily. He may take himself to be the victim of some crafty cup-illusion, and not wish to give the impression that he is wise to the trick. Admittedly, this hypothesis is a little wild. But as it is a conceivable explanation of the subject's actual behaviour, the Interpreter must be able to rule it out, if her opinion that the subject believes that there is a cup on the table is guaranteed to be correct. If the hypothesis can be conclusively ruled out at all, the Interpreter will have to know what the subject would have done in various circumstances, not merely what he actually does. But this is the problem of actuality all over again. Therefore, either we restrict the Interpreter's knowledge to the subject's actual behaviour, in which case the Interpreter's firm opinions-if she has any-will be scant indeed, or else we squarely face the problem of actuality. But I do not see how that problem can be solved." In "A Study in Scarlet", Dr. Watson reported his reaction to an article written, as he later discovered, by Sherlock Holmes, as follows: It struck me as a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and absurdity. The reasoning was close and intense, but the deductions appeared to me to be far fetched and exaggerated. The writer claimed by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man's innermost thoughts. Deceit, according to 27. There is a final corner into which an interpretivist might retreat, following the failure of the merely sufficient conditions proposal. Take the Interpreter now simply to have an unimpeachable positive opinion that the subject of interpretation has a mind-not whether he believes that p, or desires that q, but simply whether he has beliefs and desires at all. That is: x is a thinking being if the following conditional holds: if there were an appropriately informed Ideal Interpreter, she would be disposed to judge that x is a thinking being. Arguably, the Interpreter would give the same judgements in the same physical circumstances, so this proposal would-if true-vindicate a supervenience claim: that the physical facts are at least metaphysically sujficientfor the existence of minds. The proposal also has the merit of solving the problem of other minds (a virtue shared by the stronger versions of interpretivism). For I think it reasonable that an idealised version of myself would continue to judge that you have a mind, and therefore I can reasonably conclude, if the present version of interpretivism is correct, that you have a mind. 220 European Review of Philosophy him, was an impossibility in the case of one trained to observation and analysis. His conclusions were as infallible as so many propositions of Euclid. Interpretivism-at least in the versions we have considered here-is indeed, to borrow Watson's phrase, "far fetched and exaggerated". There is a certain irony in the fact that Dennett, and also Davidson, are prone to see Cartesianism as the root of all error in the philosophy of mind. They rightly repudiate the Cartesian picture of the mental as an inner stage to which the subject has complete and infallible access. But it seems to me that the picture still lingers on: the audience of one has been expanded, but the view of the stage remains as clear as ever. In denying that the Cartesian theatre is essentially private, interpretivism simply opens it up to the public.28 The present version is closely connected with the well-known Turing test. In "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950) Alan Turing proposed, roughly, that if some entity could convincee human interrogator via a teleprinter that it was thinking, then it was thinking. In other words, passing the "Turing test" (not Turing's phrase) is sufficient for having a mind. This characterisation is a little rough. In the first place, Turing proposed to "replace" the question "Can a machine think?"-which he found "too meaningless to deserve discussion" (p. 49)-with the question "Can a machine pass the Turing test?" And in the second place, the machine had to do more than convince the interrogator that it was thinking. For Turing's actual proposal was that the machine must fool the interrogator into taking it to be a human being.But there is no obvious reason why it should have to do that-why is simply convincing the interrogator that he is talking to a thinking thing not sufficient? This unnecessary restriction on what counts as passing the test led Turing to consider objections of the form: a machine can't fall in love or be telepathic, etc., but human beings can. These objections are irrelevant to the question of whether a machine could pass the Turing test conceived of as a test for thinking. rather than as a test for humanity. All this is a little ironic, since the Turing test has been widely criticised for being too easy.not too hard. Now in fact I think that this etiolated form of interpretivism can be made very hard to refute, in the sense that there are no convincing counterexamples. But I suspect that its appeal is precisely the appeal of the notorious "paradigm case argument", much discussed in the heyday of linguistic philosophy. "Surely you are a paradigm caseof another mind. Therefore there are other minds." The difficulties with this are well-known. 