Ambitious Ones Research Articles

The role of policy design in policy continuation and ratcheting-up of policy ambition

Abstract Effectively addressing grand societal challenges like climate change and environmental degradation requires policy intervention that is not only continuous but also increasing in ambition over time. However, negative feedback could lead to policies being weakened or even discontinued after a while. An important but unresolved policy question, therefore, is whether policies can be deliberately designed to survive (i.e., to “stick”) and, ideally, be replaced with more ambitious ones over time (i.e., to “ratchet up”). We bridge policy feedback and policy design scholarship to derive hypotheses on the effects of two policy design features—“intensity” (i.e., a measure of policies’ overall design) and “specificity” (i.e., a measure of policies’ targeted focus)—on policy (dis-)continuation and ratcheting-up (-down) of ambition. Focusing on policy design, we contribute to the theorization and empirical understanding of endogenous factors behind policy change. We test our hypotheses with an event history dataset of 627 low-carbon energy policies in eight developed countries. Conducting a multilevel survival analysis, we find statistically significant evidence of more intense policies being replaced with less intense ones, i.e., more intense policies lead to ratcheting-down of ambition. We also find that more specific policies are more likely to be replaced with more intense policies, i.e., more specific policies lead to ratcheting-up of ambition. Based on these novel insights, we discuss how policy design can navigate these complex dynamics. In this sense, our approach also contributes to the discussion about the “forward-looking” potential of the policy sciences.

Acceptable objectives of empirical research in bioethics: a qualitative exploration of researchers’ views

BackgroundThis is the first qualitative study to investigate how researchers, who do empirical work in bioethics, relate to objectives of empirical research in bioethics (ERiB). We explore reasons that make some objectives more acceptable, while others are deemed less acceptable.MethodsUsing qualitative exploratory study design, we interviewed bioethics researchers, who were selected to represent different types of scholars working in the field. The interview data of 25 participants were analyzed in this paper using thematic analysis.ResultsFrom the eight objectives presented to the study participants, understanding the context of a bioethical issue and identifying ethical issues in practice received unanimous agreement. Participants also supported other objectives of ERiB but with varying degrees of agreement. The most contested objectives were striving to draw normative recommendations and developing and justifying moral principles. The is-ought gap was not considered an obstacle to ERiB, but rather a warning sign to critically reflect on the normative implications of empirical results.ConclusionsOur results show that the most contested objectives are also the more ambitious ones, whereas the least contested ones focus on producing empirical results. The potential of empirical research to be useful for bioethics was mostly based on the reasoning pattern that empirical data can provide a testing ground for elements of normative theory. Even though empirical research can inform many parts of bioethical inquiry, normative expertise is recommended to guide ERiB. The acceptability of ambitious objectives for ERiB boils down to finding firm ground for the integration of empirical facts in normative inquiry.

National Energy and Climate Planning in Serbia: From Lagging Behind to an Ambitious EU Candidate?

Just in the immediate neighbourhood of the European Union (EU), the Republic of Serbia, one of the Western Balkan (WB) EU candidate countries, is lagging behind in the process of energy transition regardless of technological advances and policy instruments available. The EU created a momentum for energy transition acceleration with the European Green Deal, which has been forwarded to the WB through the Energy Community secretariat in the form of the Green Agenda; generally speaking, response in the form of National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) is expected in the short term. The Republic of Serbia’s Low Carbon Development Strategy with Action Plan (LCDSA) and the current Energy Strategy will be analysed, commented on, and improvements will be suggested for the acceleration of energy transition, based on the newest findings from the simulation-based optimization techniques using the sector coupling approach to achieve ambitious variable renewable energy shares. The motivation of this research is to provide decision makers in Serbia with the best available insights regarding sustainable energy system planning tools and possible shortcuts for delayed planning of activities. In addition, the purpose is to improve Serbia’s chance of benefitting from adoption of these strategies in the country’s faster transition towards EU membership. The research compares two scenarios to illustrate a possible policy shift from small hydro power plants to photovoltaics (PV). A further increase in PV and wind power plants has been simulated using the EnergyPLAN to achieve expected scenarios of 40% renewable energy share and some more ambitious ones—up to 80%, which is realistic only with the sector coupling approach.

Can Lower Carbon Aviation Fuels (LCAF) Really Complement Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) towards EU Aviation Decarbonization?

