Using Chinese thought, explores how non-Western thought can structure generally applicable social and political theory. With a particular focus on Chinese thought, this volume explores how, and under what conditions, so-called “non-Western” traditions of thought can structure generally applicable social and political theory. Reversing the usual comparison between “local” Chinese application and “universal” theory, the work demonstrates how Chinese experiences and ideas offer systematic insight into shared social and political dilemmas. Contributors discuss how medieval Chinese understandings of causal heterogeneity can (...) relieve impasses within contemporary historiography, how current economic and social conditions in China respond proactively to the future configuration of world markets, and how hybrid modes of cross-cultural engagement offer new foundations for the enterprise of learning from cultural others. Each chapter works from Chinese perspectives to theorize the location of knowledge, its conditions of production, and the modes through which its content or adequacy is legitimated, challenged, and sustained. Rather than reproducing Eurocentric knowledge production in Chinese form, the mobilization of Chinese thought as a generally applicable body of theory actually breaks down clear boundaries between Chinese and non-Chinese thought. (shrink)

Winner of the 2020 Essay Competition of the International Social Ontology Society. -/- Ian Hacking uses the looping effect to describe how classificatory practices in the human sciences interact with the classified people. While arguably this interaction renders the affected human kinds unstable and hence different from natural kinds, realists argue that also some prototypical natural kinds are interactive and human kinds in general are stable enough to support explanations and predictions. I defend a more fine-grained realist interpretation of interactive (...) human kinds by arguing for an explanatory domain account of the looping effect. First, I argue that knowledge of the feedback mechanisms that mediate the looping effect can supplement, and help to identify, the applicability domain over which a kind and its property variations are stably explainable. Second, by applying this account to cross-cultural case studies of psychiatric disorders, I distinguish between congruent feedback mechanisms that explain matches between classifications and kinds, and incongruent feedback mecha- nisms that explain mismatches. For example, congruent mechanisms maintain Western auditory experiences in schizophrenia, whereas exporting diagnostic labels inflicts incongruence by influencing local experiences. Knowledge of the mechanisms can strengthen explanatory domains, and thereby facilitate classificatory adjustments and possible interventions on psychiatric disorders. (shrink)

Interpretive social science consists of researchers’ interpretations of actors’ interpretations. Bevir and Blakely’s anti-naturalist approach truncates this double hermeneutic, neglecting how researcher identity affects knowledge-making. Moreover, by disappearing methodology and treating methods as neutral tools, the authors miss the significance of methodological practice. In their treatment, an anti-naturalist philosophy is sufficient to produce high-quality interpretive research, even when the methods used are those of large-N statistics or other variables-based approaches. Unfortunately, then, the book is unlikely to create more space for (...) research alternatives to the naturalism that the authors seek to unseat. (shrink)

Ricoeur a souligné l’importance de l’idée d’une identité narrative. L'argument de Ricoeur concernant l'individualisation se poursuit par une succession d'étapes. Il part de la philosophie du langage et du problème de l'identification de la référence aux personnes en tant qu'individus eux-mêmes, pas seulement aux choses. Cela amène à considérer le sujet parlant comme un agent, en passant par la sémantique de l'action que Ricoeur avait apprise de la philosophie analytique. Vient ensuite l'idée que le moi a une identité narrative. DOI: (...) 10.13140/RG.2.2.23004.74880. (shrink)

