On election day November 8, 2016 America was on edge at the end of a Presidential campaign of vitriol and lies unusual even by the forgiving standards of American politics. The two Nates and most pollsters agreed that in a tight race Hillary Clinton would become the next President of the United States. Nate Cohn of the New York Times thought the odds were 85 percent in Clinton’s favor. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight poll predicted the same outcome with more than 70 percent confidence and gave Clinton more than 300 votes in the electoral college. The Princeton Election Consortium put Clinton’s odds at around 98 to 99 percent. Its president promised to eat a bug if Trump were to win more than 240 votes of the electoral college. Elite opinion, inside and outside the Beltway, concurred with the pollsters. But between afternoon and nightfall on that November day, within a few hours Nate Cohn’s updated estimate gave Donald Trump a 95 percent chance to win the election. Rarely in the history of American elections have so many been so wrong.Footnote 1
Worldviews provide horizons for the risk-uncertainty conundrum. A world without horizons is disorienting and bereft of hope. Conspicuous “failures of worldview” sap confidence in leaders who do not know what is coming next.Footnote 2 Such failures can undermine the self-confidence of individuals, groups, and states who do not like the unexpected to undermine the sense of control they enjoy over others. Where you stand, students of bureaucracy quip, depends on where you sit. The powerless do not indulge in the fantasy of being in control. Assigned seats at the children’s table, or denied seats altogether, they often understand life’s uncontrollable uncertainties better than those seated comfortably at the high table. Precarity and marginality often make them face risk and uncertainty with dread, sometimes with hope. Worldviews and the horizons they provide are always relative to the position from which the world is viewed.
Before proceeding any further, I should put my cards on the table. My own worldview is reasonably well summarized by the title of a short article I once wrote: “Mid-Atlantic: Sitting on the Knife’s Sharp Edge.”Footnote 3 Living between American and European social science I have found myself caught, following Michael Adams’s metaphor, between “fire and ice.”Footnote 4 This captures my stance toward worldviews – both conventional Newtonian humanism and its post-Newtonian and para-humanist alternatives. Although the sharp edge of the knife is not a comfortable resting place, the geography of my thinking does not lack a firm anchor. Interested in understanding better the complementarity of risk and uncertainty, I look for promising alternatives to sweet common sense, difficult as they may be to understand. I find intuitively plausible a problem-focused approach of being in the world. Trespassing is for me the main advantage of scholarship.Footnote 5 Eschewing the cozy cocoon of the like-minded, in the stiff breeze of the imagined mid-Atlantic I am drawn to Samuel Beckett’s preference for hues of grey over black and white.Footnote 6 Like Winnie the Pooh, I lean toward “both-and” rather than “either-or” styles of analysis. Contentedly, I rest uncomfortably on the knife’s sharp edge. For “truth is one.”Footnote 7 People simply call it by different names. When all is said and done, for me it is the place “where the individual mind comes to rest.”Footnote 8
Worldviews ground different theories and models in their encounters with the risk-uncertainty conundrum. This chapter introduces the concept of worldview as elaborated by its two pre-eminent theorists, Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber (section 1). It then discusses worldviews in general, alluding briefly to two alternatives to Newtonian humanism (section 2). Elaborating on the metaphor of small and large worlds the chapter finally shows how objective and subjective probabilities are seeking to sidestep, unsuccessfully, the risk-uncertainty conundrum and how both are, implausibly, reinforcing the sweet common sense we call Newtonian humanism. That “common sense” predisposes us to focus on risk while neglecting uncertainty (section 3).
1. Dilthey and Weber
The concept of worldview is intimately tied to the names of two nineteenth-century social theorists, Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber. Both were committed to empirical investigations of intellectual and social history as an avenue to elucidate different worldviews. Both tried to find regularities in human affairs. Dilthey focused his attention on religious, artistic, and philosophical worldviews.Footnote 9 Weber inquired into the tensions modern capitalism had introduced into the civilizational legacies of the past, specifically the relationship between ideas and social action. Dilthey looked to the present and future as he sought to define the scope of an interpretive science and defend it against the rising importance of the natural sciences. Weber examined the past for the religious roots of contemporary secular beliefs and practices. For both, worldviews express values. In contrast to positivists who believe that social inquiry can be value-free, for Dilthey such inquiry is historical and inescapably value-laden.Footnote 10 Weber disagreed. He emphasized the importance of values in the selection of all objects of inquiry. But he also argued for the possibility of a value-free social science.
Dilthey
Much of Wilhelm Dilthey’s voluminous work remained fragmentary and was published posthumously. Only a small amount has been translated into English.Footnote 11 Like Kant, Dilthey was committed to the creation of a secure epistemological foundation for knowledge. As a humanist, he focused on the cultural rather than the natural sciences. In contrast to some of Kant’s writings, for Dilthey experience and knowledge are not activities that belong solely to the realm of reason. In developing a culture-bound concept of worldview, Dilthey’s work thus departs from the transcendental tradition of German idealist philosophy. Instead, for Dilthey the concept of worldview rests on the bedrock of human experience. Life itself and the human capacity to will, feel, and think are the foundation of all knowledge.Footnote 12 Dilthey thus shifted the problem of history and philosophy from the universalism of abstract concepts to inherently partial and plural notions of worldview.Footnote 13
Worldviews touch on the deepest beliefs of an individual’s inner experience about the meaning of life in the face of death, thus speaking to both risk and uncertainty.Footnote 14 They contain fundamental religious, philosophical, and esthetic beliefs that are accepted as self-evidently true.Footnote 15 Each of these three endeavors makes different demands on human capacities. Religion mobilizes will, philosophy thought, art feeling. In the history of humankind, religion preceded the other two. Like prophets, philosophers and poets seek answers to the basic riddles of human life – its purpose and meaning, its transitory nature, its beginning and end. As macroscopic disclosures of human experiences, worldviews embed individual understandings and lived experiences in the socio-cultural world.Footnote 16
Worldviews are accessible through the analysis of historical artifacts such as books, symbols, official records, painting, architecture, music, philosophy, and religion.Footnote 17 Private experience is the starting point for an individual’s expansion through re-experiencing the historical world. Historical knowledge is always also a mode of gaining more self-knowledge.Footnote 18 As collectively shared interpretations, such as Newtonian humanism, worldviews mark major historical epochs.Footnote 19 In a nutshell, Dilthey distinguishes three phases of history that are expressed in the worldviews of priestly, monotheistic Hebrew, Islamic, and Christian religions seeking salvation through communion with a living God; in the philosophies of Greece and Rome articulating universally valid patterns of thought and developing rules, law, and obligation; and in the modern era of science, epitomized by Newton and the inventions of concepts such as risk. The confluence of all three has formed the modern European worldview.Footnote 20
Dilthey’s vision was both European and universal. To be sure, his humanism focuses on the three Abrahamic religions as well as a tripartite West consisting of Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance. Yet Dilthey’s humanism resonates also with less Euro-centric sensibilities. For him all cultures embody different human interpretations of reality.Footnote 21 Once they are subjected to an interpretive approach, a Shakespearean sonnet, an African mask, and a Chinese relic cease being an It. They become a Thou to which the I of the investigator relates as she probes their different meanings. Contra the nineteenth-century view that non-European civilizations were inferior, Dilthey insisted that they, too, inform and instruct just as much as Europe does. Foreign and distant experiences open windows onto an infinitely rich reality that lies beyond any individual’s limited personal and cultural grasp. Dilthey was interested in discovering ways to transcend human limits and enable encompassing, shared human understandings.Footnote 22 Unlike Weber’s more Euro-centric sociology of religion, Dilthey’s humanism points the way toward a cross-cultural and trans-civilizational universalism.Footnote 23 He thus anticipated twenty-first-century humanists’ emphasis on the primary unifying identity of one encompassing humanity and the subordination of secondary divisions such as nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual orientation.
