A sign in the old communist ministry of finance in Warsaw read: “Theory is when you know why things work but don’t know how to make them work. Practice is when you know how to make things work but don’t know why they work. Here, nothing works and we don’t know why.”

How often have you heard people dismiss an idea as “just a lot of theory,” meaning it is useless obfuscation? They are unlikely to be talking about the natural sciences, where theory that does not work is rapidly abandoned (Grant 2006) and theory that does work leads to practical applications or explains why things work.

Theories inundate the social sciences. A general definition is “Systematically organized knowledge applicable in a relatively wide variety of circumstances, especially a system of assumptions, accepted principles, and rules of procedure devised to analyze, predict, or otherwise explain the nature or behavior of a specified set of phenomena” (American Heritage Dictionary). Theory comes in three general types.

A theory might be taxonomic—a system of classification to permit diagnosis, prognosis, prediction, and identification of similarities and patterns. Examples include Erik Erikson’s eight stages of liv, Linnaeus’s classification of plants and animals, and Mendeleev’s periodic table. Many fields make sense of events by periodization, such as the Elizabethan in drama, the Baroque in art and music, and the Cold War in history. What might a taxonomy of conflict look like? The most obvious, and probably the most useful, would start with levels of conflict, the basic arrangement of this book.

Taxonomic debate can degenerate into acrimonious conflicts over the proper basis for classification. Biologists divide into two camps—“splitters” who try to increase the number of recognized species, and “joiners” who try to reduce them. Environmentalists tend to ally with the splitters, and developers with the joiners, because conservation laws are at the species level. Thus do economic, political, and other interests sully scientific disputes.

Some use theory to refer to patterns that emerge from experience, by trial and error (Taleb 2012). Thus, some social scientists use the term to describe factors that influence the phenomena they study. Gustavson (1955) suggests the minimum necessary to understand history is the interaction of economic, individual, institutional, intellectual, religious, and technological factors. Economic factors in the outcome of the “Hundred Years War” (1340–1453) included the decline of feudalism and the impact of the Black Death on labor prices that made soldiering less attractive than staying home. Joan of Arc provides one of the strongest cases for the impact an individual can have on history. Institutionally, the war saw the revival of professional armies, the decline of cavalry in the face of the infantry revolution, and the revival of banking and trade that enabled states to tax and borrow to support larger armies. The development of vernacular languages and national consciousness affected ideas about whom to fight and why. The division in the Church over the rightful pope with the English and French backing different candidates gave a religious dimension to the war. Technologically, the longbow, the use of canons, improved armor, and improved methods for producing steel and gunpowder affected strategy, tactics, and the outcome of the war.

Finally, for most natural, medical, and some social scientists, a theory explains specific phenomena by causal relationships arrived at inductively from observations and must survive empirical testing. Examples include double entry bookkeeping (White 2012) and the germ theory of disease. Ideally, observation is conducted under controlled conditions in experiments carefully designed to eliminate all but a limited number of variables that are manipulated to determine their effects. Careful measurements often with highly sophisticated specially designed instruments and appropriate mathematical analysis of the resulting data are characteristic of this sort of theory building. Generally the most conclusive, when applied to human behavior it often involves interventions and manipulations that violate basic human rights, so is not always possible.

Which type of theory is most useful for understanding conflict remains un-answered. We are awaiting what Thomas Kuhn (1996) called a "paradigm shift" that will mark the first great profound synthesis of our thinking.¹ In his formulation, researchers, increasingly pushing the limits of current knowledge, begin to see unexpected results. As anomalies mount, researchers begin to lose faith in the existing paradigm until someone proposes an alternative accepted as a new paradigm. Then, the cycle repeats.

Often portrayed as genius overcoming conventional wisdom, paradigm shifts often have elements of mysticism and inspiration. Freud attributed many of his ideas to his “creative madness” rather than research on patients. Kekule hit on the hexagonal structure for benzene after a dream in which a snake bit its own tail. Copernicus devised the heliocentric system not because of better data but because he believed Aristotle’s idea of the perfection of circular motion, the Neoplatonist’s exalted idea of the Sun, and that God would not have designed the messy system the Ptolemaic universe had become.

According to legend, Archimedes, ordered to determine if the king’s crown was pure gold without damaging it, had no idea how to do so until he lowered himself into his bath. Noticing the water rise, he realized in a flash that the water displaced was a measure of his weight, and excitedly ran naked through the streets of Syracuse to the palace shouting, “Eureka” (I have found it).

In “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Sokal called for a "liberatory postmodern science" because "physical reality no less than social reality is a social and linguistic concept,” alleging a deep connection between quantum theory and radical politics. Actually, Sokal was satirizing both Social Text, the journal in which his article appeared and its underlying philosophy that verifiable objective truth is impossible.

Patrons in a famous New York art museum praised a lumpy cloth-draped paint-splotched creation in the middle of a gallery, actually a drop cloth temporarily protecting a pile of furniture while painters worked in plain sight nearby. Counterfeit drugs are an increasing problem, and purported news pictures may be completely altered or fabricated. More problematic are the fads we have had from fields such as psychology (e.g., anger management, emotional intelligence) and business administration (e.g., management by walking around, Six Sigma). Still worse is pseudoscience. Perhaps worst of all, some argue that “social justice” trumps objectivity and fact, which some are willing to sacrifice in trying to impose their own views on others.

Theorists from many academic disciplines have tried to explain why we fight and how to manage our conflicts. There is little synthesis and considerable contradiction among them as to causes, consequences, and cures. This raises the question of which theory is best—and of how to identify it. This chapter proposes six criteria for assessing theories.