Descriptive Claims Research Articles

How do Beliefs Simplify Reasoning?

AbstractAccording to an increasingly popular epistemological view, people need outright beliefs in addition to credences to simplify their reasoning. Outright beliefs simplify reasoning by allowing thinkers to ignore small error probabilities. What is outright believed can change between contexts. It has been claimed that thinkers manage shifts in their outright beliefs and credences across contexts by an updating procedure resembling conditionalization, which I call pseudo‐conditionalization (PC). But conditionalization is notoriously complicated. The claim that thinkers manage their beliefs via PC is thus in tension with the view that the function of beliefs is to simplify our reasoning. I propose to resolve this puzzle by rejecting the view that thinkers employ PC. Based on this solution, I furthermore argue for a descriptive and a normative claim. The descriptive claim is that the available strategies for managing beliefs and credences across contexts that are compatible with the simplifying function of outright beliefs can generate synchronic and diachronic incoherence in a thinker's attitudes. Moreover, I argue that the view of outright belief as a simplifying heuristic is incompatible with the view that there are ideal norms of coherence or consistency governing outright beliefs that are too complicated for human thinkers to comply with.

Foreword: Embracing Administrative Common Law

This article begins with the descriptive claim that much of administrative law is really administrative common law: doctrines and requirements that are largely judicially created, as opposed to those specified by Congress, the President, or individual agencies. To be sure, governing statutes exert some constraining force on judicial creativity, but the primary basis of these judge-fashioned doctrines lies in judicial conceptions of appropriate institutional roles, along with pragmatic and normative concerns, that are frequently constitutionally infused and developed incrementally through precedent. Yet the judicially created character of administrative law is rarely acknowledged by courts - and to the extent courts do acknowledge judicial development of administrative law, they usually condemn the practice.Turning from descriptive to more normative, the article argues for explicit judicial recognition and acceptance of administrative common law. Administrative common law serves an important function in our separation of powers system, a system that makes it difficult for Congress or the President to oust the courts as developers of administrative law. In particular, the institutional features of administrative law - the role it plays in structuring relationships between different government institutions and the requirements it imposes on how agencies operate - create strong pressures on courts to play a lawmaking role. Moreover, courts have employed administrative common law as a central mechanism through which to ameliorate the constitutional tensions raised by the modern administrative state. These features combine to make administrative common law inevitable. At the same time, administrative common law represents a legitimate instance of judicial lawmaking. The very same factors that support federal common law in other instances - unique federal interests at stake, a need for uniformity, and the impropriety of relying on state law - dominate federal administrative contexts. Much administrative common law also has a statutory basis to which it is at least loosely tethered, and embodies core constitutional values. As important, openly acknowledging the role that judicial lawmaking plays is critical to clarifying and improving administrative law.

Spatial aggregation of indicators in sustainability assessments: Descriptive and normative claims

Indicators are widely used in sustainability assessments. They serve both a descriptive function (i.e., assessing a situation or effects of potential changes) and a normative function (i.e., allowing the expression of value judgments). These functions are usually considered when identifying and using indicators. However, processes such as formalization, estimation, and customization are needed to produce tangible indicators. These processes and their influence on sustainability assessments are studied less often. We focus on spatial aggregation, a specific type of customization commonly used for landscape-scale and regional assessments. Using a database with 146 indicator profiles for water management, we investigated reasons for spatial aggregation choices, i.e. whether indicators based on spatially-explicit data are aggregated while under development or are provided to users in a disaggregated form. Although the literature assigns a descriptive function to spatial aggregation, our database shows that reasons underlying aggregation choices are more diverse. These reasons include highlighting differences, fitting to the scale of a process, fitting to criteria, recognizing a lack of knowledge, expressing social rationality, contextualizing information, and allowing different interpretations of the same indicator. Some of these reasons reflect the choice to expand or reduce the range of potential uses of an indicator, and therefore the potential for different viewpoints to confront each other. Hence, normative claims combine with descriptive claims when aggregating indicators, and even more so when customizing them. In general, the form of indicators merits more attention in the practice and theory of sustainability assessments.

