Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Jimmy Carter and the tragedy of foreign policy
- 2 Locating the argument: a review of the existing literature
- 3 The origins of the crisis
- 4 The waiting game
- 5 Days of decision: the hostage rescue mission
- 6 Hostages to history
- 7 Some alternative explanations: non-analogical accounts of the Iran decision-making
- 8 Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Dramatis personae
- Appendix 2 The major historical analogies used
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
2 - Locating the argument: a review of the existing literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Jimmy Carter and the tragedy of foreign policy
- 2 Locating the argument: a review of the existing literature
- 3 The origins of the crisis
- 4 The waiting game
- 5 Days of decision: the hostage rescue mission
- 6 Hostages to history
- 7 Some alternative explanations: non-analogical accounts of the Iran decision-making
- 8 Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Dramatis personae
- Appendix 2 The major historical analogies used
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Summary
The philosopher and psychologist William James believed that ‘humans can understand things, events and experiences only from and through the viewpoint of other things, events and experiences’. Although James was writing in the 1890s, many modern cognitive psychologists have picked up his mantle in recent years, proposing that under certain conditions human beings are apt to rely heavily on analogizing as a mode of comprehension and perception; experience of past situations in which the options and alternatives under consideration were tried – either successfully or unsuccessfully – may help guide the decision-maker as he or she deals with a current problem. In recent years we have seen the emergence of a much discussed ‘cognitive revolution’ in the study of psychology, a shift away from the older behaviourist tradition typified by B. F. Skinner and towards an information processing approach.
Taking this shift in world-view or metatheory as inspiration, a growing number of scholars in political science have sought to probe the role which cognitive processes, including analogical reasoning, play in the formation of foreign policy decisions, thus helping to initiate a nascent research programme to which this book aims to contribute. In this chapter we first outline the underlying assumptions of the framework to be adopted.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- US Foreign Policy and the Iran Hostage Crisis , pp. 21 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001