The present work provides an analysis of the potential impact of fossil-based Low Carbon Aviation Fuels (LCAF) for the European aviation sector, with a time horizon to 2050. LCAF are a crude-derived alternative to kerosene, offering some Green House Gas (GHG) savings, and have been defined by ICAO as eligible fuels for mitigating the environmental impact of aviation. A methodological framework to evaluate the EU technical potential for LCAF production is developed, based on data on crude utilization for jet fuel production in EU refineries, relevant carbon intensity reduction technologies, market prices, and aviation fuel volumes. Two different baselines for fossil-derived kerosene carbon intensity (CI) are considered: a global figure of 89 gCO2e/MJ and an EU-27-specific one of 93.1 gCO2eq/MJ. Three scenarios considering increasing levels of CI reduction are then defined, taking into account the current and potential commercial availability of some of the most relevant carbon intensity reduction technologies. The analysis demonstrates that, even if LCAF could offer GHG saving opportunities, their possible impact, especially when compared to the ambition level set in the most recent European legislative proposals, is very limited in most of the analysed scenarios, with the exception of the most ambitious ones. At 2030, a non-zero technical potential is projected only in the higher CI reduction scenario, ranging between 1.8% and 14.2% of LCAF market share in the EU-27 (equal to 0.6 to 4.75 Mtoe), depending on the considered Baseline for CI. At 2050, almost all considered scenarios project a larger technical potential, ranging between 6.9% and 22.2% for the global Baseline (2.21 to 7.13 Mtoe), and between 1.8% and 16.2% for the EU-27 Baseline (0.58 to 5.2 Mtoe). LCAF additional costs to current production costs are also discussed, given their relevance in large-scale deployment of these technologies, and are projected to range between 39 and 46.8 USD/toe.

Relative risk aversion models: How plausible are their assumptions?

This work examines the validity of the two main assumptions of relative risk-aversion models of educational inequality. We compare the Breen-Goldthorpe (BG) and the Breen-Yaish (BY) models in terms of their assumptions about status maintenance motives and beliefs about the occupational risks associated with educational decisions. Concerning the first assumption, our contribution is threefold. First, we criticise the assumption of the BG model that families aim only at avoiding downward mobility and are insensitive to the prospects of upward mobility. We argue that the loss-aversion assumption proposed by BY is a more realistic formulation of status-maintenance motives. Second, we propose and implement a novel empirical approach to assess the validity of the loss-aversion assumption. Third, we present empirical results based on a sample of families of lower secondary school leavers indicating that families are sensitive to the prospects of both upward and downward mobility, and that the loss-aversion hypothesis of BY is empirically supported. As regards the risky choice assumption, we argue that families may not believe that more ambitious educational options entail occupational risks relative to less ambitious ones. We present empirical evidence indicating that, in France, the academic path is not perceived as a risky option. We conclude that, if the restrictive assumptions of the BG model are removed, relative-risk aversion needs not drive educational inequalities.

Negligible evidence that people desire partners who uniquely fit their ideals

Laypersons and scholars often presume that people positively evaluate partners who match their ideal partner preferences: If Faye prefers kindness in a partner and Sonia prefers ambition, Faye should be especially attracted to kind partners and Sonia should be especially attracted to ambitious ones. However, to date, most published tests of this idea are imprecise and permit multiple interpretations of the data. The current studies improve upon prior tests by (a) having participants self-generate the ideal attributes that matter most to them and (b) using a yoked design to isolate the predictive power of self-generated (vs. other-generated) ideal attributes. Overall, participants were more romantically interested in blind-date partners (Study 1) and acquaintances/friends/romantic partners (Study 2) to the extent that they thought those individuals possessed the ideal attributes. But the positive association of these attributes with romantic interest was identical regardless of whether the attributes represented the participant's self-generated ideals or someone else's ideals. We also used a novel coding scheme to organize participants' 1011 self-generated ideal attributes into 95 different attribute-categories; we then implemented three exclusion strategies (that differed in breadth vs. precision) using this scheme in order to maximize idiosyncratic variability between self- and other-generated ideals. All approaches revealed identical conclusions. Focused tests of ideal partner preference-matching may reveal that individual differences in ideal partner preferences poorly correspond to the attributes that uniquely inspire romantic interest.

Targeted Sanctions: a Tool of Foreign Policy, Unfair Competition or Global Social Engineering?

