Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics

Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics
Author: Philip E. Tetlock
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 1996-09-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780691027913

Political scientists often ask themselves what might have been if history had unfolded differently: if Stalin had been ousted as General Party Secretary or if the United States had not dropped the bomb on Japan. Although scholars sometimes scoff at applying hypothetical reasoning to world politics, the contributors to this volume--including James Fearon, Richard Lebow, Margaret Levi, Bruce Russett, and Barry Weingast--find such counterfactual conjectures not only useful, but necessary for drawing causal inferences from historical data. Given the importance of counterfactuals, it is perhaps surprising that we lack standards for evaluating them. To fill this gap, Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin propose a set of criteria for distinguishing plausible from implausible counterfactual conjectures across a wide range of applications. The contributors to this volume make use of these and other criteria to evaluate counterfactuals that emerge in diverse methodological contexts including comparative case studies, game theory, and statistical analysis. Taken together, these essays go a long way toward establishing a more nuanced and rigorous framework for assessing counterfactual arguments about world politics in particular and about the social sciences more broadly.

Forbidden Fruit

Forbidden Fruit
Author: Richard Ned Lebow
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2010-02-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691132909

Could World War I have been averted if Franz Ferdinand and his wife hadn't been murdered by Serbian nationalists in 1914? What if Ronald Reagan had been killed by Hinckley's bullet? Would the Cold War have ended as it did? In Forbidden Fruit, Richard Ned Lebow develops protocols for conducting robust counterfactual thought experiments and uses them to probe the causes and contingency of transformative international developments like World War I and the end of the Cold War. He uses experiments, surveys, and a short story to explore why policymakers, historians, and international relations scholars are so resistant to the contingency and indeterminism inherent in open-ended, nonlinear systems. Most controversially, Lebow argues that the difference between counterfactual and so-called factual arguments is misleading, as both can be evidence-rich and logically persuasive. A must-read for social scientists, Forbidden Fruit also examines the binary between fact and fiction and the use of counterfactuals in fictional works like Philip Roth's The Plot Against America to understand complex causation and its implications for who we are and what we think makes the social world work.

Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics

Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics
Author: Philip E. Tetlock
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2020-06-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691215073

Political scientists often ask themselves what might have been if history had unfolded differently: if Stalin had been ousted as General Party Secretary or if the United States had not dropped the bomb on Japan. Although scholars sometimes scoff at applying hypothetical reasoning to world politics, the contributors to this volume--including James Fearon, Richard Lebow, Margaret Levi, Bruce Russett, and Barry Weingast--find such counterfactual conjectures not only useful, but necessary for drawing causal inferences from historical data. Given the importance of counterfactuals, it is perhaps surprising that we lack standards for evaluating them. To fill this gap, Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin propose a set of criteria for distinguishing plausible from implausible counterfactual conjectures across a wide range of applications. The contributors to this volume make use of these and other criteria to evaluate counterfactuals that emerge in diverse methodological contexts including comparative case studies, game theory, and statistical analysis. Taken together, these essays go a long way toward establishing a more nuanced and rigorous framework for assessing counterfactual arguments about world politics in particular and about the social sciences more broadly.

Unmaking the West

Unmaking the West
Author: Philip Eyrikson Tetlock
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780472031436

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Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts

Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2011-06-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004201777

During the last decades of the twentieth century highly imaginative thought experiments were introduced in philosophy: Searle’s Chinese room, variations on the Brain-in-a-vat, Thomson’s violinist. At the same time historians of philosophy and science claimed the title of thought experiment for almost any argument: Descartes’ evil genius, Buridan’s ass, Gyges’ ring. In the early 1990s a systematic debate began concerning the epistemological status of thought experiments. The essays in this volume are an outcome of this debate. They were guided by the idea that, since we cannot forge a strict definition of thought experiments, we should at least tame the contemporary wild usage of this notion by analysing thought experiments from various periods, and thus clarify how they work, what their limits are, and what their conceptualisation could be. Medieval and Early Modern Science, 15

The Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking

The Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking
Author: David R. Mandel
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2005
Genre: Counterfactuals (Logic).
ISBN: 0415322413

Brings together a collection of papers by social and cognitive psychologists. The essays in this volume contain theoretical insights. This book provides an overview of this topic for researchers, as well as advanced undergraduates and graduates in psychology.

Expert Political Judgment

Expert Political Judgment
Author: Philip E. Tetlock
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2017-08-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1400888816

Since its original publication, Expert Political Judgment by New York Times bestselling author Philip Tetlock has established itself as a contemporary classic in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. Tetlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict the future. He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields, comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the fox--the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events--is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems. He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits--the single-minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat. Clearly written and impeccably researched, the book fills a huge void in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. It will appeal across many academic disciplines as well as to corporations seeking to develop standards for judging expert decision-making. Now with a new preface in which Tetlock discusses the latest research in the field, the book explores what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events and looks at why experts are often wrong in their forecasts.

Counterfactual Reasoning

Counterfactual Reasoning
Author: Ph D. Noel Hendrickson
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 87
Release: 2011-09-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1105055639

Counterfactual reasoning evaluates conditional claims about alternate possibilities and their consequences (i.e., ?What If? statements). Counterfactuals are essential to intelligence analysis. The process of counterfactual reasoning has three stages. First, one must establish the particular way in which the alternate possibility comes to be (i.e., develop its ?back-story?). Second, one must evaluate the events that occur between the time of the alternate possibility and the time for which one is considering its consequences. And third, one must examine the possible consequences of the alternate possibility's back-story and the events that follow it. In doing so, an analyst must connect conclusions to speci

Reasoning and Choice

Reasoning and Choice
Author: Paul M. Sniderman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 1991
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780521407700

A major new theoretical explanation of how ordinary people decide what to favour and what to oppose politically.

What Might Have Been

What Might Have Been
Author: Neal J. Roese
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2014-01-14
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317780469

Within a few short years, research on counterfactual thinking has mushroomed, establishing itself as one of the signature domains within social psychology. Counterfactuals are thoughts of what might have been, of possible past outcomes that could have taken place. Counterfactuals and their implications for perceptions of time and causality have long fascinated philosophers, but only recently have social psychologists made them the focus of empirical inquiry. Following the publication of Kahneman and Tversky's seminal 1982 paper, a burgeoning literature has implicated counterfactual thinking in such diverse judgments as causation, blame, prediction, and suspicion; in such emotional experiences as regret, elation, disappointment and sympathy; and also in achievement, coping, and intergroup bias. But how do such thoughts come about? What are the mechanisms underlying their operation? How do their consequences benefit, or harm, the individual? When is their generation spontaneous and when is it strategic? This volume explores these and other numerous issues by assembling contributions from the most active researchers in this rapidly expanding subfield of social psychology. Each chapter provides an in-depth exploration of a particular conceptual facet of counterfactual thinking, reviewing previous work, describing ongoing, cutting-edge research, and offering novel theoretical analysis and synthesis. As the first edited volume to bring together the many threads of research and theory on counterfactual thinking, this book promises to be a source of insight and inspiration for years to come.