Newtonian humanism and other worldviews are holistic interpretive frameworks that differ from question-specific theories and models.Footnote 24 For Dilthey such worldviews try to understand the world synthetically by alerting us to meanings broader than scientific explanations. Worldviews incorporate ideals and purposes, offering insights into what is and postulates about what ought to be. Dilthey’s science of worldviews was to operate at an even higher level of abstraction than do worldviews themselves. That science could not be transhistorical, resting on stable observations outside of history. It had to be heuristic and provisional. Going beyond the atomistic empiricism and mono-causal explanation characteristic of Newtonianism, an interpretive science sought to describe major systems of thought, deepen conceptual knowledge, and offer circumscribed generalizations.Footnote 25 For worldviews such as Newtonian humanism have an inner dialectic rooted in their contradictions, are always open to immanent critiques, and thus always remain subject to change. And that changeability takes some of the sharp edges off the unavoidable intellectual conflicts that exist between them.Footnote 26 Early on in his career, Dilthey thought of his typology of worldviews as explanatory. Later in life he regarded it as no more than a possibly helpful heuristic.Footnote 27
Resonating with scientific models and American pragmatism Dilthey’s exploration of worldviews has a practical bent. For Dilthey the purpose of philosophy is to serve living in the world.Footnote 28 This underlines his disagreement with empiricists who rely, in his way of thinking, on a leap of faith to bridge the gap separating the reception of sensory data and human experience. For him, reality is not mute and inert, as in Newtonianism. It discloses itself in and through language and other communicative practices.Footnote 29 Humans are actors not spectators in the evolution of the world. In the end, “the humility and profundity” of Dilthey’s articulation of the concept of worldview, Young argues, stays true to the “concrete manysidedness of divergent human interests and interpretations of reality.”Footnote 30
Weber
Max Weber’s towering intellectual achievements as a social scientist lacked Dilthey’s self-reflexivity and humility. Yet in some ways Dilthey helped point the way for Weber’s cross-civilizational sociology of religion.Footnote 31 Weber’s interest in worldviews was empirical: identifying distinctive sources of Western rationalism. Weber’s foremost interest was a better understanding of the distinctive religious and secular traditions of the West and, specifically, Western notions of rationality. To make sense of life’s chaotic confusions humans create meaningful parts of their existence. Although it is haphazard, that process is not experienced as such. Individuals and groups tend to believe in the necessity and sanctity of some of their most basic beliefs and cherished values.Footnote 32
For Weber worldviews offer answers to some of the most profound questions that shape human practice. Scattered throughout his writings, Weber’s ideas about worldviews are difficult to track. The comprehensive and highly regarded Max Weber Dictionary, for example, does not contain a single entry under this subject heading.Footnote 33 My account relies on Stephen Kalberg’s authoritative summary guide and interpretation.Footnote 34 For Weber worldviews are grounded in closely connected supernatural and worldly realms. In his famous formulation,
not ideas, but material and ideal interests directly govern men’s conduct. Yet, very frequently the “world images” that have been created by “ideas” have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest. “From what” and “for what” one wished to be redeemed and, let us not forget “could be” redeemed, depended upon one’s image of the world.Footnote 35
In this arresting image of track and switchman, worldviews operate both directly and indirectly. They are filters that shape politics by defining actor identities and molding the political structures and processes that influence practices.Footnote 36 And they also embody values that inform the interests of actors.Footnote 37 Operating directly or indirectly, worldviews contain different configurations of values that become objects of political conflict, creators of groups and movements, and shapers of practices and policies. Worldviews are contingent and permit the unexpected to happen; in Leonard Seabrooke’s words “trains can be robbed, derailed, delinked, or run out of steam.”Footnote 38
In Weber’s writings on religion, the main carriers of worldviews are prophets.Footnote 39 They make available to their followers “a unified view of the world derived from a consciously integrated meaningful attitude toward life.”Footnote 40 In Weber’s analysis prophets and the prophetic age are the central events in the evolution of religion, turning points between many thousands of years of “magical” religion and the new era of post-magical “salvation” religions.Footnote 41 Prophets gave social and cosmic events a systematic and coherent meaning that should govern man’s conduct if he aspires to salvation. It requires a prophet’s sustained effort to bring order into life’s variegated manifestations and to organize man’s ordinary practices. As legacies of prophetic visions, worldviews offer practical evaluation, not logical consistency. The discrepancy between a coherent, religiously infused view of the world and empirical reality is the source of the strongest tensions between inner life and external relationships. Prophecy, priestly guidance, and subsequently secular philosophy are all concerned with alleviating those tensions.Footnote 42
Weber developed this general approach in his seminal Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.Footnote 43 For Weber the economic ethic – which he called “the spirit of capitalism” – was of central importance. It required a cultural analysis of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ascetic Protestant sects and churches, mainly Reform Calvinism. The Protestant ethic furthered rationalization, especially in economic life but also in other spheres. It set a standard that all other religions, including Catholicism, did not match. The economic practices of Protestant believers, Weber argued, were shaped by answers given to the question of salvation rather than by utilitarian considerations. The faithful came to believe that their capacity for methodical and profitable work and their success in accumulating wealth in this world served as evidence of their salvation in the next. With work acquiring religious meaning, they could create the conditions of their own salvation. Methodical work became sanctified as a religious calling. Looking for signs of redemption sent by God, Protestants saw in worldly economic success one such sign. Weber shows how in creating their religious world and a subjectively meaningful life, believers arrived at their conclusions. Over time, the religious ethic of groups of believers transformed itself into its secular successor, the spirit of capitalism. Thus, asceticism in this world gave the capitalist economy of the West a vital push to great dynamism and efficiency compared to non-Western societies. This provocative and highly original argument led Weber to eventually write a massive comparative sociology of religion that included book-length studies of China, India, ancient Judaism, and antiquity.Footnote 44
Comprehensive and coherent value configurations of worldviews can be grounded also in secular realms. Chinese literati, Hindu Brahmins, and the intellectual leaders of secular movements such as Liberalism and Marxism ponder life’s meaning and develop an integrated worldview.Footnote 45 What matters is the crystallization of a message of the ordered meaningfulness of life. In modern times worldviews thus can express inclusive-universalistic values of the world’s major religions, cosmopolitan secular ideologies, exclusive-particularistic values of ethno-nationalist movements, and the values of scientific inquiry itself.