Unconstitutionally Illegitimate Discrimination

When government officials express intent to disparage or discriminate against a group, the constitutional consequences can be severe, but they are rarely imposed. In this Article, I argue that discriminatory motive is and should be enough to declare government acts unconstitutional. Second, I argue that the main reason why is the harm to government legitimacy. While some argue that the concern with intentional discrimination is its harm, such as its stigmatizing effect, I argue that the focus should not be on harm, but on how it delegitimizes government. I make the descriptive claim that Constitutional doctrine, in its broad outlines, reflects a legitimacy-based view. In the Equal Protection context, courts have set out how discriminatory goals are not legitimate state interests. In the Executive action context, courts state that absent a legitimate and bona fide justification, the Executive may not have power delegated from Congress to act. What courts have not done is specified what happens when the hammer falls: how intent disables government policymaking and for how long. The legitimacy-focused approach can neutralize government decisions, even when the government tries to re-do its policy and claim new reasons. Third, I argue that a legitimacy-focused approach towards constitutional intent doctrine that I advance in this Article is normatively preferable. The approach does incentivize insincere reasons for government actions. However, I argue that advantages outweigh those costs. There are real benefits to even insincere expressions of non-discrimination. Conversely, when the government makes discriminatory statements, this is very strong evidence of discriminatory motive. During a time of nationwide litigation of intentional discrimination claims in areas including immigration rights, voting rights, and religious non-establishment, it has never been more important to set out the doctrine, the costs, and the consequences of unconstitutionally illegitimate intent.

The Non-Trivial Regulation of Nutrition Labels: An Exploratory Analysis of the Chilean Experience

Disclosure as a regulatory technique faces strong criticisms. However, regulators keep relying on this technique to remedy market failures. Obesity is not an exception. Ultra-processed food dominates our diet, despite being a main cause of overweight and obesity. Overweight and obesity, in turn, are major risk factors for many chronic diseases, such as diabetes and cancer. Nutrition labels are a type of disclosure. The empirical evidence of their effectiveness is mixed. This might be because nutrition labels have to deal with consumers' lack of literacy and/or information overload. Regulatory simplification can be an alternative to enhance label's efficacy. However, current criticisms of disclosure also reach its simplified forms, predicting that simpler labels will not have an effect on consumer behavior. Chile's new food labeling law incorporates a warning-signs model to alert consumers of foods and drinks containing sugar, fat, sodium, and calories levels above a certain threshold. This paper provides an exploratory impact assessment of this law, casting doubt on the skeptics' view of the inefficacy of simplified disclosures. I mostly base this analysis on information available online (i.e., impact assessment surveys; newspaper articles; stakeholder presentations). However, I also conducted field interviews with key actors to complement, and corroborate, the information available on the internet. The Chilean experience is still recent; however, it shows that simpler disclosures can have a significant effect on consumer behavior. This is a (or descriptive) claim. Although generalizations are hard to make, consumers tend to prefer products with no (or fewer) labels. Accordingly, only one year after the new labeling law was enacted, more than 1,500 products have modified their composition. This is despite warning labels appearing to impact only well-educated consumers. This may be causing an externality on less-educated consumers in some markets, probably a positive one, in many cases. On a normative level, the impact of the new labeling regulation on the nutritional value of food is still unclear. The strategies to reach the safe harbors may not only decrease the intake of ingredients subject to control but also the nutritional value of food. Further research should provide a more specific snapshot of how particular markets reacted to the new labeling law. In addition, consumers might be drawing incorrect inferences from the warning labels. The main objective of this article is to show that consumers are not indifferent or unreactive to food warning labels. Precisely because of this, law-makers should be careful in designing regulations that consider not only how consumers will respond to the warning-labels, but also how industry participants will react to supply products with no (or fewer) labels.

