264 ANALYZING DATA
264CHAPTER 14
MAKING SENSE OF MAKING SENSE
Configurational Analysis and the Double Hermeneutic
PATRICK THADDEUS JACKSON
September 1994. I’m in class—Introduction to International Relations, 6801—and the assigned
reading for the second week of the course is Designing Social Inquiry by King, Keohane, and
Verba. I have two distinct reactions, stemming from the two parts of my undergraduate back-
ground. The math major part of me is deeply concerned with how primitive the statistical models
in the book are. (Linear equations? If there are equations governing social life, they must be
nonlinear at the very least, if not chaotic.) The philosophy and literary theory part of me is struck
by the absence of any sustained philosophical reflection in the book, and by the authors’ charm-
ing naiveté in declaring that they were interested in “causal inference”—as though this cleared
anything up. And then there was their rather odd use of counterfactuals....
As an undergraduate I had been pulled in two directions—directions that didn’t seem incom-
patible to me most of the time, but that was largely because I compartmentalized them and didn’t
really think about them as somehow informing one another. I was pursuing programs in interna-
tional relations (IR) and mathematics, since those seemed to capture the two things in which I
was most interested: social relations (especially on a global level) and logical computations. I’d
been interested in both for as long as I can remember, filling out the classic stereotype of the
computer geek who spent more time observing his classmates than interacting with them. In high
school I’d gotten very interested in political philosophy, and that was my entrée into the world of
social thought, which I read and discussed avidly when I wasn’t programming a computer or
learning about some puzzle in high-energy physics.
Parallel tracks. The first person who suggested to me that they might go together was my
undergraduate IR advisor, and he initially thought that I was interested in modeling international
interactions formally when he looked at the courses I was taking. Honestly, I had never thought
about it. After he posed this possibility I toyed with the idea, but then rejected it rather quickly
because of what seemed to me to be the obviously different philosophical bases on which the two
endeavors (mathematics and social theory) rested: Logic was certain in its own terms; social
theory was inescapably normative.
What really got me off of the mathematics track and confirmed my path as one involving social
theory, however, was a more specific revelation involving the Gödel Undecidability Theorem: the
demonstration that no logical system of finite axioms with sufficient power to capture processes
like basic arithmetic could ever be both complete and consistent at the same time. It was always
possible to find a moment of undecidability that would disrupt the system’s purity; but this meant