Empirical Substance Research Articles

On the bases of radical underspecification

Radical Underspecification theories omit from underlying representations the specification of redundant feature values as well as one member of each contrastive pair of feature values. These theories also crucially employ structure building rules, delinking rules, and constraints on representations. This paper attempts to identify the empirical substance that these formal devices aim to express, and thereby to evaluate the claims of Radical Underspecification. The basic insights of Radical Underspecification theories are the preservation of distributional regularities in patterns of alternation, and the asymmetric status of feature values in distribution and alternation. A careful examination reveals that the formalism of Radical Underspecification is neither successful nor necessary in expressing these insights.

The Income and Fatigue Explanations for Worktime Change

For the last century the industrialized capitalist nations have been characterized by a tendency to reduce the length of time employees spend at their place of paid employment. Within the contemporary economic and industrial relations literature, there are two primary contending explanations for this phenomenon. The neoclassical tradition argues that the change in standard times is primarily a consequence of rising wages, while Marxists claim that it is principally a manifestation of rising work intensity. The essence of these two hypotheses is outlined in this paper and the contemporary empirical evidence underpinning each is surveyed. It is concluded that, at this stage, the Marxist thesis would appear to have greater theoretical and empirical substance than that offered by the defenders of the rising income hypothesis.

Laymen as Lawyers in the Processing of Dismissal Disputes

Concern for the perceived disadvantages of the industrial tribunal system in the processing of unfair dismissal claims has led to a debate about the possible merits of processing such claims by arbitration.1 There is a tendency for the current discussion to be conducted in terms of an implicit dichotomy between legal and industrial relations models for dispute resolution.2 From the industrial relations perspective, an over-legalistic tribunal model is assumed to operate with a set of concepts, values and procedures that are mercifully absent from the proposed arbitral model, whilst from the juristic perspective there is assumed to be a qualitative difference between lay and legal reasoning. Regardless of whether the case is made for or against the current system, it is assumed that the legal model emphasises abstract and formal consistency while the lay model emphasises the empirical substance. In the existing system legal reasoning is seen to have the prerogative of handling and establishing the boundaries of the case, whereas lay reasoning tends to deal with an unbounded reality. Legal boundary-maintenance is seen as a defect or a virtue according to the writer's standpoint; but one possibility, however, is excluded from both standpoints: that standards inherent in law may be part of the vocabulary of motives through which lay consciousness achieves its construction of reality. Drawing on evidence from a study of the arbitral disposition of dismissal disputes by lay people under statutory regulation, this paper argues that the assumption of a lay-legal dichotomy results from an unwarranted ideological simplification. The tendency to see the tribunal and the arbitrator as operating distinct models misunderstands and misrepresents the nature of law in society - it assumes that law and law-like values and concepts are absent from all common-sense lay thinking and that an arbitrator is operating with a set of social values that are divorced from the historical body of law (common and statute). As Henry3 has shown in his study of internal discipline, certain legal concepts and ways of thinking about justice are part of the common stock of everyday knowledge applied in disciplinary proceedings: law and private justice interpenetrate. In this paper illustrative evidence for the necessary interpenetration of the industrial relations model for public settlement of dismissal disputes with core values of legal justice will be drawn from

The Histonomic Approach to Economics: Beyond Pure Theory and Pure Experience

This article starts off with the distinction between logico-deductive and empirico-deductive approaches to economic theory. The logicodeductive approach, for instance neoclassical economics, uses an axiomatic framework that has only little empirical substance. The empirico-deductive approach, for instance, Ricardian economics, attempts to state economic theory as a “typical” structure of reality. It appears that the latter approach touches reality more closely and is more sensitive to intellectual enrichment and to substantial empirical evidence. However, both approaches operate within the basic assumption applied in classical physics, that theory must represent an invariant structure of reality—highlighting in this case economic phenomena that do not change over time. In the following, the induction issue is given new life, suggesting its validity under the non-conventional assumptions ofvariancy and time-asymmetry. A “histonomic” approach stressing the importance of making theoretical (-nomic) statements about economic phenomena that are basically historical (histo-) in their non-classical properties of variancy and time-asymmetry is favored.