Towards a neuro-computational account of prism adaptation

Prism adaptation has a long history as an experimental paradigm used to investigate the functional and neural processes that underlie sensorimotor control. In the neuropsychology literature, prism adaptation behaviour is typically explained by reference to a traditional cognitive psychology framework that distinguishes putative functions, such as 'strategic control' versus 'spatial realignment'. This theoretical framework lacks conceptual clarity, quantitative precision and explanatory power. Here, we advocate for an alternative computational framework that offers several advantages: 1) an algorithmic explanatory account of the computations and operations that drive behaviour; 2) expressed in quantitative mathematical terms; 3) embedded within a principled theoretical framework (Bayesian decision theory, state-space modelling); 4) that offers a means to generate and test quantitative behavioural predictions. This computational framework offers a route towards mechanistic neurocognitive explanations of prism adaptation behaviour. Thus it constitutes a conceptual advance compared to the traditional theoretical framework. In this paper, we illustrate how Bayesian decision theory and state-space models offer principled explanations for a range of behavioural phenomena in the field of prism adaptation (e.g. visual capture, magnitude of visual versus proprioceptive realignment, spontaneous recovery and dynamics of adaptation memory). We argue that this explanatory framework can advance understanding of the functional and neural mechanisms that implement prism adaptation behaviour, by enabling quantitative tests of hypotheses that go beyond merely descriptive mapping claims that ‘brain area X is (somehow) involved in psychological process Y’.

The Costs of Coercive Control: Assessing Behavioral and Mental Health Correlates of Erratic and Oppressive Coercion

Some theorists argue that coercion’s consequences depend upon the consistency with which it is experienced. This study measures the consistency of coercive experiences across social domains and lifespan stages then tests hypotheses linking coercion’s consistency to crime, prosocial behaviors, and depressive symptoms using data from randomly selected respondents in Ukraine and Bangladesh. Descriptive analyses test theoretical claims that erratic coercion generates crime while oppressive coercion deters crime, but at the cost of suppressing prosocial behaviors and exacerbating depressive symptoms. Findings show positive associations between projected criminal behavior and coercion’s magnitude, and between relative erratic but not absolute erratic coercion and projected criminal behavior. Oppressive coercion is linked to more depressive symptoms and, contradicting theoretical expectations, higher levels of criminal intent. Overall, this study’s findings challenge widespread reliance on coercive controls to influence social outcomes by documenting higher levels of projected criminal behavior and mental health problems among more coerced respondents.

Facts, norms, and dignity

There are three ways in which descriptive claims stating non-normative facts might bear on normative claims such as principles of social justice and human rights. They may identify (a) specific occasions that trigger application, (b) conditions of feasible implementation, and (c) certain sources of value. The first relation is obvious but important: norms cannot be applied without stating circumstances that make their application relevant. The second relation is also important, as norms that cannot be fulfilled are deficient for guiding social practices and institutional design. The first relation is widely accepted and discussed, and I will not say much about it here. I will say more about the second relation, but not much more because I have discussed it in detail in my writings on feasibility. In this paper, my main focus is on the third relation, which remains underexplored in the relevant literature. After identifying the three relations between facts and norms as they arise in recent discussions in political philosophy, I offer an account of their significance by articulating a specific view that I call ‘dignitarianism’. According to dignitarianism, at least some of the central norms concerning the treatment of an entity depend on the inherent dignity of that entity. Human rights offer a paradigmatic case of dignitarianism, and I concentrate on them to explore the relations between facts, norms, and dignity.

An ultrasound study of Connemara Irish palatalization and velarization

We present the first ultrasound analysis of the secondary palatalization contrast in Irish, analyzing data from five speakers from the Connemara dialect group. Word-initial /pʲ(bʲ)pˠ(bˠ)tʲtˠkʲkˠfʲfˠsʲsˠxʲxˠ/ are analyzed in the context of /iːuː/. We find, first, that tongue body position robustly distinguishes palatalized from velarized consonants, across place of articulation, manner, and vowel place contexts, with palatalized consonants having fronter and/or higher tongue body realizations than their velarized counterparts. This conclusion holds equally for labial consonants, contrary to some previous descriptive claims. Second, the nature and degree of palatalization and velarization depend in systematic ways on consonant place and manner. In coronal consonants, for example, velarization is weaker or absent. Third, the Irish consonants examined resist coarticulation in backness with a following vowel. In all of these respects Irish palatalization is remarkably similar to that of Russian. Our results also support an independent role for pharyngeal cavity expansion/retraction in the production of the palatalization contrast. Finally, we discuss preliminary findings on the dynamics of the secondary articulation gestures. Our use of principal component analysis (PCA) in reaching these findings is also of interest, since PCA has not been employed a great deal in analyses of tongue body movement.

