Empirical Claims Research Articles

The now and future of social robots as depictions.

The authors at times propose that robots are mere depictions of social agents (a philosophical claim) and at other times that people conceive of social robots as depictions (an empirical psychological claim). We evaluate each claim's accuracy both now and in the future and, in doing so, we introduce two dangerous misperceptions people have, or will have, about social robots.

The Two Sides of the Environmental Kuznets Curve: A Socio-Semantic Analysis

Since the 1990s, the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis posits an inverted U-shaped relationship between pollutants and economic development. The hypothesis has attracted a lot of research. We provide here a review of more than 2000 articles that have been published on the EKC. We aim at mapping the development of this specialized research, both in term of actors and of content, and to trace the transformation it has undergone from its beginning to the present. To that end, we combine traditional bibliometric analysis and semantic analysis with a novel method, that enables us to recover the type of pollutants that are studied and the empirical claims made on EKC (whether the hypothesis is invalidated or not). We principally exhibit the existence of a few epistemic communities that are related to distinct time periods, topics and, to some extent, proportion of positive results on EKC.

A comprehensive review on the botany, traditional uses, phytochemistry, pharmacology and toxicity of Anagallis arvensis (L).: A wild edible medicinal food plant

Medicinal plants, since times immemorial, have been used in virtually all cultures for therapeutic purposes. Anagallis arvensis (L.) is a well-known medicinal plant traditionally utilized for a varied range of disorders including wound healing, lung problems, kidney stones, urinary tract infections, gout, and rheumatic conditions. This review is an attempt to summarize and comprehend the fragmented information until now published in the literature on the biochemical and toxicological perspective of A. arvensis. The literature was searched electronically from PubMed, EMBASE, Scopus, Science Direct, Ovid MEDLINE and Google Scholar. It was found that ethnomedical uses of A. arvensis plant and parts have been recorded throughout the world, where it has been used against a panoply of diseases. Phytochemical search has led to the identification of flavonoids, terpenoids, triterpenoid glycosides, phytosterols as main classes of secondary metabolites with a few other classes. A wide spectrum of in vivo and in vitro pharmacological activities have been reported from fresh plant material and its crude extracts and/or fractions. However there is currently a dearth of structure-activity studies of the isolated compounds and mechanistic studies from this species. The plant has also been reported for in vivo toxicity. It is clear from this review thatA. arvensis, though traditionally used by various cultures harbour a plethora of bioactive compounds exhibiting multifarious biological effects that could be exploited as biopharmaceuticals. Nonetheless, additional research work and structure-activity studies arekey prerequisite to transmute the empirical claims on the utilization of A. arvenisis in folklore medicines and a food plant into scientific shreds of evidence.

Empirical adaptationism revisited: is it testable and is it worth testing?

Empirical adaptationism is often said to be an empirical claim about nature, which concerns the overall relative causal importance of natural selection in evolution compared with other evolutionary factors. Philosophers and biologists who have tried to clarify the meaning of empirical adaptationism usually share, explicitly or implicitly, two assumptions: (1) Empirical adaptationism is an empirical claim that is scientifically testable; (2) testing empirical adaptationism is scientifically valuable. In this article, I challenge these two assumptions and argue that both are unwarranted given how empirical adaptationism is currently formulated. I identify a series of conceptual and methodological difficulties that makes testing empirical adaptationism in a biologically non-arbitrary way virtually impossible. Moreover, I show that those in favor of testing empirical adaptationism have yet to demonstrate the distinctive value and necessity of conducing such a test. My analysis of the case of empirical adaptationism also provides reasons for scientists to reconsider the value and necessity of engaging in scientific debates involving the notion of overall relative causal importance.

Values disclosures and trust in science: A replication study

While philosophers of science generally agree that social, political, and ethical values can play legitimate roles in science, there is active debate over whether scientists should disclosure such values in their public communications. This debate depends, in part, on empirical claims about whether values disclosures might undermine public trust in science. In a previous study, Elliott et al. used an online experiment to test this empirical claim. The current paper reports a replication attempt of their experiment. Comparing results of the original study and our replication, we do not find evidence for a transparency penalty or “shared values” effect, but do find evidence that the content of scientific conclusions (whether or not a chemical is found to cause harm) might effect perceived trustworthiness and that scientists who value public health and disclose this value might be perceived as more trustworthy.