Distinct forms of rationalism became the eventual destination not only of the three Abrahamic religions but also of Hinduism and Confucianism. In those Eastern religions Weber also located rational and commercial elements. The eventual disenchantment of traditional religious and philosophical life forms could not be stopped as science and technology gradually weakened and eventually destroyed deeply held traditional convictions and values in both West and East. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth century was particularly impactful. In Weber’s view Chinese science, for example, remained little more than concealed empiricism and had little to do with the rigors of the mathematical universe that Newton had constructed. And while India had a very strong mathematical tradition, according to Weber it simply could not compete with the advanced mathematics developed by Western intellectuals.Footnote 46
As religious beliefs were increasingly replaced by beliefs in science and technology, religiously infused worldviews were replaced by the thin veneer of custom and rational self-interest as the main motivation for individual and group practices. As Kalberg writes, orientation to the ethical universe of worldviews involves “an uprooting of action from its common random, pragmatic, and utilitarian flux and flow, and its guidance by a constellation of values.”Footnote 47 Values clustered in the ethos of secular organizations and status groups normally do not reach the level of comprehensive worldviews. Typically, they do not offer answers to life’s broad questions about meaning, purpose, injustice, and suffering. For example, “unsentimental economic brotherhoods” practiced for the benefit of individual households possess concrete, transitory purposes and do not address basic religious, moral, and philosophical questions of life.Footnote 48 The same is true of the bureaucratic ethos of civil servants with its typical this-worldly value configuration centered around duty, discipline, respect for hierarchy, orderly work habits, security, reliability, and impartiality.Footnote 49
In Weber’s view the ascent of formal and practical rationality in modernity caused a decline in the importance of the supernatural, especially in Europe and the Americas. These two forms of rationality rule daily life in modern societies. Untethered from religious values, they follow the logic of state and market. The effect of the Judeo-Christian worldview is weakening and with it the grounds for practical-ethical action-orientations. This modern world is, like the ancient one, once again polytheistic: abstract entities now hold center stage, among them GDP growth, star-status in the social media world, and good looks. None can mobilize compassion, feelings of brotherhood, and ethical action. Custom and convention are replacing ethical values that were once given legitimacy by a shared worldview. And for Weber, when customs and conventions weaken, action will in the end be driven only by the cognitive thrusts of means-ends rational action. Quasi-religious social reform movements also fail to create configurations of binding values. They fall prey to merely utilitarian calculations. Worldviews do not disappear. But they become relics from a distant past.
Weber’s argument turned out to be flawed on two counts. The inevitable loss of religion in a disenchanted modernity failed to fully materialize. As legacies from the past and adaptations to the present, religions continue to shape contemporary worldviews and world politics. In all corners of the world different religious traditions have shown a great capacity to reinvent and reinvigorate themselves – even in Europe, the most secular region in the world. The enlargement of the European Union toward South and East and a growing stream of illegal migration, for example, have made religion once again a vigorous European concern.Footnote 50 And in America’s social and political life religion remains a vital force.
Weber also failed to consider fully the implications of different scientific worldviews in the era of disenchantment he bore witness to.Footnote 51 We live with the conviction, he wrote, that in this disenchanted world “one can, in principle, control everything by means of calculation.”Footnote 52 This scientific credo creates “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”Footnote 53 This assessment seems to be off the mark. Newton’s life work expressed the impetus of seeking divine will in the laws of nature, thus proving His superior intelligence. And in the twentieth century quantum mechanics has generated miraculously precise predictions and innumerable practical applications. But the meaning and nature of quantum mechanics, most physicists agree, has remained a mystery. This may be one reason why Newtonianism retains its iron grip over the social sciences and the analysis of world politics – despite the fact that in their normal research practices these disciplines rely heavily on the everyday technological products of the quantum revolution. Furthermore, besides quantum mechanics a second development in the humanities unfolded fully only after Weber’s death: post-modern writings expressed a loss of faith in meaning itself.
Conclusion
Both Dilthey and Weber grappled with the issue of historical relativism – Dilthey retrospectively, Weber prospectively.Footnote 54 While Weber made his own noteworthy methodological contributions, it was Dilthey who insisted that the humanistic sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) required hermeneutics, a methodology that differs from the positivism of the natural sciences. Building on the writings of the theologian Schleiermacher, Dilthey insisted that the humanistic sciences must shoulder the burden of self-interpretation and take account of the historical horizons of their times. Framing both self-interpretations and historical horizons, at a higher level of abstraction worldviews themselves are also a form of self-interpretation. They picture who we are, and how we fit into the world. This insight became a cornerstone of the writings of philosophers and historians of science in the twentieth century.
Martin Heidegger and Thomas Kuhn have built on Dilthey’s and Weber’s insights. Heidegger radicalized and broadened Dilthey’s self-interpretive method. He interrogated the experience of the everyday as a way of uncovering the ontological foundations of life. And he stripped away traditional metaphysical assumptions and applied interpretive methods to modern science.Footnote 55 In 1938 Heidegger gave a lecture, first published in 1950 without the unabashedly positive references to Germany’s Nazi government. His political culpability aside, Heidegger sought to understand modernity. He did so by focusing on the presuppositions of modern science as a way to uncover the elusive, yet unavoidably historical, foundation of modernity.Footnote 56 Heidegger argues that each scientific era has its own worldview. And that view is incommensurable with any other.Footnote 57 Linked through a historically grounded, dialectical process of critique, discovery, and interpretive innovation the Greeks’ and Galileo’s understanding of the universe differed radically from that of modern science. What was considered true in one era was deemed to be wrong in another. Different scientific worldviews pose different questions and accept different answers. Modern science has given free rein to conceiving and creating a world of controllable objects. “Calculability” has become a central characteristic of modernity without eliminating the unknowable uncertainties at the core of Being.Footnote 58 This is Heidegger’s formulation of what I call the risk-uncertainty conundrum.
A few decades after Heidegger, the American historian of science Thomas Kuhn fashioned the concept of paradigm to describe the foundational assumptions of scientific theories.Footnote 59 Paradigms are the foundations of all theories. Some scientific claims about the world are incommensurable with others, especially ancient, religious, and contemporary commonsensical ones; others are not. Progress in science is not continuous and cumulative. It consists instead of periods of normal science interrupted by brief periods of revolutionary science that create a paradigm shift. Normal science is marked by the ascendance of a single paradigm that determines central research questions, theoretical vocabulary, plausible models, acceptable methods, and criteria for assessing how well a given question has been answered. When paradigms become dominant, their weak parts are no longer recognized, foundational assumptions are no longer questioned, and anomalies are consistently overlooked. Expressed as a pre-paradigmatic worldview shared by all of the main paradigms of international relations, Newtonian and humanist presuppositions fit that description to a T.
