Methodological Claim Research Articles

Schauer's Anti-Essentialism

In his new book, The Force of Law (forthcoming), distinguished jurisprudent and first amendment scholar Frederick Schauer maintains, inter alia, that jurisprudents should not follow H.L.A. Hart and others in assuming that an inquiry into the nature of law must be a search for essential properties of law, but should instead focus on properties that are typical of law and important. He adduces two distinct claims in support of this main methodological claim, namely, (1) that law has no essential properties, and (2) that focusing on essential properties of law to the exclusion of properties that are typical of law and important, albeit not essential, means that the theorist will run the risk of missing out on important insights. And he adduces in turn two distinct claims in support of claim (1), namely, (1a) that people in general think of and with concepts not in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for their proper application, but in terms of central and peripheral cases, and accept that not all instances, not even all central instances, of a concept share any one property or properties, and (1b) that the concept of law is a family resemblance concept. I argue, however, (i) that Schauer’s attempt to show that legal anti-essentialism is a defensible position fails, because argument (1a) is either irrelevant or else incomplete, depending on how one understands it, and because argument (1b) is false, since the concept of law is not a family resemblance concept, and possibly also incoherent, (ii) that claims (1a) and (1b) could not be true together, and (iii) that Schauer’s discussion of properties of law in the chapter on the differentiation of law is in tension with, and might even undermine, the legal anti-essentialism that Schauer espouses. I also argue (iv) that Schauer’s legal anti-essentialism does not seem to be anti-essentialism in the usual sense of a rejection of the existence of essential properties, but rather a rejection of the possibility of analyzing the concept of law in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, which is a different view. Moreover, I argue (v) that legal anti-essentialism in Schauer’s sense seems to render parts of legal scholarship, such as the interesting and valuable discipline of comparative law, more or less pointless, and (vi) that a jurisprudent who despite the objections set forth in this article accepts legal anti-essentialism (in Schauer’s sense) should consider modifying his approach to the inquiry into the nature of law accordingly by giving up the method of philosophical analysis and trying instead either the method of explication or the method of the ideal-type. Finally, I argue (vii) that we do not have to go all the way back to the time of Bentham and Austin to find a prominent jurisprudent who puts coercion at the center of law, but can find a much more recent jurisprudent who does precisely that, namely Scandinavian realist Karl Olivecrona, and (viii) that a comparison of Schauer’s and Olivecrona’s accounts of legal coercion makes it clear that these accounts treat very different questions and differ quite a bit in general, and that the main reason why this is so is that they differ in their understanding of what an inquiry into the nature of law is.

Magis Rythmus Quam Metron: The Structure of Seneca's Anapaests, and the Oral/Aural Nature of Latin Poetry

The aim of this contribution is twofold. The empirical focus is the metrical structure of Seneca's anapaestic odes. On the basis of a detailed formal analysis, in which special attention is paid to the delimitation and internal structure of metrical periods, I argue against the dimeter colometry traditionally assumed. This conclusion in turn is based on a second, more methodological claim, namely that in establishing the colometry of an ancient piece of poetry, the modern metrician is only allowed to set apart a given string of metrical elements as a separate metron, colon or period, if this postulated metrical entity could “aurally” be distinguished as such by the hearer.

Cooperation in a Complex World: The Role of Proximate Factors in Ultimate Explanations

Mayr’s distinction between proximate and ultimate explanation is justly famous, marking out a division of explanatory labor in biology. But while it is a useful heuristic in many cases, there are others in which proximate factors play an important role in shaping evolutionary trajectories, and in such cases, each project is sensitive to, and relevant to, the other. This general methodological claim is developed in the context of a discussion of human cooperation, and in particular, in a discussion on the puzzling stability of the social contract over the Pleistocene–Holocene transition. For I argue that while we have a plausible account of the stability of Pleistocene cooperation, the stabilizing factors of the Pleistocene disappear in the Holocene, but cooperation does not. Holocene humans solved many collective action problems; cooperation did not collapse despite the apparent growth of free-riding elites. So the article combines a methodological claim about the interaction of proximate and evolutionary biology with a substantive one about the ecology of human cooperation.

Is Inheritance Morally Distinctive?

This paper examines a rarely-discussed argument for the right to bequeath wealth. This argument, popular among libertarians, asserts that opposition to the practice of inheritance is prone to over-generalize, such that opponents of inheritance cannot avoid condemning other uses of private property, like gift-giving. The argument is motivated by an interesting methodological claim, namely, that the morality of bequest ought to be evaluated from the perspective of the donor, and not evaluated in ways that invoke the effects of bequest on the distribution of wealth. This paper argues that this donor-centric approach ultimately favors restricting the right of bequest. Specifically, I maintain that bequest generally carries a lower opportunity cost than other uses of property. Accordingly, inheritance tax is less coercive than other taxes, and bequest is less obviously as generous an act as gift giving. While the arguments made here will encourage traditional opponents of inheritance (such as egalitarians), I also suggest why they might be welcomed by at least some types of libertarian.

Kant's Contribution to Moral Epistemology

This paper argues that the most innovative aspect of Kant's ethical theory is not afirst-order normative ethics, even though the importance and long-lasting mark ofKant's ethics of autonomy cannot be questioned. Rather, it consists in a constructivistaccount of moral cognition. This claim may be perplexing in more than one way, sinceconstructivism is often characterized both as a first-order account of moral judgmentsand as a retreat from epistemological and ontological commitments. This characterizationis misleading in general, and mistaken for Kant's constructivism in particular.Kant's constructivism is a methodological claim about the authority and productivefunction of reason and an epistemological claim about the nature of moral cognitions.