Contested mobility interactions: Characterizing the influence of ride-sharing services on the adoption and use of public transit system

The rapidly evolving and growing adoption of app-based shared-mobility platforms and TNCs, popularly called ride-hailing services, have expounded the discourse on mode-choice dissonance while provoking numerous public interest questions on how they fit or disrupt more conventional transport options. The contested dialogue on how these uniquely adopted mobility landscapes interact and impact transportation demand management decisions have produced notable yet unclear outcomes. Whereas critics of ride-hailing services challenge TNCs to compete with transit ridership demand and revenue, delaying bus services and adding to congestion – others contrastingly downplay these empirical claims to the effect that they complement transit adoption by providing multi-modal travel alternatives. Using data from the NHTS with an aggregated 399, 1017 and 4,044 household, individual and trip-level observations, this study empirically examines the intricate relationships between ride-hailing and transit service adoption in one of the fastest-growing regions in the United States. Findings showed that temporal user adoption surge periods for these two transport modes were not simultaneous – partly undermining user demand competition amongst them. While spatial patterns of adoption locations for Transit-TNC users did not demonstrate significant mode-substitution effects, the distribution of TNC adoption locations and trip purposes within the region suggested a somewhat weak multi-modal integration. Results from two regression models further demonstrated that although ride-hailing service usage has a statistically significant positive association with the count of transit user adoption, a unit increase in ride-hailing service usage may not significantly influence the odds likelihood of public transit ridership. The implications of planning for their successful inter-modal complementarities and a sustainable future for urban travel are discussed.

Law, Coercion and Folk Intuitions.

In discussing whether legal systems are necessarily coercive, legal philosophers usually appeal to thought experiments involving angels or other morally driven beings who need no coercion to organise their social lives. Such appeals have invited criticism. Critics have not only challenged the relevance of such thought experiments to our understanding of legal systems; they have also argued that, contrary to the intuitions of most legal philosophers, the 'man on the Clapham Omnibus' would not hold that there is law in a society of angels because the view that law is necessarily coercive 'enjoys widespread support among laypersons'. This is obviously an empirical claim. Critics, however, never systematically polled the 'man on the Clapham Omnibus'. We boarded that bus. This article discusses findings from five empirical studies on the relationship between law and coercion.

Biological Explanations of Social Inequalities

AbstractInequalities of social goods between gender, racial, or other groups call out for explanation. Such inequalities might be explained by socialization and discrimination. But historically some have attributed these inequalities to biological differences between social groups. Such explanations are highly controversial: on the one hand, they have a very troubling racist and sexist history, but on the other hand, they are empirical claims, and so it seems inappropriate to rule them out a priori. I propose that the appropriate epistemic attitude toward biological explanations of social inequalities is a general but defeasible skepticism. I then turn to the appropriate moral attitude, arguing that when such explanations are inadequately supported, they are offensive.

The Extended Computational Case Method: A Framework for Research Design

This paper considers the adoption of computational techniques within research designs modeled after the extended case method. Echoing calls to augment the power of contemporary researchers through the adoption of computational text analysis methods, we offer a framework for thinking about how such techniques can be integrated into quasi-ethnographic workflows to address broad, structural sociological claims. We focus, in particular, on how this adoption of novel forms of evidence impacts corpus design and interpretation (which we tie to matters of casing), theoretical elaboration (which we associate to moving empirical claims across scales and empirical domains), and verification (which we see as a process of reflexive scaffolding of theoretical claims). We provide an example of the use of this framework through a study of the marketization of social scientific knowledge in the United Kingdom.

