:: blame the extended gestation.... ::

:: Saturday, April 17, 2004 ::

A New Kind of Social Science:
The Path Beyond Current (IR) Methodologies May Lie Beneath Them

Existing formal models of political behavior have followed the lead of the natural sciences and generally focused on methods that use continuous-variable mathematics. Stephen olfram has recently produced an extended critique of that approach in the natural sciences, and suggested that a great deal of natural behavior can be accounted for using rules that involve discrete patterns. Wolfram’s work generally does not consider models in the social sciences but given the similarity between many of the techniques for modeling in the natural and social sciences, his critique can readily be applied to models of social behavior as well. We argue further that pattern-based models are particularly relevant to modeling human behavior because human cognitive abilities are far more developed in the domain of pattern recognition than in the domain of continuous-variable mathematics. We test the possibility of finding pattern-based behavior in international behavior by looking at event data for the Israel-Palestine conflict for the
period 1979-2003.

:: Jim Nichols 4/17/2004 07:36:00 PM [+] ::
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