Contingent Fact Research Articles

Pay to Play: Booking Roles in the Post-Network Era

What people have to understand is that I have to make a lot of money, an enormous amount of money, to have a lot of money. At the end of the day I probably walk home with around 20 percent of my paycheck. Each has a whole sort of business around them.-Mark Ruffalo (qtd. in Smith)actors are the largest labor force in media production by a significant margin. There are 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild Overall; SAG Contract Earnings 2002-2008; SAG Contract Earnings 2004-2010), compared to the 20,000 members of the Writers Guild of America (Young) or the 16,000 members of the Directors Guild of America (Directors Guild of America), and this number does not account for the thousands of aspirants who have yet to obtain their union cards. According to a 2015 estimate, there are 276,016 actors in Los Angeles-approximately 7 percent of the city's total population.1 Put another way, the number of actors in Los Angeles is greater than the total population of Jersey City, New Jersey.2 Acting offers the possibility of fame and fortune, but the reality of the work is that it is contingent employment-a fact that has not changed despite the tremendous boom in television production in the 2010s. Without a steady source of income, most actors are forced to look for part-time positions in other industries in order to pay the bills to sustain their creative work and dreams of stardom.Actors are the most visible workers in the media industries because unlike directors, writers, or producers, performers' work is onscreen-audiences know their faces. What we see in these performances, however, is only the glamorous and remunerated portion of their labor, which is a fraction of the work that goes into making a living as an actor. There is a battery of costly and time-consuming activities involved in booking paying work. Ideally, actors can find agents who can send them out on auditions and negotiate contracts. Finding an agent (and later a manager) involves mailing letters with headshots and resumes in the hope that someone will respond and be willing to take on the as a client. In order to get to auditions, actors also need to be mobile, which in Los Angeles means having a reliable car. Internet access is essential because Web sites provide information about roles, and email facilitates communication with agents, managers, and casting directors. There are also some aspects of an actor's work that are less intuitive: the networking process with casting directors and others is an ongoing and crucial determinant in an actor's ability to book roles. Aspiring actors must constantly meet new people and maintain their contacts-often by spending money to send updated headshots or postcards with photos and information about new work and credits. In addition to actively looking for work, performers spend a great deal of time and money honing their craft with improvisation classes, auditioning classes, voice and dance lessons, and acting classes and coaching. For working actors (as opposed to stars with the name recognition that can get a project funded), all of these steps are necessary as they try to book their next gig.Despite the large population of performers in Hollywood, the acting sub-industry has drawn comparatively little attention from media scholars. Two categories largely dominate the existing work on acting: first, those studies that position actors as bearers of meanings, and second, those that treat actors as creators of meaning. How performers arrive at the position to bear or create meaning is often overlooked. Even explorations of stars' extratextual materials tend to focus on discursive traces of the actor's work rather than the performer's labor itself. As Richard deCordova asserts, [t]he emergence of the star system involved a strict regulation of the type of knowledge produced about the actor (17). For deCordova, knowledge of actors developed in stages: acting, the picture personality, and the star-these are the three categories that define how actors are discussed and understood in popular culture. …

Asymmetry in the unificationist theory of causal explanation

The unificationist theory of causal explanation offers a theory of causation and explanation with no causal primitives. Kitcher proposed that it offered an account of explanatory asymmetry, but his proposal has been criticized for being too dependent on contingent facts and surreptitiously supposing causal realism. In addition, critics have argued that unificationism cannot account for asymmetry in a world with symmetric laws of physics (such as ours) and is lead to accept backwards explanation in certain epistemic situations. Unificationism has been defended from some of these objections. We critique those defenses, rejecting some and developing others, as well as adding new ones. In doing so, we argue that objectors are wrong to treat explanatory asymmetry as an a priori matter and that unificationism is appropriately sensitive to the right sort of empirical facts.

The Power to Do the Impossible

Several recent arguments purport to show that omnipotence is incompatible with the possession of various necessary properties. These arguments appeal to one of two plausible but false principles about the nature of power: (1) that if it is metaphysically impossible for a being to actualize a state of affairs, then that being does not have the power to actualize that state of affairs, or (2) that if it is impossible given some contingent facts about the world that a being actualize a state of affairs, then that being does not have the power to actualize that state of affairs. I pose several problems for both principles, thereby undermining the plausibility of these arguments. I then consider the implications of rejecting these principles for related principles in the free will debate. These implications suggest important differences between having the power to bring about a state of affairs, having a choice about whether it obtains, and being able to bring it about.

