Foundational Assumptions Research Articles

Regulating Resort to Force: Form and Substance of the UN Charter Regime

Much of the international legal debate about regulating force and self-defence takes place on a substantive axis, focusing on the scope of force prohibitions and exceptions. This article instead focuses on their doctrinal form, or modes of argumentation and analysis through which facts are assessed in relation to legal directives, to illuminate how many of the assumptions about substantive policy goals and risks tend to be coupled with other assumptions about the way international law operates in this field. It shows that the flexible, adaptable standards favoured by some states, scholars, and other international actors and the fixed rules and processes favoured by others reflect not only competing assessments of threats and the policy utility of force wielded beyond the Security Council's authorization, but also different sets of interlocking, foundational assumptions about international law and the conditions for its effectiveness. These include differences over how legal-doctrinal form relates to external enforcement pressures and how it generates compliance pull within states. This article shows that exposing and prising apart some assumptions underlying doctrinal orientations - assumptions that are usually obscured or overshadowed when debates are framed in terms of substantive permissiveness versus stringency - opens and clarifies options for reforming the legal regime regulating force, and it proposes avenues of further analysis of doctrinal form in this area.

Keeping (Direct) Reference in Mind

AbstractThis paper explores the psychological analogues of a cluster of arguments that have played an important role in motivating a now widespread, reference‐based approach in philosophy of language. What I will call thepsychological analogues of Kripke‐style argumentsprovide a substantial motivation for a reference‐based approach to concepts. Insofar as such an approach is rarely given serious consideration, the availability of these arguments suggests the need for a rethinking of some foundational assumptions in philosophy of mind and other branches of the cognitive sciences.

Deconstructing gender and sexuality discourses in “Brothers for Life”: A critical look at chronotopes of consumption in HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns

Despite batteries of interventions to change the dynamics of HIV in South African communities, increasing HIV prevalence suggests that much more needs to be done to stem the tides of infection. Issues of language and communication around HIV/AIDS in particular merit more attention. One aspect of the efficacy of HIV/AIDS discourses is the question of what extent they may serve to (inadvertently) reproduce sexual practices and mores inimical to HIV/AIDS prevention. This paper conducts a chronotopic and multimodal analysis of a popular South African campaign ‘Brothers for Life’ from this perspective. The campaign is an attempt to promote ‘new’ role models for South African men in order to get to grips with one of the most serious factors behind the spread of HIV/AIDS, namely male violence against women and children. The analysis suggests that past ideals of masculinity continue to find resonance in masculinities of the present, although framed, mediated and reindexicalized in late modern discourses of consumerism. Thus foundational assumptions on figurations of masculinity and male sexuality appear to remain largely consistent across generations.

Early Modern Central Asia in World History

AbstractScholars have long recognized that Central Asia played a key role in trans‐Eurasian trade, positioned as it was at the crossroads of the overland “Silk Road” network of caravan routes. The economic advantages associated with the region’s geography are presumed to have supported the great nomadic empires of the Eurasian interior in the classical and medieval eras, and to have come to an abrupt end in the early modern era. This generally has been attributed to the rise of European commercial interests in the Indian Ocean, which signaled the end of the overland Silk Road trade and sent Central Asia into a centuries‐long period of decline. This essay draws attention to a number of foundational assumptions that have informed this interpretation, and it advocates for moving beyond the decline paradigm to employ an integrative method of analysis that more effectively situates the region in its global context and invigorates the study of early modern Central Asian history.

Perceiving and Remembering Routine Action: Fundamental Micro‐Level Origins

In the contemporary research literatures on organization and on business strategy, routine is understood to be a distinct modality of organizational action – not merely the joint result of individuals making choices that maximize self-interest. As Herbert Simon (1996) pointed out, if this were not so, the observed stability of routines would merely be a reflection of the stable requirements of the environment within which individuals would be optimizing their behaviour. When the environment changed, behaviour would quickly follow and we should not expect routine’s notorious ‘resistance to change’. However, this special issue affirms that routine is a distinctive mode of organizational action, and the title phrase ‘micro-level origins’ directs us to closer observation of the underlying individual processes that generate routine action. Correspondingly, the assumptions about those micro-level processes that we put into our theories of routine will shape theoretical derivation of the expected properties of routine action, and of the organizations whose distinctive capabilities (Dosi et al., 2000; Teece et al., 1997) rest on routine. Observation, theory, and theory-based intervention will all be affected by more accurate foundational assumptions. My central assertion is that the distinctiveness of the routine mode of action stems from its being grounded in an ensemble of individual psychological processes that may be grouped together with the broad term habit (Neal and Wood, 2008; Neal et al., 2006; Rangel, 2009; Redish et al., 2008; Yin and Knowlton, 2006). It is the relationship of organizational routine action to the individual habit system that I would urge researchers to investigate. The full development of the relationship and its implications will not be simple. Habit is subtly connected to systems of emotion. It is different from, but can arise from, more deliberate and conscious action (Graybiel, 2008). And while habits can verge on

