Karnaugh-Map Utilization in Boolean Analysis:The Case of War Termination

Abstract

Abstract. This paper advocates and demonstrates the utility of the Karnaugh-map, as a pictorial manual tool, in the Boolean analysis (BA)of social and political problems, in general, and in problems of peace research, in particular, as exemplified herein by the problem of war termination. Analysis is performed for both the appearance and absence of a specified phenomenon for the cases where (a) the logical remainders (don’t cares) are ignored (actually nullified), and (b) the don’t cares are assigned certain deliberate but independentvalues, and (c) faithful representation is used via a partially-defined function whose asserted part constitutes the definite (certain) causes of the phenomenon while its don’t-care part is a disjunction of its potential (uncertain) causes. The paper also presents several novel extensions of BA in which the don’t-care entries in the Karnaugh-map are manipulated in an attempt to make the output function positive/negative in, independent of, or symmetric in some of its arguments, to assignan importance metric for each of these arguments, to obtain a threshold representation for it, or to fit a pre-specified hypothesis. An explanation is given for the relation between BA per se, and two variants thereof, namely Crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA)and Coincidence Analysis (CNA).