title: Political Science and the Taming of Contingency
metadata.name: dc.contributor.author
metadata.value: Lokshin, Ilya M.
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.date.accessioned
metadata.value: 2019-11-26T20:45:38Z
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.date.available
metadata.value: 2019-11-26T20:45:38Z
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.date.issued
metadata.value: 2019-03
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.identifier.citation
metadata.value: Lokshin I. M. Political Science and the Taming of Contingency. Political Expertise: POLITEX, 2019, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 45–58.
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.identifier.other
metadata.value: https://doi.org/10.21638/11701/spbu23.2019.104
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.identifier.uri
metadata.value: http://hdl.handle.net/11701/16675
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.description.abstract
metadata.value: 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 clear-cut boundaries between 1) knowledge and action, 2) scientific
  knowledge and pragmatically oriented heuristics.
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.description.sponsorship
metadata.value: The study was carried out with a grant from the Russian Science Foundation, project
  no. 17‑18‑01536 “Knowledge Transfer and Convergence of Methodological Traditions: Experience
  of Interdisciplinary Integration of Political, Biological and Linguistic”.
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.language.iso
metadata.value: ru
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.publisher
metadata.value: St Petersburg State University
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.relation.ispartofseries
metadata.value: Political Expertise: POLITEX;Volume 15; Issue 1
metadata.lang: -
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: political science
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: contingency
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: virtù
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: epistemology of social sciences
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.subject
metadata.value: heuristics
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.title
metadata.value: Political Science and the Taming of Contingency
metadata.lang: en_GB
metadata.name: dc.type
metadata.value: Article
metadata.lang: en_GB
resources.filename: 45-58.pdf
resources.url: https://dspace.spbu.ru/bitstream/11701/16675/1/45-58.pdf
resources.format: Adobe PDF
resources.size: 689,78 kB