Critique Of My Work Research Articles

Archetypal Metaphysics and the Psyworld

Abstract I address Erik Goodwyn’s insightful and nuanced critique of my work on the essence of archetypes that have direct bearing on his own investigations of archetypal origins, attractor states, the mind-body problem, and on the question of metaphysics. Goodwyn’s work is grounded in scientific naturalism while I offer an onto-phenomenological methodology that is compatible with his own positions. The questions of embodiment, ground, holism, panpsychism, and esse in anima are examined in light of offering a preliminary framework for an archetypal metaphysics where I introduce a theory of psyworld.

Taking one for the team: a reiteration on the role of self-blame after medical error

In a critique of my work on ‘taking the blame’ as a response to medical errors, my position on the potential goods of individual responsibility and blame is challenged. It...

The Concession that Dooms Originalism: A Response to Professor Lawrence Solum

This essay responds to a recent article by Professor Lawrence Solum in the Northwestern University Law Review which describes alleged differences between Originalism and Living Constitutionalism. I argue that even under Solum's own criteria, and his specific discussion of and critique of my work, there is no meaningful difference between Originalism and Living Constitutionalism, and this merger is important for current political and legal debates about the proper role for the Supreme Court in our system of government. The original promise of Originalism was that only by combining strong judicial deference with the search for original intent or meaning could judges be meaningfully constrained when resolving many of our country’s most difficult social, political, and legal issues. As more and more Originalists drop the deference aspect of the theory, however, and tell judges to apply the original meaning of the constitutional text differently as relevant facts (and values) change, then judicial discretion will be maximized. Whereas most Living Constitutionalists concede judges inevitably have that discretion, Originalists today still often claim that only their theory can limit the power of runaway federal judges. That claim, however, is simply false given the wide swath of discretion judges have under current originalist theory to pick and choose which facts are relevant and which ones have changed since the text at issue was originally ratified. The only meaningful theory of constitutional interpretation that can in practice privilege the Constitution's original meaning is one which includes strong judicial deference to other government officials.

Revisiting metaphilosophical naturalism and naturalized transcendentalism: response to Kaidesoja

ABSTRACTIn this article, I assess Tuukka Kaidesoja’s response to my objections to his critique of transcendental arguments and respond to his criticisms of my work. I argue that his new attempt to link transcendental arguments to Kant’s transcendental idealism is just as question-begging as his previous attempt, that his problematization of Bhaskar’s use of Kantian terminology is premised upon a confusion, and that his elaboration of explanatory necessity still fails to clearly distinguish it from transcendental necessity. I also elaborate and defend my conception of transcendental arguments and the relative a priority it involves against Kaidesoja’s criticisms of them. While I concede the validity of his concerns about the starting point of Bhaskar’s transcendental analysis of experimental activity, I maintain that this does not undermine naturalized transcendentalism itself. I thus conclude that Kaidesoja’s metaphilosophical naturalism is premised upon a flawed critique of transcendentalism and an insufficiently motivated alternative approach.

David Foster Wallace and New Sincerity Aesthetics: A Reply to Edward Jackson and Joel Nicholson-Roberts

This essay responds to the critique of my work advanced by Edward Jackson and Joel Nicholson-Roberts in “White Guys: Questioning Infinite Jest’s New Sincerity,” published in Orbit in March 2017. In addition to refuting their misrepresentations of my work, I provide a positive re-articulation of my core reading of the New Sincerity aesthetic, outlining its connection to concepts such as affect, intention, undecidability, literature, and neoliberalism.

Replies

In these replies I address criticism of my work on the grounds that I adopt a ‘humanist’ approach, underestimate the aesthetic potential of contemporary video games, overlook the role of the nation-state in resisting technological imperialism, fail to appreciate the risks of reactionary appropriations of technology, and introduce an extrinsic and dubious aesthetic value into the philosophy of technology. In the course of responding to these criticisms, I reiterate several of the basic claims of critical theory of technology.

Reply to Professor Fenelon and Adding Emotion to My Materialist RSS Theory

In this reply, I accept Professor Fenelon basic critique: that I, as most “race scholars,” fail to take seriously Indigenous accounts in my theorization. However, I challenge several of his specific arguments about my work as well as some of his historical claims. I also include in this reply an unrelated section to Professor Fenelon’s critique of my work on the topic of race and emotion. This addition to my racial theory is crucial because although I still contend that racism has a material foundation, humans cannot live of bread alone–that is, race cannot exist without an emotional bond.

