POLI 203 Clouds, Clocks, and the Study of Politics Concordia
University winter 2024 over-view short note solution
Clouds, Clocks, and the Study of Politics
• Political Science has in the recent decades lost contact with its ontological base
• It looks at political events from the same lenses (explanatory logic) as the hard sciences;
• A phase in the scientific revolution; diffusion in two steps, of ontological & methodological
assumptions
• Hard Sciences→ bell weather human sciences [Psy & Econs] → Soc, anthrop, pol sci,
history
• Soc, Sci., esp. pol sci. based on neopositivist school of philosophy of science
✓ Legitimated assumptions of ontological/meta-methodological homogeneity
• Recently, philosophers of science/psychologists/economists have questioned
the applicability of human subject matters used in the hard core science
Popper’s
Karl Popper, thesis of meta-methodological homogeneity, recently stressed heterogeneity
of reality; it’s unamenable to single model of scientific explanation;
• Continuum…..
Clouds (most irregular, disorderly, unpredictable) →→Clocks (most irregular, orderly,
predictable) [pendulum, precision clocks, motor cars]
Clouds (Solar System) Extreme: gas clouds, the weather, schools of fish, human societies
→→ Individual human beings and animals →→ pendulum, precision clocks, motor cars
Clocks
• The Newtonian revolution popularized this notion; its success in explaining/predicting
celestial bodies
✓ The universe & its parts were by nature clocklike/predictable
✓ Even phenomena that looked as if indeterminate would soon be found to
be predictable/ regular
✓ Newton (all nature was governed by deterministic laws)
✓ Popper (all clouds were clocks – even the most cloudy clocks)
• 1920s, quantum theory challenged this clockwise model of
determinacy (chance/indeterminacy were fundamentally natural process)
• Popper’s metaphor was inverted: to some degree all clocks are clouds; degree
of cloudiness/only clouds exists
• It was thought this freed determinism & the efficacy of human choice
• Popper, went ahead, indeterminism is not enough
✓ determininsm: whole world is perfect, flawless clocks, all organisms/animals/ men
✓ indetermininsm: sheer chance plays a major role in our physical world
✓ Popper, went ahead, indeterminism is not enough
• something intermediate in character, between perfect chance (clouds perfect
determinism) and perfect determinism (perfect clocks)
,• To understand how such non-physical things as purposes, deliberations, plans, decisions,
theories, intentions, and values, can play a part in bringing about physical changes in the
physical world"
, •
• "the solution must explain freedom; and it must also explain how freedom is not just
chance but, rather, the result of a subtle interplay between something almost random or
haphazard, and something like a restrictive or selective control-such as an aim or standard-
though certainly not a cast- iron control
• conform to the idea of combining freedom and control, and also to the idea of 'plastic
control, as I shall call it in contradistinction to a 'cast-iron' control.
• Once this is seen, the problem of the relationship between ideas and behavior becomes
solvable
• Popper concludes: "We have seen that it is unsatisfactory to look upon the world as a
closed physical system-whether a strictly deterministic system or a system is simply due to
chance; on such a view of the world human creativeness and human freedom can only be
illusions....
• I have therefore offered a different view of the world-one in which the physical world is an
open system. This is compatible with the view of the evolution of life as a process of trial-
and-error elimination; and it allows us to understand rationally, though far from fully, the
emergence of biological novelty and the growth of human knowledge and human
freedom."
• Thus Popper tells us that the models of explanation appropriate to the physical sciences
will not enable us to come to grips with human and cultural phenomena, and that while we
can increase our understanding of them, we cannot explain them fully because of their
creative and emergent properties.
ONTOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF POLITICS
Popper’s ways of conceptualizing social reality (a) as a clock (b) as a cloud (c) as a system of
plastic controls (best captures political reality)
• It consists of ideas- human decisions, goals, purposes- in constant and intense interaction
with other ideas, human behavior, and the physical world.
• At the center of this complex system are choices and decisions-decisions to command,
obey, vote, make demands.
• The political universe has organization; elites make decisions to command or not to
command, what to command, how to implement commands. Citizens and subjects make
decisions to comply, how to comply or not to comply; to make demands, how to make
demands, or not to make demands.
• That is the heart of politics, the subject matter our discipline is committed to exploring and
understanding.
• The relations among these events are not simply reactive, as are the encounters of
physical
objects; they are not readily amenable to cause- and-effect "clocklike" models or
metaphors. Basically, this is because the behavioral repertories of elites and citizens are
not fixed repertories. The actors in politics have memories; they learn from experience.
They have goals, aspirations, calculative strategies.
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