SEARCHING FOR SCIENCE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: INSIGHTS FROM CRITICAL REALISM

A serious academic debate in general, let alone on theoretical and methodological issues, is rare for both Western and Russian peer-reviewed journals. In the context of discussion, launched by a polemical article by a prominent Russian IR expert Alexey Fenenko, published in 2018 in the ‘International Trends’ journal, is more important and noteworthy. Nominally both this article and the subsequent responses from Denis Degterev, Igor Istomin, Andrey Baykov and Konstantin Khudoley focused on a long-running dispute between the proponents of quantitative and qualitative methods in IR studies. However, the true essence of this discussion, as well as its implications, goes far beyond a mere technical argument about methods. The present article examines this discussion as well as developments in contemporary IR theory through the lens of critical realism (CR). The first section considers the arguments of the discussants and shows that they tend to focus on secondary, technical issues leaving out the key subject of the dispute, i.e. how should international studies be organized in order to have a right to be called a science. In order to bring this issue back into the spotlight and to provide a new perspective on the issue, the second section considers the problem field of the contemporary IR theory from the viewpoint of CR. According to critical realists all predominant approaches in the mainstream IR theory are rooted in the Humean empiricism which to a large extent explains both epistemological and practical limitations of the contemporary IR studies. As an alternative, they advance the ideas of the founder of critical realism, British philosopher R. Bhaskar. The third section examines the key epistemological and ontological provisions of CR, which include the fundamental recognition of objective reality, existing prior to and beyond human activities, reality, which is stratified and differentiated. They also entail a specific perception of causality and of possible limits of cogniscibility and predictability of social phenomena. Nonetheless the article is far from a straightforward apology of critical realism. The fourth section identifies certain weaknesses of contemporary interpretations of CR in the context of IR theory, which include a static nature of their methodology and inconsistency of their implications. The author concludes that the major contribution of CR to the IR theory lies in providing a clear path for further research – that is development of materialist theories and approaches.

Phenomenal Causality and Sensory Realism

One of the most important tasks for humans is the attribution of causes and effects in all wakes of life. The first systematical study of visual perception of causality—often referred to as phenomenal causality—was done by Albert Michotte using his now well-known launching events paradigm. Launching events are the seeming collision and seeming transfer of movement between two objects—abstract, featureless stimuli (“objects”) in Michotte’s original experiments. Here, we study the relation between causal ratings for launching events in Michotte’s setting and launching collisions in a photorealistically computer-rendered setting. We presented launching events with differing temporal gaps, the same launching processes with photorealistic billiard balls, as well as photorealistic billiard balls with realistic motion dynamics, that is, an initial rebound of the first ball after collision and a short sliding phase of the second ball due to momentum and friction. We found that providing the normal launching stimulus with realistic visuals led to lower causal ratings, but realistic visuals together with realistic motion dynamics evoked higher ratings. Two-dimensional versus three-dimensional presentation, on the other hand, did not affect phenomenal causality. We discuss our results in terms of intuitive physics as well as cue conflict.

Sense of Agency in Multi-Step Actions

In our daily lives, we frequently execute actions that require several steps to bring about the outcome. However, investigations on how the sense of agency—the sense of controlling our actions and their outcomes—evolves in multi-step actions are still lacking. The purpose of the present research is to fill this gap. In the present study, the participants executed one-step, two-step, and three-step actions in which one, two, or three keys had to be pressed consecutively to generate a tone. We used sensory attenuation as an implicit measure of the sense of agency. Sensory attenuation means that self-produced sensory effects are perceived as less intense than externally generated effects. In the present experiment, sensory attenuation was measured in a psychophysical paradigm and increased in multi-step actions compared to the one-step action. We also asked the participants to explicitly rate the amount to which they felt that they had generated the tone. Ratings were highest in the one-step condition and dropped for multi-step actions, thus showing the opposite pattern of the sensory attenuation data. We assume that enhanced sensory attenuation in multi-step actions could be due to increased effort or more accurate sensorimotor predictions of action effects. The decrease in explicit ratings for multi-step actions might be attributed to reduced perception of causality.

Dynamic Glyphs: Appropriating Causality Perception in Multivariate Visual Analysis

We investigate how to co-opt the perception of causality to aid the analysis of multivariate data. We propose Dynamic Glyphs (DyGs), an animated extension to traditional glyphs. DyGs encode data relations through seemingly physical interactions between glyph parts. We hypothesize that this representation gives rise to impressions of causality, enabling observers to reason intuitively about complex, multivariate dynamics. In a crowdsourced experiment, participants' accuracy with DyGs exceeded or was comparable to non-animated alternatives. Moreover, participants showed a propensity to infer higher-dimensional relations with DyGs. Our findings suggest that visual causality can be an effective 'channel' for communicating complex data relations that are otherwise difficult to think about. We discuss the implications and highlight future research opportunities.

Comparing the aftereffects of motion and causality across visual co-ordinates

Albert Michotte (1946/1963) introduced causality into the realm of experimental phenomenology. He disputed Hume's (1739/1978) claim that the impression of causality comes only from conscious inference. Since then, causality adaptation studies have suggested that the visual perception of causality undergoes sensory adaptation, akin to the retinally-specific aftereffects of motion or orientation adaptation. Here we present 5 Experiments that, together, dispute a view of retinotopically-mapped neural populations dedicated to causality detection. We first point to key issues in previous studies of causality adaptation. Then we extend the basic causality adaptation paradigm to show that causality aftereffects occur in spatially global visual space. We directly compare causality aftereffects to the motion aftereffect to show important differences in their coordinate mapping. Our data point to a role for cognitive inferences as being an important aspect of causality aftereffects, despite causal impressions being tightly constrained by sensory perception.

The Moderating Effect of Mental Toughness: Perception of Risk and Belief in the Paranormal

This research demonstrates that higher levels of mental toughness provide cognitive-perceptual processing advantages when evaluating risk. No previous research, however, has examined mental toughness in relation to perception of risk and paranormal belief (a variable associated with distorted perception of causality and elevated levels of perceived risk). Accordingly, the present paper investigated relationships between these factors. A sample of 174 participants completed self-report measures assessing mental toughness, general perception of risk, and paranormal belief. Responses were analyzed via correlations and moderation analyses. Results revealed that mental toughness correlated negatively with perception of risk and paranormal belief, whereas paranormal belief correlated positively with perception of risk. For the moderation effects, simple slopes analyses indicated that high levels of MT and subfactors of commitment and confidence reduced the strength of association between paranormal belief and perceived risk. Therefore, MT potentially acts as a protective factor among individuals who believe in the paranormal, reducing the tendency to perceive elevated levels of risk.

The Experience of Will

This chapter talks about how the experience of will could be a result of the same mental processes that people use in the perception of causality more generally—this can be referred to as the theory of apparent mental causation. This means that people experience conscious will quite independently of any actual causal connection between their thoughts and their actions. Reductions in the impression that there is a link between thought and action may explain why people get a sense of involuntariness even for actions that are voluntary. Whereas inflated perceptions of the link between thought and action may, in turn, explain why people experience an illusion of conscious will at all.