De la nécessité et de l'utilité de développer une philosophie spécifique pour la technologie de la blockchain, mettant l'accent sur les aspects ontologiques. Après une Introduction qui met en évidence les principales orientations philosophiques de cette technologie émergente, dans La technologie blockchain j’explique le fonctionnement de la blockchain, en analysant les directions de développement ontologique de cette technologie dans Conception et modélisation. La section suivante est consacrée à la principale application de la technologie de la blockchain, Bitcoin, avec les implications (...) sociales de cette crypto-monnaie. Il suit une section de Philosophie dans laquelle j'identifie la technologie de la blockchain au concept d'hétérotopie développé par Michel Foucault et je l'interprète à la lumière de la technologie de notation développée par Nelson Goodman en tant que système de notation. Dans la section Ontologie, je présente deux voies de développement que j'estime importantes: une Ontologie narrative, basée sur l'idée d'ordre et de structure de l'histoire transmise à travers l'histoire narrative de Paul Ricoeur, et le système de l'Ontologie d'entreprise basé sur des concepts et des modèles d'entreprise, spécifiques au Web sémantique, que je considère comme le plus développé et qui deviendra probablement le système ontologique formel, du moins en ce qui concerne les aspects économiques et juridiques de la technologie de la blockchain. Dans Conclusions, je parle des orientations futures du développement de la philosophie de la technologie blockchain en général en tant que théorie explicative et robuste d’un point de vue phénoménologique cohérent, qui permet la testabilité et les ontologies en particulier, en plaidant pour la nécessité de l’adoption globale d’un système ontologique afin de développer des solutions transversales et de rentabiliser cette technologie. -/- SOMMAIRE: -/- Abstract Introduction La technologie blockchain - Conception - Modèles Bitcoin Philosophie Ontologies - Ontologies narratives - Ontologies d'entreprise Conclusions Bibliographie Notes -/- DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.22996.14724 . (shrink)

Social ontology is concerned with the nature of the social world, constituents, or building blocks of social entities in general. Some theories claim that social entities are built from people's psychological states, others are built up of actions, others from practice, and other theories deny that even a distinction can be made between social and non-social. There are different philosophical views on how the ontological significance of narrative can contribute to our understanding of the social world and the way in (...) which social reality is modeled. Some researchers consider that narrative is an instrumental cognitive skill or linguistic tool, while others regard it as an ontological category related to how people exist in the world, or understand human life as a narrative. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.14051.09763. (shrink)

Evidențierea și compararea principalelor teorii cauzale ale referinței pentru nume proprii, și propunerea unei noi abordări pe baza analogiei lanțului cauzal al referinței cu lanțul de blocuri din tehnologia blockchain și teoria narativă a lui Paul Ricœur. După o scurtă Introducere în care trec în revistă tipurile de propoziții din conceptul de lumi posibile, și o prezentare generală a teoriei în Teoria cauzală a referinței, prezint teoria cauzală inițială a referinței propusă de Saul Kripke, apoi două teorii cauzale hibride dezvoltate (...) de Gareth Evans și Michael Devitt. În secțiunea Blockchain și arborele cauzal al referinței prezint ideea dezvoltării unei noi teorii cauzale a referinței pentru nume proprii printr-un arbore cauzal al referinței. În Concluzii vorbesc despre dezvoltarea ulterioară a modurilor în care termenii referențiali s-ar putea referi la anumite obiecte și indivizi, principalele critici ale teoriilor cauzale, și sugestii de dezvoltare pe viitor. -/- CUPRINS: -/- Abstract Introducere 1. Teoria cauzală a referinței 2. Saul Kripke 3. Gareth Evans 4. Michael Devitt 5. Blockchain și arborele cauzal al referinței Concluzii Bibliografie -/- DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.23906.89289. (shrink)

This article advocates a naturalist and realist ethics of solidarity. Specifically, it argues that human needs should be met; and that they should be met in harmony with the environment. Realism should include respect for existing cultures and the morals presently being practiced – with reasonable exceptions. Dignity must come in a form understood and appreciated by the person whose dignity is being respected. It is also argued that naturalist ethics are needed to combat liberal ethics, not least because the (...) latter supports today’s inflexible and dysfunctional institutions. In arguing for these positions, reference is made to the naturalist realist ethics of Georges Canguilhem, C.H. Waddington, John Dewey and David Sloan Wilson, all of whom embed the social order in the natural order. (shrink)