Un fenómeno bien curioso: New methods for analyzing variable intensification across four dialects of Spain and Argentina

AbstractEmpirical study of variation between the Spanish intensifiersbien‘very’ andmuy‘very’ has received little attention. A recent exception is (Brown, Esther L. & Mayra Cortés-Torres. 2013. Puerto Rican intensifiers:Bien/muyvariables. In Ana Maria Carvalho & Sara Beaudrie (eds.),Selected proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, 11–19. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project), who considered the conditioning factors of the intensifiers, although the study’s interview data included low use of the variants in certain linguistic contexts. Accordingly, our contextualized preference task elicits greater token counts across contexts and extends intensifier research across dialects. In our analysis of the four dialects of Tarragona and Madrid, Spain, and Tucumán and Buenos Aires, Argentina, we test the descriptive claims thatbienis selected at higher rates in Latin America than Spain and that monolingual speakers from Madrid selectbienat lower rates than Spanish-Catalan bilinguals from Tarragona, as predicted by descriptive literature. Furthermore, we investigate whether possible differences in rates and predictors between one capital city variety and that of a smaller city are mirrored across our two capital city contexts. We surveyed 205 native speakers of Spanish via a 24-item contextualized preference task. Participants chose their preferred intensifier or indicated that both were acceptable. We manipulated three independent linguistic variables: adjective quality, verb type, and animacy, and we consider the social variables age, gender, and, in the case of Tarragona, home language. Overall, we extend research on intensifier variation through a more controlled experimental design and cross-dialectal comparison.

What a (scientific) argument is not

Education Engaging in arguments based on evidence is a practice found in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education frameworks. Are students being taught to argue evidence in the same way that professional scientists do? MacPherson interviewed 10 ecologists about arguments both current and ongoing in their field. These data were compared to ecological arguments portrayed in assessment tasks written for middle and high school science students. Ecologists discussed causal claims, whereas school science tasks instead focused on descriptive and prescriptive claims. This mismatch results in students not receiving an accurate picture of how professional ecologists argue. How can the STEM education community move forward with designing tasks that ask students to critique evidence in a truly scientific way? Sci. Ed. 10.1002/sce.21246 (2016).

Getting to Peace: Roger Fisher's Scholarship in International Law and the Social Sciences

AbstractThis article examines Roger Fisher's scholarship in international law in the decades prior to the publication of Getting to Yes. Fisher engaged with the same major questions as other international law scholars during the Cold War, but his scholarship was distinguished by the degree to which he grappled with the cutting-edge social science of the mid-century. Even as Fisher collaborated with game theorists and nuclear strategists to understand the theory of conflict, he maintained a critical view of the basic assumptions of game theoretic analysis – defending certain normative elements of the methodology even as he denied its descriptive claims. Subsequent work sought to generate robust descriptions of the role of law in international decision-making during crises. Fisher's normative and descriptive studies of the role of law in such crises led directly to Getting to Yes, creating a body of ‘meta-game theory’ that situated formal studies of conflict within a lawyer's understanding of dispute resolution. Fisher's engagement with social scientists helps illuminate current methodological debates in international law by highlighting the stakes of these theoretical questions and the tensions between scholarship and practice in international law.