28. Thanks to Fiona Cowie, Mark Johnston, David lewis, Jim Pryor, Gideon Rosen, Mark Sainsbury, Mike Thau, Ralph Wedgwood, and two anonymous referees for the European Review of Philosophy: I am also grateful to a number of audiences who had the misfortune to hear earlier versions. Interpretivism 221 Department a/Linguistics & Philosophy Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 USA email@example.com References Blackburn, S. 1984 Spreading the Word, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burge, T. 1979 "Individualism and the Mental," in P. French, T. Uehling, and H. Wettstein, eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy4, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 74-121. Child, W. 1994 Causality, Interpretation and the Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Craig, E. 1982 "Meaning, Use, and Privacy,"Mind 41,541-64. Davidson, D. 1973 "Radical Interpretation," Reprinted in Davidson 1985,125-39. Davidson, D. 1974a "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," Reprinted in Davidson 1985, 183-98. Davidson, D. 1974b "Belief and the Basis of Meaning," Reprinted in Davidson 1985, 141-54. Davidson, D. 1979 "The Inscrutability of Reference;' Reprinted in Davidson 1985, 227-41. Davidson, D. 1985 Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davidson, D. 1986 "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," in E. Lepore, cd., Truth and Interpretation: perspectives on the philosophy of Donald Davidson; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 307-19. Davidson, D. 1990 "The Structure and Content of Truth," Iournal of Philosophy 68, 279-328. Davidson, D. 1992 "The Second Person," in P. French, T. Uehling, and H. Wettstein, eds., Midwest Studies ill Philosophy 17, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 255---67. Davidson, D. 1994 "Radical Interpretation Interpreted," in J. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives8, Atascadero, Ca.: Ridgeview Press, 121-28. 222 European Review of Philosophy Dennett, D. C. 1971 "Intentional Systems," Reprinted in Dennett 19B1, 3-22. Dennett, D. C. 1977 ''A Cure for the Common Code?" Reprinted in Dennett 198\, 90-108. Dennett, D. C. 1978 "Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology," Reprinted in Dennett 1987,43-68. Dennett, D. C. 1979 "True Believers," Reprinted in Dennett 1987, 13-35. Dennett, D. C. 1981 Brainstorms, Brighton, England: The Harvester Press. Dennett, D. C. 1987 The Intentional Stance, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Dennett, D. C. 1987a "Evolution, Error, and Intentionality," in Dennett 1987.287321. Dennett, D. C. 1987b "Mid-Term Examination: Compare and Contrast," in Dennett 1987. Dennett, D. C. 1988 "Quining Qualia," in A. J. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds. Consciousness in Contemporary Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 42-77. Devitt, M. 1991 Realism and Truth, second edition, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Divers, J" and A. Miller 1994 "Best Opinion, Intention-Detecting and Analytic Functionalism:' Philosophical Qllarterly44, 239--45. Dummett, M. A. E. 1973 "The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic:' Reprinted in Durnmett 1978,215--47. Dummett, M. A. E. 1978 Truth and Other Enigmas, London: Duckworth. Fodor, J. A., and E. Lepore 1992 Holism: a shopper's guide, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Fodor, J. A., and E. Lepore 1994 "Is Radical Interpretation Possible?" in J. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives 8, Atascadero, Ca.: Ridgeview Press, 101-19. Holton, R. 1993 "Intention Detecting:' Philosophical Quarterly43, 298-318. Hurley, S. L. 1992 "Intelligibility, Imperialism, and Conceptual Scheme," in P. French, T. Uehling, and H. Wettstein, eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 89-108. Johnston, M. 1992 "How To Speak of the Colors," Philosophical Studies 68, 221-63. Johnston, M. 1993a "Objectivity Refigured: Pragmatism Without Verificationism," in J. Haldane and C. Wright, eds., Reality, Representation, and Projection, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 85-130. Johnston, M. 1993b "The Missing Explanation Argument and Its Impact On Subjectivism," Ms. Interpretivism 223 Lewis, D. K. 1974 "Radical Interpretation," Reprinted in his Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, 108-18. Peacocke, C. 1983 Sense and Content, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quine, W. V. 0.1960 Word and Object, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Shope, R. K. 1978 "The Conditional Fallacy in Contemporary Philosophy:'journal of Philosophy 75, 397-413. Turing, A. M. 1950 "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Reprinted in M. A. Boden, ed., The Philosophy of Artificiallntelligellce, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990,40-66. Van Cleve, J. 1992 "Semantic Supervenience and Referential Indeterminacy,"Journal of Philosophy 89, 344-61. Wright, C. 1988 "Moral Values, Projection and Secondary Qualities," Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 62, 1-26. Wright, C. 1989 "wittgensrein's Rule-Following Considerations and the Central Project of Theoretical Linguistics," in A, George, ed., Reflections on Chomsky, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 233-64. Wright, C. 1992 Truth and Objectivity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Wright, C. 1993 "Realism: The Contemporary Debate-W(h)ither Now?" in J. Haldane and C. Wright, eds., Reality, Representation, and Projection, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 63-84.


Philosophy

Globalistics and Globalization Studies 2014 50–60 Making Sense of History? Thinking about International Relations Fabien Schang Can international relations (IR) be a distinctive discipline? In the present paper I argue that such a discipline would be a social science that could be formulated within the perspective of comparative paradigms. The objections to scientific methods are thus overcome by the logic of international oppositions, in other words a model takes several paradigms into account and considers three kinds of foreign relation (enemy, friend, and rival) in the light of three main questions: what is IR about (ontology); what does relate therein (epistemology); and how to assess such a relation (logic). Keywords: international relations (IR), state, nation, country, foreign policy. Introduction: What is IR? Roughly speaking, the 'international relations' is the study of relations among nations. Therefore, it deals with foreign policy. But what does a 'nation' mean