Future Studies and Counterfactual Analysis PDF Download

Author: Theodore J. Gordon
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030184374
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
In this volume, the authors contribute to futures research by placing the counterfactual question in the future tense. They explore the possible outcomes of future, and consider how future decisions are turning points that may produce different global outcomes. This book focuses on a dozen or so intractable issues that span politics, religion, and technology, each addressed in individual chapters. Until now, most scenarios written by futurists have been built on cause and effect narratives or depended on numerical models derived from historical relationships. In contrast, many of the scenarios written for this book are point descriptions of future discontinuities, a form allows more thought-provoking presentations. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that counterfactual thinking and point scenarios of discontinuities are new, groundbreaking tools for futurists.

Author: Ph D. Noel Hendrickson
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1105055639
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 87

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Book Description
Counterfactual reasoning evaluates conditional claims about alternate possibilities and their consequences (i.e., ?What If? statements). Counterfactuals are essential to intelligence analysis. The process of counterfactual reasoning has three stages. First, one must establish the particular way in which the alternate possibility comes to be (i.e., develop its ?back-story?). Second, one must evaluate the events that occur between the time of the alternate possibility and the time for which one is considering its consequences. And third, one must examine the possible consequences of the alternate possibility's back-story and the events that follow it. In doing so, an analyst must connect conclusions to speci

Author: Christoph Hoerl
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199590699
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Twelve essays explore what bearing empirical findings might have on philosophical concerns about counterfactuals and causation, and how, in turn, work in philosophy might help clarify issues in empirical work on the relationships between causal and counterfactual thought.

Author: Riyukta Raghunath
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030534529
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive Possible Worlds framework with which to analyse counterfactual historical fiction. Counterfactual historical fiction is a literary genre that comprises narratives set in worlds whose histories run contrary to the history of our world, usually speculating on what would have happened had a significant historical event (such as a war) turned out differently. The author develops a systematic critical approach based on a customised model of Possible Worlds Theory supplemented by cognitive concepts that account for the different processes that readers go through when they read counterfactual historical fiction, a genre which relies heavily on pre-existing knowledge about history and culture. This book will be of interest to anyone working with Possible Worlds, including within the fields of philosophy, literary studies, stylistics, cognitive poetics, and narratology.

Author: David Atkinson
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1648896871
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
The Covid-19 pandemic reinforced the perception that capitalism is in crisis, that the future is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, and that, increasingly, our thinking about it and ability to manage and organize ourselves within it, are challenges we are ill-equipped for. Despite the efforts of many writers, and a surfeit of manuscripts concerning the need to rethink capitalism, questions concerning the struggle for social and economic justice remain unanswered. While some suggest that with corrective action, businesses can save the world, there is an acceptance that they cannot do so alone. However, while governments might strengthen their institutions, enacting more effective policies, the challenge is simply laid bare at the feet of industry and commerce. Is the challenge to confront the establishment just too big to face? Government institutions and the barons of industry and commerce are but interrelated, interconnected, interplaying components in one socio-economic system. This book offers readers a progressive, radical and academic provocation of that system; it also proposes a field of Applied Negative Dialectics. In 'Reimagining Capitalism', Atkinson confronts the need to rethink capitalism and presents an integrated range of thinking through a lens of applied negative dialectics, questioning how and why things might have occurred, and where and how we might begin to improve them.

Author: Michael Carley
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 1483163946
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Rational Techniques in Policy Analysis covers the role of rational techniques in policy making process. This book is organized into two parts encompassing 12 chapters that consider the relationship of policy making and other approaches to rational analysis. Part I deals with the "disintegration" of rational policy analysis to find out what the pieces are, how they work, how the parts interact and how they relate to the wider policy making environment. Part II considers the types of rational analysis in more detail, and serves not only as a survey of rational techniques but as an introduction to the important literature in each field. This part specifically looks into the cost-utility techniques, social forecasting, and evaluation and social indicator research. This book is intended primarily for analysts, researchers, and students of the policy making process in university and government.

Author: Catherine Gallagher
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022651255X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Inventing counterfactual histories is a common pastime of modern day historians, both amateur and professional. We speculate about an America ruled by Jefferson Davis, a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK. These narratives are often written off as politically inspired fantasy or as pop culture fodder, but in Telling It Like It Wasn’t, Catherine Gallagher takes the history of counterfactual history seriously, pinning it down as an object of dispassionate study. She doesn’t take a moral or normative stand on the practice, but focuses her attention on how it works and to what ends—a quest that takes readers on a fascinating tour of literary and historical criticism. Gallagher locates the origins of contemporary counterfactual history in eighteenth-century Europe, where the idea of other possible historical worlds first took hold in philosophical disputes about Providence before being repurposed by military theorists as a tool for improving the art of war. In the next century, counterfactualism became a legal device for deciding liability, and lengthy alternate-history fictions appeared, illustrating struggles for historical justice. These early motivations—for philosophical understanding, military improvement, and historical justice—are still evident today in our fondness for counterfactual tales. Alternate histories of the Civil War and WWII abound, but here, Gallagher shows how the counterfactual habit of replaying the recent past often shapes our understanding of the actual events themselves. The counterfactual mode lets us continue to envision our future by reconsidering the range of previous alternatives. Throughout this engaging and eye-opening book, Gallagher encourages readers to ask important questions about our obsession with counterfactual history and the roots of our tendency to ask “What if...?”

Author: Philip E. Tetlock
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691027913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Political scientists often ask themselves what might have been if history had unfolded differently: if Stalin had been ousted as General Party Secretary or if the United States had not dropped the bomb on Japan. Although scholars sometimes scoff at applying hypothetical reasoning to world politics, the contributors to this volume--including James Fearon, Richard Lebow, Margaret Levi, Bruce Russett, and Barry Weingast--find such counterfactual conjectures not only useful, but necessary for drawing causal inferences from historical data. Given the importance of counterfactuals, it is perhaps surprising that we lack standards for evaluating them. To fill this gap, Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin propose a set of criteria for distinguishing plausible from implausible counterfactual conjectures across a wide range of applications. The contributors to this volume make use of these and other criteria to evaluate counterfactuals that emerge in diverse methodological contexts including comparative case studies, game theory, and statistical analysis. Taken together, these essays go a long way toward establishing a more nuanced and rigorous framework for assessing counterfactual arguments about world politics in particular and about the social sciences more broadly.

Author: Rick Szostak
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1035309874
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Championing an emerging global community of scholars, this Handbook provides a detailed examination on how to successfully integrate interdisciplinarity into education programs. A comprehensive look into the current landscape of the field, it emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary teaching and administration in the development of creativity, citizenship and information literacy. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.

Author: Laura Anna Costanzo
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1848447272
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 569

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Book Description
This important Handbook explores and evaluates dynamic environments and the appropriate strategic responses to them in the 21st century. Drawing together a collection of 29 original chapters, the Handbook makes an invaluable contribution to theory and practice by stimulating disciplined, rigorous and imaginative enquiry into the relationship between strategy and foresight. Leading scholars in the field of strategic management are brought together to offer innovative and multi-disciplinary perspectives on the past, present and future of strategy formation and foresight. In so doing, they challenge research in four key areas: strategy and foresight processes; strategy innovation for the future; understanding the future; and strategically responding to the future. The Handbook of Research on Strategy and Foresight is a comprehensive resource that will be invaluable for academics, students and practitioners interested in this important phenomenon.