National_Catalogues: Heuristics, Anecdote and Applying "Art": Why War Theorists are Kidding Themselves

Title: Heuristics, Anecdote and Applying "Art": Why War Theorists are Kidding Themselves
Identifier: ADA500598
STOAbstractExternal: Contemporary war theorists face a bedeviling thicket of problems precluding accurate forecasting or estimation. War is a complex, multivariate, and difficult-to-define enterprise; it is a quintessentially human activity, arising from man's emotional and rational makeup, his civilization, his genetic heritage, and his environment. War theorists' personal familiarity with the planning, practice, and consequences of war drive their adoption of a philosophical -- nonscientific -- framework for understanding which ignores underlying physical phenomena in favor of broad "principles." Yet just as philosophers have been unable to divine the purpose of human existence through discourse, war theorists fail to explain the causes and outcomes of human conflict when they substitute anecdotal evidence for data, derive heuristics from small sample sizes, and eschew science as "reductionist" -- incapable of accurate prediction in a realm as complex as human behavior. We must replace empirical (observation-based) methods and artful heuristics with the rigorous tests of hypothesis-based science, building up from low-level physical and social phenomena arising in the neurophysiology of human brains, to eventually answer behavioral questions unsolved for millennia.

STOAuthorExternal: ARMY WAR COLL CARLISLE BARRACKS PA Kennedy, III, Fred G.
STOClassificationExternal: N
STOKeywordsExternal: *WAR THEORISTS, *WAR THEORY, *SCIENTIFIC METHOD, EMPIRICAL METHODS, ART OF WAR, THEORY OF WAR, CLAUSEWITZ CARL VON, DATA COLLECTION, SINGER J D, SUN TZU, TESTABLE HYPOTHESES, HUMAN BEHAVIOR
STOPublisher: USA
Language: English
STOReportSource: http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA500598
Published: 3/7/2009

Created at 11/9/2016 3:26 PM by System Account
Last modified at 11/9/2016 3:26 PM by System Account

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