as distinct from its twin concept of a state? In the present paper I would like to deal with this issue by investigating the foundations of the so-called theory of international relations (hereafter, IR), together with the possibility of its formalization from a logical point of view. In what follows, I investigate three main domains helping to face this challenge having assumed a formal philosophy of global processes for the method of my study. Ontology (who?) The first domain is the ontology of IR: What sort of being is there, that is what are the political categories that matter in such a discipline? Ontology is the domain of philosophy concerned with the identity of agents; in short, it purports to answer the following question: What are the relata a,b in any international relations of the form R(a,b)? The plausible candidates for these are states, regional alliances, transnational firms, non-governmental organizations, mere individuals, and the like. Epistemology (what?) The second domain is the epistemology of IR which concerns the relation R in itself, namely: What is the nature of the relation between any two specified relata? Because of the troublesome distinction between facts and interpretations, the problem here is how to characterize a relation: by means of a natural or a human science whose methodological rules crucially differ. As the German philosopher of culture Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) stated, 'We explain nature; we understand psychic life'. For this reason, a genuine theory of IR should be clarified either through the explanation (causal disSchang • Making Sense of History? 51 course) or through the understanding (intentional discourse) it is supposed to provide in order to make sense of any given 'fact'. On the one hand, the sort of discourse attached to a given political event may differ following the Aristotelian fourfold set of causes, whether these are material (the material conditions under which an event happen), efficient (the agents who caused the event), formal (the definition of the event), or final (the reason why some event was provoked by some agents). On the other hand, the kind of cause the IR theorist tends to choose actually depends upon the sort of questions she/he naturally asks before making her/his point; indeed, questions make sense of events and relevantly betray the questioner's assumptions. We will return to this crucial role of questions with the case of paradigms, as implicit theoretical representations in the construction of IR. This role is all the more crucial for whoever doubts the positivist view that facts are transparent data. To put it blantly: what is a fact? Against the positivist dream of a Sirius point from which any situation could be easily depicted, it hardly makes sense to assume a theorist asking neutral questions. A radically opposed view has been endorsed by the Frankfurt School and famously stated by the post-positivist Robert Cox in the following words: 'Theory is always for someone and for some purpose', thus discarding the common belief in bare facts. Correspondingly, the choice of specific questions to make sense of political events may lead to such paradigms as realism, liberalism, or some more fine-grained variants. Their level of abstraction may vary, according to the theoretical concerns that make them arise: any investigation about the geopolitical strategy of a state leads to technical questions about material resources, for example, while a larger reflection about the motivations of mankind resort to the more general domain of political philosophy and leads to what may be called 'meta-questions' (abstract questions about more concrete questions). To account for the complexification of world politics throughout the notion of globalization, the paper aims at describing the transition from state-centred relations to Global Studies by means of an inquiry into the construction of a world space and through the set of social interrelation networks. Such a large-scale ambition may lead to a disciplinary holism, in the sense that such a large topic as IR calls for a number of related disciplines from politics to other social sciences like sociology (religion and culture), anthropology (human nature), psychology (folk behavior, statesmen's rationale), or economics (geopolitical motivations). A natural objection to this project concerns its philosophical flavor. After all, the story of the world patently showed how the history of ideas departs from the history of nations. From Plato's expedition in Syracuse to utopian speculations, recall these words by Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786) that summarize some reluctance in the air at floating abstractions, 'If I wished to punish a province, I would have it governed by philosophers'. The king argued by these words against the liberal-minded view of Enlightenment philosophers, among which Rousseau's concept of general will or Kant's project of perpetual peace. At the same time, it should be noted that not every philosopher is a liberal thinker. Think about Hobbes' republican absolutism, or Heidegger's fascination for the Third Reich. Notwithstanding a common opinion of the effect that philosophy distorts reality, I would reply that the present paper aims at a philosophy for IR rather than a theory of IR Globalistics and Globalization Studies 52 for philosophers. In short, the point is not to give a prescriptive view of what IR should be but, rather, to think speculatively about what IR might be, without any definite answer and by means of proper interrogative methods. Accordingly, philosophy is not to be taken as a field of ideologists or idealists opposed to the so-called 'internationalists', that is the theorists of IR whose favored domain would be the field of action and pragmatics. There are two main objectives of the next sections: to break with this shared view and to show how both