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There are different scientifically valid ways to produce knowledge. The field of International Relations should pay attention to these methodological differences, and to their implications for research on world politics. This book offers an introduction to the philosophy of science issues and their implications for the study of global politics.

The West Pole fallacy -- The language of legitimation -- The topography of postwar debates -- The power of "Western civilization" -- Conflicts of interpretation, 1944-46 -- The turning point, 1947-48 -- Securing the new trajectory, 1949-55 -- The fate of 'Western civilization'

One of my pet peeves when watching televised sports is when the commentators declare that one or another player or team "has momentum" or that "the momentum has shifted." Typically, this statement is made shortly after a team or player does something that puts them in a better position to win the game, and the implication seems to be that this change in momentum will carry someone to victory. But there are at least two problems with this all-too-typical sportscaster pronouncement. One is that "momentum" is a mathematically well-defined notion in physics, where it means the mass of an object multiplied by its velocity; linear momentum is also a vector quantity, and has both a magnitude and a direction. It is this complexity that allows momentum and changes in momentum—in conjunction with an account of the various forces at work on the object—to explain the object's trajectory. A well-kicked football has momentum in the physics sense, but it is quite unclear how the "momentum" of a player or a team might be calculated, to say nothing of the various forces at work on the player or team's movement through the playing of a game. Hence both the determination of a player or team's "momentum," and the use of that "momentum" in explaining or predicting the outcome of a game, necessarily remain at the level of metaphor.

William Bain's book does a brilliant job excavating some key conceptual underpinnings of our contemporary discussions about order, but he has perhaps underplayed the importance of nominalism in structuring our present.

C. A. W. Manning was an important figure in the early days of what became known as the English School, and was one of the most philosophically explicit articulators of the interpretivist approach that informed that branch of scholarship. He was also a defender of the apartheid system of his native South Africa. A close examination of his work reveals both the promises and the pitfalls of a methodologically interpretive approach to explanation. An interpretive explanation involves developing the capacity in the listener to "go on" appropriately, and this makes criticizing the rules of the game somewhat difficult, but not impossible. A clearer understanding of what an interpretive explanation is may very well help us to avoid the pitfalls illustrated by Manning's advocacy, which I argue is made possible by a category confusion that remains very much with us: a confusion between delineating the rules of a given domain, and actively advocating or defending those principles.

To lay my cards on the table at the outset: I am broadly sympathetic to Frederic Schaffer's overall campaign in favor of conceptual elucidation: "investigating the ways in which the social world is built up linguistically and the ways in which social actors deploy concepts to pursue their goals." On numerous previous occasions I have been, like Schaffer, decidedly critical of scholarly efforts to "fix" the meaning of a concept (like the West or civilization) and then to use that scholarly reconstruction as a base from which to legislate appropriate and inappropriate practical claims using that concept—as though our task as scholars were to correct the social world rather than to explain and understand it. So Schaffer's careful explication of techniques for elucidation, grouped under the headings of "grounding," "locating," and "exposing," provides a refreshing alternative to the sort of advice about concept analysis one typically receives from scholars engaged in the kind of project I think rather problematic.

To lay my cards on the table at the outset: I am broadly sympathetic to Frederic Schaffer's overall campaign in favor of conceptual elucidation: "investigating the ways in which the social world is built up linguistically and the ways in which social actors deploy concepts to pursue their goals." On numerous previous occasions I have been, like Schaffer, decidedly critical of scholarly efforts to "fix" the meaning of a concept (like the West or civilization) and then to use that scholarly reconstruction as a base from which to legislate appropriate and inappropriate practical claims using that concept—as though our task as scholars were to correct the social world rather than to explain and understand it. So Schaffer's careful explication of techniques for elucidation, grouped under the headings of "grounding," "locating," and "exposing," provides a refreshing alternative to the sort of advice about concept analysis one typically receives from scholars engaged in the kind of project I think rather problematic.