I’m in the Netherlands to give a paper tomorrow to the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs at Leiden University (at their campus in Den Haag/The Hague).
Because the audience will mainly be empiricists, I’m talking about what political theorists can learn from political science (and a bit of the reverse).
The first part of the talk will summarise my past work on history of political thought. In five articles and book chapters, I’ve implicitly or explicitly argued that much textual interpretation can benefit from scientific ideas.
The second part of the talk is more speculative, as it’s on something I’ve only been working on for a few weeks (although I’ve taught the key idea for nearly a decade). I’m going to extend France’s Kamm’s insight about normative thought experiments being like scientific experiments, and see what else we can take from the analogy.
Assuming the ideas about thought experiments are not demolished tomorrow, I’ll be giving a more polished version of this argument at APSA in Philadelphia and ECPR in Prague in September.
ey insight was that we can easily be the slaves of an idea of causation if we do not think about ideas of causation – and that means ideas, plural. There are several different ideas of causation, each of which has weaknesses. And different social-science methods sometimes use different ideas of causation. If we knew more about different ideas of causation, we might not be so quick to reject some social-science methods.
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