IA 261. Hypothesis Testing. 3 credits.
Examines hypothesis testing in national, military, counter-, and competitive intelligence. By comparing alternate theories in terms of their explanatory power and predictive success, students will learn the most relevant methods for integrating facts into unified theories, assessing theories, and properly qualifying and reevaluating theories to compensate for risk and uncertainty.
Course Objectives:
Students will develop knowledge and skills such that they can
- integrate seemingly unrelated facts into unified and plausible explanatory theories
- recognize and employ the most useful strategy to evaluate a hypothesis given the limitations of time and available information
- assess the probability of a hypothesis given a particular set of evidence and background assumptions
- determine the explanatory power of a hypothesis to accounting for a particular range of facts
- compensate for the uncertainty of information by properly qualifying hypotheses and reevaluating them at the appropriate time
Course Outline:
- The conceptual foundations of nondeductive reasoning
- The intelligence-relevant principles of confirmation theory
- The intelligence-relevant principles of inference to best explanation4.
- The intelligence-relevant principles of contrastive explanation
- Use of theoretical simplicity in evaluating explanations
- Role of auxiliary assumptions in hypothesis assessment
- Practice in applying the above to a wide range of actual cases
