x Each frame of reference is, in effect, a "conceptual lens."
By comparing and contrasting the three frameworks, we see what each magnifies, highlights, and reveals
as well as what each blurs or neglects.
p.3 But this simplification - like all simplifications - obscures as well as reveals.
p.4 Our first proposition is that bundles of such related assumptions constitute basic frames of
reference or conceptual models in terms of which analysts and ordinary layman ask and answer the questions: What happened?
Why did it happen? What will happen?
p.7 Understanding that ordinary explanations, predictions, and evaluations
are inescapably theory-based is fundamental to self-consciousness about knowledge.
p.8 because simplifications are necessary, competing simplifications
are essential... Concepts and theories, especially ones that do real work, become accepted, conventional, and
efficient for communicating answers. Particularly in explaining and predicting actions of governments, when
one family of simplifications becomes convenient and compelling, it is even more essential to have at hand one or
more simple but competitive conceptual frameworks to help remind the questioner and the answerer what is omitted.
They open minds a little wider and keep them open a little longer. Alternative conceptual frameworks are important
not only for further insights into neglected dimensions of the underlying phenomenon. They are essential as a reminder of
the distortions and limitations of whatever conceptual framework one employs... this is a general methodological truth applicable
in all areas of life
p.19 From the point of view of a social scientist trying to predict human behavior, the concept
of rationality is important because, if a person acts rationally, his behavior can be fully explained in terms of the goals
he is trying to achieve.
p.44 Another well-known Cold War strategist, Albert Wohlstetter, characterizes the method and scope of a
prominent think tank's use of one gaming technique:
RAND analysts, in conducting map exercises to determine the performance of alternative defenses, typically
try some defense tactics and then attempt to figure the best means the enemy has available for countering this tactic; then
they try another tactic, examine the possible countermoves again, and so on.
What is distinctive about this approach? In Wohlstetter's words, it "attempts to introduce the enemy by
letting him, in his best interest, do his worst to our forces and then seeing which of our forces accomplishes the job most
effectively in the face of this best enemy attempt."
p.52 How does the actor "select, derive, and represent its information about the 'state of the system'?
How does it derive the standards by which this information is evaluated? How does it select and initiate a response?" We can
think of these three sets of judgments - value, reality, and instrumental - coming together in a triangle of mingles
beliefs. Though separate, all three judgments converge in the rational actor paradigm.
p.52-53 Value judgments (what the state cares about) influence the goals and objectives
but also affect which aspects of reality the state will care to observe. Judgments about
value and reality are deeply intertwined, "for facts are relevant only in relation to some judgment of value, and
judgments of value are operative only in relation to some configuration of fact." The value judgments
can be influenced in turn by instrumental calculations, since what a state wants may often be affected by what it
thinks it can get. These intermingled judgments combine, for Vickers, to form an agent's "appreciation" of a situation. "Such
judgments," he adds, "disclose what can best be described as a set of readiness to distinguish some aspects
of the situation rather than others and to classify and value these in this way rather than that." These readiness, taken
together, form an appreciative system.
p.56 The agent's appreciation of value is, however, bounded by - actually interpenetrated by - the agent's
perception of reality since "facts are relevant only in relation to some judgment of value, and judgments of value are operative
only in relation to some configuration of fact." Sir Geoffrey Vickers, The Art of Judgment; A Study of Policy Making,
centenary ed.
p.144 If knowledge of the tendency prompts the right question, attention is drawn to a variable that otherwise
might be overlooked
p.145 existing organizations and the existing programs and routines constrain behavior in the next
case: namely, they address it already oriented toward doing whatever they do.
p.266 Within any process, concentrate on innovations in information processing.
p.379 each [account] emphasized quite different factors in explaining the central puzzles of the crisis.
The source of the differences is the conceptual model each employed.
The conceptual models are much more than simple angles of vision or approaches. Each conceptual
framework consists of a cluster of assumptions and categories that influence what the analyst finds puzzling, how he formulates
the question, where he looks for evidence, and what he produces as an answer.
p.392 By emphasizing one causal dynamic rather than another, each framework yields different
expectations. Each directs the analyst or manager to allocate scarce attention and effort in one area rather than
others.