Outdoor learning in Aotearoa New Zealand: voices past, present, and future

Many of the principles and practices that have influenced outdoor education in Aotearoa New Zealand find their genesis in the United Kingdom and North America. In recent times, many of these foundational assumptions have been called into question. This paper highlights how emerging ‘local’ voices are questioning and reframing how outdoor education is conceptualised and practiced. In large part this is due to a sense of distinctiveness borne from the bicultural foundations that underpin governance and policy-making. This paper explores how outdoor educators are developing pedagogies that acknowledge the particularities of our context, particularly the bicultural foundation of Aotearoa New Zealand. The paper highlights how social and cultural influences shape educational policy and how outdoor educators are responding, both theoretically and practically, to meet the needs of learners in an increasingly diverse society.

Opening new institutional spaces for grappling with uncertainty: A constructivist perspective

In the context of an increasing reliance on predictive computer simulation models to calculate potential project impacts, it has become common practice in impact assessment (IA) to call on proponents to disclose uncertainties in assumptions and conclusions assembled in support of a development project. Understandably, it is assumed that such disclosures lead to greater scrutiny and better policy decisions. This paper questions this assumption. Drawing on constructivist theories of knowledge and an analysis of the role of narratives in managing uncertainty, I argue that the disclosure of uncertainty can obscure as much as it reveals about the impacts of a development project. It is proposed that the opening up of institutional spaces that can facilitate the negotiation and deliberation of foundational assumptions and parameters that feed into predictive models could engender greater legitimacy and credibility for IA outcomes.

Attention Deficit Democracy: The Paradox of Civic Engagement. By Ben Berger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. 216p. $35.00.

“Civic engagement” is the cornerstone of democracy, right? Everyone knows we need more civic engagement—everyone, that is, except Ben Berger, whose willingness to argue against convention, particularly when that convention is a key tenet of good governmentism, makes me reflexively sympathetic to his argument. Berger and I both attack foundational assumptions of conventional democratic thought, but we differ in our approaches. I base my arguments on economic theory and quantitative analysis, whereas he bases his arguments primarily on interpretations of canonical theorists, most importantly Hannah Arendt and Alexis de Tocqueville. Ultimately, I am convinced by Berger's argument that civic engagement is a messy concept that cannot be considered an “intrinsic good” for democracy, but like most formal theorists, I needed little convincing because the debate that he characterizes is remarkably similar to one that game theorists held some years ago, and resolved in the same direction. Ironically, then, he may face a more hostile audience from within his own subfield than outside of it.

500 Hats: Exploring the Challenges of Boundary and Community—Reflections on Professionalization

I argue that it is possible to reframe the current debates over professionalization in a way that can account for disagreement without insisting that its advocates and opponents are adversaries. Giles Scofield, and critics like him, may be understood as engaging in the sort of theoretical disagreement that is an inescapable and vital part of our practice. The field could profit from the work of legal theorist Ronald Dworkin who has long argued that people of good will and great competence need not share foundational assumptions. They may, instead, be advancing rival interpretations of what the practice of healthcare ethics (PHE) requires.

Undermining inclusion? A critical reading of response to intervention (RTI)

In this paper, I critically examine the discourse surrounding response to intervention (RTI), a US-based education reform that has garnered a considerable amount of attention (as well as controversy) in a very short amount of time. A multi-pronged reform effort, RTI is a tiered approach to delivering instructional intervention to students at risk, an on-going and systematic model of monitoring student performance, as well as an alternative to the ability/achievement discrepancy model for identifying learning disabilities. In this paper, I argue, however, that RTI is not so much a reform but a tactic, aimed at returning to the status quo of segregated special education and reinvigorating many of the foundational assumptions of traditional special education practice.

Academic institutions and field based practitioners: Using the Delphi method to analyze foundational philosophical assumptions in the field of survival.

The purpose of this study was to identify and analyze the prevailing philosophies of survival professionals working in the field. Survival education is a growing subject in the field of outdoor education, and with very little scholarly literature published on the subject it is imperative that we as researchers set a sound foundation of research to establish philosophical and practical ideals of the subject (Ewert, 1981). For the literature review some 200 survival based publications were categorized according to scholarly depth and intended audiences. While there were many sources available on survival or survival related topics, only two underwent a formal peer reviewed process and are of scholarly quality (Ewert, 1981; Ball, 2001).

