Poking counterfactual holes in covering lwas : cogninitive styles and historical reasoning
By: TETLOCK, Philip E
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Contributor(s): LEBOW, Richard Ned.
Material type: 
ArticlePublisher: 2001American Political Science Review 95, 4, p. 829-844Abstract: We report a series of studies of historical reasoning among professional observers of world politics. The correlational studies demonstrate that experts with strong theoretical commitments to a covering law and cognitive-stylistic preferences for explanatory closure are more likely to reject close-call counterfactuals that imply that "already explained" historical outcomes could easily have taken radically different forms. The experimental studies suggest that counterfactual reasoning is not totally theory-driven: many experts are capable of surprisin themselve when encourage to imagne the implications of particular what-if scnearios. Yet, there is a downside to openness to historical contigency. The more effort expert allocate to exploring counterfactual worlds, the greater is the risk that they will assign too much subjective probability to too many scenarios. We close by defining good judgment as a reflective-equilibrium process of balancing the conficting causual intuition primed by complementary factual and counterfactual posings of historical quetions
| Item type | Current location | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Periódico | Biblioteca Graciliano Ramos | Periódico | Not for loan |
We report a series of studies of historical reasoning among professional observers of world politics. The correlational studies demonstrate that experts with strong theoretical commitments to a covering law and cognitive-stylistic preferences for explanatory closure are more likely to reject close-call counterfactuals that imply that "already explained" historical outcomes could easily have taken radically different forms. The experimental studies suggest that counterfactual reasoning is not totally theory-driven: many experts are capable of surprisin themselve when encourage to imagne the implications of particular what-if scnearios. Yet, there is a downside to openness to historical contigency. The more effort expert allocate to exploring counterfactual worlds, the greater is the risk that they will assign too much subjective probability to too many scenarios. We close by defining good judgment as a reflective-equilibrium process of balancing the conficting causual intuition primed by complementary factual and counterfactual posings of historical quetions
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