On Value Pluralism, Its Implications, and the Nature of Philosophy

This essay responds to the critique of my work by Robert Talisse, the philosopher, by further clarifying my views on the meaning of value pluralism, its implications, and the nature of philosophy. I argue here that most, if not all, of the substantive arguments that Talisse advances against me derive from premises that are contested by respected scholars within his own field.

Conventions or foundations? A response to Miles Little's ex nihilo nihil fit? Medicine rests on solid foundations.

In this essay, I respond to the critique of my work by Professor Miles Little.

Robert L. Campbell's essay, “An End to Over and Against”

This essay replies to a review essay written by Robert L. Campbell, “An End to Over and Against” ( The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 13, no. 1), which discussed recent biographical and historical studies of Ayn Rand by Jennifer Burns ( Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right ) and Anne C. Heller ( Ayn Rand and the World She Made ). The main point of discussion is the way in which Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden engaged the ideas and practices of modern psychology.

Response to ‘High Noon for Microfinance Impact Evaluations’

Duvendack and Palmer-Jones are critical of analysis and conclusions in Chemin (2008) because they are unable to replicate my results. This response identifies key differences between the two papers, especially regarding the sample and measurement of variables, which imply that Duvendack and Paler-Jones should not be considered as either a replication or a criticism of my work.

Reflections on the New Historicism

In this essay, I describe my practice of historicism circa 1986 by setting it into a field of distinctions and affinities gathered from the annals of intellectual history, literary history, critical theory, and critical practice. Under “critical practice,” I set my own developing thought over the past two decades, the new resources on which it draws, and its overall shape as an immanent critique of commitments informing the ideas and methods of my earliest work. I offer this vantage on what was lacking in my historicism in order to bring out a double irony: one, that my critique of my work goes deeper than the many attacks on it, and, two, that in surpassing that practice of historicism, I see it realized and validated.

The interpretive approach to religious education: challenging Thompson’s interpretation

In a recent book chapter, Matthew Thompson makes some criticisms of my work, including the interpretive approach to religious education and the research and activity of Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit. Against the background of a discussion of religious education in the public sphere, my response challenges Thompson’s account, commenting on his own position in relation to dialogical approaches to religious education. The article rehearses my long held view that the ideal form of religious education in fully state funded schools of a liberal democracy should be ‘secular’ but not ‘secularist’; there should be no implication of an axiomatic secular humanist interpretation of religions.

In Defence of Offences and Defences

My title is a more than a little self-parodic. The more my writings on criminal law retreat into the past, the more aware I become of their deficiencies. I should have foreseen this. It is not just a matter of critical distance, or of exposure to new waves of objections. It is also a matter of irreparability. As I have pointed out elsewhere, 1 reasons to which we do not conform stay with us, waiting for whatever conformity we can still belatedly muster. As time passes and circumstances change, our ability to do anything by way of conformity with some reasons may be lost. Then we only have our regrets. Sadly that is the stage I have reached with some passages in Offences and Defences. 2 I am no longer in a position to account for some of the strange things I said, never mind to mitigate their strangeness. By attempting to defend what I wrote I will only dig myself into a deeper hole. In such cases I can only concede the case for the prosecution. Fortunately I have, in Miriam Gur-Arye, Leora Dahan-Katz, and Daniel Statman, merciful prosecutors who make it easier for me to confront the errors of my misspent youth. They soften many of their searching criticisms of my work with superhuman efforts to find redeeming merit in the positions they criticise. They give patient attention to, and seek sensible explanations for, even my most far-fetched ideas. I am honoured by the time and energy that each has invested in making sense of Offences and Defences, and by the opportunity provided to me by the editors of the Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies to reflect on and reply to their comments in print. In all three contributions I find much to agree with, and much less to disagree with. But it falls to me, nevertheless, to say some final words in my defence, or at least mitigation, before the jury goes out (that means you, dear reader). As my work is now heading in a new