Book Review: Book Review of Fiscal Sociology and the Theory of Public Finance: An Exploratory Essay

Public finance theory has historically treated government as an omniscient actor working outside of the market. The state is assumed to be able to identify problems and take the necessary action to fix them. In this book, Wagner redefines the foundational assumptions of public finance. Instead of an omniscient actor, state, like markets, is an emergent order where people interact. While this book leaves certain applications underdeveloped, it addresses important implications of a social-theoretic approach to public finance. This book provides a strong critique to welfare economics, and lays the groundwork for future scholars to redefine how we think about public finance.

Modeling of the Impact of Nonlinear Propagation Effects in Uncompensated Optical Coherent Transmission Links

We address perturbative models for the impact of nonlinear propagation in uncompensated links. We concentrate on a recently-proposed model which splits up the signal into spectral components and then resorts to a four-wave-mixing-like approach to assess the generation of nonlinear interference due to the beating of the signal spectral components. We put its founding assumptions on firmer ground and we provide a detailed derivation for its main analytical results. We then carry out an extensive simulative validation by addressing an ample and significant set of formats encompassing PM-BPSK, PM-QPSK, PM-8QAM, and PM-16QAM, all operating at 32 GBaud. We compare the model prediction of maximum system reach and optimum launch power versus simulation results, for all four formats, three different kinds of fibers (PSCF, SMF, and NZDSF) and for several values of WDM channel spacing, ranging from 50 GHz down to the symbol-rate. We found that, throughout all tests, the model delivers accurate predictions, potentially making it an effective general-purpose system design tool for coherent uncompensated transmission systems.

The 2010 Ruth Zemke Lecture in Occupational Science Occupational Therapy/Occupational Science/Occupational Justice: Moral Commitments and Global Assemblages

Twenty years have passed since occupational science was founded. It is time to reassess the relationship of occupational science to its roots in occupational therapy and also to reopen a discussion of some foundational assumptions. In particular, we need to situate the profession, occupational therapy, and the discipline, occupational science, in relation to the phenomenon of globalization. The internationalization of the post-World War II era, followed by the neoliberalism of the 1980s, began an erosion of state sovereignty that has empowered new formations in the global marketplace. New spaces exist for political action by non-state players, especially those concerned with human rights. Globalization did not set the stage for the founding of occupational science, but we can no longer look at the discipline outside the context of globalization. Globalization set the context for the transnational advocacy networks now operating that link occupational therapy with occupational science in service of a shared moral philosophy of social hope.

Breaching the wall of traumatic silence: Holocaust survivor and descendant person–object relations and the material transmission of the genocidal past

Deviating from foundational assumptions regarding the semiotic and performative role of material objects, mementos of traumatic pasts are conceptualized as resisting mnemonic re-presentation and inter-objectivity. In keeping with trauma discourse, souvenirs of deathworlds are depicted as incapable of encapsulating sublime suffering or breaching the wall of silence between survivors and descendants, failing to constitute a material legacy. Rather than act as conduits for ‘continuing bonds’ with the past and the dead, survivors are expected to disentangle the self from souvenirs of difficult pasts facilitating separation and recovery. Ethnographic interviews with descendants depict the way discursive framing elides the semiotic potential of domestic material traces of the Holocaust and parent–child–object relations engendering intimate inter-corporeality and embodied memory. Object relations are central in the passage between life- and deathworlds, allowing survivor families to sustain the lived memory of the past in everyday life. Findings problematize the discourse of genocidal suffering that overshadows micro-moments of lived experience.

Emergence, Supervenience, and Introductory Chemical Education

In learning chemistry at the entry level, many learners labor under misconceptions about the subject matter that are so fundamental that they are typically never addressed. A fundamental misconception in chemistry appears to arise from an adding of existing phenomenal concepts to newly-acquired chemical concepts, so that beginning learners think of chemical entities as themselves having the very same ‘macro’ properties that we observe through the senses. Those who teach or practice chemistry never acquire these misconceptions because they were able to naturally pick up the nature of the subject to begin with. But as a result, they remain unaware of the foundational assumptions and understanding that they operate with and that many beginning learners persistently lack. Thus, a systematic picture of the workings of chemical theory as they relate to observable phenomena needs to be elucidated so that the attention of chemical educators is drawn to the fundamental understanding of the subject that they already possess and that beginning learners of chemistry lack, so that beginning learners can be given the opportunity to gain an understanding of how chemical explanations are in general related to observable phenomena. The ‘layered’ way in which chemical and physical entities are related to each other within chemical theory can also be clarified in this way. To afford this picture, the philosophical concepts of supervenience and emergence are explained and applied to chemistry, as philosophers of chemistry have already done. The result provides a model for teaching chemistry that, if consistently applied, has the potential to greatly enhance fundamental understanding of the subject matter.

