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In his book The War Trap Bruce Bueno de Mesquita claims to offer a deductive theory of international conflict based on the assumption that foreign policy makers attempt to maximize their expected utility. The theory is subjected to a systematic empirical test that seems to provide impressive confirmation. The first part of this article examines Bueno de Mesquita's theory and argues that it cannot be derived from his assumptions. The second part examines the operational version of the theory, which was the one actually tested, and argues that it can be more plausibly interpreted as a version of a different theory—one that Bueno de Mesquita claims to have discredited. The essay concludes by discussing the significance of this book with regard to the question of whether theories of individual rational choice can explain foreign policy decisions.

Some important philosophical issues to do with truth, meaning and translation are raised if we attempt to take the language of business seriously. There may be difficulties associated with trying to make sense of what this would amount to, but a preliminary exploration of the territory provides interesting perspectives on business ethics and on the philosophy of language. When we decide that we know what another speaker is saying, we are simultaneously making decisions about the way the world is, the structure of the speaker's language and the speaker's veracity. Since there is an irreducible ethical dimension to translation, a decision to `translate' business language as ethical, but simply having different truth values, is not going to be `right' or `wrong' except in the context of an ethical stance taken by the translator. In other words, it is no different from a decision to adjust one's ethical position into conformity with the values apparently embedded in business practice.