Controversially, like Heidegger, Kuhn argued initially that across different historical eras scientific paradigms are incommensurable with one another. If true, that would make it impossible to integrate or compare theories developed in different paradigms. In some of his later writings, however, unlike Heidegger, Kuhn backed away from this claim. Instead, he sometimes likened revolutionary, paradigm-shifting scientific progress to the process of Darwinian evolution: non-directional improvement with no specific purpose. By contrast, change during normal times, within well-understood paradigms, is directional.Footnote 60 While there are multiple truths in all scientific endeavors, on the record of the last several centuries, natural scientists have ruled out many things previously thought to be true. There is thus justified hope of movement in the direction of greater truth. That hope is much weaker in the social sciences, including the analysis of the political world and world politics. Kuhn dismissed them as inconclusively fumbling around in a pre-paradigmatic state, unable to address, let alone escape, the risk-uncertainty conundrum.Footnote 61
2. Worldviews
We navigate our way through life guided by different worldviews.Footnote 62 “Our views of the world,” writes political psychologist Brian Rathbun, “provide comfort in an uncertain environment.”Footnote 63 I refer to “we” in the encompassing sense – “we the people,” decision makers, and students of world politics. Stabilizing our fraught experiences is one of the great accomplishments of worldviews. Individually experienced yet irreducibly social, they touch deep emotions. In the words of Martha Nussbaum “they reside at the core of one’s being, the part of it with which one makes sense of the world.”Footnote 64 Worldviews can have both sustaining and disruptive qualities.Footnote 65 Incorporating at times contradictory components, fixed or fluid worldviews compete, co-exist, and co-evolve with one another. Worldviews can endure for centuries.Footnote 66 They acquire force by being believed in – strongly and frequently unconsciously.Footnote 67 They are taken for granted and offer meaning in an often meaningless world. Informing theories and models they help tell stories about the world. Ideas come and go; stories stay.Footnote 68 Worldviews lead us to pose our questions, and they shape our answers. And the correctness of those answers is not always supported by facts. The real world changes, yet all too often our mental frameworks don’t. “Sometimes in life you should stick to your worldview and defend it against criticism,” writes journalist David Brooks in a self-critical column titled “I Was Wrong about Capitalism.” But when the world is genuinely different “the crucial skills are the ones nobody teaches you: how to reorganize your mind, how to see with new eyes.”Footnote 69
In comparison to the concepts of “theory” and “model,” as Figure 1.1 shows, the concept of “worldview” is rarely used, as the flat line close to the x-axis demonstrates.Footnote 70 This is unfortunate. The concept of worldview plays a vital role as the unacknowledged foundation for common-sense, conventional understandings of concepts such as “theory” and “model.” Collective patterns of thought, Nathan Leites argued long ago, matter in world politics. During the Cold War, for example, Soviet decision makers adhered to an “operational code” that shaped their views of cooperation and conflict in world politics.Footnote 71 Vying for the position of favored crown-prince in the second Trump Presidency, in 2024 J. D. Vance and Elon Musk have partly rival and partly overlapping worldviews about the future of America.Footnote 72 In the sciences, meta- and pre-theoretical constructs such as “worldview” go by the name of “paradigm.” Kuhn’s paradigms have been reinterpreted by students of world politics, who refer to paradigms as normatively infused, analytically compelling, and politically salient schools of thought.Footnote 73 Realism, Liberalism, and Marxism, for example, are battling over how to explain or interpret past and present, and how to act in world politics. Their sharp disagreements rest on the invisible, shared foundation of Newtonian humanism. Newtonians strive for a social physics that humanists decry as futile. With interpretivists persisting in their critique, the American study of world politics, John Ruggie observed three decades ago, “is reposed in deep Newtonian slumber wherein method rules.”Footnote 74
Figure 1.1 N-grams: Worldview, Model, Theory
Figure 1.1Long description
The y-axis marks percentages from 0.00000 to 0.00500 in intervals of 0.0005%. The x-axis marks years from 1800 to 2020. There are three lines in the graph, labelled as Worldview, Model, and Theory. All lines start between 0.0000% and 0.0005%. The worldview line remains almost flat and most data points on it are close to 0. The other two increase gradually. At date 1894, the lines read as follows. Worldview: 0%. Model: 0.0005063470%. Theory: 0.0008711275%. Both the Model and Theory lines continue rising. Model peaks at about 0.00450% near 1990, before dropping to about 0.00300% at 2020. Theory peaks at about 0.00350% near 2020. All values are approximate.
That said, the eminent historian of science Alexandre Koyré’s assessment from 1965 still rings true. All or nearly all have accepted “the idea of the Newtonian world machine as the expression of the true picture of the universe and the embodiment of scientific truth.”Footnote 75 Applied to the analysis of world politics, Newtonianism searches for law-like correlational statements and causal mechanisms.Footnote 76 Built on Newtonian foundations, these analyses hold that the world is external, static, and fully knowable; that it is independent of the observer; and that the temporal and spatial coordinates of the world are independent from one another. The simple billiard ball model of international relations, conventionally taught to first-year college students, is a good example of cause and effect reasoning that is mechanistic. Indeed, many scholars of world politics emulate economics which was deeply affected by nineteenth-century mechanics.Footnote 77 More generally, much of American political science has imitated or adapted theoretical developments in the more mature disciplines of economics and sociology.Footnote 78 Just as atoms are the smallest entities that constitute the physical world, for many political scientists independent social entities – individuals, groups, states, or “things” – are the building blocks of the social and political world.Footnote 79 The analysis of world politics tries to get hold of an always-in-flux and elusive world based on three unacknowledged assumptions: the context of world politics is relatively homogeneous; social and political processes are stable; language is a mirror of the world.Footnote 80
Many students of world politics are also humanists, in the sense of putting humans at the center of their stories. A humanistic worldview dates back to the Renaissance, the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Common to these lineages is a central claim: human beings are distinct from the rest of the world. The natural world is knowable and governed by laws that humans can identify and manipulate to their own advantage. Human beings thus possess a unique status. They can explain and change the design of the natural and social world. As masters of the world, they stand apart from and above it. Reason and language can fire human imagination to explore unknown possibilities. This idea has waxed and waned over time. In the early nineteenth century in Germany the idea of a humanistic education was narrowed to a Western tradition dating back to Greco-Roman antiquity. A hundred years later Nietzsche argued that humans were a-rational and irrational, and humanist talk was nothing more than a bladder full of hot air.Footnote 81
Worldviews offering alternatives to Newtonian humanism do exist. They merit attention not because we should start everything over anew but because unconventional worldviews can offer fresh insights into the complementarity of risk and uncertainty. Like Newtonian humanism, they are constructs of the human imagination, open to different ways of building theories and models, and subject to intellectual and political controversy. But unlike the Newtonian part of Newtonian humanism, they are more comfortable engaging issues of uncertainty. In the words of David Dequech, they help define a natural and social reality “subject to non-predetermined structural change” and “inhabited by individuals who have … the potential for creative thoughts and acts.”Footnote 82 This should make it impossible to push uncertainty aside. But it does not. Conventional arguments often bypass the distinction between the risk of known unknowns and the uncertainty of unknown or unknowable unknowns, and they gloss over the difference between the unintended (by humans) and unanticipated (in systems) consequences of actions.Footnote 83 In short, they do not acknowledge the risk-uncertainty conundrum.
In the late nineteenth century, experimental physics began to probe the subatomic structure of matter. Electrons, quarks, photons, gluons, neutrinos, and a few “Higgs bosons” are the elementary particles studied by quantum mechanics.Footnote 84 They are not real, like little pebbles. “They are the elementary excitations of a moving substratum … minuscule moving wavelets.”Footnote 85 Einstein’s special relativity theory of time and space, and relativistic quantum field theory more generally, opened up an invisible world of energy governed by randomness. Time and space are related and fluid. Nineteenth-century philosophical relationalism inspired the first generation of quantum physicists to think relationally about many of the new phenomena they were discovering with ingenious experiments. Although the weirdness of the quantum world has defied all attempts at explanation since then, the new theory became a marvel of predictive accuracy. It has generated technological innovations and applications that continue to revolutionize world politics. Filled with many baffling aspects, the subatomic world is indeterminate and cannot be visualized. Electrons moving in an atom are ruled by quantum uncertainties.Footnote 86 The world is not a causal machine driven by the past but a creative generator of unfolding propensities and future potentialities.Footnote 87 For many purposes the classical model is practical; but it conveys a truncated view of the world. The inventors of quantum theory discovered the observer-created reality that flies in the face of conventional notions of objectivity.Footnote 88 Quantum mechanics also directs our attention to apparatuses of measurement and the linguistic practices and performances they entail.Footnote 89 This highlights relational aspects of difference; the boundary-producing effects of measurement; and the entanglements between objects and subjects, of matter and meaning, and of the natural and the social world.Footnote 90
Para-humanism goes “around” and “beyond” humanism without excluding it. It describes “the ‘more-than-human’ character of human existence.”Footnote 91 It has generated its own paradox in modern times. The more modern humans succeeded in knowing and controlling nature, the more they came to realize that they are neither so different from animals nor superior to machines. Call it the human dog-cog paradox. The headlines of our daily sources of news scream that humans no longer fully control nature and no longer can use it with impunity for their own purposes.Footnote 92 Humanity is deeply entangled with everything and everybody.Footnote 93 The human species is not unique and cannot observe nature at a distance.Footnote 94 Para-humanism thus rejects anthropocentrism because it blinds us to humans’ deep implication with rather than domination of the natural world. For Donna Haraway, for example, the world is populated by collectively produced systems. Such systems do not have clear boundaries. Systems of distributed information and meaning link symbiotic components in complex relationships. Self-regulation is a chimera.Footnote 95 Human beings are an inseparable part of others. Furthermore, relationships connect beings with things. Things are not passive props but participants in a collective process of becoming.Footnote 96 Para-humanism occurs at all scales. At a macro-scale, it conceptualizes the cosmos as an evolving set of processes and relations and thus is foundational for the field of scientific cosmology. It suggests that our scientific theories and models are not intellectual representations of the universe but integral parts of its evolution.Footnote 97 The universe is an open system that continuously interrogates all of its basic assumptions. Cosmology is “a human intellectual creation, not merely a collection of facts.”Footnote 98 It incorporates new data and speculations as the cosmos pushes back against the always imperfect and incomplete facts and beliefs humans hold about it. For humanist Newtonianism critical junctures or inflection points in history are exogenous ruptures in a human-engineered future.Footnote 99 Para-humanism hears instead the thunderclaps of the uncontrollable in the endogenous workings of an evolving world that does not know its own future.
