Search Results

The human imagination is often thought of as creativity and originality. It is often considered in terms of its high-end, creative products such as religion, arts, and literature. However, the human imagination does not solely produce flights of creative fancy. It is also involved in the production of highly stable and fairly predictable representations of possible situations. This chapter discusses the humble imaginations of the human mind which are generally automatic and largely unconscious, yet are crucial to the formation of representations of what is to happen. This imagination is the construction of ‘what if’ which aids in the prediction of possible outcomes. The focus of this chapter is on specialized inference engines which are believed to be vehicles of creative imagination. Examples are provided in this chapter to illustrate the specialized ‘what if’ inferential systems of the human mind.

This sets out my positive account of causal explanation. According to this account, successful explanations must answer what-if-things-had-been-different questions: they must cite conditions such that changes in those conditions (produced by interventions) are associated with changes in the phenomenon being explained. It follows from this account that nomothetic models of explanation according to which laws are required for sucessful explanation are mistaken. This is a highly desirable result since explanations that do not cite laws are common in the special sciences. Explanation has to do with the exhibition of relations of dependency, not with nomic subsumption.

Economists build models to understand the economy, but to outsiders these often seem to be imagined or fictional worlds, accounts that seem closer to those of science fiction than to matters of science. Such a judgement underrates the importance of fictional elements and the imagination in the way economists make and use their models. Paying attention to the ‘what-if’ questions that economists ask when they use their models reveals how they create the keys that enable them to translate between their imaginary model worlds and the real economic world we all live in.

This chapter examines the factors and processes in how worst cases are imagined. It analyzes the mental and institutional mechanisms at work when people imagine things. It suggests that whether we are looking forward in anticipation or looking back to make sense of a situation the imagination is at work, holding some factors at bay while highlighting others, creating scenarios and then trying to convince ourselves and others of their reasonableness. This chapter also explores the relation between cognitive resilience and virtual worst cases, and explains how to tell a good “what if” from a bad one.

This chapter reviews some of the key arguments that are in favour of NMD, and considers some of the lasting assumptions about the character of security and threat, as well as the concept of policy positivism. It then studies foreign policy as a practice central to the notion of ‘narrative activity’. The chapter also considers the intersection of foreign policy and identity, the influence of ‘what if’ statements and the meanings associated with ballistic missiles. It determines that the specific context of a proliferation ‘problem’ has made the construed picture of a rogue other a valid threat which is understood in the US foreign policy.

This chapter talks about “What-if” history, which did not originate in the provocative minds of a few Anglo-American historians at the beginning of the millennium, nor from the pen of some nineteenth-century novelist. The approach was adopted early on by historians and then by researchers in other social sciences who defended very different, even contradictory interpretations of counterfactual analysis. The chapter probes historical depths by presenting some of the most famous cases, such as the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. It highlights a familiar strangeness that characterizes what is called today as counterfactual or “what-if” history. Counterfactual argumentation was employed early on as a kind of digression.

This chapter grasps the current state of counterfactual history by examining uchronia in its more explicitly literary sense. It explains how the what-if history and revisions of the past spontaneously bring to mind H. G. Wells's famous time machine and the epigraph quoted from William S. Burroughs's The Place of Dead Roads that indicates how widely accepted this type of fictional voyage has become. If uchronia is defined by its playful nature, it must also be noted that it is a literary form with its own set of techniques that cannot be ignored. The chapter talks about work of fiction that is based on the principle of the divergence of a historical event that can take various forms and operate in different registers. It emphasizes the importance of guarding against overly rigid definitions and boundaries between genres when approaching a literary world full of surprising contrasts.

§1. Complete Effective Inseparability. A disjoint pair (A1,A2) is by definition recursively inseparable if no recursive superset of A1 is disjoint from A2. This is equivalent to saying that for any disjoint r.e. supersets ωi and ωj of A1 and A2, the set ωi is not the complement of ωj —in other words, there is a number n outside both ωi and ωj. The disjoint pair (A1,A2) is called effectively inseparable—abbreviated E.I.—if there is a recursive function δ(x, y)—called an E.I. function for (A1, A2)—such that for any numbers i and j such that A1⊆ ωi and A2Í ωj. with ωi being disjoint from ωj, the number d(i , j) is outside both a;,- and ωj. We shall call a disjoint pair (A1, A2) completely E.I. if there is a recursive function δ(x, y)—which we call a complete E.I. function for (A1, A2)—such that for any numbers i and j, if A1⊆ ωi and A2Í ωj, then δ(i , j) Í ωi ↔ d(i , j)Í ωj (in other words, d(i, j) is either inside or outside both sets ωi and ωj.). [If ωi and ωj happen to be disjoint, then, of course, d(i, j) is outside both ωi and ωj, so any complete E.I. function for (A1,A2) is also an E.I. function for (A1,A2) In a later chapter, we will prove the non-trivial fact that if (A1, A2) is E.I. and A1 and A2 are both r.e., then (A1,A2) is completely E.I. [The proof of this uses the result known as the double recursion theorem, which we will study in Chapter 9.] Effective inseparability has been well studied in the literature. Complete effective inseparability will play a more prominent role in this volume—especially in the next few chapters. Proposition 1. (1) If (A1,A2) is completely E.I., then so is (A2,A1) —in fact, if d(x,y) is a complete E.I. function for (A1,A2), then d(y,x) is a complete E.I. function for (A2, A1).