POL SCI 5 Lecture Notes - International Criminal Court, Siege Of Melos, Hard Power
Document Summary
Theories= lenses; tell us where to look for the most important details & focus our attention in understanding; x descriptions. Explain, predict, and prescribe: explain- provide explanations of certain phenomenon; hone in on what causes things & isolate certain causes; gives a sense of process/connection leading from one cause to another; need a notion of causality/ finding correlation. Ex) smoke and fire: every time i see smoke and fire together, so i know there is a correlation between the two, but i don"t know why. Something might be happening simultaneously as the fire that causes smoke, but i think it"s the fire. We think there are relations/ causes & effects, but they are not always the cause or the only cause. We need to know why things are happening, not just idiosyncratic situations. Ex) lots of realists believe that bipolar world is more stable than a multipolar world but this shouldn"t be assumed as advocacy for bipolarity.
