Violence and the Politics of Explanation: Kampuchea revisited[1]

ABSTRACT The criteria for adequate explanation have been the subject of intense debate in the philosophy of social science. This paper examines a variety of explanations of a decade of violence in Kampuchea in order to clarify the dimensions of the Kampuchean tragedy and to challenge both the hypothetico-deductive and the Verstehen models of explanation central to contemporary debates in the philosophy of social science. Using the Kampuchean case as an example, I suggest that the analyst's propensity to assimilate new information into a tacit, pre-supposition-laden conceptual framework contributes to an oversimplification or caricature of the event to be explained. For this reason, no individual explanation of an event can be definitive. An adequate explanation can emerge only from the juxtaposition of and extrapolation from multiple, non-privileged interpretations representing different methodological and ideological perspectives on the socio-political event to be explained.