Why Fighting Structural Inequalities Requires Institutionalizing Difference: A Response to Nienke Grossman

People ask me sometimes, when—when do you think it will be enough? When will there be enough women on the court? And my answer is when there are nine.Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme CourtNienke Grossman offers a much needed overview of the statistical patterns behind the substantial underrepresentation of women in international courts benches. As her inquiry reveals, despite the growing proportion of female qualified lawyers, sex representativeness has hardly improved in recent years. On the contrary, in the absence of special requirements in courts’ statutes or judicial selection procedures, the percentage of women judges has actually stagnated or even declined in some cases. Such acute sex imbalance cannot be attributed to the (contingent) fact that not enough qualified women are available for such highly prestigious positions. Grossman persuasively contests the plausibility of this widespread assumption. Not only is the limited-pool argument fallacious, but, as her analysis suggests, part of the problem might actually be that judicial selection procedures lack transparency and arenotdriven by merit. Instead, nominations of international judges are often used “to reward political loyalty or to advance political agendas”; this practice seriously impinges on the chances of women to be appointed as international judges, as politics (both domestic and international) remains very much a male-dominated sphere.

Justinian’s πάτριος φωνή

In the Justinianic Novellae, repeated occurrences of the phrase ??????? ????, meaning the Latin language, are generally believed to be indicative of Justinian?s favourable stance towards Latin culture, Roman tradition, and his own roots. Per se, the importance and dignity of Latin needed no advocacy in the actual environment of the sixth-century Constantinople: not only was the idiom in wide official use, but a fair share of literary production was in Latin, and proficiency in that language was normal with the many admirers and connoisseurs of Roman antiquities. The usual understanding is that by calling Latin the ?father tongue? Justinian never emphasized the contingent fact of its being his own first language, but rather referred to Latin as the primary language of the Roman people and the traditional vehicle of high administration throughout the Empire. In the present paper the use of ??????? ???? (or ?. ??????) is examined in the wider context of earlier, contemporary and later Greek sources, in which it normally means the native language of a foreign individual or ethnicity as opposed to the Greek of the author and his readers; the instances involve a large number of foreign languages, including contemporary spoken idioms as well as traditional languages of different communities. However, the question whether ??????? ???? ever became a context-free denotation of Latin viewed as the traditional language, by all appearances, is to be answered to the negative. On the other hand, the phrase ??????? ???? often assumes the specific task of ?flagging? instances of code-switching in Greek texts, and it is this special purpose that it seems to fulfill more than once in the Novellae as well.

“Habitus” or the possibility of science of the contingent

Most of sciences can be traced back to Aristotle. This is because in opposition to Plato he was able to find a way in which one could give a scientific form to reflection concerning contingent facts of every-day life. Knowledge of the contingent was made possible thanks to the Aristotelian concepts of category and state (habitus). It is the latter concept that was especially important for forming knowledge about change. Aristotle and his medieval followers apply it in analyses of various processes, from local motion to changes in temperaments, to formation of virtues.

Private education, positional goods, and the arms race problem

This article defends the view that markets in education need to be restricted, in light of the problem posed by what I call the ‘educational arms race’. Markets in education have a tendency to distort an important balance between education’s role as a gatekeeper – its ‘screening’ function – and its role in helping children develop as part of a preparation for adult life. This tendency is not merely a contingent fact about markets: It can be traced to ways in which education is a partly positional good and how markets respond to (and stimulate) demand for positional goods over non-positional goods. The problem with arms races is that they allow markets to facilitate wider use of defection in a collective action problem. Using these claims, I argue that markets in education have a distinctive tendency to become objectionably exploitative. I conclude by applying some of my conclusions to illuminate various egalitarian claims about justice in education.

I—Hallvard Lillehammer: Moral Testimony, Moral Virtue, and the Value of Autonomy

According to some, taking moral testimony is a potentially decent way to exercise one's moral agency. According to others, it amounts to a failure to live up to minimal standards of moral worth. What's the issue? Is it conceptual or empirical? Is it epistemological or moral? Is there a ‘puzzle’ of moral testimony; or are there many, or none? I argue that there is no distinctive puzzle of moral testimony. The question of its legitimacy is as much a moral or political as an epistemological question. Its answer is as much a matter of contingent empirical fact as a matter of a priori necessity. In the background is a mixture of normative and descriptive issues, including the value of autonomy, the nature of legitimate authority, and who to trust.

