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Poking Counterfactual Holes in Covering Laws: Cognitive Styles and Historical Reasoning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2017

Philip E. Tetlock  and
Richard Ned Lebow
Philip E. Tetlock
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
Richard Ned Lebow
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 95 , Issue 4 , December 2001 , pp. 829 - 843
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2001

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