Poking Counterfactual Holes in Covering Laws
Cognitive Styles and Historical Reasoning
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7597286 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Philip E Tetlock (0000-0002-6535-530X, The Ohio State University), Richard Ned Lebow (0000-0002-1972-141X, The Ohio State University) |
| Year | 2001 |
| Volume | 95 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 829-843 |
| Publication date | 2001-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Political Science Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-0554 • E-ISSN: 1537-5943 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0003055400400043 |
| OpenAlex | W2100808988 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 47 |
| References cited | 28 |
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 Counterfactual 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 surprising themselves when encouraged to imagine the implications of particular what-if scenarios. Yet, there is a downside to openness to historical contingency. The more effort experts 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 conflicting causal intuitions primed by complementary factual and counterfactual posings of historical questions
Cognition · Contingency · Counterfactual conditional · Counterfactual thinking · Defeasible estate · Economics · Epistemology · Motivated reasoning · Openness to experience · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Psychology · Qualitative Comparative Analysis Research · Social Psychology
Reason and Cause
Historical-Institutionalism in Political Science and the Problem of Change
Pride, Not Prejudice
Heuristics and Biases
Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism
Individual differences in reasoning
Representativeness Revisited
Hindsight Bias
Conceiving of Future War
Understanding the End of the Cold War as a Non-Linear Confluence
Critical review of the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses technique
Expert biases in technology foresight. Why they are a problem and how to mitigate them
Thinking Counterfactually Supports Children’s Evidence Evaluation in Causal Learning
Ambiguity and Self-Evaluation
The Affect Heuristic
The Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking
Managing Uncertainty in Crisis
Erasing the Brown Scare
From what might have been to what must have been
War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe
When do past events require explanation? Insights from social psychology
How experts think about counterfactuals in business history
Social institution, cognition, and survival
The Egyptian Revolution and the Politics of Histories
How good are your counterfactuals? Assessing quantitative macro-comparative welfare state research with qualitative criteria
Counterfactuals and the Study of the American Presidency
Risco epistêmico♦
Genealogy as a research tool in International Relations
From Prediction to Learning
Anti-risk epistemology and negative epistemic dependence
Justice Bork, or, be careful which supreme court nominees you choose to fight
Governing by Looking Back
The Future of Memory
When are leaders blamed for bad events that never happened? Partisanship and close counterfactual catastrophes
Thinking within the box
Cognitive Biases and the Strength of Political Arguments
Moving Beyond Pathology
If Mozart had Died at Your Age
Of Dominoes and Firewalls
When Can History Be Our Guide? The Pitfalls of Counterfactual Inference
The Micro-Foundations of International Relations Theory
Paradoxes of Democratic Accountability
Tetlock and Counterfactuals
President Al Gore and the 2003 Iraq War
Experiments and Surveys on Political Elites
The Growth and Development of Experimental Research in Political Science
Disasters as Crisis Triggers for Critical Junctures? The 1976 Guatemala Case
The Spread of Nuclear Weapons
That Noble Dream
Norm theory
Extensional versus intuitive reasoning
Motivated closing of the mind
Weighing risk and uncertainty.
Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays
Perception and Misperception in International Politics
Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics
Unmaking the West
The Hedgehog and the Fox
Close-call counterfactuals and belief-system defenses
Thinking in Time
Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science
Theory-Driven Reasoning About Plausible Pasts and Probable Futures in World Politics
Perceptual biases, affect, and behavior in the relationships of dependents and self-critics
On History and Philosophers of History
Hindsight
Explanation, imagination, and confidence in judgment
Contingency, Catalysts, and International System Change
History, Historiography, and Political Science
The Realist Paradigm and Degenerative versus Progressive Research Programs
The Pursuit of Power
Dinosaur in a Haystack
| Unique citing works | 47 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,81 |
| Citation span | 2000 - 2025 (26) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 47 |