Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics
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Adolf Hitler
Analogy
Appeasement
Artificial world
Assassination
Bias
Calculation
Case study
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Causality
Cellular automaton
Cognitive bias
Complex adaptive system
Consequent
Contingency (philosophy)
Cosmological argument
Counterfactual conditional
Counterfactual history
Counterfactual thinking
Daniel Kahneman
Decision-making
Democratic peace theory
Determinant
Emergence
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eq_history
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eq_isMigrated=2
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Estimation
Explanation
Forecasting
Foreign policy
Hypothesis
Ideology
Inference
Instance (computer science)
International relations
Literature
Logic
Methodology
Mohammad Mosaddegh
Nikita Khrushchev
Nuclear warfare
Nuclear weapon
Occam's razor
Philosopher
Philosophy of science
Policy debate
Political science
Politician
Politics
Possible world
Prediction
Princeton University Press
Principle
Probability
Reason
Result
School of thought
Simulation
Skepticism
Social science
Soviet Union
Stalinism
Statistical hypothesis testing
Suggestion
Superiority (short story)
Theory
Theory of International Politics
Thought
Thought experiment
Uncertainty
War
World War I
World War II
Product details
- ISBN 9780691027913
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 08 Sep 1996
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Philip E. Tetlock is Harold E. Burtt Professor of Psychology and Political Science at the Ohio State University. He is coeditor of Psychology and Social Policy and coauthor of Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology. Aaron Belkin is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley.