domains are interrelated. Logic (how?) Finally, the third domain is the logic of IR: How to account for the sort of relation R between the relata a, b in R(a, b)? Against a positivist stance that claims to penetrate reality and its facts with one-sided answers, the primary role I impute to questions in the very process of a theory leads to a 'logic of IR' in a larger sense of the word, that is a guess-who game, where a variety of questions makes sense of political events without giving a final answer to the question how the world politics is ruled. While this method has already been applied in other contexts by means of a so-called Question-Answer Semantics (see, e.g., Schang 2012), I suggest to organize the content of IR in the form of a qualitative model with coefficients (see Section 3). By doing so, a difference must be made between what is meant by a paradigm and an ideology (compare with the debate between Kuhn and Feyerabend about the legitimacy of natural science) and be able to overcome the oversimplifying dichotomy between philosophy (orating about morality) and politics (aiming at efficiency). In particular, such an enterprise amounts to a formalization of IR towards a continuist dynamics: enduring questions may lead to changing answers, in order to account for (giving a sense to) the theory of IR and its numerous '-isms' (realism, liberalism, neo-structuralism, culturalism, marxism, constructivism, and so on). In case of successful results, formal epistemology of IR has to clarify their technical parlance and numerous concepts related to the previous areas of ontology and epistemology. A sample of it is given by what the French internationalist Jean-Louis Martres said about his German fellow Alexander Wendt (who depicts himself as a 'constructivist' or second-rank theorist, strives to establish the identity of neo-liberal and neo-realist views, both relying upon an 'ontological atomism and an epistemological positivism'); in short, Martres blames both neo-liberal and neo-realist theories for reifying instances, whether the agent, the state, or the world system (Martres 2008: 34). Let us review in detail the way in which IR can be characterized in its foundations and prospects. 1. The Object: State vs Country Let us consider again the primary question: what is the object of IR? The traditional answer is state-centrism, according to which the IR deals with nothing but states since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). In the same vein, the French politologist Raymond Aron (1905–1983) depicted IR as the set of relations between states that are endowed with the monopoly of legitimate physical violence (for external war and inner repression). This means that political relations are uniquely about states, insofar as these rule armies and are entitled to declare war against foreign powers. The American internationalist Kenneth Waltz (1924–2013) summed up this classical view by a reductio argument, 'For what can act on the international scene, if not states?' Schang • Making Sense of History? 53 In contradistinction to such a mainstream approach, I want to formulate a plea for political pluralism which is an alternative view stating that IR is not so much about states or even nations than countries, so to a wide extent it is the agents that matter. Thus, the English Susan Strange was depicted as blaming the abuse of state-centrism in political science: Being exclusively interested in the state (state-centrism) is oversimplifying and leads to develop a conception of political science that does not help understand human condition and does not take into account the various entities having an economic and political power (Tooze 2001: 103). Borrowing from an analogy of the American philosopher Willard van Orman Quine, countries are not homogenous entities but, rather, force fields composed of contradictory forces. They include military forces (states), but also economic forces (multinational firms, transnational holdings, lobbies) and social movements (undergrounds organizations, ethnic minorities, leagues of civil rights). To manage these contradictory forces and ensure their foreign policy, states have to do with such 'inner enemies' to maintain their coercive force and attempt to legitimate what Aron referred to as the monopoly of physical violence. While state-centrism assumes that states are the only efficient forces in IR, the aforementioned counter-forces often occur from the public opinion, especially medias. And conversely, a more comprehensive approach to IR should take into account the influential role of medias over mass beliefs: sometimes medias serve as a public weapon against the state policy; sometimes the states employ them to turn public opinion into a general will. It results in a two-fold behavior, that is to construct an official propaganda of state-nations or to provoke a reaction of public opinion against the state's action. The role of propaganda corroborates a previous objection to the positivist belief in bare facts, insofar as the power of mass media constructs a collective picture of reality beyond its duty to tell the truth to educated people. Concerning the very nature of the relata a,b in the general scheme R(a,b) embedding IR, a difference is to be made between state, nation, and country. Just as a state organizes the inner policy in a country, a nation means a homogeneous set of people ruled by a state (state-nation) whereas a country is the spatial territory on which a state rules its given nation. My emphasis upon countries thereby enlarges the scope of IR while avoiding to reify the state as a static representation of a standing nation. Instead of talking about such static elements, the general trend of the following goes towards a dynamic approach to countries as the proper relata of IR A balance is to be found between total order and total chaos, as argued by Martres, neglecting slyness removes the agent