Through the recent decades, the use of asymmetric and hybrid measures in international relations has acquired a qualitatively new scale and system. Today such measures have turned into one of the leading forms of external pressure and subsequent coercion, often exceeding the effectiveness of such straightforward instruments as the threat of potential use of force and almost equal to real power actions. Arguably, among those asymmetric and hybrid measures, Western countries assign a key role to the pressure of international sanction upon competitor nations and uncooperative actors on the world arena. The article is devoted to a critical analysis of some common approaches to the study of the problems of «targeted» sanctions in the theory and practice of international relations and the use of sanctions as a means of achieving geostrategic objectives, including such ambitious ones as social constructivism and social engineering on national, regional and global scales. Particular attention is paid to the contribution of Thomas Biersteker to the development of the theory and of practical designs of «targeted sanctions» in international relations. The author disputes with him over some issues related to the effectiveness of targeted sanctions and the impact they produce upon various sectors of the targeted societies. Based on the author’s schematic matrix of sanctional influences upon national elites and possible limits of their responses, the article formulates the principles of segmentation of the national elites both for the purposes of identifying the layers most susceptible to sanctional pressure and singling out most effective and capable strata from the point of view of practical implementation of the indented outcomes of the undertaken pressure from the outside.

The relevance of public policies for the sustainability of community media: Lessons from Argentina

Since 2004 and for the first time in the history of broadcasting in the region, a dozen Latin American countries have acknowledged community radio and television stations as legal providers of audiovisual communication services. In Argentina, a law passed in 2009 not only awarded legal recognition to the sector, it also provided a promotion mechanism for community media. In this respect, it was one of the most ambitious ones in the region. The driving question is: How relevant are public policies for the sustainability of community media in Argentina? The argument is: even though the sector of community media has developed and persisted for decades in illegal conditions imposed by the state, the legalization and promotion policies carried out by the state from the perspective of human rights in a context of extreme media ownership concentration have been critical to the growth and sustainability of non-profit media.

Overseas Study as Zone of Suspension: Chinese Students Re-negotiating Youth, Gender, and Intimacy

ABSTRACTThis article draws on longitudinal ethnographic research with a group of Chinese women students in Australia to consider how time studying abroad functions as a temporal and geographic ‘zone of suspension’ for these mobile youth, through which they reconfigure the meanings of both youth and feminine gender. Vis-à-vis life course, on one hand this generation of young women is subject to the fairly rigid normative life-stage model of the elder generations, which is more compressed for women than for men and leaves women little leeway for deviation between stages; while on the other hand they are drawn toward a more open understanding of life course, incorporating an extended period of ‘emerging adulthood,’ pre-marital sexual exploration, and a greater diversity of possible life pathways. Since the normative life-stage model’s opportunity-cost is greater for women than for men, there is more pressure on women – especially academically, professionally and personally ambitious ones – to elaborate alternatives. Based on formal, recorded interviews as well as participant-observation over a number of years, this article explores how for some, educational mobility seems like a step toward this goal; however, in practice the contradictions of both femininity and life course are reconfigured, rather than resolved, in overseas study’s ‘zone of suspension.’

The Mediterranean: Not a Union, but an Integrated Space?

This study examines several multilateral cooperation initiatives in the Mediterranean and by discussing their failures in generating a genuine cooperation, it hypothesizes about an integrated Mediterraneanspace, where prime challenges might lead to a loose functional framework of integration. In puttingforward this hypothetical integrated space, the study begins with discussing prime challenges in theregion: security, migration and environment, and it proceeds with early multilateral cooperationattempts. Among these, it focuses its attention on two ambitious ones: Euro-Mediterranean Partnershipand the Union for the Mediterranean, and underlines the disappointments in these attempts in realizingpeace and prosperity in the region. The study concludes that an integrated space in the Mediterranean,which takes European integration experience as a model, might offer a better solution to the commonproblems in the region with a precondition that southern Mediterranean states are provided a clearperspective in a sincere and equal partnership.

