Isacoff 15 flows neg – they say we should focus on empirics but also theorize –the whole point of the K is that we recognize historical failures of securitization and make theories that are attached to reality – LS reads yellow

The well-known RCT scholars Shepsle and Bonchek humorously note that while it might not be “rocket science,” the study of politics should be scientific.46 Others, especially postmodernist critics, argue against the notion of political science and IR as science. A Deweyan pragmatist approach would suggest that this debate is not useful. By that, I mean that what IR is or is not is not nearly as important as what it achieves. So the question should not be whether IR is scientific, but rather, how scientific does it need to be to get the job done? To this, there are many answers, but I suggest a line of reasoning: the scientific method in the most general sense is useful in helping to explain how and why, all else equal, causal processes work. Put differently, if we want to know how and why some states go to war and others do not, it would be more useful—in the sense of getting logically coherent, empirically verifiable answers—to analyze historical cases systematically than it would be to consult with a shaman or use a crystal ball to obtain an answer. This is not say that there is not an important role for textual interpretation in the process of studying war and other international phenomena. Indeed, I elsewhere argue that interpretation of historical texts is crucial to making valid claims about wars.47 But the main point here is that interpretation is a means toward an end, namely, the process of coping with the world via human experience. Toward that end, interpretation is necessary and useful, but it is not the end itself. A second point is that there is clearly a pragmatic and justifiable need for certain types of quantitative methods, namely, statistics, though not necessarily formal models, in some segments of IR. Taking a simple example for illustrative purposes, if one wished to study the effect of speed limits on motor vehicle fatalities, the use of aggregate data statistically analyzed would be far superior to standing on the corner waiting for an accident to observe or reading several diary accounts of individual accidents. The key point here, however, is not that statistical methods are inherently better, or more “rigorous” than any other type of method. Rather, the use of statistically analyzed data to find answers to problems of highway fatalities creates knowledge that if properly applied, would alleviate “concrete human woes,” which is to say it would help to save lives. That is pragmatic political science.48 What Is a Problem? Many political scientists believe in the idea of having a “problem orientation” for the field. For example, Atul Kohli asserts that there is a strong consensus among leading experts “that comparative politics is very much a problem-driven field of study.” “What motivates the best comparative politics research are puzzles of real-world significance,” writes Kohli, in “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics: A Symposium.”49 Similarly, Ian Shapiro, responding to the question of what would be a better alternative than RCT asks the question: “What is the phenomenon to be explained?… The formulation of alternative explanations, in other words, should be a problem-driven activity.”50 This is clearly consistent with Deweyan pragmatism; in fact, it is inherently pragmatist. “A Deweyan pragmatic approach to political inquiry,” writes Maurice Meilleur, “would transform political science from a discipline, based on a set of methods, into a profession, based on a set of problems.”51 But what, more specifically, is a “problem orientation?” First, it is clear that Kohli and his colleagues mean an empirically driven problem orientation. That is, the study of politics should be driven by empirical, not theoretical or methodological problems. Careful not to push this point too far, a Deweyan pragmatist would suggest that theorization is an important activity, but it must not lose its link to problems of human experience, which is to say empirical problems. However, Kohli and others advocating an empirically driven problem orientation have little to say about how to identify and value problems. After all, there is a limitless supply of political problems only a fraction of which can be studied. In response, I would argue that some problems are more significant to the detection and response to human suffering and thus more deserving of study, than others. This is itself a tricky ethical problem, for who is to say what is or is not a “real problem?” One reader of this manuscript suggested that “What is really going on here, when one scratches the analytical surface, is not that IR theorists aren't discussing problems; it's that they are discussing problems that the author does not feel are worthy of attention. But why should we accept that the author's “problems” are more important or privileged? Why does the author get to decide what a “real” problem is?” This is a good question but it is a misreading of the argument. Nowhere does Dewey or this author imply that any individual could or should decide or dictate which problems matter and which do not. To the contrary, the question of “who decides” is a public deliberation problem, a subject Dewey addressed exhaustively in his classic The Public and Its Problems.52 According to Dewey, problems are the direct outcome of a public's determination of its common good. A full analysis of how this works, or in some cases, fails to work in practice is beyond the scope of this article. But it is important to note that there is no argument here for the privileging of one private individual's notion of what constitutions “real problem” versus that of another. That is for the public to decide. Human Woe and Issues That Matter The final point to be made about reconstruction stems directly from the previous discussion: some problems matter more than others with regard to the alleviation of concrete human suffering. Which issues matter the most in our world? Ultimately, per Dewey's political philosophy touched on above, that is for the public to decide. Assuming that there ever could be a “common good,” we can hypothesize that people might choose to focus on issues that affect them daily, issues such as climate change, poverty, health care, education, racism, and sexism, as well as war and peace, all issues that are of grave importance to humanity. IR, especially in its American form, with its disproportionate emphasis on global security and great power war, has given scant attention to too many other issues, and when attention is given to the “lesser” topics, they are relegated to sub-sub-specializations within the discipline, “Gender and IR,” for instance. More problematic from the standpoint of pragmatism, the approach-driven wing of the discipline is more concerned with which paradigm has scored more points in the epic contest for paradigmatic supremacy than with the matter of how the world could or should respond to climate change or why hundreds of million of children lack basic nutrition and medical care. The interpretivist/linguistic wing, in contrast, is more concerned with how texts are interpreted in graduate seminars than with the fact that children in inner cities cannot even read a text at all.53 Many IR scholars are still fighting over whether and to what extent “unit-level variables” should be taken into consideration in understanding international politics (and if so, whether one might still rightly be accepted in the club of realism).54 Others are trying to demonstrate that IR constructivism is really “liberalism in disguise.”55 This is not a stab at “why realism is (yet again) wrong.” It is a critique of the self-definitionally obsessed, paradigm-driven culture of academic IR. I would not go so far as to claim that there are no scholars who study everyday politics; many clearly do.56 Rather, the problem is that that the incentive structure to contribute to the “big debates” of the discipline, namely, those at the paradigmatic level, is a project that drifts ever afar from the problems of “concrete human woe” that affect the other millions of people who happen