POLI 243 Chapter Notes -Forego, Dependent And Independent Variables, Falsifiability

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We try to understand international events in terms of patterns of activity. Theories or models are used by social scientists to simplify events in the world. The textbook focuses on explaining why certain events happened in the past in order to establish causal patterns, which will hopefully provide guidelines as to how to act in the future. The future may differ from the past in innumerable ways, so there is always the possibility even the likelihood that any predictions we make based on models of past behaviour will be somewhat inaccurate. But just because we cannot predict the future with total certainty does not mean we should forego any planning or any attempt to make educated or informed analyses of the possibilities (or probabilities) of something happening (14). Political science differs from history precisely because it emphasizes the development of generalizable causal theories.

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