Language as tools for interaction: Grammar and the dynamics of ellipsis resolution

In this paper we explore the consequences of defining natural-language syntax as procedures for context-dependent interpretation as argued within Dynamic Syntax. Dynamic Syntax is a formalism where both representations of content and context are defined dynamically and structurally, with time-linear growth across sequences of partial trees as the core notion, presumed to be manipulated by both speaker and hearer alike. The challenge of modelling the notorious heterogeneity of ellipsis effects in conversational dialogue is taken as a case study for establishing the appropriate concept of context. In the light of the success of these assumptions in capturing the diversity of ellipsis within an overall explanation, we argue that foundational assumptions like the competence/performance distinction as regards the nature of linguistic knowledge need to be reconsidered. We argue that the grammar needs to be defined in action-based terms with incrementality and context-dependence as crucial explanatory notions of syntactic/semantic phenomena. As a consequence of taking this perspective, we argue that success in communication may rest in the ongoing interaction between participants, as underpinned by low-level mechanisms of language use like the grammar, rather than in recognising some intended propositional content.

Reclaiming Marginalized Stakeholders

Within stakeholder literature, much attention has been given to which stakeholders “really count.” This article strives to explain why organizational theorists should abandon the pursuit of “Who and What Really Counts” to challenge the assumption of a managerial perspective that defines stakeholder legitimacy. Reflecting on the paucity of employee rights and protections in marginalized work environments, I argue that as organizational researchers, we must recognize and take responsibility for the impact of our research models and visions. By confronting and rethinking the foundational assumptions of stakeholder theory, business and society scholars can identify and pursue research questions that more effectively address contemporary social challenges.

Rewriting the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America: beyond disciplinary and national boundaries

Similar to the black subjectivity dilemmas discussed by W.E.B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison in the US context, Afro-Latin Americans are caught between the paradoxical tensions of hyper-visibility and invisibility. In the imagined community narratives of Latin America, the presence of Afro-Latin Americans and their societal contributions are rendered invisible in the name of national unity. This article begins by exploring how the colonial imagined communities in the region erased Afro-Latinos. As Latin America achieved independence in the nineteenth century, color-blind nationalism functioned to differentiate Latin American identity from explicitly racialized North American identity. In contrast, Latin American Blacks have been hyper-visible subjects for North American social scientists for more than a century. Utilizing extensive archives of colonial documents, the Afro-Latin American subject emerged as a key research site to examine socio-cultural change. Over time, different disciplines took turns leading the debate, illuminating the significant Afro-Latino impact on national formations and cultural practices. These contradictory genealogies frame the diverse discussions gathered in this special issue on Afro-Latin America. The collection illuminates many of the themes, countries of focus, and theoretical approaches emerging in contemporary Afro-Latino studies. As a result, social scientists, including those represented here, are actively rewriting some of the foundational assumptions about the Afro-Latino subject.

Legitimizing assertions and the logico-rhetorical module: Evidence and epistemic vigilance in media discourse on immigration

Critical Discourse Analysis has recently begun to consider the implications of research in Evolutionary Psychology for political communication. At least three positions have been taken: i) that this research requires Critical Discourse Analysis to re-examine and defend some of its foundational assumptions (Chilton, 2005); ii) that this research provides a useful explanatory framework for Critical Discourse Analysis in which questions can be addressed as to why speakers might pursue particular discursive strategies and why they might be so persuasive (Hart, 2010); and iii) that findings bare little or no relevance for Critical Discourse Analysis (Wodak, 2006). In this article, I take up the first two of these positions and in doing so, of course, implicitly disagree with the third. I consider the positions in i) and ii), then, specifically in relation to Sperber’s (2000, 2001) notion of a ‘logico-rhetorical’ module. Taking the argument that Chilton makes concerning this module one stage further, I suggest that the logico-rhetorical module evolved as much for persuasion as it did for vigilance. I further suggest that the semantic category of evidentiality operationalized in media discourse serves to satisfy the conditions of acceptance laid down by the logico-rhetorical module. I show how this semantic category therefore performs a legitimizing function in media discourse on immigration.