What's the Hubbub, Bub?: On the Natural and Social Sciences and Why IR Is More Complex than Quantum

In this concluding chapter, rather than revisit the core arguments and concepts of this book, I'd like to instead situate them and this project as a whole within some emerging debates in the field of International Relations (IR) around engagement between the social and natural sciences. Such debates have, of course, come and gone in all of the social sciences over the past century. But the emerging debates in IR now are different in a way and I believe this book has something to add to them. Throughout this book I've attempted to speak broadly to the social sciences and perhaps much of what I have to say here may be equally as valuable in other fields. The advent of Quantum IR (QIRQuantum IR (QIR)), regardless of its flaws, has, however, spawned considerable debate in my own field about this topic and in a manner quite distinct from past debates over science and the social world, which revolved primarily around methodological issues with positivismPositivism as a stand in for what we take ‘science’ to be. Despite my criticisms of QIR so far—and those yet to come—, and my concerns over a quantum social theoryQuantum social theory generally, this quantum turn has done one unquestionably good thing: it has begun reorienting debate about the place of the natural sciences in the social sciences away from these old and questionable methodological discussions towards potentially more productive ontological and theoretical ones.