The logico-formalist turn in comparative and case study methods: a critical realist critique

ABSTRACT

Comparative and case study researchers have responded to critiques of their methods by developing formal procedures to validate theoretical claims through set theoretical logics of causal conditions. This ‘logico-formalist turn’ has involved the stricter application of the schemas of set theory and the philosophy of logic to raise validation standards of theoretical and causal claims in comparative historical research. This paper critiques these solutions from a critical realist standpoint. It argues that the cost of such a defense has been the retention of positivist assumptions of causal inference and the downplaying of the importance of interpretive and theory-building work in comparative and case study research. By contrast, critical realism’s process of retroduction sees causal analysis not as proceeding inductively from empirical observation to causal proposition, but rather points out the constant epistemic shift from the level of empirical observation to that of the theoretical description of intransitive causal powers. The paper highlights the ways in which the meta-theoretical perspective of critical realism makes possible a full break with both positivism and the implicit empiricism of the logico-formalist turn.

KEYWORDS:

• Comparative methods
• case study methods
• critical realism
• set theory
• causality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this article, ‘empiricism’ is defined as any view of science that, following Hume, maintains the ultimate impossibility of causal knowledge, thereby limiting causal claims to laws of constant conjunction of empirically observable events. It is here contrasted with ‘realism’ (discussed below). ‘Positivism’ includes the assumption of empiricism but additionally prescribes protocols for hypothetico-deductive procedures for causal inference based on the formal falsifiability of empirical hypotheses.

2. Critical realists acknowledge that social science always risks generating theory effects, in that its conceptual interventions may come to generate their own effects on the organization of concept-dependent causal structures.

3. The matter can be expressed in the set-theoretical terms of logico-formalist CCSM. The difference between claims of necessity and sufficiency and an INUS claim is that while the former can treat condition (X) and an outcome (Y) as two distinct sets, the INUS claim involves four sets: in addition to outcome Y and condition X, sets Z and W. These two additional sets contain factors that are in theory necessary for X and sufficient for Y. Insofar as W can be eliminated as an explanation for Y (W is not present and cannot therefore be sufficient for Y), a can be claimed to be an INUS condition (cause) of Y insofar as a ɛ (Z∩X) and Y ɛ (Z∪X) (Z and X are both subsets of Y, because they share factors of necessity between them but jointly share a factor of sufficiency for Y).

4. The hermeneutical moment arguably involves problems of the meaningful constitution of social phenomena explored in great detail by social phenomenologists like Schutz (1970). These range from the basic objectivations and interpretive schemas used to reconstruct past phenomenal reality through the question, in the case of historical analysis, of perspective, i.e., the social positions out of which past social realities are reconstructed. Awareness of these complexities is a reminder against a naïve realist view of empiricism, i.e., of case studies as the pure ordering of ‘facts,’ thus leaving out the many layers of hermeneutical selection and interpretation that are unavoidable in the construction of observations of any kind.

5. Unsurprisingly, Beach and Pedersen (2013) see an affinity between Bhaskarian realism and the kind of ‘mechanismic ontology’ and Bayesian confidence testing they advocate for process-tracing analysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Besnik Pula

Besnik Pula is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Specializing in comparative-historical analysis, Besnik is the author of Globalization Under and After Socialism: The Evolution of Transnational Capital in Central and Eastern Europe (Stanford University Press, 2018) as well as numerous other studies in the political economy of communism and post-communism. His research experience spans methods from archival research to interviews to statistical analysis of survey and economic data. He has a long-standing interest in critical realism and its contributions to understandings of theory, method, and causal inference in the social sciences.