Distinctive Claims Research Articles

Otto Neurath, the Vienna Circle and the Austrian Tradition

It is one of the distinctive claims of Neurath, though not of the Vienna Circle generally, that the Vienna Circle's philosophy was not really German philosophy at all. The relation is, if Neurath is to be trusted, anything but straight-forward. To understand it, not only must some effort be expended on specifying Neurath's claim, but also on delineating the different party-lines within the Vienna Circle.

Stakeholders and the Moral Responsibilities of Business

Abstract:This paper discusses the normative ethical theory of the business firm advanced principally by William E. Evan and R. Edward Freeman. According to their stakeholder theory, the firm should be managed for the benefit of its stakeholders: indeed, management has a fiduciary obligation to stakeholders to act as their agent. In this paper I seek to clarify the theory by discussing the concept of a stakeholder and by distinguishing stakeholder theory from two varieties of stockholder theory—I call them ‘pure’ and ‘tinged.’ I argue that the distinctive claims of stakeholder theory, as contrasted with tinged stockholder theories, have been inadequately supported by argument.

The conceptual clash of liberal education and public policy

AbstractGovernment policies for the support of colleges and universities give little attention to the distinctive claims of the liberal arts.

Why expressivists about value should love minimalism about truth

Does expressivism about value depend on views about the nature of truth and truth-assessability beyond those that we glean from a minimalist account of truth and truth-assessability? More precisely, if minimalism tells us all there is to know about truth and truth-assessability, does it follow that there is no room left for the expressivist's distinctive claim that evaluations are not truth-assessable? So two minimalists, Crispin Wright [24] and Paul Horwich [10], have recently argued. But it seems to me that they are very much mistaken. Expressivists who make this distinctive claim should love minimalism about truth, because minimalism shows us just how few assumptions about the nature truth and truth-assessability are required to get going the problem with evaluations to which this distinctive claim is, according to the expressivists, the solution. Don't misunderstand me. I am not a fan of the expressivist's solution. But I do think that expressivism is one of several solutions we might give to a problem with evaluations that expressivists, among others, rightly bring to our attention. I have elsewhere called this the 'moral problem' ([21], [23]). Unfortunately for minimalists, however, though that problem does indeed require certain assumptions about the nature of truth and truth-assessability, the assumptions required are just those that the minimalist makes as well.

The Anti-Individualistic Ideology of Hellenistic Culture1

AbstractHistorical generalizations are invariably shaped by modern cultural values. One of the dominant values of modern Western culture is individualism, the origins of which tend to be claimed by historians for their own domains of research, with examples extending from sixth-century B.C. Greece through modern Europe. The generalization about a Hellenistic period of history, first made in the nineteenth-century, clearly reflects this value of individualism which became, consequently, part of the scholarly convention about the culture of this period. With reference to the thought, religious practice, and material culture of the period, this article argues to the contrary that neither Hellenistic idea nor ideal can be held to value in any way an individualistic view of the self. Alexander the Great and the Athenian general Alcibiades were typical examples of individualism taken to task by philosophers. Hellenistic ethics seem, rather, to have been dominated by a social principle of "Socratic care". Similarly, Hellenistic religions, including the early Christian associations, defined their raison d'être on the basis of distinctive social claims. One Christian tradition even explicitly employed the Hellenistic ethical principle of "Socratic care" as its distinctive criterion. Finally, the well-known Hellenistic terracotta figurines, often adduced as examples of Hellenistic individualism, were, in fact, mass-produced and were employed in ritual, i.e., collective, contexts. Whereas the socio-political transformations that characterize Hellenistic culture did challenge traditional collective bases for identity, the intellectual, religious and artistic expressions of this culture all confirm an anti-individualistic character for the alternative social strategies of identity produced during this period.

Stakeholders and the Moral Responsibilities of Business

This paper discusses the normative ethical theory of the business firm advanced principally by William E. Evan and R. Edward Freeman. According to their stakeholder theory, the firm should be managed for the benefit of its stakeholders: indeed, management has a fiduciary obligation to stakeholders to act as their agent. In this paper I seek to clarify the theory by discussing the concept of a stakeholder and by distinguishing stakeholder theory from two varieties of stockholder theory—I call them ‘pure’ and ‘tinged.’ I argue that the distinctive claims of stakeholder theory, as contrasted with tinged stockholder theories, have been inadequately supported by argument.