Cosmopolitan jurisprudence for economic governance

PurposeThe paper aims to extend deliberation on legal and political aspects of debate over globalisation versus cosmopolitanism into the field of jurisprudence – philosophy of law. It gives particular attention to questions of the legitimacy of international law and emerging forms of economic governance for business enterprises, soft law, rule of law, accountability and human rights.Design/methodology/approachIn terms of research method, the paper proceeds from normative, as opposed to empirical studies. The paper develops arguments connected with cosmopolitan jurisprudence, a value-based frame of reference for corporate social responsibility. In legal and moral philosophy, normative statements derive from arguments concerning what states of affairs ought to be, how they are to be valued, which things and actions are good or bad. Normative claims contrast with positive (descriptive or explanatory) claims with respect to types of theories, beliefs or propositions. Value is both independent of fact and, at the same time, of an objective nature.FindingsA cosmopolitan jurisprudence frame of reference for economic governance treats human communities as interdependent and takes seriously the human rights obligations and ethical and legal responsibilities of international business enterprises presupposed by international rule of law. In contrast to globalisation jurisprudence, the cosmopolitan philosophy of international law seeks justificatory ground, not only exclusively for traditional forms of centralised governmental authority but also for decentralised, polycentric, private and hybrid public–private forms of authority.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper demonstrates the insufficiency of just describing, as political science and economics does, the emergence of new arrangements for global economic governance. As well, it is insufficient for management theory to propose instrumental strategies for managing various stakeholder interests at play in emerging forms of governance. Efforts of empirical researchers in documenting, classifying and providing empirical analysis of power shifts do not provide moral justifications or groundings of legitimacy from human rights and rule of law. The paper shows how a cosmopolitan jurisprudence standpoint is a fertile theoretical source for addressing such justificatory issues.Practical implicationsIn the context of a rapidly globalising economy, the justification of responsible business conduct across borders and cultures is more and more becoming a pressing practical concern. Increasingly, private actors are operating in authoritative positions, fulfilling governing functions once perceived to be the exclusive domain of nation-states.Social implicationsThe paper suggests that more important than focusing exclusively on descriptive, coercive and instrumental features of law, and seeking some overarching sanctions system that would necessitate pledging allegiance to a global super-sovereign, is cultivating social awareness of the importance of non-instrumental internal dispositions of actors to respect the normative obligatory nature of norms. The intrinsic value of rule of law and human rights provides a vital intellectual pathway for surmounting legitimacy gaps in global economic governance.Originality/valueThe paper breaks new ground by developing a cosmopolitan jurisprudence as an alternative to globalisation jurisprudence. This new articulation of cosmopolitan jurisprudence serves to provide analysis of philosophical justifications for emerging soft law syndicates that purport to establish obligations for business enterprises and other participants towards soft law regimes touching upon sustainability and human rights responsibilities.

A Comparison of Scientists’ Arguments and School Argumentation Tasks

ABSTRACTThis study sought to investigate the arguments that ecologists engage in as part of their work and to compare their arguments with the way in which ecological arguments have been presented in school argumentation tasks. Ten ecologists, in subfields ranging from individual/behavioral ecology to global ecology, participated in semistructured interviews. Transcripts were coded using a framework for analyzing arguments as well as open coding to identify emergent themes. Ecologists’ descriptions of their arguments were compared with a set of published school argumentation tasks. Ecologists’ descriptions differed from school tasks mainly in terms of the types of claims offered. Whereas the ecologists all mentioned causal claims (i.e., claims that attempt to offer an underlying cause for natural phenomena), school argumentation tasks asked students to construct and critique mainly descriptive claims (i.e., claims that describe natural phenomena) and prescriptive claims (i.e., claims about human decision making). Furthermore, while ecologists emphasized the importance of critique in their arguments, school argumentation tasks generally ignored this aspect. The lack of materials addressing causal claims raises questions: Why are these types of claims absent from school science, and how can we design tasks that ask students to construct and, importantly, critique such claims?