The Distant Sound of Book Boats: The Itinerant Book Trade in Jiangnan from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries

The Distant Sound of Book Boats:The Itinerant Book Trade in Jiangnan from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries* Fan Wang (bio) I live near the Terrace of the Top Graduate.Throwing open the windows on all four sides of my little pavilion, I see book boats coming from the Stream of Zha, Carried by the rising tide of last night. – Chen Zhan (1753–1817)1 The morning arrival of book boats was a welcome sight to Chen Zhan, a distinguished scholar and book collector. As he notes in the comment accompanying his poem, there were no book stores in Xiashi, the town in central Haining county northeast of Hangzhou where he was born and lived for many years: these itinerant peddlers were his only commercial source for books. His remark is of interest to book historians on two counts.2 First, it suggests that even in the economically prosperous [End Page 17] and culturally sophisticated Jiangnan area (the lower Yangtze delta), bookstores were uncommon in eighteenth-century China: even a town in Haining, a county renowned for its cultural brilliance, lacked one. Second, we learn that a well-connected scholar and book collector such as Chen Zhan would consider travelling peddlers a regular, reliable means of book acquisition.3 Throwing open the windows of his pavilion, Chen Zhan offers us a rare glimpse of the itinerant booksellers who, complementing the bookstores clustered primarily in market towns and county/prefectural seats, played a significant role in the circulation of books in China at least from the sixteenth century onwards.4 During the three hundred years from the 1570s to the 1870s, the book trade underwent considerable growth and diversification. The expansion and stratification of the book market over this longue durée depended upon a smoothly functioning transportation network, especially in the Jiangnan area. Taking advantage of a water transport system greatly improved during the first half of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) and a rapidly emerging money economy, book peddlers contributed to the geographical and social expansion of print culture in Chinese society, linking urban centers of book production with consumers of printed matter living in small towns and villages across the Jiangnan area. With the growing complexity and stratification of the book market, a group of itinerant booksellers also emerged who specialized in rare books and solicited the patronage of literati. As Chen Zhan's poem suggests, the increasingly extensive networks between traveling peddlers and private book collectors facilitated the thriving, elite-oriented antiquarian book trade that gained momentum in the later sixteenth century and peaked in Chen Zhan's lifetime. This article resituates itinerant booksellers and their book boats within the late imperial Chinese bookscape, foregrounding their significance as mediating agents between producers and consumers of books.5 [End Page 18] Substantial research has been done on itinerant book-distribution systems in early modern England, France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands.6 But little scholarly attention has been paid to the significant role of book peddlers in late imperial China. This gap in the study of Chinese book culture is all the more unfortunate given the numerous references to book boats and book peddlers left by Chinese collectors and scholars in the form of colophons, miscellaneous notes, essays, correspondence, and poems – a treasure trove of evidence that both suggests the importance of the itinerant book trade in late imperial China and furnishes us with the primary sources needed to reconstruct the economic mechanisms, logistical arrangements, and cultural processes of book peddling. Drawing upon sources ranging from literary works and miscellaneous notes to handwritten colophons and local gazetteers, I sketch a social and cultural profile of the itinerant booksellers in the Jiangnan area from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. A fascinating variety of travelling booksellers inhabited the world of books in this period, from the smalltime peddlers who journeyed from village to village selling shoddy commercial editions to the high-end merchants who dealt in rare editions and frequented the homes of elite scholars. Their social and cultural functions varied as much as their wares and customers. Enterprising travelling booksellers ventured into publishing; intellectually ambitious ones leveraged their book expertise into participation in scholarly debates. Some took...

Deep Integration: Considering the Heterogeneity of Free Trade Agreements

Regional Trade Agreements have emerged in an environment of stalled multilateral trade negotiations. Although the impact of Regional Trade Agreements on international trade has been well documented, scant attention has been paid to empirical studies exploring their heterogeneity from the point of view of deep integration. We set out to determine whether deeper Regional Trade Agreements promote trade more effectively than less ambitious ones. We generate credible deep integration indicators using two recently available datasets from the World Trade Organization and the World Trade Institute. We then test the effect of depth on trade using a gravity model. We treat additive indicators as factor variables and use multiple correspondence analysis to obtain distilled indicators of deep integration to offer new insights and confirm recent deep integration findings. We find that deeper Regional Trade Agreements increase trade more than shallow agreements do, irrespective of whether the provisions they contain are within or beyond the competence of the World Trade Organization.