Misplaced criticism of breast screening research

Dear Sir, The paper by Gotzsche and Jorgensen1 contains a number of inaccuracies and omissions in its criticism of my work and that of my colleagues.2 Firstly, Gotzsche and Jorgensen take exception to the quoted 50% improvement in breast cancer survival in screen-detected cancers. They omit to mention that the approximate 50% improvement is after correction for lead time and length bias – before correction, the figure was a 70% improvement.3,4 Secondly, they claim that the 28% reduction in breast cancer mortality in England in the screened ages compared to other ages did not occur. They are mistaken. Table 1 shows breast cancer mortality by epoch in ages 50–69 and in all other age groups. While mortality rose by 2% in the latest period compared to the earliest for all other age groups, it fell by 27% in the age group 50–69. The relative risk of breast cancer mortality is therefore: Table 1 Breast cancer mortality in England by age group and epoch That, is a 28% reduction compared to other age groups. In the published analysis, the estimate was age-adjusted, but I give the crude analysis here so that readers can see where the estimate comes from. Gotzsche and Jorgensen's criticisms are particularly error-prone on the subject of over-diagnosis. It might be illuminating to contrast our approach2 with that of Jorgensen and Gotzsche.5 Both teams attempted to estimate overdiagnosis by calculation of expected incidence of breast cancer in the screening epoch based on trends observed in the pre-screening epoch. However, the methods differed at each stage, as follows: Data Sources: Duffy et al. used data on numbers of cases and populations at risk in England from Cancer Registry data.2 Jorgensen and Gotzsche estimated rates for England and Wales from a published graph. Changes in Incidence Independent of Screening: Duffy et al. took full account of these changes by correcting for the 7% increase above expected values at ages below the target age group for screening.2 Jorgensen and Gotzsche failed to do so.5 Method of analysis: Duffy et al. used poisson regression, as is the correct procedure for rate data.2,6 Jorgensen and Gotzsche used linear regression, which is incorrect.5 Data selection: Duffy et al. used all pre-screening and screening epoch data available.2 Jorgensen and Gotzsche excluded the three years of highest incidence in the pre-screening period, and only included the year of highest incidence in their screening epoch data, 1999.5 This inflated their estimate of overdiagnosis. Adjustment for lead time: Duffy et al. subtracted the deficit in incidence above the screening age from the excess observed in screening ages.2 Jorgensen and Gotzsche failed to do so.5 To be fair, they claimed not to observe a deficit. This is partly because in 1999 too few women above the screening age range had been screened in the past, but also because of their failure to fully adjust for changes in incidence independent of screening, as noted in point 2 above. Ductal Carcinoma in situ (DCIS): In the absence of data, Duffy et al. restricted estimation to invasive disease, although in the same paper, they estimated overdiagnosis including DCIS in a randomized trial.2 Like Duffy et al, Jorgensen and Gotzsche had no data on DCIS in the UK, so they assumed a result which was not observed.5 From the above, it can be seen that our modest estimate of overdiagnosis has more reliability than the implausibly high estimate of Jorgensen and Gotzsche. Gotzsche and Jorgensen make a number of further errors in defence of their estimate, including: failure to acknowledge that in the 1990's in the age range for screening, a full paper (not an abstract as stated by Gotzsche and Jorgensen),7 has shown that around 40% of tumours were screen-detected; citation of figures from 2006 to justify their estimate for 1999; and misinterpretation of those figures from 2006, as pointed out previously.8 More importantly, one should not lose sight of the benefit of the NHS Breast Screening Programme and the fact that the only randomized trial with more than 25 years of follow-up, shows that the quoted benefit of one breast cancer death prevented for every 400 women screened is accurate and may even underestimate the benefit.9

