Story, Dale                                                                                                                                                        7/13/2015
POLS  3310

POLITICS AS SCIENCE

• “Political Science”
• Explanation v. description
• Empirical v. normative
• Objective v. subjective
• What is v. what ought to be
• Fact v. value
• Characteristics of behavioralism
• Explain and predict
  • Nate Silver--Nate Silver first came to everyone's attention in 2008, when his online forecast correctly called 49 of 50 states in the U.S presidential election. In 2012... he accurately projected results in all 50 states.
• Observable
• Quantified
• Measuring Political Tolerance as an example (On the Conceptualization and Measurement of Political Tolerance, James L. Gibson; Richard D. Bingham.  The American Political Science Review, Vol. 76, No. 3. (Sep., 1982), pp. 603-620.
• Theory-oriented
• Readings
• Philosophy of the Social Sciences I
• Specifically sections 1, 2a, 3, 4, and 5 (Positivism; Empiricism; Falsifiability; Regularity in Social Phenomena; Individualism vs. Holism; “Do things go together” or Correlation Analysis; Multiple Research Strategies)
• Philosophy of the Social Sciences II (“Is social science inherently distinct from the natural sciences?”)
• Nature and Philosophy of Science
• Introduction
• Basic Structure
• “Objective, deductive, and empirical”
• Inductive and deductive
• Competing theories
• Religion and science
• Conclusion
• Rational Actor Model
• View at home: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on predicting the future of Iran.
• Charitable contributions, Invention of Lying, Crime without punishment.
• Role of values
• “We Value What Values Us…”
• Contrary to popular claims, this suggests that scientific knowledge alone is no protection against the effects of bias on research evaluation.
• Laboratories & experimentation—closure and completeness
• Statistics
• Correlation v. causation
• Induction v. deduction
• Testing a theory—cannot confirm
• Revolutions in scientific paradigms.  How do we achieve knowledge?
• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, Links, and pdf
  • Copernican Revolution.  Copernicus suggested that the sun was the center of this solar system and that the Earth and other planets revolved around it (as opposed to the Earth being stationary at the center).
  • Galileo challenged the basic principal of motion that an object must be continually pushed in order to stay in motion.  He maintained that without friction an object set in motion would continue that motion.
  • Singularity--exponential growth of intelligence--artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence--paradigm shifts. Stephen Hawking: Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it would take off on its own and redesign itself... The development of full artificial ntelligence could spell the end of the human race. Time Magazine, 12/29/14.
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  • Slide Rule in Apollo 13, 1970
    • Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
    • The Movie
  • Time Travel
  • Quantum Physics--Superposition--Computer in which bits could be 1, or 0, or 1 and 0 at the same time
  • "Albert Einstein thought that a black hole--a collapsed star so dense that even light could not escape its thrall--was too preposterous a notion to be real." National Geographic, March, 2014.
  • Is the Earth round?
    • The Round Earth and Christopher Columbus.
    • Flat Earth Society
  • Is the Universe round, flat (expanding), or infinite?
  • If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
  • Kuhn TS ( 1997) Comments on the relations of science and art. in The Essential Tensions: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, 340–351. Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.
• FYI.  Somit and Tanenhaus, The Development of American Political Science