Foundational Claim Research Articles

Epistemic injustice? Banning ‘critical race theory’, ‘divisive topics’, and ‘embedded racism’ in the classroom

Abstract In more than half of its states, the USA has recently passed or proposed legislation to limit or ban public educational curricular reference to race, gender, sexuality, or other identity topics. The stated justifications for these legislative moves are myriad, but they share a foundational claim; namely, these topics are asserted to be politically and socially divisive such that they ought not to be included within state-controlled schools. In this paper, we consider the claims of divisiveness regarding these topics and explore whether, even if taken in good faith, the popular versions of these arguments and actions are epistemically defensible. We conclude that these bans are an epistemic injustice and therefore argue for their end. The article proceeds to consider the foundational claims of epistemic injustice, followed by the invocation of epistemic standards by which the arguments for these bans can be evaluated. The article then transitions to a close application of these standards, weighing the possible epistemic gains and losses. Before concluding, we consider objections and explore the social and epistemic significance of these issues.

Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony

On Metaphysical Necessity: Essays on God, the World, Morality, and Democracy

On Metaphysical Necessity: Essays on God, the World, Morality, and Democracy

Models and Numbers: Representing the World or Imposing Order?

Abstract We argue for a foundational epistemic claim and a hypothesis about the production and uses of mathematical epidemiological models, exploring the consequences for our political and socio-economic lives. First, in order to make the best use of scientific models, we need to understand why models are not truly representational of our world, but are already pitched towards various uses. Second, we need to understand the implicit power relations in numbers and models in public policy, and, thus, the implications for good governance if numbers and models are used as the exclusive drivers of decision making.

Imprecision farming? Examining the (in)accuracy and risks of digital agriculture

The myriad potential benefits of digital farming hinge on the promise of increased accuracy, which allows ‘doing more with less’ through precise, data-driven operations. Yet, precision farming's foundational claim of increased accuracy has hardly been the subject of comprehensive examination. Drawing on social science studies of big data, this article examines digital agriculture's (in)accuracies and their repercussions. Based on an examination of the daily functioning of the various components of yield mapping, it finds that digital farming is often ‘precisely inaccurate’, with the high volume and granularity of big data erroneously equated with high accuracy. The prevailing discourse of ‘ultra-precise’ digital technologies ignores farmers' essential efforts in making these technologies more accurate, via calibration, corroboration and interpretation. We suggest that there is the danger of a ‘precision trap’. Namely, an exaggerated belief in the precision of big data that over time leads to an erosion of checks and balances (analogue data, farmer observation et cetera) on farms. The danger of ‘precision traps’ increases with the opacity of algorithms, with shifts from real-time measurement and advice towards forecasting, and with farmers' increased remoteness from field operations. Furthermore, we identify an emerging ‘precision divide’: unequally distributed precision benefits resulting from the growing algorithmic divide between farmers focusing on staple crops, catered well by technological innovation on the one hand, and farmers cultivating other crops, who have to make do with much less advanced or applicable algorithms on the other. Consequently, for the latter farms digital farming may feel more like ‘imprecision farming’.

Why Physical Barriers Backfire: How Immigration Enforcement Deters Return and Increases Asylum Applications

What, if any, effect do physical barriers have on cross-border population movements? The foundational claim that barriers reduce migration flows remains unsupported. We conceptualize barriers as a tool of immigration enforcement, which we contend is one form of state repression. State repression could reduce mobilization (reduce immigration), have no effect on mobilization (barriers as symbolic political tools), or increase mobilization (backfire). We evaluate the relationship between barriers and cross-border population movements using a global directed dyad-year dataset for the 1990–2016 time period of all contiguous dyads and nearby non-contiguous dyads. Using instrumental variables, we find that physical barriers actually increase refugee flows, consistent with the “backfire effect” identified in research on United States immigration enforcement policies on its Mexican border. Furthermore, we find that state repression (immigration enforcement) creates this “backfire effect” via a “sunk costs” problem that reduces movements of people and increases movement of status from migrant to refugee.

Populism, Nationalism, and Nationalist Populism.