while favoring deep forces and trends; extolling the uniqueness of a phenomenon cancels any logicality to the system of international relations and leads to chaos. For this purpose, a reference to countries amounts to a set of moving forces whose interrelations are supposed to make sense of the worldwide history. Once the agents are identified (in a provisory way, at the very least), let us consider the nature of their relation in any foreign policy. What are they doing exactly that justifies the construction of a theory of IR? 2. The Relation: Force vs Power Here is the second question of our inquiry: Which sort of relation stands in IR? A brief overview of the origins helps to give a preliminary answer. Let us note indeed that the discipline has been founded to understand and warrant the conditions of peace between Globalistics and Globalization Studies 54 states; it has been created in 1919 by the Welsh sponsor David Davies, who supported the first professorship of international politics at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth. Despite this primary goal of stable peaceful relations between states exhausted by the First World War, the breakdown of the League of Nations and the subsequent the Second World War dramatically showed a patent failure of idealist optimism from the twenties onwards and led to the shared conclusion that international right, democracy, and free trade would not be sufficient conditions for peace. In this sense, the external anarchy between states marked the triumph of state-centrism and the related view that states are the only necessary organizations of human societies. This accounts for the fall of idealism and the rise of realism, given the historical context of the young discipline. A philosophical, more general assessment of the situation consists in saying that the theory of IR is nothing but a social science whose agents are naturally determined by human desires, including power. Thus, any realist would say that she/he aims at assessing the action of states through their essential search for power. Note that while the realists equate power with the aggressive or offensive way to satisfy one's own interests, such a concept is not as clear as it stands. As a matter of fact, power has more to do with the status of a political force than the conditions under which it can preserve it, assuming force as a physical aggression at the forefront. In a sense, the relation of cooperation may be also viewed as a single mode of power obtained with the help of other means within a set of peaceful relations. Nevertheless, power is usually viewed as a one-sided action used by a single state for its unilateral interest. If power corresponds to a general situation of satisfaction, however, its necessary and sufficient conditions are not given unanimously among the theorists. For the ones, power requires violence as the best defense of its own interests against the others' (Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Schmitt, and Huntington); for the others, it requires peace in order to ensure a standing and fruitful cooperation between potential partners (Rousseau, Kant, Fukuyama). Actually, the characterization of power depends on how mankind and societies are viewed from an anthropological perspective. No wonder if the historical context contributes to the answers, as witnessed by, for example, the role played by the bloody civil war of England on Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and his subsequent anthropological pessimism. Hence his words from the Leviathan (ch. XI), 'In the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceases only in death'. A similar description of mankind as a perpetual quest for maximizing power can be also found in the concepts of conatus (any effort to persist in being) by Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), or the concept of will of power ('Wille zur Macht') by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Between war and peace as preconditions for power, a primary dichotomy thereby occurred within the theory of IR between liberalism (or idealism) and realism. Marxism was introduced into IR only after the Second World War, to account for the economical relations between states. Whatever the answer given to the sources of power, each of these stands for a given paradigm, that is, a system of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality. The role of paradigms in the theoretical construction of IR was represented as follows: Etymologically speaking, 'paradigm' means 'declination' and, without altering the sense, we can accept the view that paradigm functions as a dogma; dogma from which the sense of the object at hand can be gathered (Martres 2008: 37). Schang • Making Sense of History? 55 Returning to the difference between a paradigm and an ideology, the former can be taken to be a set of interrelated implicit beliefs whereas the latter reduces all these beliefs to a central one (compare with the Marxist reduction of superstructures to the economic infrastructure of production modes). In both cases, the problem concerns the way to organize values and the criteria attached to their political relevance. What is to be favored between economical and military power, for instance? Starting from a binary opposition between idealism and realism, the theory of IR increasingly introduced more complex data to explain historical events: no black-or-white scenario between either total war or total peace but, rather, a pale gray lore of interrelations between different agents and their common environment. A large literature on IR attempts to inject some rationality behind these international facts, while attempting to justify their own paradigms at hand. Let us go through a list of such theorists and their main assumptions. In response to the failure of British idealism, the American realist Hans Morgenthau supported a classical realism by