Some have suggested that images can be arguments. Images can certainly bolster the acceptability of individual premises. We worry, though, that the static nature of images prevents them from ever playing a genuinely argumentative role. To show this, we call attention to a dilemma. The conclusion of a visual argument will either be explicit or implicit. If a visual argument includes its conclusion, then that conclusion must be demarcated from the premise or otherwise the argument will beg the question. If (...) a visual argument does not include its conclusion, then the premises on display must license that specific conclusion and not its opposite, in accordance with some demonstrable rationale. We show how major examples from the literature fail to escape this dilemma. Drawing inspiration from the graphical logic of C. S. Peirce, we suggest instead that images can be manipulated in a way that overcomes the dilemma. Diagrammatic reasoning can take one stepwise from an initial visual layout to a conclusion—thereby providing a principled rationale that bars opposite conclusions—and the visual inscription of this correct conclusion can come afterward in time—thereby distinguishing the conclusion from the premises. Even though this practical application of Peirce’s logical ideas to informal contexts requires that one make adjustments, we believe it points to a dynamic conception of visual argumentation that will prove more fertile in the long run. (shrink)

The paper addresses recent developments in historical epistemology, traces the main inspirational sources that feed this approach, and suggests a possible agenda for closer approximation between historical epistemology and the human sciences in studying thought styles and thought collectives, conceptual and theoretical levels of knowledge and the material culture of science.

I argue that contemporary accounts of ideology critique—paradigmatically those advanced by Haslanger, Jaeggi, Celikates, and Stanley—are either inadequate or redundant. The Marxian concept of ideology—a collective epistemic distortion or irrationality that helps maintain bad social arrangements—has recently returned to the forefront of debates in contemporary analytic social philosophy. Ideology critique has similarly emerged as a technique for combating such social ills by remedying those collective epistemic distortions. Ideologies are sets of social meanings or shared understandings. I argue in this paper (...) that because agents must coordinate on them to be mutually intelligible, ideologies, on the fashionable contemporary account, are conventions. They are equilibrium solutions to a particular kind of social coordination problem. The worry is that changing pernicious conventions requires more than the epistemic remedy contemporary critical social theorists prescribe. It also requires overcoming strategic impediments like high first-mover costs. Thus contemporary proponents of ideology critique—the “new ideology critics,” as I’ll call them—face a dilemma. Either their account of social change fails to account for important strategic impediments to social change, in which case it is inadequate, or it incorporates a theory of strategic behavior, and thus merely reinvents the wheel, poorly. It adds nothing to prominent convention-based accounts of social change in the social sciences. More generally, this is an example of a pernicious trend in contemporary critical social theory. Contemporary critical social theorists have abandoned their predecessors’ commitment to engaging with social science, thereby undermining their efforts. (shrink)

Despite providing the basic theoretical framework for Western biology and all related sciences, Darwinism continues to be a controversial perspective when it comes to understanding ourselves as distinctly "human." In this paper, I try to correct a common misinterpretation of Thomas Hobbes' conceptualization of human nature which I think sheds light on some of the significant misunderstandings and sources of objection to Darwinism. I begin by contrasting this common misreading of Hobbes' philosophy of human nature with an alternative reading that (...) suggests a more subtle notion than is often allowed. I then summarize the basic ideas of Darwinism and explain why I think a Darwinian conceptualization of humanity, freed from misinterpretations of Hobbes, need not lead to an agonistic or reductive notion of human nature. Suggestions made by the philosophers Charles Taylor and Howard Gardner about how science and philosophy can help or hinder conceptualizations of personhood are considered insofar as they corroborate this idea. (shrink)

