POLITICAL SCIENCE AND THE TAMING OF CONTINGENCY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu23.2019.104Abstract
The paper makes an attempt at inserting (positivistic) political science in a broader epistemological context than it is usually conceived. The implied context is that of the contingency of the human world which was pointed out by Aristotle in “Nicomachean Ethics” when he stated that politics deals more with particulars than with general principles, and more with changeable than stable things. Under the conditions of contingency, finding a foothold for thinking and acting becomes a problem; political science is considered as one of the three “strategies” of dealing with contingency, along with “political creativity” and “political virtù”. Political science as such aims at finding invariants and regularities which govern the social world; “political creativity” is concerned both with designing new invariants which would structure the social world and with making the connection between causes and effects more reliable; finally, “political virtù” is what makes human action less dependent on the invariants, and it can manifest itself in various forms - from the Machiavellian virtù as such to “antifragility”. The choice of the strategy depends on the degree of complexity of the process which has to be dealt with. The paper describes three strategies of taming contingency, proposes a classification of the degrees of complexity of (social and political) processes (elementary, simple, complex and chaotic) and derives some implications from the general argument. These implications entail, among other things, that in the world which political science studies there are no clearcut boundaries between 1) knowledge and action, 2) scientific knowledge and pragmatically oriented heuristics.
Keywords:
political science, contingency, virtù, epistemology of social sciences, heuristics
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