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The critique of common knowledge of rationality (CKR) developed in the preceding chapters should convince researchers interested in explaining social reality to simply avoid the concept. The actual cost of abandoning CKR in terms of explaining social behavior is minimal because the Nash equilibrium concept itself is problematic when the recursive nature of interagent beliefs is important and the correlated equilibrium is by far the more cogent equilibrium concept. Nevertheless, it may seem curious that we must reject CKR even in situations where all players are in fact rational. What, after all, is the problem with assuming agents know something that is in fact true? This chapter discusses the pitfalls of naïve epistemic logic, the common knowledge of logicality paradox, the Surprise Examination problem, the modal logic of knowledge, and a solution to the Surprise Examination conundrum.

The idea of margin for error of principles is used to analyse the Surprise Examination Paradox. Although the pupils in the story know that there will be a surprise examination, they do not know that they will know tomorrow that they will know the day after that …, because each iteration requires a further margin for error until nothing is left. A similar account is suggested for knowledge of rationality in Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Versions of the Surprise Examination Paradox in which the pupils know only that there will not be an expected examination are used to criticize alternative accounts of the paradox.

This chapter discusses the events leading up to the October Surprise. Clark Clifford suggested that there were two possible courses of action: postpone the bombing pause and wait to hear what Nguyen Van Thieu had to say, or simply inform him that the United States was going ahead with the bombing pause anyway. Despite Thieu's stonewalling, Lyndon B. Johnson decided to go ahead with the bombing halt anyway. He planned to announce the decision on television that evening, but he scheduled a conference call with the presidential candidates to inform them first. Speaking on television that evening the president announced that he had ordered a complete halt of all bombardment of North Vietnam. The role of Clifford during the Vietnam War is especially significant because of the insight it sheds on the influence of domestic politics on foreign policy.

This chapter explains the main concept of the book, religious improvisation, or how the practice of Islam involves trial and error and is contingent upon context. The possibility for religious improvisation has been enhanced in Indonesia’s transition from authoritarianism and democracy, which is why both conservative Islamists and liberal Muslims—the main actors shaping Indonesian democracy—are participating in it. Religious improvisation produces part-Islamic, part-Western assemblages. Such hybrid practices may indeed seem strange and surprising, and they importantly challenge dominant assumptions that Islam is external to Western secular liberalism.

Blind belief in the force of history make intelligence operatives think that history repeats itself. But history, of course, never repeats itself. Nor do threats repeat themselves. However, they do appear in new forms and varieties, and these may easily be misjudged as historical echoes. This may lead to orthodox beliefs that fuel a classic threat discourse that easily misleads. The US intelligence community thus failed to capitalise on the collected material they already had, and they were therefore not able to identify the change that had occurred on their threat radar. This chapter demonstrates how the US intelligence community’s focus on Afghanistan and bin Laden indicates that bin Laden in practice operated as his own diversion and scapegoat, since he managed to have the US intelligence community focusing more on him than on his organisation and on the threat evolving on American soil. Whether it was intentional or not is unknown, but the focus of US intelligence on bin Laden and al Qaeda in Afghanistan led them away from the terrorists in the US. It led the focus of US intelligence away from al Qaeda’s real target; New York and Washington.

This chapter shows how Israel persuaded the US to initiate the ‘memorandum of understanding’ which changed Israel’s deterrent capabilities. First, Israel insisted that the balance of power had changed dramatically in terms of heavy armaments and the construction of Arab forces, due to greater Soviet support. Khrushchev’s visit to Egypt aggravated anxiety of in Israel regarding a Soviet-Arab plot to destroy Israel in a surprise attack. The visit was not merely symbolic, but rather proofof Soviet solidarity with Arab intentions, including public support for the Palestinian cause. The US promised that the Sixth Fleet was ready to react to any Arab attack, but Israel had little faith in such promises, in view of the Arab summits which bid for military escalation. The Soviet made it clear that without the removal of the western bases in Turkey and the western courting of Iran, no settlement in the Middle East was possible.

This chapter discusses communication with God. It analyses a range of activity that is understood this way in the Vineyard, from simple prayer, to reading Bible verses as a form of ‘personal communication,’ to being contacted by God directly through voice or vision. It addresses how saliency, exteriority, and most of all surprise function as variables that make these events intelligible as supernatural communication, and as something that exceeds, divides, and reconfigures the will. Finally, both typification and elaboration, processes that constrain the expressions of the charismatic diagram, are introduced.

Contingentism describes how order arises without locating that order in an external world or describing it as inhering in or being an intrinsic property of an external world. This chapter also explains several other phenomena from a contingentist perspective: how surprise can arise in the absence of “resistance” from an autonomous reality; how theories can be valued in the absence of their correspondence to such a reality; and how deep time and pre-observer worlds can be described in the absence of intrinsically existent historical objects or order. Finally, the chapter returns to the original biological questions that motivated the explorations undertaken in this book—that is, “How do organisms perceive the world?”—and offers a surprising and hopeful view of the relationship of organismal perceivers and reality. The chapter concludes by asking, “What does natural order depend on?”: It depends upon practices of patterning themselves; it depends on cognitive consonance, or the resolution of unexpected experiences into experiences that “make sense”; it depends on the capacity to know when and when not to be surprised in the face of novel experiences; and it depends on the valuing of theories for virtues like predictive power but not necessarily for their assumed correspondence to an intrinsically existent order.

“From Fresh Air to Summer Camp: Social Work Enters the Picture” traces developments occurring from about 1900 to 1926. During this period the new profession of social work coalesced, incorporated the reform spirit of the Progressive Era, began to develop rationales for programs that could best benefit residents of congested urban environments, and established numerous social agency-sponsored summer camps. The purposes of these camps varied and included improved health and weight gain, play, Americanization, progressive informal education, skill-building, and group life as a milieu for growth and change. The chapter includes descriptions of four early social agency summer camp programs: Surprise Lake Camp, Lillian Home, Camp Wise, and the camps at Harriman State Park, Palisades Interstate Park Commission (PIPC).