For the most part students of the political world and world politics are unaware of the tacit knowledge their foundational worldview provides. Anchored in the mechanical world of the nineteenth century and infused by anthropocentrism, the Newtonian humanism that informs most analyses of world politics is simply taken for granted. Trying to grasp an always-in-flux entangled world,Footnote 100 conventional analyses see a disentangled social atomism as its defining feature.Footnote 101 Newtonian humanism is both serviceable and misleading. It is serviceable because of its simplicity. It is misleading because it suggests that, like God, humans are observing the political world and world politics at a distance and can figure out how to control it. All too often, the risk-uncertainty conundrum defeats that effort.
Vaccine skepticism during the COVID pandemic offers a vivid example of the richness of unacknowledged worldviews. American public health professionals learned that the public skepticism they encountered was not a knowledge problem that could be solved by providing people with better information. Lack of health insurance and distrust of America’s sorry health care system helped create a vaccine resistance that was much greater among younger Americans than older ones who were covered by Medicare.Footnote 102 Moreover, “follow the science” efforts at education ran into deeply held beliefs. About one third of the American population, and a much larger proportion of Republicans, resisted vaccines because they believe that rights exist without obligations. Vaccine skeptics value individual liberty and individual rights above all; show less deference to elites in general and the government and medical establishment in particular; are concerned about the “purity” of their minds and bodies; and are open to conspiratorial thinking. At the root of vaccine skepticism lie moral intuitions and gut feelings that are largely impervious to information.Footnote 103 This is a good illustration of worldviews that are always present as typically invisible foundations for how we describe and explain what happens in the world. They place us in the world and tell us how that world does or should work. A typically unacknowledged Newtonian humanism that informs our conventional theories and models denies the risk-uncertainty conundrum and points to a small world of risk – an inadequate way to get a full grip on the political world and world politics.
3. Objective and Subjective Probabilities in Small and Large Worlds
One of the leading statisticians of the twentieth century, Leonard Savage, merged the concepts of utility and personal probability, under conditions of uncertainty, into “a highly idealized theory of the behavior of a ‘rational’ person.”Footnote 104 Savage insisted that his formalization of decision theory made it possible to calculate probabilities only in a metaphorically small world; the large world does not lend itself to precise calculation. “The use of modest little worlds, tailored to particular contexts,” writes Savage, “is often a simplification, the advantage of which is justified by a considerable body of mathematical experience.”Footnote 105 “Look before you leap” and “he who hesitates is lost” are two proverbs that capture the difference between the two worlds. When proverbs conflict there is truth in both of them. In a small world it is feasible to look before you leap. An actor can reckon with all the effects of her action and all conceivable future pieces of information would have on the model that determines her subjective beliefs. Consistency is an unqualified virtue.Footnote 106 But “when the world in which we are making decisions is large and complex, there is no way that such a process [of reflection and introspection] could be carried through successfully,” writes Ken Binmore. “Savage restricted the sensible application of his theory to small worlds … The worlds about which real people learn are almost always large … The problem of how best to learn in a large world is unsolved.”Footnote 107 Strict adherence to consistency in a large world where “he who hesitates is lost” refuses to admit the possibility of error.Footnote 108 Savage was very explicit about claiming that his analysis would work only in the confines of small worlds. His caution has often been overlooked. Many economists have embraced the notion that personal subjective probabilities are of great importance for individuals maximizing utilities. The two leaders of the Chicago School of economics, Milton Friedman and Gary Becker, went so far as to assert that their models had direct application to policies appropriate in large, uncertain worlds.Footnote 109
Conventional analyses of world politics are attracted to the siren call of economics, which is inclined toward puzzles with well-defined rules and single solutions. Puzzles can be solved even though the solution may be difficult. And when puzzles cannot be solved, there is a realistic hope that a correct answer will be found in the future. By contrast, mysteries lack clear definition and objectively correct solutions. They are marked by vagueness and indeterminacy. Mysteries elicit John Kay’s and Mervyn King’s central question in their book Radical Uncertainty: “What is going on here?” Coping with the complementarity of risk and uncertainty means being willing to accept mysteries. It requires judgment, experience, imagination, and the capacity to tolerate ambiguity. One of the hard questions is always which of the mysteries of the uncertain can be treated as puzzles of risk-based analysis and which cannot?Footnote 110
Identifying some traits that distinguish small from large worlds helps. In small worlds the relevant entities are known, and their configurations are stable. Small worlds have sufficient data for the calculation of objective probabilities that offer reasonably reliable guides for private beliefs. And the consistency requirement for good decisions can be met. In large worlds all relevant entities are not known, and their configurations are not stable. Large worlds lack sufficient data to calculate objective probabilities and thus do not offer reliable guides for forming private beliefs. And the consistency requirement for good decisions cannot be met. In small worlds decision makers know that “normal,” calculable surprises may happen. But in large, uncertain worlds decision makers can rely only on their unchecked private beliefs and thus set themselves up for “nasty,” incalculable surprises. The risk-uncertainty conundrum makes incalculable surprises normal.
The concept of probability is Janus-faced. It gives the concept of chance two different meanings. Believing that probability inheres in the world, “frequentists” concern themselves with numerical calculations of random variations that are connected to the existence of some chance process producing stable frequencies. This creates the conditions favoring an “inferential” rationality of learning about the world through probabilistic calculations. Some well-controlled situations fit the frequentist paradigm by producing probability distributions with predictable, long-run properties: large collections of gas molecules and genetics in the natural world, mortality tables and the tools of the casino (such as shuffled cards, roulette wheels, and spinning coins) in the social world.