advocating offensive power against the alleged threat of the Soviet Union. Then the complex evolution of the Cold War was paralleled by a general reflection about international regimes in the eighties and nineties, to do justice to the role of common objectives among the states through regular international institutions or general agreements. Although most of the theorists agree about the situation of anarchy between states (no higher authority rules them over and above their own sovereignty), the existence of regional or worldwide organizations (UNO, NATO, and the like) refined the notion of anarchy in three ways: in a Hobbesian (states are mutual enemies), Lockean (states are mutual rivals), or Kantian (states are mutual friends) sense of the word. By augmenting the binary opposition friend-enemy with a third intermediary term of rivalty (following Carl Schmitt in this respect), Kenneth Waltz took the logic of Lockean anarchy to be the prominent way to understand the contemporary history (Waltz 2003); it resulted in a so-called neorealism, or structural realism, that differs from the classical version by strengthening the role of economic relations towards the global task of sustaining power. In other words, realists and idealists are at odds as to the fundamental objectives of a state; nevertheless, they may agree about the way to achieve it as in the common objective of economic growth (among the liberal-minded defenders of idealism and the neorealists). For example, Robert Gilpin equally defends neo-realism by arguing that economy takes growing interest in coercive relations; while Andrew Moravcsik claims that the rational individual is prime and supports neo-liberalism against the realist assumption of state-centrism. But trading is at any rate the central factor that most of the international relations rely upon, whether in a competing or in a friendlier way. Given the increasing influence of commercial relations after the Second World War and the ensuing hegemony of the United States, a large network of interrelations has developed between the states until then. The upshot is a number of more or less cooperative agreements, thus favoring a global status quo around two blocks (Western vs. Eastern blocks) with economic pressures and nuclear weapons as their major arguments. Therefore, the history of the post-war world led to a number of more intricate paradigms beGlobalistics and Globalization Studies 56 tween the absolute relations of peace and war. On the one hand, the school of NeoMarxists (also known as dependency theory) emerged with Immanuel Wallerstein or Johan Galtung during the period of decolonization, rendering the American hegemony in terms of dominant centers and dominated peripheries. On the other hand, the development of information through mass media strengthened the role of public opinion in the collective decisions; it followed from it some impetus on soft constructivism and transnationalism. The former has been famously formulated by Alexander Wendt as follows, 'Anarchy is what states make of it', in order to turn the realists' negative connotation of anarchy into a more positive field of rational and responsible relations between states. The latter weakens the role of these states in the international relations, stressing upon the complex interdependence of collective institutions around the states like non-governmental organizations and economic firms. Joseph Nye described this globalized situation in terms of soft power, according to which the states try to defend their interests by means of cooptation rather than the classical coercion of hard power. Likewise, James Rosenau argued for a general situation of interstate or multi-centered sphere between interdependent states. Again, the binary opposition of peace and war has been muddled by the historical context of the postwar world: Bretton Woods, oil crisis and liberal values produced a multi-polar framework where rigid masters and servants turned into flexible sellers and clients. That is a sketchy (not exhaustive) overview of the paradigms in IR, from the idealist sources of the theory to its interdisciplinary stance. To put all of this in order, a question naturally arises: How many schools or paradigms can there be in the discipline? To answer this question requires a capacity to specify the sort of questions that make sense of such worldwide relations between states or broader decision groups: the more questions there should be to define the properties of foreign relations, the more paradigms there can be to assign a definite value to each of these and establish a resulting hierarchy between them. Note that such a debate already occurred within the 'Four Great Debates' of the theory of IR, concerning the opposition between traditional and behaviorists: Morton Kaplan advocated the use of quantitative methods to characterize the relations between states, whereas Hedley Bull blamed the latter for not taking the random character of human decisions into account. Between science and art, or determination and wisdom, a division occurred as to the role of exact sciences while some of the writers called for the knowledge of balance theory, game theory of complex systems to model international relations. Does it make sense to use formal tools into a social science, insofar as the latter primarily deals with agent's intentions? How to find room inside such a debate between positivists and post-positivists, in order to make of history without reducing it to a mechanist and continuous line? 3. The Value of the Relation: A Comparative Logic A general logic is to be found for the discipline, but not in the sense of explaining the occurrence of foreign relations by means of computing data. Rather, the point is to find a way to understand the reasons underlying any expected or unexpected relation between states or broader items like countries. For one thing, the theory of IR is naturally concerned with truth in two respects. It ought to respect the criteria of formal (or logical) truth as any normal science, insofar as science aims at truth by obeying criteria like consistency. Moreover, it is obviously conSchang • Making Sense of History? 