Abstract
This chapter argues that the concept of retroduction, as distinct from induction and deduction, can be developed to frame the methodological implications of anti-essentialist approaches to social science research. Although prominent in debates over how best to understand the production of theories in the natural sciences, the concept of retroduction is also relevant to a set of debates in the philosophy of social science. In particular, we argue that it can support a post-positivist picture of the study of social and political phenomena. Drawing on Reichenbach’s distinction between ‘context of discovery’ and ‘context of justification’, the chapter develops the idea of a ‘retroductive cycle’ as a meta-methodological logic within which to understand the research process in poststructuralist discourse analysis and critical empirical research more generally.
This essay draws on and develops key aspects of Chaps. 1 and 6 in Glynos and Howarth (2007).
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Notes
- 1.
For a useful critical and clarificatory note on Peirce and retroduction, see Frankfurt (1958).
- 2.
The openness and fragile character of the social world, however, does not entail abandoning the explanatory aims of social science. An emphasis on possibility, as opposed to probability, makes it possible to disarticulate prediction from explanation. For this reason, scholars such as Bhaskar affirm the aims of social science to ‘be explanatory and non-predictive. (Particularly important here will be the capacity of a theory (or research program) to be developed in a non-ad hoc way so as to situate, and preferably explain, without strain, a possibility once (and perhaps even before) it is realized, when it could never, given the openness of the social world, have predicted it.)’ (Bhaskar 1998: 46).
- 3.
As far as this essay is concerned, we are agnostic as to whether the stark separation between contexts of discovery and justification is sustainable even in the natural sciences. Our argument does not rely on this. Our argument takes as its target a particular image of doing natural science that is deployed rather rigidly to frame our understanding of social science practice, irrespective of whether this image stands up to scrutiny. We have adduced reasons about why this image is not appropriate when applied to the social sciences, but this does not preclude the possibility of adducing reasons that contest the suitability of this image even for characterizing natural science practice, particularly when one considers how heterogeneous and expansive this field is, extending well-beyond Newtonian physics as the stereotypical image of natural science.
- 4.
In our book, we conceptualize the cycle in terms of a meta-methodological logic comprising three overdetermined activities: problematizing empirical phenomena, accounting for these phenomena, and persuading—and/or intervening into—the relevant community and practices of scholars and practitioners. Thus, the practices of persuasion cannot—except heuristically—stand outside the retroductive cycle (cf. Glynos and Howarth 2007: Chap. 1).
- 5.
The idea of ‘retroductive cycle’ differs from the notion of a ‘hermeneutic circle’ (cf. Shklar 2004[1986]) in a number of important respects. First, the term cycle, as opposed to circle, emphasizes how each moment of relative equilibrium reached in the to-and-fro movement of retroduction is always a ‘return’ to a different point, thus pointing to an inherent openness in the process. A ‘hermeneutical circle’, in contrast, can sometimes carry with it the connotation of a closed or asymptotically ‘final’ or ‘correct’ interpretive fit between text and context. Second, the qualifier ‘retroductive’, at least as we have adapted it to a social science context, explicitly links hypothesis to problematization and persuasion, foregrounding the role played by ontology and subjectivity, often underemphasized when thinking about interpretation predominantly in terms of the relation between text and context. Finally, the idea of a ‘retroductive cycle’ aspires to capture a process that is not exclusive to those found in the hermeneutical tradition, but whose scope of application is relevant also for other traditions of thought in social science that are critical of the causal law paradigm, including critical realist and poststructuralist traditions.
- 6.
The concept of articulation is a crucial concept in poststructuralist discourse theory. Although it plays an important role in understanding the logic of the retroductive cycle, this has not been developed in detail in this chapter, largely due to space limitations. (See Glynos and Howarth 2007: Chap. 6 for a detailed treatment of this concept.)
- 7.
A post-positivist understanding of testing can, of course, incorporate experimental, statistical, and other mathematical techniques normally associated with natural science practice. It simply does not assign these methodological techniques any presumptive epistemological privilege that somehow allows them to ‘escape’ the orbit of the retroductive cycle (cf. Topper 2005: 192–4).
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Glynos, J., Howarth, D. (2019). The Retroductive Cycle: The Research Process in Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis. In: Marttila, T. (eds) Discourse, Culture and Organization. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94123-3_5
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