Im Zentrum dieses Bandes stehen die Beiträge einer Tagung, die im Oktober 2017 an der Universität Konstanz stattgefunden hat. Thema der Tagung war ein den historischen Kontext einbeziehender Blick auf den frühen Rudolf Carnap, vom Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs bis zur Emigration Ende 1935. Der 1891 in Ronsdorf bei Wuppertal geborene Rudolf Carnap entschloss sich erst relativ spät zu einer Karriere als akademischer Philosoph, nämlich 1920, nachdem er sein durch den Krieg unterbrochenes Studium der Physik und Philosophie in Jena und (...) Freiburg abgeschlossen und kurze Zeit überlegt hatte, als Lehrer in der Schulreform-Bewegung zu arbeiten. Es folgte die philosophische Promotion im Jahr 1921, bei Bruno Bauch in Jena, mit einer Doktorarbeit zum Raumproblem. 1923 organisierte Carnap, gemeinsam mit Hans Reichenbach und anderen, eine für die Entstehung des Logischen Empirismus bedeutsame kleine Tagung in Erlangen. Auf Einladung von Moritz Schlick habilitierte er sich 1926 an der Universität Wien und verbrachte die Zeit bis 1931 zumindest teilweise in Wien, als eines der Kernmitglieder des Wiener Kreises um Moritz Schlick. Seine Habilitationsschrift erschien 1928 unter dem Titel Der logische Aufbau der Welt (hier immer Aufbau). 1931 folgte Carnap einem Ruf an die Deutsche Universität Prag. In den darauffolgenden Jahren blieb aber der enge Kontakt mit Wien und dem Wiener Kreis erhalten. Carnaps hauptsächliche Arbeit in dieser Zeit war seinem zweiten großen Buchprojekt gewidmet, der 1934 publizierten Logischen Syntax der Sprache. Daneben verfasste Carnap in seiner Zeit in Wien und Prag auch zahlreiche Aufsätze, zu unterschiedlichen Aspekten der Logik, der Metaphysikkritik und der Wissenschaftstheorie. Er war Mitautor des Manifests Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis und nahm regen Anteil an den zahlreichen wissenschaftlichen Aktivitäten des Logischen Empirismus, von der Gründung der Zeitschrift Erkenntnis bis hin zum Projekt einer Enzyklopädie der Einheitswissenschaft. Spätestens ab 1933 musste Carnap jedoch feststellen, dass an eine weitere wissenschaftliche Karriere in dem von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus geprägten politischen Klima in Kontinentaleuropa nicht zu denken war. Er strebte deshalb die Emigration ins englischsprachige Ausland an, die schließlich Ende 1935 gelang, als Carnap ein Angebot von der Universität Chicago erhielt. Obwohl Carnap nur den kleineren Teil der in diesem Band abgedeckten eineinhalb Jahrzehnte in Wien verbracht hat, widmet sich der Großteil der hier versammelten Beiträge schwerpunktmäßig der für Carnaps philosophische Karriere zentralen Wiener Zeit. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall show how Heidegger’s notions of Dasein’s “Being-with” (Mitsein), “discourse” (Rede), and “solicitude” (Fursorge) illustrate how he has a conception of the dialogical in Being and Time. There are at least three advantages to proposing that Heidegger is a dialogist in Being and Time. First, this paradigm offers an alternative, and more perspicuous, vocabulary for describing the discursive nature of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world as a Being-with others. Second, it provides a better way of recognizing and understanding the (...) normative dimensions of “solicitude.” And third, it helps to underscore the ineliminable sociality of Dasein’s understanding of itself and of others, such that its identity remains social even in the seemingly individualizing initial moment of becoming authentic. (shrink)

Die Einleitung unseres Kapitels bietet eine grundsäzliche Charakterisierung der Soziologie und zeichnet einige wichtige historische Entwicklungslinien der Philosophie der Soziologie (PdS) nach. Im Hauptteil werden zentrale ontologische sowie ausgewählte explanatorische Themen der PdS vorgestellt. Im Schlussteil sollen einige aktuelle Diskussionen umrissen werden.

