Политическая наука и укрощение контингентности

Политическая экспертиза: ПОЛИТЭКС. 2019. Т. 15. № 1. С. 45–58.

Lokshin I.

The paper makes an attempt at inserting (positivistic) political science in a broader epistemological
context than it is usually conceived. The implied context is that of the contingency of the
human world which was pointed out by Aristotle in “Nicomachean Ethics” when he stated that
politics deals more with particulars than with general principles, and more with changeable than
stable things. Under the conditions of contingency, finding a foothold for thinking and acting becomes
a problem; political science is considered as one of the three “strategies” of dealing with
contingency, along with “political creativity” and “political virtù”. Political science as such aims at
finding invariants and regularities which govern the social world; “political creativity” is concerned
both with designing new invariants which would structure the social world and with making the
connection between causes and effects more reliable; finally, “political virtù” is what makes human
action less dependent on the invariants, and it can manifest itself in various forms – from the
Machiavellian virtù as such to “antifragility”. The choice of the strategy depends on the degree
of complexity of the process which has to be dealt with. The paper describes three strategies of
taming contingency, proposes a classification of the degrees of complexity of (social and political)
processes (elementary, simple, complex and chaotic) and derives some implications from the
general argument. These implications entail, among other things, that in the world which political
science studies there are no clear-cut boundaries between 1) knowledge and action, 2) scientific
knowledge and pragmatically oriented heuristics.

Keywords: political science, политическая наука, эвристика, contingency, контингентность, virtu, heuristics, virtu, эпистемология социальных наук, epistemology of social sciences