Lexington Books U.S. Officials and the Fall of the Shah: Some Safe Contraction Interpretations

Unlike the dominant trend in cognitive approach to foreign policy, the approach in this book is not guided by reflections in psychology. Like part of Jervis's work, it is inspired by reflections concerning the philosophy of science; yet not by Kuhn's or those of its most well-known critics, but by some more recent and formal reflections known as the AGM theory. The AGM theory, proposed in the 1980's by Alchourrón, Gärdenfors, and Makinson, is the core of a most dynamic branch of logic, focusing on belief change. It has produced impressive formal results, with echoes in artificial intelligence, database management, and decision and game theory. This book shows how it can be used in political science. The book includes three parts. Part One is a twenty-page review of the AGM theory, avoiding a number of pitfalls, inaccuracies, and misunderstandings that are common elsewhere. Part Two is a review of U.S.-Iranian relations under the reign of the last shah, focusing on the last years of monarchy, and including an unconventional interpretation of U.S. intelligence performance in 1978. The essential part is Part Three, where an AGM model is tested, and intriguing results obtained in connection with U.S. perceptions of the Iranian revolution. Review Bridging the gap between logical and empirical approaches to opinion formation, Dr. Brotons' innovative book introduces formal models from philosophical logic into social science and applies those models to the US perception of the Iran crisis that led to the fall of the Shah. The result is a precise, fine-grained and illuminating account of belief change in politics.--Erik J. Olsson, Chair in Theoretical Philosophy, Lund University About the Author Jean-Charles Brotons was a lecturer and researcher at the University of Geneva (Switzerland), and now managing director of Arta Studio (Tehran, Iran).