Obama's AUMF Legacy

Despite massive changes in the geographical scope of the conflict that began on 9/11, the strategy and tactics employed, and the identity of the enemy, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (“AUMF”) remains the principal legal foundation under U.S. domestic law for the President to use force against and detain members of terrorist organizations. For many years, President Obama proclaimed that he wanted to repeal the AUMF and end the AUMF-authorized conflict. By the closing year of his presidency, however, his administration had established the AUMF as the legal foundation for an indefinite conflict against Al Qaeda and associated groups and extended that foundation to cover a significant new conflict against the Islamic State. This transformation of the AUMF is one of the most remarkable legal developments in American public law in the still-young twenty-first century, and it will stand as one of President Obama’s primary legal legacies. In addition to establishing this descriptive claim, this Essay considers how the Obama administration has invoked international law in making arguments about the scope of the AUMF. As the Essay explains, although the Obama administration often maintained that international law was an important constraint on its actions, on a range of issues where international law was unsettled it interpreted it in ways that supported presidential discretion and flexibility under the AUMF.

Normative Reasoning and Moral Argumentation in Theory and Practice

Abstract“Morality is relative to culture” is a descriptive claim, but in practice its normative entailment is rarely embraced. It is often claimed that this poses a problem of consistency for relativism as a morally normative theory: either relativists do not act in accordance with their beliefs or they hold different beliefs from what they espouse. This article evaluates a debate between Paul Boghossian and Stanley Fish over relativism, analyzing their arguments on the relationship between theory and practice in ethics and the tenability of moral relativism. I defend two claims: that the truth or falsity of moral relativism has significant bearing on action and that morality is based on a conjunctivity of doxastic and practical discursive commitments. Establishing the conjunctive commitment argument, I make the case that the doxastic and the practical lie at the heart of normative reasoning in general and ethics in particular and discuss the implications of such a view for rhetorical theory and community.

Interpretation and the Hypothetico-Deductive Method: A Dilemma

Interpretation and the Hypothetico-Deductive Method: A Dilemma

Disgust as Heuristic

Suppose that disgust can provide evidence of moral wrongdoing. What account of disgust might make sense of this? A recent and promising theory is the social contagion view, proposed by Alexandra Plakias. After criticizing both its descriptive and normative claims, I draw two conclusions. First, we should question the wisdom of drawing so straight a line from biological poisons and pathogens to social counterparts. Second, we don’t need to explain the evidential value of disgust by appealing to what the response tracks. These lessons point toward an alternative: namely, that disgust is a moral heuristic. On the heuristic view, disgust is a trigger for the subconscious use of a particular rule: I show how this view fits with a plausible hypothesis about the social function of disgust, and then apply it to Leon Kass’s famous use of repugnance to criticize cloning.

Normativity, probability, and meta-vagueness

This paper engages with a specific problem concerning the relationship between descriptive and normative claims. Namely, if we understand that descriptive claims frequently contain normative assertions, and vice versa, how then do we interpret the traditionally rigid distinction that is made between the two, as ’Hume’s law’ or Moore’s ’naturalistic fallacy’ argument offered. In particular, Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s ’rule-following paradox’ is specially focused upon in order to re-consider the rigid distinction. As such, the paper argues that if descriptive and normative claims are not mutually exclusive, then we need a new framework with which to understand this relationship. In this regard, the paper borrows from concerns with vagueness, particularly using a degree-theoretic approach in terms of subjective probability, in an attempt to graphically figure out these differences. Consequently, the paper tentatively proposes the hyperbola model in which degrees of normativity and degrees of descriptivity could be expressed and measured. It is hoped, as a result, that this tentative proposal will contribute to deepening the debate on vagueness in general.

Framing deformalisation in public international law

Prominent international lawyers have flagged a process of deformalisation as one of the main perils confronting public international law. The term ‘deformalisation’ is, however, used rather ambiguously. This paper maps the discourse so as to frame the normative stakes associated with deformalisation. First, it surveys the perils associated with the process. Secondly, it distils the core descriptive claims regarding deformalisation. Thirdly, it expounds upon the pivotal movement underlying these descriptive claims: the displacement of content-independent techniques of reasoning with content-dependent ones. The paper advances an understanding of law's formal dimension grounded in actors' dispositions to treat legal norms as having a normative standing apart from their content. To the extent that content-independent normativity is displaced by deformalisation, the value of the rule of law diminishes.