Institutional Dynamics of Scientific Change: Ben-David's Legacy

Professor Joseph Ben-David devoted much of his life's work to the definition and investigation of central topics in the sociology of science. This volume presents a generous sample of his research, twenty-six papers in all, and contains his most important writings on professional roles, scientific norms and the institutional structure of science. Two previously unpublished articles were prepared for inclusion, as well as a biographical introduction by the editor. Although Ben-David was not formally trained in Mertonian sociology of science, he advanced and later defended many of its most distinctive claims. His work is organized by core theoretical issues of Weberian-Mertonian sociology, including the treatment of institutional values as determinants of scientific behaviour, the universal character of the scientific ethos and the general autonomy of science. Ben-David displayed an intense concern for the institutional goal of

The Irony of Theology

Every so often a book appears on the intellectual scene that reopens basic questions about the character of a scholarly discipline. Thomas Kuhn's work in the philosophy of science was such a text, so too the work of Alasdair MacIntyre for moral philosophy, Michael Foucault in the human sciences, and more recently Charles Taylor on Western conceptions of the self. All of these ventures pose the question of the nature of a mode of inquiry by tracing its historical development. Yet what is most fundamentally under examination in each case is rationality itself. Donald Wiebe's recent book, The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought, undertakes an analogous project. Wiebe reopens the question of the nature and status of theology and religious thought with respect to debates about rationality. In this review I want to highlight the main features of Wiebe's argument and engage him around his central claims about rationality. My contention, in brief, is that Wiebe's account of rationality is problematic because he does not adequately differentiate the distinctive claims of practical reason from the other modes of thought he isolates. This makes it difficult on his theory to understand the task of theology, or, for that matter, any humanistic and hermeneutical inquiry. Yet I also contend that Wiebe has properly isolated

Politics, Intellectuals and the University

Abstract The current crisis facing intellectuals and the university certainly is multifaceted and not reducible either to pat structuralist explanations or those which would simply treat the crisis as a reflection of the spiritual morass of our age (post-modernist ennui, the eclipse of metanarratives, the collapse of meaning, etc.). This crisis must be seen as rooted in the fall of those lines of demarcation which separate intellectuals from other groups on the basis of their practical activity, and the university from the state and all other institutions of civil society. In other words, what might very well be at stake is nothing less than the privileged particularity of intellectuals (their special status as bearers of universal knowledge, their distinctive claims as seekers of truth and excellence) and the privileged particularity of the university.

The Landscape of Enchantment: Redaction in a Theory of Ethnicity

My object in this article is to examine an mobility notion that became prominent in sociological and historical literature clustering around Beyond Melting Pot in 1963. In that book Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who were to become deans of sociology of American ethnic groups, first tentatively pursued a theoretical argument that ethnic (in New York City, at least) had by 1960s become interest groups that assert distinctive claims against American institutions. Interests, mobility, and, importantly, are terms in which sociologists, historians, and anthropologists have posed related notions of ethnicity. All, however, are part of an analytical problem, not its solution, because such scholarly conceptions of ethnicity bear complex, but un-noted, relationships to indigenous ethnic discourses. Our work on ethnicity in 1980s is still shaped by our arguments for and against such models, and analysts who lose sight of a cultural perspective that an anthropology of ethnicity affords stay on a treadmill of debate using terms not our own. My strategy is to treat terms of these theoretical debates not as arguments to be joined but as data for a cultural analysis. It is such ethnic discourses that I wish to be able to represent in their cultural realities as they are constructed from different perspectives. My theory focuses on communication, a social, intersubjective and intertextual, culturally constituted process. To recover an anthropology of ethnicity in United States, we need to encompass all its forms and their relations; analytical move required is to locate scholarly discourses on ethnicity in their relations with indigenous discourses. These discourses can then be seen as above all moral and not morally neutral but authoritative calculations with which scholarly rhetorics seek to encompass them. Scholarly tales are drawn, I will argue, from the natives' tales and in part derive their power from resonances with them. Like indigenous tales, social theories set critical terms of social life. But their authority rests primarily on their alterations of natives' stories and their removal of stories to new institutional quarters. My argument will be that Beyond Melting Pot appropriated and transformed by redaction American success story myth. But what Glazer and Moynihan did not note is that success story is a tale of profound moral ambiguity, that is, it resembles more than a logical scheme of social transformation, a tricks