This article builds an original, analytical framework to understand one of the most important developments of our times — the global ascendance of leaders who fuse populist anti-elite rhetoric with nationalist appeals. In contrast to arguments that treat populism and nationalism as either completely separate or essentially equivalent phenomena, I begin from an understanding of the two as distinct ideologies that grow from a shared foundational claim to represent an “us” versus a “them.” In part 1, I first juxtapose populism and nationalism around this common, undergirding us-them boundary to bring out their core features. I then analyze how populism and nationalism vary across the twin axes of intensity and inclusiveness to bring out their distinct sub-types. In part 2, I use this theoretical map of populism and nationalism to navigate the conceptual terrain of their intersection. I focus, in particular, on the implications of nationalist populism for those seen as “us” versus those viewed as “them,” where the “us” and “them” are determined by the dimensions of intensity and inclusiveness. In contrast to characterizations of nationalist populism in directional terms as negative, I suggest that it is instead better understood as an amplifying force that exacerbates both the positive and negative consequences of populism. All else equal, relative to populism, those beyond nationalist populist boundaries are subject to heightened hostility and discrimination, while those within benefit from enhanced life opportunities.

On plants and principles

A critical oversight in the authors’ (Birch et al.) UAL framework arises in its stated basis in an “unlimited heredity” (UH) argument. Specifically, the foundational UH claim is that there is a possibility space constrained by the known properties of DNA, and that, within that space, a subset of specific “real” lineages arise. These lineages are actualisations of possibilities, under the assumption that no amount of time would be sufficient to actualise all possibilities. The oversight – already present in UH, but ‘inherited’ by UAL – regards what pressures produce the actual subset of lineages from the in principle possible lineages. Significantly, the subset is neither due solely to the “constraints” granted by Birch et al., nor is it arbitrary. Rather, the subset of actual lineages is the result of a reciprocal process with the environment that has been highlighted in research on the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) (e.g. Laland et al. 2017). In this commentary, we will underscore how this critical oversight concerning reciprocal pressures poses a core problem for the target article’s characterisation of UAL.

The Origins of Isaiah 24–27: Josiah’s Festival Scroll for the Fall of Assyria

The Origins of Isaiah 24–27: Josiah’s Festival Scroll for the Fall of Assyria

The Sense and Sensibility of Equality

AbstractThe idea of equality in political thought is often approached from a distributive perspective that entails a rethinking of institutional arrangements. In this paper I present an approach to conceived as a complement to the common institutional approach in liberal theory. The foundational claim is that blacks do not come into view for a wide range of people as worthy of full human recognition, that is, persons in possession of human vulnerabilities that require responses and in possession of warrants to rights that demand respect. The central argument is that this problem of diminished social value can be addressed by imagination and that imagination is crucially important to bridge the experiential divide between white and black Americans. I deploy two ideas I claim are essential for leveraging imagination: attentiveness and skill. When we are attentive we provide the imagination range to sense the more difficult aspects of others’ lives under inequality; when we are skilled we deploy a finer sensibility in taking the proper ethical stance towards others’ experiential difficulties under a regime of racial inequality. To achieve this, I provide a schematic of three pairs of concepts that provide a foundation though not full accounting of the necessary skills in response to ethical challenges: narrative/receptivity, reasons/responsibility, affect/compassion.

Theorising Areas of Law

This paper provides a general account of special jurisprudence, i.e. the part of jurisprudence that deals with theorising discrete “areas of law”. Section II starts with a few comments on the nature of theorisation itself. We claim that a theory is an at-tempt to provide an explanation of a phenomenon with the aim of understanding the phe-nomenon. We then outline three types of theoretical questions that are of relevance to us: ontological, empirical, and normative. Section III claims that “an area of law” is an inter-subjective social artefact that exists only because legal officials, practitioners, academics, and other actors, who constitute the “legal complex” in a given society, recognise it as such. We further claim that once an area of law is so recognised, it starts experiencing pressures to make it coherent in three distinct, but interrelated, ways. These are coherence-as-non-contradiction, coherence-as-consistency, and normative coherence. Over time, these coher-ence-seeking forces are likely to lend the area of law a distinct identity. Section IV deals with the three different approaches to special jurisprudence. It taxonomises the field based on whether the theoretical enterprise is ontological, empirical, or normative. Ontological theories aim to explain the nature of an area of law. They are usually concerned with its identity and its essential or defining features. Empirical theories are concerned with the actual functioning of legal actors and institutions. They tend to go beyond an exclusive focus on legal doctrine. Normative theories, we argue, may be detached or committed, ideal or non-ideal, universal or local, hypernormative, or interpretive. Ontological and normative theories usually deploy philosophical tools, whereas empirical theories use social science methods. Section V explores what it means to provide a theoretical foundation of an area of law, in terms of its ‘functions’ or ‘aims’. We argue that a foundational claim about an area of law in relation to its function or aim is a committed or detached normative theory. Section VI deals with two distinct methodological problems in special jurisprudence. The first of these is the “problem” of transparency—to what extent, if any, should a theoretical explanation of an area of law itself be accepted, at least by legal officials? We argue that official recognition is not a success condition for a theory. The second problem is the prob-lem of fit. Underfit occurs when the theoretical claim is insufficiently supported by the facts that inform the theoretical enterprise. Overfit is a problem when theoretical claims fail to sufficiently explain the available facts about legal practice (even after making allowances for the complexity, contingency, and multiplicity of factors that bring about such facts), and this failure cannot be explained by practical mistakes. Section VII concludes.