The Great British Class Fiasco: A Comment on Savage et al.

Savage et al. (2013) claim they have produced a new model of the British class structure. They stress the innovative use of an internet survey, the BBC’s Great British Class Survey (GBCS), but it plays no serious role in the generation of their class typology. What they do is a theory free (though Bourdieu inspired) data dredging exercise. What they derive is an arbitrary typology determined by a contingent fact – the size of their sample.

Why Constitutionalism Matters: The Case for Robust Constitutionalism

This article is founded on disillusionment with a dominant approach to justifying the legitimacy of constitutions and of judicial review. In the prevailing tradition, constitutionalism is justified by its desirable consequences, e.g., the promotion of justice or democracy. This article disputes this methodological starting point and defends robust constitutionalism. Robust constitutionalism refers to a mode of justification that does not rest on contingent facts. Instead robust constitutionalism defends constitutionalism on the basis of values that are embedded in the very concept of a constitution and in the very essence of judicial review. Constitutional entrenchment of rights is valuable because it constitutes public recognition that the protection of rights is the state’s duty, rather than a mere discretionary gesture on its part. Judicial review is valuable not because it is likely to result in “better” or just decisions, but because judicial review is nothing but a hearing to which individuals are entitled.

1. A Long Career

‘Imagine Mozart had lived into old age: we'd be referring to The Marriage of Figaro, the Requiem, and the Jupiter Symphony as early Mozart.’ This poignant remark (not quoted verbatim) made to me by the late Derek Parfit evokes not only the frustrated sense of loss which we feel when contemplating the premature passing of an artistic genius, but also the impact which the contingent fact of an artist's death date can have on our overall characterization of their output. In the case of Sophocles, the genius did live on, and continued to produce masterworks right up until the end of his life. The counterfactual here is to imagine that he died rather before the age of approximately ninety in 405. His dying only five years earlier would have denied us Philoctetes, performed first in 409 and likely written not long before then, and Oedipus at Colonus, produced posthumously in 401 by Sophocles’ homonymous grandson, himself a tragedian of some note. But his reputation was by then secure, and we may hope (to pile counterfactual on counterfactual) that some other plays, now lost to us, would have survived in their stead; in which case our picture of Sophocles today would be rather different. A still earlier death, say at the age of fifty, would not only have meant that his Electra and, quite probably, Oedipus the King were never written, but also that plays sometimes often seen today as ‘early’, especially Trachiniae and Ajax, would have been regarded as mature works standing at the summit of a still substantial career.

History, Value, and Irreplaceability

It is often assumed that there is a necessary relationship between historical value and irreplaceability, and that this is an essential feature of historical value’s distinctive character. Contrary to this assumption, I argue that it is a merely contingent fact that some historically valuable things are irreplaceable, and that irreplaceability is not a distinctive feature of historical value at all. Rather, historically significant objects, from heirlooms to artifacts, offer us an otherwise impossible connection with the past, a value that persists even in the face of suitable replacements.

The Reliability of Armchair Intuitions

AbstractArmchair philosophers have questioned the significance of recent work in experimental philosophy by pointing out that experiments have been conducted on laypeople and undergraduate students. To challenge a practice that relies on expert intuitions, so the armchair objection goes, one needs to demonstrate that expert intuitions rather than those of ordinary people are sensitive to contingent facts such as cultural, linguistic, socio‐economic, or educational background. This article does exactly that. Based on two empirical studies on populations of 573 and 203 trained philosophers, respectively, it demonstrates that expert intuitions vary dramatically according to at least one contingent factor, namely, the linguistic background of the expert: philosophers make different intuitive judgments if their native language is English rather than Dutch, German, or Swedish. These findings cast doubt on the common armchair assumption that philosophical theories based on armchair intuitions are valid beyond the linguistic background against which they were developed.

Actual Time and Possible Change

Sider (2001) and Hawley (2001) argue that, in order to account for the mere possibility of change, temporal parts must be as fine-grained as possible change, and hence as fine-grained as time. However, when dealing with metaphysical possibility, the fine-grainedness of actual time and the fine-grainedness of possible change can come apart. Once this is taken into account, we see that, on certain assumptions about the actual microstructure of time, the modal arguments of Sider and Hawley lead to the problematic claim that temporal parts are more fine-grained than time. The utility of a temporal parts theory thus seems to be sensitive to metaphysically contingent facts concerning the microstructure of time.