Mental representations of spatial relations

Three classes of theories of the mental representation of spatial relations were tested. Nonhierarchical theories propose that spatial relations among objects in an environment are mentally represented in networks or in imagelike, analog formats. The distinctive claim of these theories is that there is no hierarchical structure to the mental representation. Hierarchical theories, on the other hand, propose that different “regions” of an environment are stored in different branches of a graph-theoretic tree. These theories can be divided into two classes of subtheories depending on the kinds of relations encoded in memory: Strongly hierarchical theories maximize storage efficiency by encoding only those spatial relations needed to represent a layout accurately; partially hierarchical theories predict redundancy in the representation, such that many spatial relations that can be computed also will be stored explicitly. These three classes of theories were tested by having subjects learn the locations of actual objects in spatial layouts or the locations of objects on maps of those layouts. Layouts and maps were divided into regions with transparent boundaries (for the layouts, string on the floor; for the maps, lines). After learning the layouts or maps, subjects participated in three tasks: item recognition, in which the variable of interest was spatial priming; direction judgments; and euclidean distance estimation. Results from all three tasks were sensitive (a) to whether objects were in the same region or in different regions and (b) to the euclidean distances between pairs of objects. These findings were interpreted as supporting partially hierarchical theories of spatial representations. Computer simulations supported this conclusion.

Club Government‐the Crisis of the Labour Party in the National Perspective

WHATEVER MAY BE IN DOUBT ABOUT THE CURRENT CRISIS IN the Labour Party, one thing is clear. In a sense true of no other internal crisis in the 62 years since the loose and inchoate ‘Labour Alliance’ of 1900 first became a true political party, with individual members and a distinctive claim to power, the arguments which have provoked it concern the rules of the game as well as moves within the game: the way in which party decisions are made and enforced, as well as the content of the decisions themselves. This, of course, is why the arguments are so fierce and the crisis so deep. Policy defeats can be revised later if Fortune's wheel turns again. Constitutional defeats damage the losers permanently. It is true, no doubt, that both sides in the current struggle have exaggerated the likely consequences of the changes forced through at the October party conference. The old French saying that there is more in common between two deputies, one of whom is a Communist, than between two Communists, one of whom is a deputy has not suddenly lost all relevance to Westminster merely because Labour MPs will have to face compulsory reselection between general elections, or because the party leader is elected in an electoral college. Reselection will not re-make the Parliamentary Labour Party in the image of constituency management committees, and the creation of an electoral college will not free the leader from the need to win and hold the confidence of his parliamentary colleagues. When all the necessary qualifications have been made, however, there can be no doubt that the constitutional changes will shift the balance of party power to the advantage of the Left and to the detriment of the Right — as, of course, they were intended to do. That is what the struggle has been about; and the media have been right to concentrate their attention on that aspect of it.

Oblique causation and reasons for action

By a causal theory of action I mean one which makes two distinctive claims: (1) that behavior is not intentional unless it is caused in a certain way-unless it has certain specific kinds of causes; (2) that all acceptable explanations of intentional behavior are causal-in parti cular, that when we explain an agent's act by giving the reasons for his acting as he did, we specify causes of his behavior, so that reasons are causes of a certain kind. A causal theory sees these two claims as necessarily connected: an intentional act just is an act that has a certain kind of explanation, namely, one that was done for a reason, and an act is done for a reason only if it is caused in a certain way. The most influential advocate of a causal theory of action in recent years is Donald Davidson, who in spite of candid self-criticism contin ues to defend the main lines of an account he first laid out in 'Actions, Reasons, and Causes'. In that paper Davidson defended two theses:

Aesthetic Subjectivity and Generalized Empirical Method

AESTHETIC SUBJECTIVITY AND GENERALIZED EMPIRICAL METHOD T HE GENERALIZED EMPIRICAL method proposed by Bernard Lonergan 1 e:ffects a mediation through self-appropriation of the subject's intelligent, reasonable, and responsible intentionality. More precisely, the work of Lonergan is a quite thorough maieutic of intelligent and reasonable consciousness, of what Lonergan would call the second and third levels of conscious intentionality,2 and a significant pointer to the other levels. The developing articulation of the dynamics of the fourth level, the level of responsible or existential consciousness, is currently the principal concern of many of Lonergan's students.8 What constitutes self-ap1 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957); as applied to theology, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). 2 On the levels of consciousness, see Method in Theology, Chapter Oue. Lonergan there discusses four levels. Consciousness is so structured as to move by questioning from experience of the data of sense and of the data of consciousness (the empirical level) to insight into the experienced data and conceptualization and formulation of one's insights (the intelligent level), and then to reflection on the adequacy of one's understanding and to judgment in accord with the adequacy reflectively grasped (the reasonable level) , and finally to deliberation, decision, and action, i.e. to constitution of the world and of oneself (the responsible or existential level) . In the lecture, " The Subject" (A Seoond Collection, edited by William F. J. Ryan, S. J., and Bernard J. Tyrrell, S. J., Philadelphia: Westminster , 1974, pp. 69-86, cf. esp. p. 80), Lonergan adds a lower level of dr.eaming consciousness, and in Philosophy of God, and Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1973, p. 38), he adds a highest level of religious love. 3 Scholars Press is undertaking the publication of papers delivered at the annual Lonergan Workshops held at Boston College. The volumes, edited by Frederick Lawrence, will be entitled Lonergan Workshop·. Oue volume was published in 1978. Almost all of the papers in some way reflect concern with the mediation of existential subjectivity. Furthermore, an annual seminar at the American Academy of Religion meeting is devoted to the study of what Lonergan means by dialectic, a functional specialty in Lonergan's method that is correlated with the fourth level of consciousness. 257 258 ROBERT M. DORAN, S.J. propriation of the level of consciousness concerned with evaluation , deliberation, decision, and action? The present paper proposes to advance discussion of this issue. The core of my argument is to the effect that the selfappropriation of existential subjectivity depends on a maieutic of consciousness distinct from but complementary to that proposed by Lonergan, a second mediation of the subject as subject , a psychic mediation of one's dramatic artistry, of the aesthetic subjectivity whose concern is to make a work of art out of one's living:4 The aesthetic and dramatic dimension of our being attends the operations which occur at all levels of conscious intentionality . There is a drama not only to one's self-constitution as existential subject and to one's constitution of the world through decisive action but also to one's pursuit of intelligibility and truth.5 The drama is more than adverted to in Lonergan's •It is obvious, then, that I am employing the term, aesthetic subjectivity, in a manner quite different from the usage of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method, New York: Seabury, 1975). For Gadamer, the term is pejorative, and designates an immediacy of taste that would empty the work of art of its distinctive claim to truth. In my usage, the term also designates an immediacy of feeling, but to a world already mediated and constituted by meaning. As such, it is not simply the immediacy of empirical consciousness to data of sense, but permeaks all of the levels of conscious intentionality disclosed by Lonergan. Thus, insights, judgments, and decisions are all dramatic events; permeating their quality as intentional operations is a dispositional character, a quality of feeling, of " mass and momentum," of energic compositions and distributions, without which "our knowing and deciding would be paper thin" (Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology , pp. 30-31). When...

Two Newly Created Capitals: Islamabad and Brasilia

The new national capitals of Islamabad in Pakistan and Brasilia in Brazil are the result of a similar decision by these two nations to shift governmental functions away from older and more settled regions to lesser developed regions in their interior (see figures I and 2). Since both of these countries are federal states, their commitment to the establishment of a 'created capital'1 in a region with no distinctive claim to individuality is by no means a unique political act.2 States of this type usually contain several regional cores. As a consequence, regional interests are commonly so divergent that no single core has a clear-cut claim to political superiority. Therefore, as Spate points out, 'The device of forming a neutral district, abstracted from the control of any of the states of the federation, and the building therein of a new city devoted specifically to federal administration is an obvious answer to the problem/3 'Created capitals' of the past have been relatively small in size,4 and uni-functional in nature; they invariably have been perceived by government 'decision makers' as small administrative cities rather than as large metropolitan centres capable of becoming primate cities or major regional cores. Devoted almost exclusively to the business of government and located in a part of the state not strongly identified with vested interests or commercial pressure, the 'created capital' has conveyed a feeling of locational and functional neutrality. In this way it has served to allay the fears of those members of the state who tend to equate excessive federal control with large, well-established metropolitan centres of political power. Both Brazil and Pakistan hope to achieve a higher level of national cohesion by rejecting their former capitals of Rio de Janeiro and Karachi for a new capital site. But while Brasilia, in many respects, can be compared with previous 'created capitals', with the emphasis of its planners on administrative functions and restricted urban growth, Islamabad is being developed as a multi-functional capital city which may, in time, become one of the largest cities in Pakistan. A comparative analysis of Brasilia and Islamabad brings into sharp focus the fact that the federal governments of Brazil and Pakistan have envisioned the character of their 'created capital' in quite different perspectives. Although both countries have sought an interior location for their new national capital, the form and function of each is very unlike the other. This study is the result of an attempt to comprehend some of the significant political-spatial factors which have been important in the development of two such widely divergent contemporary approaches to the concept of the 'created capital'.