This article considers the question ‘What makes hope rational?’ We take Adrienne Martin’s recent incorporation analysis of hope as representative of a tradition that views the rationality of hope as a matter of instrumental reasons. Against this tradition, we argue that an important subset of hope, ‘fundamental hope’, is not governed by instrumental rationality. Rather, people have reason to endorse or reject such hope in virtue of the contribution of the relevant attitudes to the integrity of their practical identity, which (...) makes the relevant hope not instrumentally but intrinsically valuable. This argument also allows for a new analysis of the reasons people have to abandon hope and for a better understanding of non-fundamental, ‘prosaic’ hopes. (shrink)

Can purely predictive models be useful in investigating causal systems? I argue ‘yes’. Moreover, in many cases not only are they useful, they are essential. The alternative is to stick to models or mechanisms drawn from well-understood theory. But a necessary condition for explanation is empirical success, and in many cases in social and field sciences such success can only be achieved by purely predictive models, not by ones drawn from theory. Alas, the attempt to use theory to achieve explanation (...) or insight without empirical success therefore fails, leaving us with the worst of both worlds – neither prediction nor explanation. Best go with empirical success by any means necessary. I support these methodological claims via case studies of two impressive feats of predictive modelling: opinion polling of political elections, and weather forecasting. (shrink)

This paper aims to come to grips with the rich philosophy of Charles Taylor by focusing on his concept of ‘strong evaluation’. I argue that a close examination of this term brings out more clearly the continuing tensions in his writings as a whole. I trace back the origin of strong evaluation in Taylor’s earliest writings, and continue by laying out the different philosophical themes that revolve around it. Next, the focus is on the separate arguments in which strong evaluation (...) is central, uncovering several methodological conflicts in Taylor’s strategies. Arguing against most of his commentators, I suggest that a distinction should be drawn between the philosophical anthropological, moral, and ontological implications of strong evaluation. As a result, the contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it clarifies the issue of strong evaluation by distinguishing the different arguments in which Taylor employs the concept. Second, it makes the case for multiple tensions within Taylor’s methods. Third, as a consequence, this analysis not only enables us to evaluate the potential and limits of his subject-centered philosophy but also separates his objectivist claims from his theories of human subjectivity, opening up the question of the metaphysical status of his ontological view. (shrink)

This article argues that two significant implications of Wittgenstein’s writings for social thought are (1) that people are constitutively social beings and (2) that the social context of an individual life is nexuses of practice. Part one concretizes these ideas by examining the constitution of action within practices. It begins by criticizing three arguments of Winch’s that suggest that action is inherently social. It then spells out two arguments for the practice constitution of action that are extractable from Wittgenstein’s remarks. (...) Part two contrasts the conception of the social context of individual life as practices with three historically significant conceptions of such a context: totality; sui generis reality; and abstract structure. It also circumscribes that contemporary movement - practice theory - that develops the Wittgensteinian position and represents, perhaps, his most significant legacy for social thought. (shrink)

The aim of the book is to uncover the relation between market and justice through the critical examination of the work of Friedrich Hayek. The book argues for the following thesis: the institution of free market is not the only candidate social system; substantial, not merely formal distributive justice must become the central virtue of our social institutions. Notwithstanding its achievements and virtues, the Hayekian theory makes a simple mistake by equivocating possible social systems, dividing them into two groups. One (...) is the world of liberty and free market where people follow the general and abstract rules of conduct, accepting the outcome of market processes, be those good or bad. The other is the world of coercion and repression in which organized distributive instituions dominate and free market is non-existent. According to Hayek’s famous thesis, although freedom is possible in the latter world, we are nevertheless already on the road to serfdom: this fate is inevitable. In this dichotomy the decision is indeed simple. If justice is nothing else but the Trojan horse of oppression, then it is indeed a dangerous and unworkable ideal. However, if this dichotomy does not hold and there is a variety of acceptable social systems, then justice may become the central virtue of institutions, thereby contradicting Hayek’s theory. In the second half of the book I present this alternative, justice-governed social system in more detail. (shrink)

Liberals who want to support multiculturalism need to be able to justify the parental authority to instill cultural value systems or worldviews into children. However, such authority may be at odds with liberal demands that citizens be autonomous. This paper argues that parents do not have the legitimate authority to instill in their children a specific value system, contrary to the complex and intriguing arguments of Robert Noggle (2002). Noggle’s argument, which draws heavily on key ideas in Rawls’ theory of (...) justice, is that children are not moral agents and that parents are in a special kind of fiduciary relationship vis-à-vis their children. Noggle’s position is contrasted with the more limited conception of parental authority advanced by David Archard (2002). I argue that we can accept that parents are agents of their children, but contra Noggle, this does not entitle them to impose their parochial value systems onto their children. I argue that while children have an interest in acquiring values, they do not have an interest in acquiring a value system. (shrink)

