Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics

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.

• List of ContributorsAcknowledgments1Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives12Causes and Counterfactuals in Social Science: Exploring an Analogy between Cellular Automata and Historical Processes393Counterfactual Reasoning in Western Studies of Soviet Politics and Foreign Relations694Confronting Hitler and Its Consequences955Back to the Past: Counterfactuals and the Cuban Missile Crisis1196Counterfactual Reasoning in Motivational Analysis: U.S. Policy toward Iran1497Counterfactuals about War and Its Absence1718Using Counterfactuals in Historical Analysis: Theories of Revolution1879Counterfactuals and International Affairs: Some Insights from Game Theory21110Off-the-Path Behavior: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Counterfactuals and Its Implications for Political and Historical Analysis23011Rerunning History: Counterfactual Simulation in World Politics24712Counterfactuals, Past and Future268Commentary 1: Conceptual Blending and Counterfactual Argument in the Social and Behavioral Sciences291Commentary 2: Psychological Biases in Counterfactual Thought Experiments296Commentary 3: Counterfactual Inferences as Instances of Statistical Inferences301Commentary 4: Counterfactuals, Causation, and Complexity309References317Index337

"The book sets out to examine the many roles that counterfactuals and counterfactual reasoning play in the study of world politics. It has many merits. The quality of the papers is high. It is well edited by Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin. It succeeds very well in building on earlier discussions of counterfactuals in social science, from Weber to Elster, and linking them with a wide range of concrete problems and issues in international relations."--Andrew Hurrell, The Times Literary Supplement