Occupational status and organizations: Variation in occupational hierarchies across Swedish workplaces

A foundational claim in social stratification research is that occupational hierarchies are largely invariant across societies, a phenomenon known as the Treiman constant. However, recent research in social stratification has focused on the role of local social spaces in generating inequalities, casting doubt on the validity of the idea of a universally invariant occupational hierarchy. In this paper, we focus on organizations as a local space in which occupational hierarchies may vary. We ask three questions: (1) do occupational hierarchies vary across workplaces, (2) why do occupational hierarchies vary across workplaces, and (3) what can explain why some occupations move up or down the occupational hierarchy in specific workplace contexts? Using novel administrative data from Sweden we measure and model the correlation between a workplace’s occupational hierarchy and the national occupational hierarchy, finding substantial variation across workplaces in the matching of a given workplace’s hierarchy to the national hierarchy. We then develop a set of contextual and relational variables at the organizational level to potentially explain this variation, as well as to explain which occupations move up or down the workplace hierarchy. This paper points toward an important and novel empirical finding – variation across workplaces in occupational hierarchies – both confirming the power of the Treiman constant while opening up avenues to explore deviations from it. It also reveals the need to develop theories than can explain this workplace-level variation.

Does capitalism (still) come in varieties?

That capitalisms vary and that these capitalisms neatly resolve themselves into distinct and discrete ‘varieties of capitalism’ is an almost foundational claim of contemporary comparative political economy. Yet it is far from evident that it is true. In this article, I return to the varieties conjecture, assessing the degree to which the claim might be warranted. In the process, I argue for the importance of differentiating clearly between ideal types and real types and for the value of heeding Weber’s advice about the dangers of confusing one for the other. I suggest that although capitalisms do not really come in varieties it is sometimes useful to proceed on the basis that they do, particularly if we think of such varieties as potentially dystopic. I suggest that such an acknowledgement is crucial in sensitizing us to the potential biases of varietal thinking, drawing out the implications for the positing of capitalist varieties in the period after the global financial crisis.

The inversion of the ‘really big trade-off’: homeownership and pensions in long-run perspective

The hypothesis of a trade-off between homeownership and welfare state provision, first proposed by Jim Kemeny around 1980, is a foundational claim in the political economy of housing. However, the evidence for this hypothesis is unclear at both macro and micro levels. This paper examines the link between welfare and homeownership at the macro level using new long-run data and a multilevel modelling approach. It shows that the negative cross-sectional correlation between homeownership and public welfare provision observed in the earliest available data disappears and becomes neutral by the 1980s and possibly positive subsequently. Within-country trajectories vary, but are significantly positive in more countries than significantly negative, suggesting that in some contexts welfare and homeownership are complements rather than competitors. The paper posits a dual ratchet effect mechanism in both pension benefits and homeownership capable of producing this inversion, and further suggests that rising public indebtedness and the debt-stabilising effects of welfare states may account for the emergence of complementarity in the pension‒homeownership relationship. The latter supports the hypothesis that some countries have avoided the trade-off by ‘buying time’ on credit markets.

A New Beginning of Trauma Theory in Literature

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"The Meandering Course of Chinese Political Thought"