Charles Taylor’s latest collection of essays, Dilemmas and Connections, is the most recent installment in his development of a grand history of the rise of a modern, secular age. In this review, I show how the historical narrative that defines Taylor’s late work is in continuity with his earlier hermeneutic commitments, while also allowing him to advance new inquiries into areas as diverse as secularism, religion, nationalism, and human rights discourse. I do this by not only providing a succinct summary (...) of Taylor’s master narrative, but also by arguing that it resolves a number of philosophical dilemmas. (shrink)

The concept of natural kind is center stage in the debates about scientific realism. Champions of scientific realism such as Richard Boyd hold that our most developed scientific theories allow us to “cut the world at its joints” (Boyd, 1981, 1984, 1991). In the long run we can disclose natural kinds as nature made them, though as science progresses improvements in theory allow us to revise the extension of natural kind terms.

This paper examines the changing context for sexual images and the spaces that give law meaning. The details are evident in Congressional efforts to regulate sex on the Internet and the Supreme Court’s response as well as changing contexts for encountering forbidden images from the old stag films and peep shows to the local public library and sex sites on the web. The paper is part of a larger project on seeing law and the idea that Lady Justice is blind.

Identification figures prominently in moral psychological explanations. I argue that in identification the subject has an ‘identity-thought’, which is a thought about her numerical identity with the figure she identifies with. In Freud's psychoanalytic psychology character is founded on unconscious identification with parental figures. Moral philosophers have drawn on psychoanalysis to explain how undesirable or disadvantageous character dispositions are resistant to insight through being unconscious. According to Richard Wollheim's analysis of Freud's theory, identification is the subject's disposition to imagine, unconsciously, (...) her bodily merging with the figure she identifies with. I argue that this explanation of identification is not adequate. Human character is held to be capable of change when self-reflection brings unconscious identifications to conscious self-knowledge. I argue that for self-knowledge these identifications must be an intelligible part of the subject's self-conception, and that Wollheim's ‘merging phantasy’ is not intelligible to the subject in this way. By contrast, the subject's thought that she is numerically identical to the figure she identifies with does provide an intelligible starting-point for reflecting on this identification. This psychoanalytic account provides a clear conception of identification with which to investigate puzzle cases in the moral psychology of character. (shrink)

This article criticizes a view about the interpretation of human action, labeled in the text as interpretivism. This view posits a sharp separation between the natural and social sciences, to the effect that the methods of the latter cannot be applied to the former. I criticize this standpoint by reconstructing a case of educational research. As I argue, the case I analyze indicates that the arguments in support of interpretivism are contradicted by what social researchers can actually achieve. I conclude (...) that the interpretivistic claims lack support and that the general separation claim appears as problematic. (shrink)

Are sagging pants cool? Are cows food? Are women more submissive than men? Are blacks more criminal than whites? Taking the social world at face value, many people would be tempted to answer these questions in the affirmative. And if challenged, they can point to facts that support their answers. But there is something wrong about the affirmative answers. In this chapter, I draw on recent ideas in the philosophy of language and metaphysics to show how the assertion of a (...) generic claim of the sort in question ordinarily permits one to infer that the fact in question obtains by virtue of something specifically about the subject so described, i.e., about women, or blacks, or sagging pants. In the examples I’ve offered, however, this implication inference is unwarranted. The facts in question obtain by virtue of broad system of social relations within which the subjects are situated, and are not grounded in intrinsic or dispositional features of the subjects themselves. The background relations are obscured, however, and as a result, the assertion is at least systematically misleading; a denial functions to block the problematic implication. Revealing such implications or presuppositions and blocking them is a crucial part of ideology critique. (shrink)