57 cerned with material truth but should not access to it by a mere observation of allegedly bare facts: again, facts and interpretations cannot be disentangled in scientific theories. To discard the black-and-white picture of reality, Quine (1960: 374) noticed the point that 'The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. A pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention'. This means that one and the same political relation may take different meanings in different theories, that is depending upon the paradigm adopted to make sense of it. A way has been devised to go beyond the naïve distinction between facts and interpretations, thus referring to the Chinese Yixing that emerged during the Warring States Period (around 475–221 BC) for political motivations. Thus, it is easy to imagine, by resorting to the fundamental matrices of Chinese thought, the construction of a theory of international relations which, ignoring the Western binary distinction between Good and Evil, would give a much better account of the genuine sense of international politics (Martres 2008: 36). I see a connection between this Eastern reference and IR, since I developed elsewhere (see Schang 2011) a translation of the Yiking in the form of Boolean bitstrings that express the context-sensitive identity of any meaningful sources of information. In our present case, this purports to give a definite number of criteria to characterize the identity of context-sensitive countries within our globalized world. Consider a 'guess-who' game for IR, assuming that there is a finite number of maximally relevant questions to define the foreign relations between countries. Let us say that any yes-answer corresponds to an agreement, that is a friendly relation between two relata a and b, whereas any no-answer expresses a disagreement, that is an unfriendly relation between them. Four questions are meant to discriminate international relations between countries, viz. q1: 'military agreement?'; q2: 'economic agreement?'; q3: 'cultural agreement?'; q4: 'social agreement?'. The source of agreement between countries relates to what is investigated in geopolitics, and the previous questions represent a set of metaquestions to assess such relations. Indeed, any agreement between countries can be established by the existence of international alliances, whether military, economical, or even cultural: EU, NATO, NAFTA, Mercosur, and the like. It can also be obtained according to the compatibility of their political system (democracy, dictatorship, etc.), their population (ethnical, religious kinship), or their standard of living (employment, way of life, mentalities). Furthermore, the main import of paradigms is to establish a hierarchy between the previous domains included into the questions: the realists favor military over economic criterion; and the other way around for the liberals. In a context-sensitive process of identification, the relations are defined from a reference country to make sense of the answers. Following some previous works about the logic of opposition in Schang (2012), let us state that the logical value of a country varies according to this basic reference of a country. In the context of the Cold War, for example, the United States could be given as such a reference (or hegemonic) country. What are the foreign relations between the latter and other countries like Yugoslavia, the USSR, France, or Poland? Let '1' be the symbol of a yes-answer and '0' be a no-answer, this yields a set of logical values (an ordered set of answers A) to our preceding four questions: A(Yugoslavia) – 0100, A(USSR) – 0000, A(France) – 1110, and A(Poland) – 0010. Following the definition of the logical relations of opposition, any two countries are said to stand into a normal friendship if and only if they are subcontrary to each other – they have at last one common yes-answer, while they Globalistics and Globalization Studies 58 stand into a mere non-friendship (as either rivals or enemies) if and only if they are contradictory or even contrary to each other – they have no common yes-answer. How to make sense of the difference between contradiction and contrariety in IR, taking to be granted that such logical relations lead to a mutually hostile relation? Let us say that any two countries are mutual enemies whenever they are incompatible relata, and friends (allies) as compatible relata. Insofar as international relations are more dynamic than static processes, we can refer to a relation of political integration between a given country and a reference country whenever there are more yes-answers than no-answers between them; as to the relation of political assimilation, it means that there are only yes-answers (no distinction) between these. A political preference between countries can be stated as follows: any country a prefers b to c if and only if the logical value of b is less different with a's one than c's one is. A balance of power obtains within a set of related countries once these are balanced poles with equivalent forces (logical values). In accordance to the notion of hegemony, the assumed hierarchy within friendly groups can be determined by their power measurement. Thus, a country can be said to be strong according to a set of criteria. The military criterion includes army capacity, technical equipment, and nuclear force. The economic criterion relies upon features like selfsufficiency, or business resources (production, subsoil resources). The cultural criterion can be equated with cultural data like the religious or linguistic sources of a country. Finally, the social criterion refers to some inner harmony from base (public