Strategie nauczania filozofii

W Polskich mediach, nawet tych ambitnych, brak jest filozoficznych analiz oraz komentarzy do życia intelektualnego i politycznego. Co więcej, brak również zapotrzebowania na nie. Ta konstatacja skłania do poszukiwania przyczyn. Jedną z głównych autor widzi w, oczyszczonym z odniesień do rzeczywistości społeczno-kulturalno-intelektualnej, sposobie wprowadzania w filozofię licealistów i studentów. Naucza się jej w porządku historycznym, skupiając się na chronologii oraz przedstawiając filozoficzne koncepcje jako teorie wyrafinowane intelektualnie i oderwane od świata zwykłych ludzi. Teorie, które czasami wchodzą w interakcje i bardzo rzadko ze światem. Że można i należy inaczej pokazuje autor, przyglądając się trzem strategiom nauczania: historycznej, problemowo-życiowej oraz zagadnieniowo-historycznej. Główną część artykułu poświęca on właśnie opisowi tych strategii w oparciu o analizę najbardziej popularnych w Polsce podręczników do filozofii.

On the EU's performance and leadership in global environmental governance: the case of the Nagoya Protocol

ABSTRACTAnalysing the European Union's (EU) role in the negotiations of the 2010 Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit sharing regarding genetic resources, this article argues for the integration of (1) the EU's policy objectives and (2) their achievement in the analysis of the EU's performance and leadership in international (environmental) negotiations. We first develop a conceptual and explanatory framework that highlights the inter-relationship between both aspects. We then establish that the EU pursued conservative policy objectives in the Nagoya process (becoming more moderate in 2006/2007) but was highly successful in achieving its goals. The explanatory analysis provides illustrative evidence of how the degree of ambition of the EU's policy objectives directly affects and indirectly frames goal achievement: while conservative objectives are easier to realize than ambitious ones, factors such as domestic legislation, internal interest homogeneity, universal norms and external policy making procedures may be especially important for achieving ambitious goals.

From “Green Growth” to sound policies: An overview

“Green growth” is an attractive slogan with a variety of possible meanings. This essay critically examines several potential meanings of this slogan and provides a brief overview of some of the main implications of the other papers in this special issue. Taken together, these papers argue for the importance of careful analysis of energy/environmental policies, particularly ambitious ones claiming to offer huge benefits with little or no cost.

The Lantana, Blooming

The Lantana, Blooming Annalisa Grier (bio) In the year before Daniela leaves him, the first and only year of their marriage, Jay often finds himself staring at her, wondering, weighing, marveling. He feels that he has married too well, though Daniela laughs whenever he mentions it, tells him: I used to swim naked in the cow ponds and burn the leeches off with a match. In fact I'm still doing it. Don't act as if I'm a queen, Jay McFaddin, love of my life. Be a good man, leave your boots outside. At the end of their marriage, she does a very simple thing, so simple Jay wonders how it never occurred to him that she might: she hitches a ride in a semi-truck and disappears. His friend Grady says that from inside the gas station, where he was buying cigarettes, he saw Daniela climb into the cab of a Mack truck with Arizona plates. He will tell Jay that he thought she was only talking to the guy. Jay will punch Grady in the jaw as he says this and walk away, feeling righteous and wronged. Before she gets in the truck, Daniela will take Jay's handgun out of the sock drawer, wrap it in a few of his t-shirts, and stuff this all in the bottom of a backpack with a few boxes of bullets. Then she will leave. He will not understand why she does it; but still, he thinks, he should understand. The answer is there, if he can just find it. But now, before all that, before she gets into a stranger's truck and vanishes, they are eighteen, just married, living in a cabin that belonged to Jay's father, as caretaker for land owned by a big oil man from Houston. There is a trailer for the kitchen, a shed for the house, and Jay's father presents it to him solemnly, as if it is his to give: Jay is to earn his keep by periodically driving the fences for his father, but also to be prepared to leave at a moment's notice, should his father be evicted from the place he now rents in town. It is, Jay thinks, an appropriate present from his father, a man whose nomadic days are barely behind him, days his father mourns; a man who would never realize that, as a wedding present, temporary tenancy could leave something to be desired. After Jay outfits his father's shell of a shed with a wooden floor, a handmade frame for the bed—even curtains on the window—his friends move in, friends he has known since childhood. The friends bring sheds, [End Page 21] like Jay, or the trailer from a semi-truck, or even just a tent. Most of them live in rented rooms in town when they are not at camp, or in additions off the back of relatives' homes; just until I get on my feet, they say, just until I get a real job. Some, the ambitious ones, speak of houses, most of trailers. They are old friends and new adults, weighing whether they will join the Army or the Marines, one about to take over his father's car repair shop, poised in the moment between childhood and adulthood; none but Jay married, none but Jay ever accompanied in the camp by a woman, although Jay knows the women are there in the background, indefinite but present. The ranch is better for hunting than for working cattle, which is just as well, as the oil man will never run nearly enough head on it to use it all. Since he grew up bombing around it in his father's beat-up Jeep, Jay knows the property better than the rancher himself: the irregularities, the side of the railroad tracks where the fences break, the uncertainty on the edge of a ranch too big for its owner, the place where he or his friends can trespass into the good neighboring hunting grounds while maintaining plausible deniability. There is enough range between boundaries here—between the railroad tracks, the potholed two-lane highway, and the barbed...

