Thinking, Feeling, and Choosing: Pragmatism, Political Psychology, and the Intelligence Community

Abstract

This chapter tells a story of how knowledge from economics, psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and philosophy has been adapted, at times by political scientists and at other times by political practitioners, to challenge prevailing constructs of reason and passion in the analysis of decision-making in international politics. These new waves of interdisciplinary research have changed the understanding of how humans think, feel, and choose. This chapter is also a story of how pragmatism and practices produce knowledge. A rich tradition that encompasses a wide range of approaches, pragmatism is defined broadly as a set of dispositions for making sense of the world and what works in the world. It treats the world as relational and contingent where people continuously adjust their habits through processes and practices. These processes and practices of knowledge production are embedded both in an acknowledgement of the uncertainty of the world and practices of knowledge production through action. Pragmatism emphasizes the deliberation, practices, and experimentation of agents amid the ebb and flow of events. These processes and relations do not essentialize states, or sovereignty, or agents and structures, but rather tell a story of continuous learning. The chapter illustrates these arguments by a close examination of knowledge production through pragmatism within the intelligence community in the United States.