"The Meandering Course of Chinese Political Thought" Philip J. Ivanhoe (bio) Youngmin Kim. A History of Chinese Political Thought. Cambridge, UK and Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2017. x, 288 pp. Paperback $24.25, isbn 978-0-7456-5247-4. A History of Chinese Political Thought is a masterful and highly accessible account of the intersecting and often-competing expressions of political philosophy that have flowed through and shaped Chinese history, showing the complex interplay between changes in material conditions and conceptions of what such changes imply, aspire to, or might represent.1 Professor Kim weaves trenchant philosophical analysis together with careful historical detail, drawing upon a wide range of sources and making skillful use of secondary literature from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Western sources. The book bristles with original insights, challenging many traditional ideas not only about Chinese political thinking but also and more basically about what China has been and what it has meant to be Chinese. This is far and away the most interesting and revealing study of the history of Chinese political thought available and is essential reading for anyone seeking to gain an understanding of one of the [End Page 186] world's great civilizations and fully appreciate its protean and ever-evolving character. Kim describes one of his primary goals as providing "a theoretically informed long-term historical narrative" (p. viii) of Chinese political thought. This narrative is theoretically informed in at least the following two ways: (1) it takes seriously the ways in which Chinese intellectuals understood themselves and their political activity (i.e., their theories of self, value, governance, culture, etc.) and deploys these as part of the explanatory apparatus to describe, analyze, and explain what happened in the meandering course of history, and (2) it draws upon and applies a range of contemporary theories about the nature of social, political, and historical phenomena in order to further this goal. I will return to these two features of the work in the course of my comments, but first it is important to make clear some of the ways in which Kim's approach quite dramatically breaks with past attempts to provide a history of Chinese political thought and note some of the implications his approach has for scholarship in other areas of Chinese studies. Kim provides a fair and balanced description of the best classic and contemporary studies of Chinese political history and argues that all of them are "dominated by ahistorical and nationalistic perspectives" (p. viii). While there is no conceptual reason to assume it to be true, it turns out there is a common flawed assumption underlying such work—work that spans a wide range of theoretical approaches and political sensibilities—which is that there is some single, enduring essence to Chinese political thought that establishes some eternal realm of China; constitutes the character of what it is to be Chinese; and unifies the history of Chinese society, culture, and politics. Kim's book is founded on the claim that no such essence exists, and he builds his account of the history of Chinese political thought on the rubble of this foundational claim. Aside from overthrowing widely held essentialist views about the nature of Chinese thought and culture, within both the academic world and the popular imagination, Kim's view poses profound challenges to a number of contemporary thinkers who propose that the world, and particularly the West, should study China in order to understand, appreciate, and learn from the wisdom of its purported enduring essence. An important assumption lying behind this advice is that China presents a system of political governance founded on some timeless political theory that has enabled it to endure intact throughout its long history and weather the kinds of trials and tribulations that have led to the collapse of other great civilizations. The problem is clear: if there is no enduring essence to Chinese political thought, there is no eternal realm of China; no shared sense of what it is to be Chinese; and no unified and homogenous society, culture, and politics. This does not in any way imply that the study of Chinese political thought is not valuable or that the world does not have...

The importance of being explicit.

Van Lange et al. propose that climate affects violence via its effects on life history. That much is reasonable (and not novel), but their theory lacks causal specificity. Their foundational claim of an association between heat and violence is not well documented, and several findings that the authors themselves cite seem inconsistent with their model, rather than supportive.

Re-Thinking the Role of the Family in Medical Decision-Making.

This paper challenges the foundational claim that the human family is no more than a social construction. It advances the position that the family is a central category of experience, being, and knowledge. Throughout, the analysis argues for the centrality of the family for human flourishing and, consequently, for the importance of sustaining (or reestablishing) family-oriented practices within social policy, such as more family-oriented approaches to consent to medical treatment. Where individually oriented approaches to medical decision-making accent an ethos of isolated personal autonomy family-oriented approaches acknowledge the central social and moral reality of the family. I argue that the family ought to be appreciated as more than a mere network of personal relations and individual undertakings; the family possesses a being that is social and moral such that it realizes a particular structure of human good and sustains the necessary conditions for core areas of human flourishing. Moreover, since the family exists as a nexus of face-to-face relationships, the consent of persons, including adults, to be members of a particular family, subject to its own respective account of family sovereignty, is significantly more amply demonstrated than the consent of citizens to be under the authority of a particular state. As a result, in the face of a general Western bioethical affirmation of the autonomy of individuals, as if adults and children were morally and socially isolated agents, this paper argues that social space must nevertheless be made for families to choose on behalf of their own members.

Discursive Resilience

Discursive Resilience

The Secessionist Movement in the Southernmost Provinces of Thailand: A View from the New Haven School of International Law

Based on the author’s research on the relationship among secession, self-determination and recognition in contemporary international law, this article argues that the secessionist movement in the southernmost provinces of Thailand is unjustified. This is because the movement’s foundational claim lies in a historical grievance that does not find support from lex lata; nor does the movement’s claim receive justification from lex ferenda as it fails spectacularly to meet the criteria of remedial secession considered as a measure of last resort.