According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific (...) explanation. In C. G. Hempel (Ed.), Aspects of scientific explanation (pp. 331–496). New York: Free Press; Kitcher (1989); Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. F. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67(1), 1–25). My concern is with the minimal suggestion that an adequate philosophical theory of scientific explanation can limit its attention to the format or structure with which theories are represented. The representational subsumption view is a plausible hypothesis about the psychology of understanding. It is also a plausible claim about how scientists present their knowledge to the world. However, one cannot address the central questions for a philosophical theory of scientific explanation without turning one’s attention from the structure of representations to the basic commitments about the worldly structures that plausibly count as explanatory. A philosophical theory of scientific explanation should achieve two goals. The first is explanatory demarcation. It should show how explanation relates with other scientific achievements, such as control, description, measurement, prediction, and taxonomy. The second is explanatory normativity. It should say when putative explanations succeed and fail. One cannot achieve these goals without undertaking commitments about the kinds of ontic structures that plausibly count as explanatory. Representations convey explanatory information about a phenomenon when and only when they describe the ontic explanations for those phenomena. (shrink)

My purpose in the researching and the writing of this thesis has been to investigate, and to try to explain, Frank Ankersmit's curious shift from his well expressed and firmly held narrativist position of "Narrative Logic", to an arguably contradictory, yet passionately held counter belief in the plausibility of a form of direct historical experience - an authentic unmediated relationship with the past. I am, accordingly, presenting here what I believe to be the most adequate explanatory account of/for Ankersmit's intellectual (...) journey. A journey which, in essence, constituted a substitution of his earlier representational, language centred philosophy of history for what might be taken as a new and mystical non-representational theory. This alternative theory of Ankersmit' s, lacking cognitive foundations, works on the basis of sensations, moods, feelings and therefore a consciousness deemed to be received directly from the past itself, and therein - for this thesis - lies its fatal weakness as a historical theory. Belief in the mystical may be all right at some level, if this is what is wanted, but a mystical experience itself cannot produce a historical re-presentation which is the only way that the past can be presented historically. Thus, I argue that Ankersmit's journey from language to experience - the latter phenomenon being more appropriately situated within the field of sociology/social theory and memory studies - is, in the end, a lost historical cause. (shrink)

The traditional restrictive attitude towards claim for compensation about non-pecuniary harms in both cause law and legislation become weaker even if the theoretically and practically reason behind the old exception-construction remain. This reason can best be explained by the thesis about incommensurability when it comes to compensate for some losses that money cannot compensate. To explain why the exception-construction is problemized in recent days I think two circumstances has played an important role the materialisation of human rights as a consequence (...) of the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights in Sweden since 1995 and the right to crime victim compensation and the establishing of victimology in the legal and academic field. In practice there is of course a co-operation between these two factors and there is also some kind of hybrids like the legal interest of for example discrimination. This tendency is in my opinion therefore a practical and concrete example of law and justice in the risk society where almost every person is a potential victim of crimes and discrimination or other violations. In the risk society, given Ulrich Beck’s definition, it is characteristic that these phenomenons in our society rub out the boarders between law and politics in the manifestation of reflexive subpolitics about flexibility. The possibility to obtain redress with this compensation function as a mean to support the judicial systems official goal that is to satisfied the citizens needs and at the same time secure the confidence and the legitimacy for the judicial system through the factors legal security and the legal rights of the individual. At the same time these compensations bring on inherent risks because of its unclear function and the incommensurability between injury and compensation that risks fall upon both the victims and the lawyer’s profession. So when human rights now is both a goal and a mean for democracy and violations of the citizens bring about a right to compensation this illustrate a paradox. The judicial system cannot handle this type of injury that has it is ground in public law without challenge traditional principles and the legal professionalism. This tendency is also interesting in a comparative perspective given the premise that the jurisprudence movement known as Scandinavian Legal Realism has had an influence on the Swedish judicial culture. This follows from two circumstances: Given the Scandinavian Legal Realism it is impossible to set up a legal claim from a violation of justice or somebody’s rights and even if it would be possible, it is impossible to imagine the basis of calculation of these compensation because there is no way for informal norms from the society to influence the formal legal norms and the application of the law given the Scandinavian Legal Realism. The last circumstance is relevant because the compensation of non-pecuniary harms consist of incommensurability and the only way to calculate these compensation, so it make it serves as rectification or redress for the victim, is in reflection and influence of the informal norms or the “common sense of justice”. My topic presupposes that the legal field is influenced by the theory in jurisprudence and can we therefore talk about an idealistic tendency or “critical legal realist” movement that maybe illustrates in these compensations. In a more concrete perspective these compensations bring to the fore methodological question in social science of how we can get empirically knowledge about norms in our society. (shrink)