THE INJUSTICE OF UNDER-POLICING IN AMERICA

THE INJUSTICE OF UNDER-POLICING IN AMERICA

Adat Court in Indonesia’s Judiciary System: A Socio-Legal Inquiry

This article addresses the question of how the constitution drafters considered the existence of a plural legal system in Indonesia, especially the adat judicial system. There are several sociological arguments for constitutional pluralism, empirical and normative claims, and the necessity of formalizing adat court. Constitutional pluralism identifies the phenomenon of a plurality of constitutional sources and claims of final authority which create a context for potential constitutional conflicts that are not hierarchically regulated. Hence, this article argues that ‘constitutionalizing’ does not mean ‘formalization’, or even ‘structuring the adat court under the state formal judicial system’. This should be critically assessed not merely on recognition, but also on protection, especially to exercise fundamental values of social significance. It considers the concepts of ‘self-recognition based adat court’ and ‘regional recognition based adat court’ as important in defending universal values to respect and protect the rights of the people, including their traditional systems. By doing so, this article aims to contribute to the studies on the importance of the plural legal system in plural societies like Indonesia.

Playing God: Symbolic Arguments Against Technology

In ethical reflections on new technologies, a specific type of argument often pops up, which criticizes scientists for “playing God” with these new technological possibilities. The first part of this article is an examination of how these arguments have been interpreted in the literature. Subsequently, this article aims to reinterpret these arguments as symbolic arguments: they are grounded not so much in a set of ontological or empirical claims, but concern symbolic classificatory schemes that ground our value judgments in the first place. Invoking symbolic arguments thus refers to how certain new technologies risk undermining our fundamental symbolic distinctions by which we organize and evaluate our interactions with the world and in society. Such symbolic distinctions, moreover, tend to be resilient against logical argumentation, mainly because they themselves form the basis on which we argue in the cultural and ethical sphere in the first place. Therefore, effective strategies to evaluate and counter these arguments require another approach, showing that these technologies either do not challenge these classifications or, if they do, how they can be accompanied by the proper actions to integrate these technologies into our society.

Markets, repugnance, and externalities

AbstractThis Article considers one aspect of the ongoing debate about the moral limits of markets – namely, the purported harmful effects of market transactions on particular relations, goods, services, or society at large, due to an inappropriate valuation. In other words, the argument is that some markets are ‘repugnant’ because they degrade and corrupt a variety of nonmarket values and relations, not just to the willing parties to the exchange, but to larger segments of society. This objection contains both a (frequently unacknowledged) empirical component and a moral component. This Article critiques these empirical claims on two grounds. First, market skeptics fail to provide evidence of the negative effects they hypothesize, despite widespread variation over time and across legal regimes. Second, these objections fail to account for the well-documented human tendency to fashion repugnant exchanges in a manner that reinforces – rather than undermines – deeply held values and relationships.

PREDICTING THE ONSET, EVOLUTION, AND POSTGRADUATE IMPACT OF COLLEGE ACTIVISM

The topics of differential recruitment to activism and its longer-term impacts have generated substantial empirical research. Yet, the lack of longitudinal studies of movement participation have limited our understanding of individual activism’s dynamics over time. Here, we use six years of longitudinal survey data and two waves of interview data from a class of college students before, throughout, and after college to examine predictors of variation in college activism, the ebb and flow of activism over the course of college, and the effect of college activism on activism two years post-graduation. Our findings dispute one consistent empirical claim in social movement studies and confirm another. Counter to the scholarly finding on the weak impact of predisposition on recruitment, we find that predisposition powerfully predicts variation in college activism. Consistent with the claim that significant early activism is linked with future activism, we find that students’ activism at the end of college significantly predicts their engagement in activism after graduation.

Accessing the availability of inverse scope in German in the covered box paradigm

This paper presents the results of a novel experimental approach to relative quantifier scope in German that elicits data in an indirect manner. Applying the covered-box method (Huang et al. 2013) to scope phenomena, we show that inverse scope is available to some extent in the free constituent order language German, thereby validating earlier findings on other syntactic configurations in German (Radó & Bott 2018) and empirical claims on other free constituent order languages (Japanese, Russian, Hindi), as well as recent corpus findings in Webelhuth (2020). Moreover, the results of the indirect covered-box experiment replicate findings from an earlier direct-query experiment with comparable target items, in which participants were asked directly about the availability of surface scope and inverse scope readings. The configuration of interest consisted of canonical transitive clauses with deaccented existential subject and universal object QPs, in which the restriction of the universal QP was controlled for by the context.

