This chapter presents an idealized path towards theory development (for all kinds of theories), called the “demarcation-explanation” cycle. The cycle comprised four stages: (a) the provisional demarcation of the explanandum in a working definition, (b) the proposal of different types of explanations, (c) the validation of explanations in empirical research, (d) and the proposal of a scientific definition flowing from these explanations. The chapter also takes a closer look at (a) different types of definitions (working vs. scientific, intensional vs. extensional/diviso) and ways to evaluate the adequacy of scientific definitions, (b) different types of explanations (constitutive, causal, mechanistic, teleological) and levels of analysis, and (c) ingredients of mechanistic explanations such as representations, operations, operating conditions (related to automaticity), and related notions of dual-process/system models, rationality, and cognition.

To this point I have offered an account of understanding by examining the conditions under which one can correctly and appropriately ascribe understanding to oneself or another. Correctness, I argued, depends on honoring the evidence available from an expression or text. Intersubjectivity is achieved by bringing the beliefs of the speaker and listener into alignment. These beliefs and expectations were left relatively unanalyzed, sometimes simply glossed as “context.” What calling this background the context fails to acknowledge is the depth of the beliefs and commitments that subjects bring to their understanding, commitments so fundamental that the linguistic properties of an expression are neglected. This is one implication of the proposition that all understanding involves the fixation and updating of beliefs; understanding is never the sentence processing independent of these beliefs.

The Conclusion reexamines Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population from the perspective of the transformative mode of demographic governance explored throughout the earlier chapters, as well as in terms of the eighteenth-century debates about the limits and locus of demographic agency examined in Chapter 4. Rather than seeing Malthus’s Essay as marking a definitive break with earlier demographic thinking, it argues for strong continuities, particularly concerning the importance of situation, the providential nature of demographic processes and the real effects of intervention in demographic governance. Instead, it identifies Malthus’s key departure as an emphasis on the propertied and rational individual as the legitimate locus of demographic agency under God. The conclusion ends by considering some of the implications of the history of early modern demographic governance for reinterpreting – and broadening – the history of modern demographic thought.

The chapter discusses Pasinetti’s arguments for a theory which is ‘firmly placed on an objective foundational framework’ rather than on the fictional reality of the ‘purely imaginary world of rationally behaving individuals’. This approach – Pasinetti argues – was typical of the ‘Cambridge Keynesians’, which following a path traced by Marshall, placed at centre of the analysis not abstract entities, but flesh-and-blood economic agents acting in various specific markets. The vision of economic behaviour guided by customs and habits, setting limits to the crude maximisation through marginal analysis, was shared by Kahn and Keynes, who accepted it in its modified form, namely, not as exact calculation but as the outcome of a trial and error method. Although they did not endorse Sraffa’s rejection of its validity for price determination and income distribution, they shared the common objective of placing reality at the centre of their analysis, rather than abstract rationality, as the principle guiding behaviour. In other words, what characterises the approach is a vision of individuals less stereotyped than mere maximising machines. This means that in the Cambridge approach there is room for rationality in depicting political and economic decisions, as long as we interpret it as constrained by limited knowledge and uncertainty.

We introduce BPS, a research paradigm which takes seriously the cognitive limitations and varied motivations of citizens and elites as they make politics happen around the world. The most important claim in this book is that a set of ideas from psychology, economics, political science and communication studies can be combined in a simple way to greatly enhance our understanding of politics. These approaches can help explain the many deviations we see in political attitudes, political decision making, and political behavior that are often predicted from the dominant, alternative approach to understanding politics: RCT. The BPS paradigm encapsulates a broad set of research programs that challenge traditional assumptions about the processes and motivations structuring political decision-making, including: (1) the role, use and influence of heuristics and cognitive biases on decision-making, 2() the effects of message framing on political attitudes, (3) institutional factors and the psychology of group-decision making in state policy formation, (4) the role of emotions in political behavior, (5) individual differences in preferences stemming from personality, values and norms, and (6) the importance of motivation and identity in information processing.

We come to the end of the book with a hopeful summary and discussion about the benefits to the policy community of behavioral political ccience and our synthesis of rational choice and BPS. By linking ideas from diverse social scientific disciplines – economics, political science, sociology, psychology, communication, and others – we hope the book might create benefits larger than the sum of its individual chapters. Moving beyond the simple assumptions of Economic Man, BPS has improved our understanding of how people actually think, decide, and act in the political realm. We also discuss how BPS insights can be incorporated into the formal political models that are the hallmark of RCT approaches to political sciences, paving a path for integration of the work by theorists working in both traditions. The biases carefully reviewed in the first half of the book, combined with insights about what types of preferences, with what origins, influence political decisions leave us much better off than we were even fifty years ago in the field. We hope the reader will agree, and that those who hope to make informed, responsive public policies will use BPS insights as a helpful foundation.

Digitalization in the legal domain is an amazing example of the way information technology (IT) can displace or enrich typically human tasks. Fueled by the recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) (big data, machine learning, natural language processing, etc.), this phenomenon of digitalization affects more and more legal tasks and functions. Effective examples of digitalization in the legal domain are very diverse, ranging from exploration of patent classifications1 to prediction of legal cases’ outcomes (e.g., anticipation of foreseeable damages from an action).2 One can also mention e-discovery,3 as well as the digitalization of the organization and review of legal documents.4

This chapter scans the range of possibilities now open for emergency operations planning. The embedded case study describes use of the cloud, artificial intelligence, and the “internet of things.”

This chapter examines the early critical responses of philosophers to Kuhn's SSR. I analyze how Kuhn responded to these criticisms.

This chapter examines the influence of Kuhn's SSR on the sociology of science. I analyze Kuhn's influenced on the sociology of science before and after the development of the Strong Programme.