opinion) to tip (state). Now what is the hierarchy between these criteria themselves? It depends upon which paradigms are mentioned to order them, and a criterion for measurement can make use of coefficients in this respect (see Fig. 1). That is, the power of a country (superpower, average power, lower power) is characterized by the sum of its coefficients, and a reference country corresponds to any country such that its sum is maximal in a given pole (set of countries). To sum up, such a question-answer game results in a logic of IR that wants to account for the difference between enemies, rivals, and friends by more fine-grained relations than unique yesand no-answers. There are some advantages in such a game. On the one hand, no quantitative methods from natural science have been used in the preceding presentation. As a reply to postpositivists, this means that not any logical approach to the IR leads to mechanic equations. On the other hand, such an 'IR game' goes beyond the realist paradigm by taking into account the role of paradigms through the various coefficients assigned to each ordered question (definitional criterion of context-sensitive countries). There are some defects related to these political oppositions, however. Firstly, the number of questions required to individuate countries remains undetermined. Secondly, the logical calculus hinges upon paradigms which lead to a variable hierarchy of the criteria. Thirdly, there may be some interdependence between the given criteria of economy, culture, and social condition (following the statements of Marxists and constructivists). Fourthly, the amount of a given coefficient should be given by means of quantitative measurements after all; while it arguably corresponds to a quantity of efficient equipment in the military domains, any quantification of the cultural or social areas is a more troublesome affair. Schang • Making Sense of History? 59 Fig. 1. The criteria of power and their coefficients according to three main paradigms A number of technical challenges remain open within such a logic of IR and its foundations, accordingly. Let us quote three of these. Two of these are about the nature of foreign relations: Why need not 'the enemies of my enemies' be my friends (calculus of opposites)? How can a given country prefer a to b, b to c, but not a to c (compare with the socalled Condorcet's Paradox)? Another one is about the criterion of identity and unity between countries: what makes them politically differ, and how many questions are required to individuate them (so as to make them minimally distinct from each other)? 4. Conclusion and Prospects (So What?) Let us summarize the main statements of the present paper, before recalling its expected developments. a) The theory of IR is centered on countries, rather than states. b) It relies upon a variety of paradigms. These can be summarized in two main questions, namely: what the countries want above all, and how they proceed for this purpose. The variety of corresponding answers leads to a variety of paradigms, mostly based upon two core concepts: force (to be opposed to cooperation, and distinguished from the broader notion of power) and state. Thus, realism emphasizes the role of states to maximize the force of any homogeneous country; and conversely, liberals tamper the notion of power in the sense of a cooperative relation while sustaining the central role of states in the realm of international relations. c) No such paradigm normally prevails over the others, because IR is a social science. As a matter of fact, this sensibly differs from what is meant by a 'normal' science as any discipline which ought to change its theory after a scientific revolution: according to Thomas Kuhn's related works, the uniqueness of paradigms in natural science is warranted by the fact that the rule of consistency prevents several paradigms from ruling a given science at once. If so, then IR proceeds as a non-normal science accordingly. Realism Military EconomicalCultural Social Military Economical Cultural Social Economical Military Cultural Social Liberalism Neo-Marxism Globalistics and Globalization Studies 60 d) IR is an interdisciplinary social science requiring an investigation into human beliefs and intentions. Such a context-sensitive discipline must cope with randomness, thus leading to a set of unpredictable coefficients in the 'IR game'. Fig. 2. A diagram for IR through two main imports: force and state State + ● Realism ● Liberalism ● Neo-Marxism – + Force ● Constructivism ● Transnationalism – This formal epistemology of IR gives room for a number of prospects to implement its content. Three of these can be stated as follows. For one thing, the ontology of IR is based on countries, hence the need of a contemporary history of countries to characterize their relative identity and subsequent relations. Then, the role of opinions with respect to the construction of public opinions demands an investigation into mass media as belief formers; such is the task of a so-called mediology. Last, but not least, the crucial role of criteria to make sense of relations between dynamic countries assumes a preliminary analysis of paradigms in the theory of IR. References Martres, J.-L. 2008. De la nécessité d'une théorie des relations internationales (l'illusion paradigmatique). In Berges, M. (ed.), Penser les relations internationales (pp. 19–47). Paris: L'Harmattan. Quine, W. van O. 1960. Carnap and Logical Truth. Synthese 12: 350–374. Schang, F. 2012. Abstract Logic of Oppositions. Logic and Logical Philosophy 21: 415–438. Schang, F. 2011. An Arithmetization of Logical Oppositions. Paper presented at the World Congress LMPS. Nancy, July 19–26. Tooze, R. 2001. Susan Strange et l'économie politique internationale. L'Economie politique 10: 101–112. Waltz, K. 2003. Conversation with History. February, 10. URL: http://globetrotter.berkeley. edu/people3/Waltz/waltz-con0.html.