Counterfactuals and unphysical ceteris paribus: An explanatory fallacy

I reconsider a type of counterfactual argument often used in historical sciences on a recent widely discussed example of the so-called ?rare Earth? hypothesis in planetary sciences and astrobiology. The argument is based on the alleged ?rarity? of some crucial ingredient for the planetary habitability, which is, in Earth?s case, provided by contingent evolutionary development. For instance, the claim that a contingent fact of history which has created planet Jupiter enables shielding of Earth from most dangerous impact catastrophes, thus increasing Earth?s habitability, leads often to the conclusion that such state-of-affairs must be rare in the Galaxy. I argue that this reasoning is deeply flawed, for several closely related reasons. In addition, the relevance of the philosophical problem of transworld identity for this kind of historical reasoning in science is put forward. This highlights many explanatory problems one faces when using historical counterfactuals in study of complex, nonlinear dynamical systems - and bolsters the relevance of philosophy for evaluation of scientific explanatory claims.

When is consensus knowledge based? Distinguishing shared knowledge from mere agreement

Scientific consensus is widely deferred to in public debates as a social indicator of the existence of knowledge. However, it is far from clear that such deference to consensus is always justified. The existence of agreement in a community of researchers is a contingent fact, and researchers may reach a consensus for all kinds of reasons, such as fighting a common foe or sharing a common bias. Scientific consensus, by itself, does not necessarily indicate the existence of shared knowledge among the members of the consensus community. I address the question of under what conditions it is likely that a consensus is in fact knowledge based. I argue that a consensus is likely to be knowledge based when knowledge is the best explanation of the consensus, and I identify three conditions—social calibration, apparent consilience of evidence, and social diversity, for knowledge being the best explanation of a consensus.

Can Counterfactuals Really Be about Possible Worlds?

AbstractThe standard view about counterfactuals is that a counterfactual (A > C) is true if and only if the A‐worlds most similar to the actual world @ are C‐worlds. I argue that the worlds conception of counterfactuals is wrong. I assume that counterfactuals have non‐trivial truth‐values under physical determinism. I show that the possible‐worlds approach cannot explain many embeddings of the form (P > (Q > R)), which intuitively are perfectly assertable, and which must be true if the contingent falsity of (Q > R) is to be explained. If (P > (Q > R)) has a backtracking reading then the contingent facts that (Q > R) needs to be true in the closest P‐worlds are absent. If (P > (Q > R)) has a forwardtracking reading, then the laws required by (Q > R) to be true in the closest P‐worlds will be absent, because they are violated in those worlds. Solutions like lossy laws or denial of embedding won't work. The only approach to counterfactuals that explains the embedding is a pragmatic metalinguistic approach in which the whole idea that counterfactuals are about a modal reality, be it abstract or concrete, is given up.

Remedies, Rights, and Properties

This Essay studies the relationship between rights and remedies and celebrates the multiplicity of our private law rights in general and of our property institutions more particularly.Remedies obviously serve as instruments of rights enforcement, but they also participate in the constitution of the rights they help enforce. Although institutional reasons bring about certain gaps between the content of rights and the judicial response to their infringement, the constitutive role of remedies introduces significant subtlety into the domain of rights. Thus, the choice of different remedies, as well as the possibility of incorporating qualifications, limitations, and even obligations, allows private law to accommodate qualitative (and normatively attractive) distinctions between different types of rights.This phenomenon of the multiplicity of rights manifests itself in property law as well. Property law is composed of a distinct, though not infinite, number of property institutions, each reflecting a particular balance of values that is attached to a specific category of social contexts and a specific category of resources.This variety and the contingent facts on which it partly relies should not be embarrassing. Quite the contrary: a truly liberal law must resist uniformity and endorse multiplicity, which is both freedom-enhancing and individuality-enhancing. By appreciating private law’s multiplicity and understanding the normative value of the (at times contingent) choices on which it relies, as well as their potential critical bite, private law theory can provide a better understanding of the order embedded in this complex legal mosaic and, possibly, even fruitfully contribute to its improvement.

Contingent facts: a reply to Cresswell and Rini

Contingent facts: a reply to Cresswell and Rini

Contingent facts: comments on Mellor's reply

Contingent facts: comments on Mellor's reply