POLI 244 Chapter Notes -Wage War, Immanuel Kant, Consistency
16 Dec 2012
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Document Summary
This anecdote illustrates what we study when we study world politics. World politics also called international relations seeks to understand how peoples and countries of the world get along. Understanding the varied landscape of conflict and cooperation is the task of those who study world politics. This text is organized around the most compelling and pressing puzzles in the study of world politics. Puzzles are observations about the world that demand an explanation: example: war. Puzzles of variation: disparity of wealth, schooling, health. Which of these patterns will hold in the future? (chapter 13) Each chapter will show how one can build theories out of these puzzles. A theory is a logically consistent set of statements that explains a phenomenon of interest. Given that theories are simplified explanations of important factors in highly complex phenomena, we aspire for probabilistic claims, that is, arguments about the factors that increase or decrease the likelihood that some outcome will occur.