Empirical Studies or Philosophy? (Reply to Barnes and Collins)

'One can either debate the possibility of the sociology of scientific knowledge or one can do it', wrote Steven Shapin in a recent paper.' This dichotomy is hardly to be taken literally. Shapin would presumably agree that one has to do both. But I think the emphasis that the Edinburgh school Shapin, Barnes, MacKenzie and other relativists, like Collins, have put on empirical studies, on doing sociology of scientific knowledge, is a good thing. However, the complexity of our experienced world makes it an insufficient antidote against wishful thinking to immerse oneself in empirical material. Sound scientific and scholarly results depend on criticism and debate with opposing views. This is a lesson which the new historiography of science, developed during the last few decades, has brought home with renewed force. My paper followed the relativists' invitation to move the focus of the debate from the philosophical to the empirical level.2 I took up two of their most popular and strongest case studies. They are 'strong' in the sense that they issue in claims that even a rationalist would feel support important objections to his views, if they were true. One case was the controversy in genetics between biometricians and Mendelians, as analyzed by Donald MacKenzie and Barry Barnes.3 The other was the controversy between Pasteur and Pouchet, as analyzed by John Farley and Gerald Geison.4 Both of these cases play a central role in Steven Shapin's bold attempt to marshal an army of case studies in favour of relativism, in the paper that I cited above. The Responses of Barnes5 and Collins6 do not go into the empirical substance of the cases. In a short Reply like this there is no room for any precise discussion of the philosophical arguments that Barnes and Collins touch on. I just want to make a few remarks to indicate issues that one should have in mind in handling the case studies. A distinction between what can be called 'internal' and 'external' factors is generally observed in scientific and scholarly debates by most participants, including Barnes and Collins. It is not a valid argument against a view that the people holding it belong to a certain interest group for instance, that they are capitalists, communists or Jews. But we know well that such factors can influence scientific behaviour in important ways. One of my points is that this distinction must also be reflected in our historical account of science. Linked to the distinction that scientists actually make, there is an important difference between the ways that these factors

GROWTH AREAS, GROWTH CENTRES AND REGIONAL CONVERSION*

SummaryFive arguments in favour of a growth area strategy have been analysed and though all of them lack empirical substance, they have certain merits on a priori grounds. Thus any policy which contributes, on the long‐run, to a more rapid concentration of a region's population into relatively large urban areas, is likely to create the conditions for servicing net and replacement demand for social/economic overhead capital at a low per capita cost. Moreover for a given subsidy cost, discriminatory investment in the dense, complex, urbanised areas of a region may maximise the flow of income to regional earners in the short‐run: attract the maximum flow of exogenous enterprise and capital; and give the best chance of creating a new export base which reduces the regional balance‐of‐payments deficit and provides sufficient job‐opportunities to restrain the flow out of the region of the economically active. In addition, the quality and content of shortterm regional planning may be improved if the mix and scheduling of public investment over time is given a rigorous spatial dimension. Thus, on all of these counts, there are convincing reasons for encouraging an especially rapid development of the relative large, dense interrelated urban areas and by contrast good reasons for a relative neglect of the small hinterland areas.

Conditions for a Social Welfare Function

_HE social welfare function, formulated first by Bergson in 1938, gave I promise of serving as a single, compact, formally elegant foundation for welfare economics by generalizing group value scales. With very little empirical content, the function could yield all the analytic conclusions of received welfare theory. With additional empirical content, the function might even help in the formulation of public policy. Recently, however, the usefulness of the social welfare function in the corpus of economic theory has been challenged. One attack is that the function is too abstract, too clumsy. It does not-and, indeed, cannot be made to-possess an empirical substance simple yet adequate enough to enable it to solve specific problems.3 Another attack is that posed by Arrow in his book Social Choice and Individual Values. His argument is that if we require a social welfare function to fulfil certain apparently reasonable conditions, then it can be proved that no such function exists.