Often, however, numerical probability “is not an objective property of the world, but a construction based on personal or collective judgements and assumptions.”Footnote 111 In contrast to “frequentists,” “personalists” (also called “subjectivists” or “Bayesians”) focus on coherent degrees of subjective beliefs about the world. They rely on “understanding” the rationality of how humans learn under conditions of uncertainty.Footnote 112 Here the laws of probability are preferences for specific gambles measured in expected utility expressing partial beliefs that constitute our personal probabilities. Generally speaking, for the world of politics it does not make much sense to think of our judgments as estimates of “true” probabilities.Footnote 113
The complementarity of risk and uncertainty requires analysts of world politics to pay attention to both aspects of the concept of probability. It is confusing that the class of repeated, similar observations of the world and the class of repeated, similar judgments about the world sound so similar. They are not. And it is also confusing that numerical probability is useful for thinking about both the “aleatory” uncertainty of an unknowable future and the “epistemic” risk about what we currently do not know.Footnote 114 Risk can be resolved by checking facts. It can be mapped by frequencies and known probability distributions conventionally, and unreasonably, assumed to look like the familiar, bell-shaped curve of Gaussian statistics. Overlooked in the analysis of politics and world politics are the infrequent occurrences mapped by power laws that are hidden in the “fat tails” of distributions hiding “black swan” events that are fiendishly difficult to anticipate until they happen. Uncertainty cannot be resolved by checking facts. It results from a host of factors including lack of information or knowledge, vagueness of problem specification, and irremediable ambiguity. Beyond unforeseeable, unknown events located in the world of risk lie the possibilities of the unknowable, unimagined, and unimaginable of the uncertain. Irresolvable disagreements, speculation, and, most important, silence are its hallmarks. As a matter of practice, however, conventional analysis of the political world and world politics assumes that the large world of uncertainty can be reduced to the small world of risk that we can analyze with numerical probabilities of repeated similar observations of the world.Footnote 115 Two prominent theorists of international politics, John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato, thus argue that “there is no meaningful difference in how rational individuals make choices under uncertainty and under risk.”Footnote 116 Reducing uncertainty to information-deficiency and denying the risk-uncertainty conundrum, for them risk defines “the reality of international politics.”Footnote 117
Objective Probability
In the 1920s Frank Knight argued that probabilities could not be established outside the realm of known or knowable frequency distributions. For Knight a “measurable uncertainty” (i.e., risk) was qualitatively different from an unmeasurable one.Footnote 118 Knight’s goal was to explain a puzzle: why do corporate profits exist in markets that equalize demand with supply. In a world of frictionless markets, new suppliers will enter markets until the marginal price of a good equals the marginal cost of production.Footnote 119 Knight reasoned that successful entrepreneurs are willing to make investments with calculable future payoffs permitting them to charge a premium. For him “measurable uncertainty,” or risk, is the mainspring for entrepreneurial activity and capitalist growth.
Risk calculations are shaped by some curious conventions. For example, time is assumed to be reversible. “Post-dictions” become stand-ins for predictions. “If you predict Denmark’s GDP in the year 2000 based on only data through 1910,” argues Lant Pritchett, “the prediction is off by like 3%. That’s unbelievable. We have a 90- or a 100-year-ahead forecast.”Footnote 120 Pritchett avers that there is no difference between past and future. “Post-dictions” are thought to be useful since, as in a casino, the dice of world politics are rolled many times, yielding calculable outcomes in a game that does not change. But for this to hold, the processes generating the political outcomes in question must be stable. Only when that assumption is met does it make sense to use “post-dictions” as guides for “predictions.” Over short time spans, a few months or years, that assumption is often plausible. Over long periods, as in the example of Denmark’s twentieth-century GDP, it is not. Furthermore, the outcome in question is an ordinary event of little consequence in and of itself. Focusing only on a single or a small number of events is cherry-picking. Doing so commits the political scientist’s cardinal sin: “selecting on the dependent variable.” But it is easy to forget that statistical distributions are always simplifications that replace the fuzziness of the risk-uncertainty conundrum with the precision possible with the concept of risk.
In the world of risk, the social scientific concern with numerical frequencies and stochastic processes looks at events as tiny specks of large ensembles that fit the normal, bell-shaped distribution of Gaussian statistics with thin tails. In the teaching of graduate political science programs in the US only Gaussian statistics are taught.Footnote 121 This makes abnormal events look vanishingly rare. Even though they can have profound effects, understood as causes rare events such as large wars, great depressions, and global pandemics appear not to matter. Single cases are crumbs left for historians who analyze “one damned thing after another.” Submitted to statistical analysis, however, such rare events are best captured by power laws, a statistic that does not look at all like a bell-shaped curve with thin tails. Marked by fat tails, in a power-law distribution the top 20 percent of entities typically hold 80 percent of the value or power. It is often more suitable to deal with risk than Gaussian statistics. Abnormal events falling into fat tails are not all that rare. In fact, many human-made rare events follow the logic of power laws. They capture the jumps and discontinuities in the statistical distribution of events that elude Gaussian statistics.
Power laws make us look at the exceptional first because it is so important and only then move to the ordinary and less consequential.Footnote 122 The casino view of world politics produces the “mild” randomness of normal statistical distributions with thin tails and the small effects of outliers. Human height and weight, car accidents, deaths by heart attack, and gambling in a casino are examples for which the law of large numbers works very well. Randomness disappears with averaging. However, this does not capture the “wild” randomness of power-law distributions with their fat tails and the higher probability that extreme values can have on the total distribution. Book sales are a good example. The widely read author of the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling, sold more than 600 million copies, a number that is about six orders of magnitudes larger than the 600 or so copies this book may sell. Power-law distributions capture many politically more salient issues than book sales, including wealth, income, market returns, stock market crashes, deaths in wars, and casualties of terrorist attacks. In world politics it is often the outliers that we need to understand. Market crashes provide powerful illustrations. For example, “just ten trading days represent 63 per cent of the stock market returns of the past 50 years.”Footnote 123 As Central and Latin American countries all defaulted at the same time in the summer of 1982, America’s large banks lost close to all of their past earnings, everything they had ever made in the history of American banking.Footnote 124 And during the crash of 1987, on October 19 the Dow Jones index fell “three times as much in a little over an hour as it had in any other full trading day in history.”Footnote 125 Power laws encapsulate the tyranny of the accidental, underline the difficulty of predicting the future based on the past, and remind us that history does not always crawl but also jumps. In short, there are different ways of dealing with chance events and processes in the small world of risk. Because many features of politics shaped by humans are wild, it is often misleading to rely on the standard deviation of the normal distribution as the measure of randomness. Compared to the casino view of risk, power laws “have become an alternative way to view the world, and a methodology where large deviation and stressful events dominate the analysis.”Footnote 126 Students of the political world and of world politics who are strongly committed to the analysis of risks based on frequency statistics have exciting and important work to do once they trade in Gaussian for power-law statistics.