Nursing practice invites nurses to embody caring practices that meet, comfort and empower vulnerable others. Such a practice requires a commitment to meeting and helping the other in ways that liberate and strengthen and avoid imposing the will of the caregiver on the patient. Being good and acting well (phronesis) occur in particular situations. A socially constituted and embodied view of agency, as developed by Merleau‐Ponty, provides an alternative to Cartesian and Kantian views of agency. A socially constituted, embodied view (...) of agency is less mechanistic and less deterministic than Descartes' and Kant's radical separation of mind and body, and more responsive and generative than Kant's vision of moral agency as constituted by autonomous choice makers who are uninfluenced by emotion. The role of emotion in perception and judgement is explored in this paper. Distinctions between techne and phronesis are drawn. The role of emotion in market relationships and procedural ethics drawn for the abstract, general other are strategies for exchange of goods and services, but these same market relationships are dependent on well‐functioning nonmarket relations of noncalculated giving and receiving. (shrink)

Charles Taylor defines `hypergoods' as the fundamental, architechtonic goods that serve as the basis of our moral frameworks. He also believes that, in principle, we can use reason to reconcile the conflicts that hypergoods engender. This belief, however, relies upon a misindentification of hypergoods as goods rather than as works of art, an error which is itself a result of an overly adversarial conception of practical reason. For Taylor fails to distinguish enough between ethical conflicts and those relating to the (...) religio-aesthetic domain. A proper identification of hypergoods as aesthetic, moreover, requires us to revise his accounts of ordinary life, of evil and of the controversy over university curricula. (shrink)

People discussing science and religion usually frame their conversations in terms of essentialist assumptions about science, assumptions requiring the existence (but not the specification) of criteria according to which science can be distinguished from other forms of inquiry. However, criteria functioning at a level of generality appropriate to such discussions may not exist at all. Essentialist assumptions may be avoided if science is understood within a broader context of human practices. In a philosophy of practices, to label a practice as (...) “scientific” is to make a practically motivated provision for a way of speaking. Charles Taylor and Joseph Rouse have produced complementary philosophies of practice that promote this kind of understanding. In this essay I review the work of Taylor and Rouse, identify apparent residues of essentialism that each seems to harbor, and offer a resolution to some of their disagreements. I also criticize a form of essentialism commonly employed in Christian circles and outline an anti-essentialist view of science that may be helpful in science-and-religion discussions. (shrink)

Epistemologies and research methods are not free of metaphysics. This is to say that they are both, supported by (or presumed by), and support (or presume) fundamental ontologies. A discussion of the epistemological foundations of "multimethod" research in the social sciences—in as much as such research claims to unearth "causal" relations—therefore cannot avoid the ontological presuppositions or implications of such a discussion. But though there isn’t necessarily a perfect correspondence between ontology, epistemology, and methodology, they do constrain each other. As (...) such it is possible to make methodological choices that are at odds with one’s (implicit) ontology or argue from an ontology that is inconsistent one’s choice of methods.Yet lack of recognition of this fact has hampered methodological discussions in political science, especially with respect to the discussion on the merits of multimethod research. The ontology implicitly accepted in such discussions is "reductionist" and "regularist," that is, one that respectively defines causes in terms of noncausal relations and states of affair and affirms that such noncausal relations are regularities in nature. This article will argue that any attempt to fit "multimethod" research (where "multimethod" signifies some combination of inferential statistics and case studies) within this narrow ontology is destined to fail since such a metaphysics logically cannot accord case studies a necessary or sufficient role in the in the establishment of causal relations. However, there are metaphysical positions within the ambit of an empiricist philosophy of science that can accommodate multiple methods without contradiction. The article discusses two such ontologies and suggests ways in which they might allow the establishment of a coherent epistemological foundation for multimethod research, however, within a decidedly empiricist philosophy of science. (shrink)