Generosity Pays in the Presence of Direct Reciprocity: A Comprehensive Study of 2×2 Repeated Games

By applying a technique previously developed to study ecosystem assembly [Capitán et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 168101 (2009)] we study the evolutionary stable strategies of iterated 22 games. We focus on memory-one strategies, whose probability to play a given action depends on the actions of both players in the previous time step. We find the asymptotically stable populations resulting from all possible invasions of any known stable population. The results of this invasion process are interpreted as transitions between different populations that occur with a certain probability. Thus the whole process can be described as a Markov chain whose states are the different stable populations. With this approach we are able to study the whole space of symmetric 22 games, characterizing the most probable results of evolution for the different classes of games. Our analysis includes quasi-stationary mixed equilibria that are relevant as very long-lived metastable states and is compared to the predictions of a fixation probability analysis. We confirm earlier results on the success of the Pavlov strategy in a wide range of parameters for the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, but find that as the temptation to defect grows there are many other possible successful strategies. Other regions of the diagram reflect the equilibria structure of the underlying one-shot game, albeit often some non-expected strategies arise as well. We thus provide a thorough analysis of iterated 22 games from which we are able to extract some general conclusions. Our most relevant finding is that a great deal of the payoff parameter range can still be understood by focusing on win-stay, lose-shift strategies, and that very ambitious ones, aspiring to obtaining always a high payoff, are never evolutionary stable.

Gene design, cloning and protein-expression methods for high-value targets at the Seattle Structural Genomics Center for Infectious Disease

Any structural genomics endeavor, particularly ambitious ones such as the NIAID-funded Seattle Structural Genomics Center for Infectious Disease (SSGCID) and Center for Structural Genomics of Infectious Disease (CSGID), face technical challenges at all points of the production pipeline. One salvage strategy employed by SSGCID is combined gene engineering and structure-guided construct design to overcome challenges at the levels of protein expression and protein crystallization. Multiple constructs of each target are cloned in parallel using Polymerase Incomplete Primer Extension cloning and small-scale expressions of these are rapidly analyzed by capillary electrophoresis. Using the methods reported here, which have proven particularly useful for high-value targets, otherwise intractable targets can be resolved.

How General Do Theories of Explanation Need To Be? *

Theories of explanation seek to tell us what distinctively explanatory information is. The most ambitious ones, such as the DN-account, seek to tell us what an explanation is, tout court. Less ambitious ones, such as causal theories, restrict themselves to a particular domain of inquiry. The least ambitious theories constitute outright skepticism, holding that there is no reasonably unified phenomenon to give an account of. On these views, it is impossible to give any theories of explanation at all. I argue that both the less ambitious and outright skeptical varieties are committed to a certain context-sensitivity of our explanatory discourse. And though this discourse is almost certainly context-sensitive in some respects, it does not exhibit the context-sensitivity less than fully ambitious theories are committed to. Therefore, all accounts that seek to restrict themselves in scope, including causal accounts of explanation, fail.

How General Do Theories of Explanation Need to Be?

Theories of explanation seek to tell us what distinctively explanatory information is. The most ambitious ones, such as the DN-account, seek to tell us what an explanation is, tout court. Less ambitious ones, such as causal theories, restrict themselves to a particular domain of inquiry. The least ambitious theories constitute outright skepticism, holding that there is no reasonably unified phenomenon to give an account of. On these views, it is impossible to give any theories of explanation at all. I argue that both the less ambitious and outright skeptical varieties are committed to a certain context-sensitivity of our explanatory discourse. And though this discourse is almost certainly context-sensitive in some respects, it does not exhibit the context-sensitivity less than fully ambitious theories are committed to. Therefore, all accounts that seek to restrict themselves in scope, including causal accounts of explanation, fail.