Subjective Probability
In contrast to Knight, for Keynes “radical uncertainty” refers to matters about which there are no scientific ways to calculate any probabilities, such as major scientific discoveries and major nuclear war.Footnote 127 This kind of uncertainty is rooted in our unavoidably incomplete knowledge of the world. Keynes argued that decision makers find themselves occasionally in situations in which there are measurable, objective probabilities for risky events. For the most part, however, he insisted, our tools and evidence are “too limited to make probability calculations: there may be no way of calculating, and/or there is no common unit to measure magnitudes.”Footnote 128
Frank Ramsey was an Oxford mathematician, economist, and philosopher whose work in the 1920s proved to be foundational for our thinking about risk and uncertainty. His main contribution was to go beyond Keynes’s logical theory of probability.Footnote 129 He insisted instead that all probabilities are measurable in terms of risk based on degrees of belief. Grounded more in human psychology than logic, probabilistic or partial beliefs could be rational. This insight was the origin of twentieth-century subjective probability and decision theory. In Cheryl Misak’s words Ramsey showed “how to measure partial belief by using a subjective interpretation of probability.”Footnote 130 Probability for Ramsey is multidimensional. Partial beliefs establish connections between inward states of dispositional beliefs and outward states of action. Beliefs are habits normally tested by experience. For Ramsey, the utilitarian assumption and a definition of rationality as the maximization of utility can offer useful simplifications for particular purposes. But he argued also that such simplifications are wrong for two reasons. Utility maximization is wrong philosophically: It is a moral decision that puts utility before justice and equality. And utility maximization is wrong empirically; humans differ greatly in their initial probability assignments and the strength of their beliefs.Footnote 131
The quantification of subjective probabilities pushes back against the idea of a “correct” or “objective” probability, for example in a national security crisis.Footnote 132 Since the standard for what is objectively “correct” is unavailable, only subjective assessments are possible.Footnote 133 In this view, assessments of the risk-uncertainty conundrum are considered “correct” only in as far as they coherently reflect an actor’s personal beliefs in a specific context. When objective assessments are unobtainable, the ability to give well-structured and coherent assessments of judgment are not. This requires, Jeffrey Friedman argues, that we distinguish clearly between “assessments of probability (which reflect the chances that a statement is true) and assessments of confidence (which reflect the extent to which analysts believe they have a sound basis for drawing conclusions).”Footnote 134 Confidence depends on the range of reasonable opinion surrounding a judgment, and the susceptibility of a judgment to new information that might be forthcoming.Footnote 135 Put simply, as a subject of Bayesian statistics confidence is analytic.Footnote 136
Bayesian models start with “prior beliefs” – subjective probability estimates. Anchoring the analysis, prior beliefs are “updated” in a process that is deemed to be as unproblematic as the newly acquired information.Footnote 137 Updating permits continued disagreement of actors in the short term. In the long term it will lead to a social consensus based on shared information, that is, changing beliefs.Footnote 138 Under conditions of calculable risk this can work. “Overconfidence,” for example, crosses some fuzzy boundary of what is “justifiable” by some conventionally understood or calculated risk metrics. But under conditions of uncertainty this does not work. Objective and subjective probabilities are not closely aligned. Lacking a reliable metric of measurement, actors instead share with others the confidence they have in their personal beliefs by trying to be persuasive. That consensus, for example about the weather and harvest conditions three months out, will be less durable than one based on objective probability calculations that are based on the accretion of human practices and experiences, for example the inadvisability of leaving your tenth-floor apartment by walking out of the window.
Accuracy is not the only concern that influences a decision maker’s choice. In American foreign policy, for example, it is implausible to think that Presidents are simply concerned about predictive accuracy when they confront the risk-uncertainty conundrum in international affairs. Friedman reports that decision makers exhibit a widespread resistance against relying only on probabilistic reasoning.Footnote 139 Logic, cognition, and rigor are surely relevant.Footnote 140 Typically, however, they work along with other factors such as individual or group emotions, religious and other beliefs, and social conventions.Footnote 141 All of these factors buttress the confidence that decision makers have in their subjective beliefs.Footnote 142 They create “biases” that distort the process of information updating.
Bayesian theory insists that actors must accept the “correct” Bayesian model of how the world works even when other models work better.Footnote 143 When humans do not optimize, their “bias” makes them deviate from “rational” behavior. But rationality does not exist in thin air. Preferences are not “revealed” in Bayesian updating but are “constructed” and are very sensitive to framing and context effects.Footnote 144 Typically, there are many different ways of being rational or at least reasonable. Axiomatic rationality as developed by economists, for example, differs considerably from evolutionary rationality. For Kay and King “many so-called ‘biases’ are responses to the complex world of radical uncertainty.”Footnote 145 Indeed, being unreasonable or irrational, one might argue, affirms being human. The application of subjective probabilities to the analysis of world politics all too often forgets Ramsey’s insistence that this theory presents a simplified scheme that actual people approximate only very imperfectly. It is a convenient shortcut for Newtonians who remember only Thomas Paine and forget Friedrich Nietzsche.
Furthermore, psychologists have taught us what the eighteenth-century statistician Thomas Bayes did not know. The initial values of an estimate of the world systematically distort the estimates and chain of reasoning that follow based on newly acquired information. Because it is context dependent and relies on language, the newly acquired information does not speak for itself. “Priors” and “updates” thus are estimates expressed in the numerical language of risk that conceals hidden uncertainties. As I will argue in Chapter 2, its “diagnostic” is as laden with judgment, experience, and values as that of any doctor. Interpretation is the work of human beings who fit new information into existing beliefs or use it to create new ones. And that work relies on experience, memory, and language, all rich sources of ambiguity and uncertainty, to make sense of and give meaning to the world. In short, Bayesianism gives the misleading appearance of a transparent, episodic process of information updating, unhindered by doubts about the meaning of the information itself.Footnote 146 A psychologically realistic description highlights instead an opaque, continuous process of information updating, inflected by the ambiguities that inhere in specific contexts and in reliance on human language.
Trying to tame uncertainty through an extension of the concept of risk, Bayesians all too often work with poor descriptive models of how people actually think.Footnote 147 The risk-uncertainty conundrum cannot be resolved by invoking “Bayesian updating” as a “nomological machine” – a fixed arrangement of a target mechanism operating in a relatively stable, repetitive, and predictable way that is not exposed to unrecognized or unforeseen potentialities.Footnote 148 Ramsey’s innovative formulation gave subjective beliefs, probability calculations, and rationality their due without insisting, unreasonably, that this was the end of the story. His intuition is supported by the research program that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky developed in behavioral economics during the last several decades. Their psychological studies document both the updating of reference points for the calculation of gains and losses and the persistent biases and “irrational” reasoning of humans, one of the sources of the inescapable complementarity of risk and uncertainty.Footnote 149 Too frequently such lessons in human psychology have not been heeded. Before the great financial meltdown of 2008, for example, most economists believed that data were copious, that rational learning entails always and everywhere the updating of information, and that actors adhered to the rules of consistency. Criticisms that pointed to possible violations of those beliefs were “commonly greeted with incredulity and laughter.”Footnote 150
The concept of subjective probability is an important and useful tool. But it does not eliminate the risk-uncertainty conundrum.Footnote 151 “Irreparable ignorance” is an unavoidable part of the analysis of world politics. By tracking in Newtonian fashion how discrete objects course on predictable paths through the political universe, the study of world politics typically assumes that the world consists mostly of calculable risk. But all too often world politics is also marked by uncertainties and unforeseen potentialities. The ambiguity and creativity human language infuses into the world reinforces the importance of those potentialities. “Simply knowing in principle that the way we think now is the product of historical contingency rather than logical necessity,” Lorraine Daston writes, “is rarely sufficient to lift the blinders imposed by history and habit. The mental world we happen to inhabit contracts the imagination to its own cramped dimensions.”Footnote 152