It has frequently been argued that there must be a necessary and important difference between the methods of the natural and social sciences, or that an empirical method in social science must be supplemented by or is inferior to an interpretative method. Often these claims have been supported by arguments using premises derived from the early Heidegger or the late Wittgenstein. These arguments, in turn, tend either to be transcendental in form or to follow a hermeneutic argument strategy. This paper (...) argues that neither of these types of argument, based on Heideggerian or Wittgensteinian premises, can be used successfully to show an important or essential difference between natural and social science. It does this by examining arguments proposed by Peter Winch and Hubert Dreyfus, showing how they are fallacious and misconstrue the import of the premises upon which they are based, and generalizing these objections to the transcendental and hermeneutic styles of argument in this field as such. The paper concludes with a consideration of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which reaches conclusions in this area which are similar to those of this paper but which, it is argued, misconstrues the character of its own argument. (shrink)

Showcasing original arguments for well-defined positions, as well as clear and concise statements of sophisticated philosophical views, this volume is an ...

Yhteiskuntatieteiden ja humanististen tieteiden, tai lyhyemmin, ihmistieteiden, asema tieteiden joukossa on monien kiistojen kohteena. Ihmistieteiden ja luonnontieteiden välistä suhdetta koskevassa keskustelussa on perinteisesti ollut vastakkain kaksi kantaa: Toinen näkökanta on painottanut, että sama yleinen tieteellinen menetelmä soveltuu niin luontoon kuin ihmiseenkin ja että ollakseen tieteellisiä ihmistieteiden on täytettävä samat tieteellisyyden kriteerit kuin luonnontieteidenkin. Toinen on korostanut ihmistieteiden olemuksellista erilaisuutta luonnontieteisiin verrattuna, koska ne noudattavat erityistä ymmärtävää menetelmää.

This article disputes the common view that social science explanations depend on discovery of lawlike generalizations from which descriptions of social outcomes can be derived. It distinguishes between governing and phenomenal regularities, and argues that social regularities are phenomenal rather than governing. In place of nomological deductive arguments, the article maintains that social explanations depend on the discovery of causal mechanisms underlying various social processes. The metaphysical correlate of this argument is that there are no social kinds: types of social (...) entities that share a common casual constitution giving rise to strong regularities of behavior. The article turns next to a consideration of the character of social causation and argues for a microfoundational interpretation of social causation: social causal powers are embodied in the constraints and opportunities that institutions present to individual agents. Finally, it is noted that these arguments have consequences for the credibility of social predictions: it is argued that predictions in social science are generally unreliable. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Humean theories of moral motivation appear preferable to Kantian approaches only if one assumes a broadly foundationalist conception of rational justification. Like foundationalist approaches to justification generally, Humean psychology aims to counter the regress-of-justification argument by positing a set of ultimate regress-stoppers-in this case, unmotivated desires. If the need for regress-stoppers of this type in the realm of practical deliberation is accepted, desires do indeed appear to be the most likely candidate. But if this (...) foundationalist strategy is rejected, there is no longer any reason to suppose that all motivation must be traceable to some extra-rational incentive. This clears the way for a rehabilitation of the Kantian claim that reasons for action can take the form of categorical imperatives. To illustrate this thesis, I show how a conception of practical rationality that incorporates a contextualist model of justification can be developed that treats social norms as reasons for action, without assigning any mediating role to agent desires. a theory of action of this type eliminates the gap between moral obligation and action, and so articulates the fundamental Kantian intuition that acting on the basis of moral principle-and with disregard for self-interest-is just one way of acting rationally. (shrink)

opinionated survey paper to be published in the Blackwell’s Philosophy Compass.

Methodological triangulation is the use of more than one method to investigate a phenomenon. Nurse researchers investigate health phenomena using methods drawn from the natural and social sciences. The methodological debate concerns the possibility of confirming a single theory with different kinds of methods. The nursing debate parallels the philosophical debate about how the natural and social sciences are related. This article critiques the presuppositions of the nursing debate and suggests alternatives. The consequence is a view of triangulation that permits (...) different methods to confirm a single theory. The article then explores the consequences for the philosophy of social sciences. (shrink)