Back-To-Back Review: Ontological Investigations

Published date01 September 2008
Date01 September 2008
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0010836708092840
Subject MatterArticles
With this issue of Cooperation and Conflict we have introduced a new for-
mat for Book Reviews. In back-to-back reviews, authors of two recent
books review each other’s work and discuss issues raised in the books and
reviews. Patrick Jackson, with whom the original idea was invented, and
Colin Wight are a perfect duo for the first presentation, sharing enough
common ground to have a fruitful dialogue but disagreeing sufficiently to
make the debate interesting and stimulating. Readers are encouraged to
contact the Journal with ideas for dialogues to appear in forthcoming issues.
MATTI JUTILA
Review Editor
BACK-TO-BACK REVIEW
Ontological Investigations
PATRICK THADDEUS JACKSON
Colin Wight, Agents, Structures, and International Relations. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006,340 pp. ISBN 0 521 67416 6.
‘Ontological Investigations’ should have been the title of Colin Wight’s
remarkable book, which is the most systematic and thorough-going presen-
tation of a scientific or critical realist account of social life that we have yet
seen in print. Wight’s book is also among the most accessible realist works
around, presuming very little philosophical background on the part of the
reader while still managing to both flesh out varying social ontologies and
‘to examine the epistemological and methodological consequences associ-
ated with differing ontological accounts of structure and agency’ (p. 8).
Wight’s book is an important piece of social theory, and one of the few
works in the field in recent years to really undertake a sustained investiga-
tion of the most basic assumptions shaping our empirical and theoretical
scholarship about social life — including, but not limited to,global politics.
In the book, Wight is interested in two different kinds of ontology: philo-
sophical ontology, which concerns the relationship between the researcher
and the world, and scientific ontology, which concerns the catalogue of things
that are taken to exist and hence available to serve as objects of scholarly
research (Patomäki and Wight,2000). Philosophically,he seeks to justify ‘the
belief in non-observable causal mechanisms’ (p. 22) on the basis of the claim
Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of the Nordic International Studies Association
Vol.43(3): 341–360. © NISA 2008 www.nisanet.org
SAGE Publications,Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore
www.sagepublications.com
0010-8367. DOI: 10.1177/0010836708092840

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