Response

Response Joyce Appleby The topic of culture and capitalism is hot. I recently attended a conference on “Power and the History of Capitalism” at the New School and discovered there a group of young British and American scholars from a variety of fields who are bearing down on it with great verve. One of them, Peter Knight of Manchester University, runs “The Culture of the Market Network,” which promotes interdisciplinary research on 19th-century America. As Hendrik Hartog so elegantly explains, such a subject would have seemed like an oxymoron in the intellectual milieu of the 1980s. Front and center now, the subject of culture and capitalism has yet to be fully plumbed, as both Hartog and Hans Eicholz have shown. Hartog’s own writings in American legal history reveal how capitalism and mobility worked together to challenge legal traditions based on the assumption of stable communities. From his studies has emerged a capitalist mindset. Diverse as the economic world in which they operated, market participants displayed what Hartog calls “a peculiar kind of cosmopolitanism.” A historian couldn’t ask for more interesting material. Eicholz, in his incisive critique of my work, asks what it means to ascribe the origins of capitalism to culture. He evidently fears that scholars might ignore the insights of economists if they insistently invoke culture to explain the market. His review of the Austrian tradition points to the importance they assigned to purposeful behavior. It, not maximization of material interests, drove economic development, the Austrians said, but an unintended orderliness issued from equally unintended consequences. Here lies the intellectual conundrum. Eicholz acknowledges that capitalism emerged from an unpredictable matrix of motives, means, and measures, but he points to the fact that the constancy [End Page 14] of purposeful behavior in market transactions over time has produced ordering processes. The dependence of capitalism upon these, for him, means that markets are not “historically contingent in the same way as ideas and values.” Culture must yield to a more positivistic phenomenon. The economy is not only distinct, but different from, the society and political milieu in which it operates. By establishing parameters and observing the rule of ceteris paribus, economists have built powerful models to track economic transactions. They can predict the price of wheat in the Chicago exchange after a drought in Minnesota or the impact of the minimum wage on restaurant workers in New Jersey, working with the residuals of participants’ decision making. This can be useful, but historians are mainly concerned with change, particularly transformational change. Let me take the example of the recent rise of financial services in the American economy to make my point. Between 1980 and 2005, financial services grew from 11% to 20% of GNP! Assets of $12 trillion in 1980 went to $140 trillion—a tenfold increase in twenty-five years. Financiers’ power increased as well. As debtholders, they pressured CEOs to produce profits sooner rather than later. “Long term” lost value as a goal. At the same time, they responded to low rates of interest by creating asset-based securities tied to real estate, blowing the bubble in housing prices up to the bursting point that ushered in the Great Recession of 2007–2008. There are obvious factors we could introduce to explain all this: deregulation, high rates of savings in Asia, government encouragement of home ownership, banks’ switch from partnerships to corporations, and the willingness of pension fund managers to take on risk. Self-interest, game theory, and the psychology of the trading floor can be adduced as causes. Historical contingencies abounded. The unintended consequences of purposeful behavior had a field day. Laws of supply and demand operated throughout the debacle, but without being very helpful to those who want to explain it as the historical phenomenon it has now become. Both Hartog and Eicholz raise the issue of capitalism and morality. Where capitalism belongs on a moral spectrum of institutions never settles down for me. I have called it amoral. Yet that judgment doesn’t comprehend the historic role of enterprise. Economic developments in 17th-century England revealed the capacity of ordinary people to be responsible and consistent in their market dealings. It promoted small-bore...

Reply to Sober and Waters

Elliott Sober and Ken Waters both raise interesting and difficult challenges for various aspects of the position I set out in Evolution and the Levels of the Selection. I am grateful to them for their penetrating criticisms of my work, and find myself in agreement with many of their points.

Responses to Stanley and Schlenker

I am grateful to Jason Stanley and Philippe Schlenker for their careful exposition and penetrating criticisms of my work on intentionality, assertion and presupposition. I have learned a lot from both of them from these papers as well as others, and from discussion over the years since each was a graduate student at MIT. Some of their points have led me to modify my views; others have shown the need for elaboration and clarification, which I will try to provide. I will begin with Stanley's discussion of my general project, and then look at more specific issues, discussed by both Stanley and Schlenker, about the model of discourse that I have defended.

The Origins of Jesus-Devotion: A Response to Crispin Fletcher-Louis.

The critique of my work on Jesus-devotion by Dr. Fletcher-Louis (in a previous issue of this journal) combines an essentially correct brief summary of some broad contours of my views and a few interesting points for further discussion; but, unfortunately, the main criticisms are often directed against over-simplified or exaggerated portrayals of my views, and also involve at least one serious red herring. In this brief response, therefore, I try to correct and clarify some key matters in the hope of promoting a more productive discussion of the remarkable devotion to Jesus that characterised earliest Christianity.

Sometimes Wave, Sometimes Particle

This article is a response to the ongoing, weighty and often caustic critique of my work by Robert Carroll. Over a lifetime of ‘ideology spotting’, Carroll has rejected any attempt to take the faith claims of the text with theological seriousness, and has targeted my work as a model for the failure of such an approach. My response is an insistence that every approach to the text, that of ‘ideology spotting’ as well as ‘theological seriousness’, moves from a faith claim and a ‘prejudice’, whether explicit or not. Thus, there is no ‘high ground’ in interpretation, as Carroll assumed about his own work in his dismissiveness of mine. Rather, interpretation that is generative is an act of playful imagination that allows, after Gadamer, for interpretation to move in and out of theological seriousness. Such a perspective seeks to shun very one-dimensional reductionism.