The Prussian, the Hawk, and the "Revealed Essay"

It is commonly believed that Neo-Kantian moral theory is necessarily hostile to enlightened environmentalism. My argument: Kantians can acknowledge our obligations toward nature once they recognize the value that the aesthetics of the natural world have as a proving ground for moral judgment. Treating this as an empirical claim, I supplement it with Maurice Mendelbaum’s notion of “fittingness” and test it via appeal to a specific case study provided by the phenomenological expertise of the twentieth century nature writer Loren Eiseley. What emerges is a (very) broadly Kantian defense of ecologically responsible action which does not presuppose the intrinsic moral value of non-human nature.

Modeling and corpus methods in experimental philosophy

AbstractResearch in experimental philosophy has increasingly been turning to corpus methods to produce evidence for empirical claims, as they open up new possibilities for testing linguistic claims or studying concepts across time and culture. The present article reviews the quasi‐experimental studies that have been done using textual data from corpora in philosophy, with an eye for the modeling and experimental design that enable statistical inference. I find that most studies forego comparisons that could control for confounds, and that only a little less than half employ statistical testing methods to control for chance results. Furthermore, at least some researchers make modeling decisions that either do not take into account the nature of corpora and of the word‐concept relationship, or undermine the experiment's capacity to answer research questions. I suggest that corpus methods could both provide more powerful evidence and gain more mainstream acceptance by improving their modeling practices.

“Thinking With” When Peer Reviewing: Introduction to the PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation on Peer Review

“Thinking With” When Peer Reviewing: Introduction to the <i>PoLAR Online</i> Emergent Conversation on Peer Review

The Interplay of Ubuntu and Hospitality as Defining Tenets in African and South African Ethics: A Christian Ethics Reflection

The notion of Ubuntu as a moral theory in the South African and African contexts, presents attractive norms of an African world view that can be articulated and applied to contemporary Christian ethics. The proponents of Ubuntu perceive it as an African philosophy based on the maxim, ‘a person is a person through other persons’, whereby the community prevails over individual considerations. It is not merely an empirical claim that our survival or well-being is causally dependent on others but is in essence capturing a normative account of what we ought to most value in life. The shortcomings of Ubuntu should not preclude from reflecting on Ubuntu as a natural ethic potential that enforces and engenders hospitality, neighbourliness and care for all humanity. In this instance, Ubuntu should shift to liminal Ubuntu with Christ as a bond as Ubuntu seeks to restore African communal cultural behaviours. Hospitality should be practiced by doing or reflecting on things which might look insignificant such as, supporting the vulnerable, the marginalized and the migrants that come to South Africa from the neighbouring African countries that bear the brunt of xenophobic acts. This article seeks to appeal to the predominant influence of Ubuntu and Judeo-Christian ethos embedded in the South African psyche to the challenge posed by xenophobia. The article further argues for human dignity as understood by identifying and exhibiting solidarity with others.

Darwin’s empirical claim and the janiform character of fitness proxies

Darwin’s claim about natural selection is reconstructed as an empirical claim about a causal connection leading from the match of the physiology of an individual and its environment to leaving surviving progeny. Variations in this match, Darwin claims, cause differences in the survival of the progeny. Modern concepts of fitness focus the survival side of this chain. Therefore, the assumption that evolutionary theory wants to explain reproductive success in terms of a modern concept of fitness has given rise to the so-called tautology problem. It is shown that the tautology problem reappears in the treatment of fitness proxies in today’s experimental evolutionary biology when these proxies are considered to indicate fitness only. Taking Darwin’s empirical claim seriously suggests, by contrast, that fitness proxies are first of all measures of the match between organism and environment, which I call the organism’s ‘fittedness’. At the same time, they are indeed related to reproductive success. Thus looking in both directions, at fitness and at fittedness, they are janiform. Acknowledging this situation not only allows for rejection of the tautology objection, but also for integration of Darwin’s argument into current evolutionary biology. It is suggested that this helps reframe and alleviate the dispute between the Modern Synthesis and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.