If everyone’s imagination is shrunk the same way, then everyone shares the same model of how the real world works: small and risky. The problem that Bayesianism tries to solve with information updating is thus solved by fiat. This is what the common knowledge assumption does in game theory.Footnote 153 It stipulates that all players share continuously updated beliefs about the game’s structure and one another’s identity and rationality.Footnote 154 Common knowledge is necessary to ensure consistency and convergence of beliefs among rational agents.Footnote 155 In the absence of common knowledge, player expectation, choice, and coordination are compromised and the accuracy of the game’s predicted outcome is significantly impaired.Footnote 156 Put differently, in game theory the cramped dimensions of our mental world must take the same form for all players.Footnote 157
Some scholars have tested the role of common knowledge in signaling and bargaining under conditions of uncertainty and looming war. Smith and Stam, for example, have found, unsurprisingly, that the common knowledge assumption all too often does not hold in real-world political contexts. Games supposedly are mapping the territory. But their ubiquity, argues philosopher Jean Baudrillard, has reversed the traditional relation between map and territory. In olden times, useless maps were rotting across the countryside. Now the situation is reversed. Since all too often maps are mistaken for the territory, it is “the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map.”Footnote 158 The unpredictability and complexity of international relations undercut the assumption that all actors share prior and common knowledge.Footnote 159 On questions of war and peace, states often come to blows because they hold fundamentally different views of their relative strengths and resolve. War updates divergent beliefs that ultimately can lead to a convergence and a negotiated settlement. But James Fearon also argues that the lack of mutual knowledge and the inability to commit can lead to prolonged war. Even with shared beliefs about capabilities, uncertainty about future actions can prevent serious bargaining.Footnote 160 In a similar vein, Harvey Lederman holds that the assumption of common priors is insufficient to prevent disagreement as long as additional assumptions about the updating of common knowledge and the truthfulness of the updates are not met.Footnote 161 And higher-order uncertainties are often encased in tacit beliefs, that is, worldviews actors are not even aware of.Footnote 162
Put briefly, the risk-uncertainty conundrum in small and large worlds cannot be avoided by trying to circumvent uncertainty either through the practice of Bayesian updating or through reliance on the common knowledge assumption. This does not create an insurmountable obstacle for a scientific study of the political world and of world politics. Far from it. Philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright speaks for a science of localized practices gleaned from a world that can be imitated. She warns against tracing the consequences of scientific laws in the hope of controlling the world. For her, nature is an artful modeler. In this, nature gives a hint how to make sense of and cope with risks and uncertainties. The impressive scientific successes scored over centuries do not speak, in Cartwright’s captivating words, for a “unified world of universal order, but rather for a dappled world of mottled objects.”Footnote 163 Recouping Nature we should focus not on general principles but on specific practices. Artful modeling avoids flights of fancy and leaps of faith. It locates instead pockets of predictable order. Cartwright pleads the case for pluralism, particularism, and practice.Footnote 164 So did Albert Hirschman, who noted half a century ago that the inferiority economists felt vis-à-vis physicists was rivaled by the inferiority political scientists felt vis-à-vis economists, with both disciplines showing a surprising eagerness to be colonized and join the invaders.Footnote 165 Skeptical of heroic generalizations, Cartwright and Hirschman favor humble over lofty arguments. We should take their advice as a warning of the intellectual imperialism of swashbuckling pirates, armed with strong assumptions, satisfying their predatory instincts while searching for bounty on the vast ocean of human inquiry.
4. Conclusion
Many scholars of world politics discuss their most basic beliefs in the language of “paradigms” such as Realism, Liberalism, Marxism, Constructivism, Feminism, and Post-colonialism.Footnote 166 Paradigms express what their adherents consider the foundational understandings of world politics.Footnote 167 With none of these paradigms able to claim final victory, each asserts its particular view as sacrosanct and seeks to “convey a world view more basic than theory.”Footnote 168 Their sharp intellectual and political disagreements occur on the shared ground of Newtonian humanism. Friedrich Hayek would not have been surprised by the existence of this unobtrusive collective mind set. Hayek argued that all knowledge is built on and reinforced by tacit, commonsensical understandings.Footnote 169 Newtonianism assures most students of world politics that the world is real, stable, singular, and subject to law-like generalizations relying either on variable- or on mechanism-based analysis. Humanism shows humans as gyrating between Paine’s predictable reasonableness and Nietzsche’s unpredictable unreasonableness, thus helping create the risk-uncertainty conundrum.
It is the internal tensions and contradictions of Newtonian humanism that have generated a series of debates about the foundations of the study of world politics.Footnote 170 Realism-liberalism-Marxism, idealism-realism, traditionalism-positivism, and rationalism-constructivism-reflectivism are some of the headlines under which these debates were conducted during the last half century. They have always remained inconclusive. Their value was to clarify positions more than to change research practices. They may have been “great debates” when they were waged in North America and across the Atlantic. But the globalization of the study of world politics and the passage of time have shrunk their importance.Footnote 171 A younger cohort of scholars and some new schools of thought have moved to the fore, among them subaltern, indigenous, critical race, and post-colonial studies. They detract from some arguments and augment others. But they do not resolve the tensions that inhere in Newtonian humanism and the persistence of the risk-uncertainty conundrum.
Nothing speaks against the signal importance of all sciences, including the science of international relations, operating successfully in small worlds. Everything speaks against defending small world thinking by adopting the Peter Pan principle – closing one’s eyes and wishing really hard. Together small and large worlds create the risk-uncertainty conundrum. The economist John Maynard Keynes was both a plumber and a poet. As plumber he specified the relations between economic aggregates such as consumption, investment, savings, government spending, exports, and imports. As poet he was keenly aware of the ferocity of speculative “animal spirits” and the importance of social conventions. Keynes understood that “expectations can literally drive reality,” as in self-fulfilling prophecies.Footnote 172 Answering precise questions in carefully specified field experiments can lead to interesting and useful knowledge in small worlds. Neglecting, as Keynes did not, the insight that controllable small world risk is all too often hitched to uncontrollable large world uncertainty is to mistake the proverbial tree for the entire forest. Sharpening our analytical tools for the small world of risk, as Hans Morgenthau is reported to have remarked ruefully, should not be mistaken for cutting something worthwhile in the large world of uncertainty.
An unthinking acceptance of Newtonianism tempts some students of world politics to differentiate conventional “modern” approaches from unconventional “post-modern” ones. Often the conventional modern actually is “early-modern,” rooted in nineteenth-century mechanics. And the unconventional post-modern is actually “late-modern,” reflecting intellectual currents in the second half of the twentieth century. According to Stuart Kauffman “scientists tend to live with philosophies of science that are decades out of date.”Footnote 173 The effect of Newtonian humanism on the study of world politics has been a powerful force for more than a century. Early modelers in political science were drawn to nineteenth-century views of scientific theories. “The Received View, with its origins in classical mechanics, seemed a natural fit for scholars looking to put their young discipline on an equal footing with the ‘hard’ sciences,” write Kevin Clarke and David Primo. “Soon after, philosophers abandoned the Received View as a description of scientific theories.”Footnote 174
But most students of the political world and world politics have stuck with the Received View, foregoing the opportunity to learn from other worldviews how to engage the complementarity of risk and uncertainty. As a result, they tend to shy away from discussing uncertainty.Footnote 175 For example, in their outstanding and widely used textbook Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba distinguish between a probabilistic and a deterministic world.Footnote 176 Barely brushing up against the risk-uncertainty conundrum they advise that “the perceived complexity of a situation depends in part on how well we can simplify reality.”Footnote 177 This is surely correct. But what about the “other part” they put aside? In Newtonianism the world exists as a place “out there,” separate from us as a series of probabilities. In other worldviews it exists “in here,” as not yet determined conditions of possibility. In its self-organizing the real world does not know its own future. Putting uncertainty and its possibilities simply aside, however, denies the existence of the risk-uncertainty conundrum and thus limits political analysis unnecessarily.
Open access