{"id":436,"date":"2012-04-09T09:37:31","date_gmt":"2012-04-09T09:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rulesofreason.wordpress.com\/?p=436"},"modified":"2012-04-09T09:37:31","modified_gmt":"2012-04-09T09:37:31","slug":"models-in-political-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=436","title":{"rendered":"Models in Political Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inside Higher Ed<\/a> has a good interview with David Primo and Kevin Clarke on their new book A Model Discipline: Political Science and the Logic of Representations.<\/em><\/a>\u00a0 The book and the interview criticize the hypothetico-deductive tradition in social science:<\/p>\n

The actual research was prompted by a student who asked, “Why test deductive models?” The essence of a deductive model is that if the assumptions of the model are true, then the conclusions must be true. If the assumptions are false, then the conclusions may be true or false, and the logical connection to the model is broken. The point is that social scientists work with assumptions that are known to be false. Thus, whether a model’s conclusions are true or not has nothing to do with the model itself, and “testing” cannot tell us anything that we did not already know.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My thoughts exactly. Unfortunately, I don’t see the new book\u00a0 changing the practice of political science research (Primo and Clarke are also pessimistic about the short term impact of the book).<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inside Higher Ed has a good interview with David Primo and Kevin Clarke on their new book A Model Discipline: Political Science and the Logic of Representations.\u00a0 The book and the interview criticize the hypothetico-deductive tradition in social science: The actual research was prompted by a student who asked, “Why test deductive models?” The essence of a deductive model is that if the assumptions of the model are true, then the conclusions must be true. If the assumptions are false, then the conclusions may be true or false, and the logical connection to the model is broken. The point is that social scientists work with assumptions that are known to be false. Thus, whether a model’s conclusions are true or not has nothing to do with the model itself, and “testing” cannot tell us anything that we did not already know. My thoughts exactly. Unfortunately, I don’t see the new book\u00a0 changing the practice of political science research (Primo and Clarke are also pessimistic about the short term impact of the book).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[33],"tags":[129,320,499,643],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7g3hj-72","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":282,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=282","url_meta":{"origin":436,"position":0},"title":"Writing with the rear-view mirror","date":"February 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Social science research is supposed to work like this: 1) You want to explain a certain case or a class of phenomena; 2) You develop a theory and derive a set of hypotheses; 3) You test the hypotheses with data; 4) You conclude about the plausibility of\u00a0the theory; 5) You\u00a0write\u00a0a\u00a0paper\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academic publishing"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":372,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=372","url_meta":{"origin":436,"position":1},"title":"Torture and game theory","date":"March 15, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"The latest issue of Political Research Quarterly has an interesting and important exchange about the use of game theory to understand the effectiveness of torture\u00a0for eliciting truthful information. 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Not only were polls and predictions way off the mark\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Risk and probability"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":350,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=350","url_meta":{"origin":436,"position":4},"title":"David Graeber's 'Debt' will shake your world","date":"March 7, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"David Graeber's 'Debt: The First 5,000 Year' is easily the most thought-provoking, insightful, erudite and provocative book I have read over the last few years. While you can disagree with particular arguments or resist certain conclusions, it will shake your most fundamental assumptions about social life. After reading the book,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropology"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":934,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=934","url_meta":{"origin":436,"position":5},"title":"The Discursive Dilemma and Research Project Evaluation","date":"November 21, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"tl; dr When we collectively evaluate research proposals,\u00a0we can reach the opposite verdict\u00a0depending on how we aggregate the individual evaluations, and that's a problem, and nobody seems to care or provide guidance how to proceed. Imagine that three judges need to reach a verdict together using majority rule. To do\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Normative political theory"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}