Metaphysically Lightweight Posits

We discuss metaphysically lightweight posits, providing some examples. The ontological assertion is that the right ontology does not include any lightweight posits. There are two semantical claims: statements about lightweight posits are often true in context, and truth is often indirect correspondence. Methodological claim is that this approach fits well with reflective common sense, considering the dialectics involving naive common sense realism, common sense antinomies and the reflective or austere realism. This kind of approach is roughly compatible with Searle’s view on the same matters in his story about the construction of social reality.

Moral Psychology And Moral Intuition: A Pox On All Your Houses

Peter Singer has argued for a radical anti-intuitionism on the basis of recent empirical research into the psychological and evolutionary origins of moral intuition. There is, however, a gap between the putative genealogy of moral intuition that Singer offers and his desired methodological claim. I explore three ways to bridge the gap, and argue that the promising way is to construe the genealogy as a debunking genealogy. I sketch an account of how debunking arguments work, and then show that this causes problems for Singer, since utilitarianism itself is liable to be debunked. Finally, I suggest how we can take lessons for ethics from the empirical work, but that the result is a far more restricted kind of anti-intuitionism than Singer was hoping for.

Together, nevertheless? Television memories in mainstream Jewish Israel

Drawing on 40 life-stories of Jewish-Israeli television viewers collected over the years 2004—6, this article makes three claims. First, it suggests that the formation of memory is tightly intertwined with television viewing, both at the individual level and the collective levels of the family and the nation. It elaborates on a typology of television memories, differentiating between wallpaper memories, flashbulb memories, media events and close encounters. Second, it asserts that in Israel, the nation remains a major framework for apprehending collective memory. Nevertheless, fragmentation can be felt: immigration and ethnicity play a role, as does commercialization. Finally, it makes a methodological claim about the ways collective memory can best be studied. Examining the reception of audiences, in addition to the common focus on memory texts, reveals that even with commercialized, fragmentized television, Jewish-Israeli viewers share a strong sense of common memories and a collective past.

Wittgenstein e il naturalismo

The paper is concerned with Wittgenstein’s attitudes towards various forms of naturalism. On the one hand, Wittgenstein’s antinaturalism is based on the idea that there is a deep divide between science and philosophy. The paper argues that such a methodological claim cannot be criticized by resorting to Quine’s attack to analyticity, for the Wittgensteinian notion of a grammatical rule is different from the Carnapian notion of an analytical proposition. Though, at the same time, the paper underlines that Wittgenstein’s conception of grammar is the core of the so-called “linguistic doctrine of necessity”, which has been strongly criticized by Kripke. On the other hand, Wittgenstein’s naturalism is based on notions such as “form of life” and “general facts of nature”. The paper shows that such a view is motivated by antifoundationalist and non intellectualistic biases, and is mainly characterized by a peculiar attention to the normative dimension of human behaviour and activities.

Hobbes's Liberty and Skinner's Discontent

This article questions the plausibility of the interpretation of Hobbes's liberty that Quentin Skinner articulates in Hobbes and Republican Liberty. It argues that Skinner's book fails to prove two of the three claims it must uphold: the ‘textual accuracy claim’ and his ‘methodological claim’. This article maintains that understanding Hobbes's use of liberty in Leviathan according to his definition of ‘corporall liberty’, as Skinner does, ignores many of Hobbes's claims that invoke liberty outside the beginning of chapter 21, resulting in a one-dimensional reading of Hobbes.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Musical Works: Ontology and Meta‐Ontology

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Musical Works: Ontology and Meta‐Ontology

Politics and Volunteering in Japan: A Global Perspective (review)

Reviewed by: Politics and Volunteering in Japan: A Global Perspective Patricia L. Maclachlan (bio) Politics and Volunteering in Japan: A Global Perspective. By Mary Alice Haddad. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007. xviii, 218 pages. $80.00. There is something distinctive about the way state and society interact in contemporary Japan—distinctive, that is, from the perspective of Western conceptualizations of civil society. To varying degrees, Western scholars define civil society in a democracy as an autonomous social realm in which individuals freely interact with one another. Although few countries come close to achieving this ideal, there is a tendency in the literature to evaluate different civil societies according to the extent to which they approximate it. Against this measure, Japan invariably comes up short. Postwar Japanese civil society, it is said, has been long weakened by a strong state. In Politics and Volunteering in Japan, Mary Alice Haddad takes issue with these Western assumptions by exploring the rich and varied phenomenon of volunteerism in Japan. In their fixation with citizen participation in autonomous social groups, she observes, students of civil society have overlooked the comparatively high rates of Japanese citizen participation in what she terms "embedded organizations"—those that have close relations with the state. These entities, she argues, should be interpreted not so much as examples of the state's control over civil society as evidence that the two spheres are complementary; the state helps nurture civil society, while civil society helps perform state functions for the sake of the community. Japan, in other words, has a strong state and a vibrant civil society all at the same time. [End Page 224] Haddad deepens her observations by exploring different patterns and rates of volunteerism not only in Japan but also in the United States, Finland, and Turkey. Differences in volunteer patterns, she explains, are determined by norms of civic engagement that are in turn shaped by prevailing citizen ideas about the responsibilities of governments and individuals toward solving social problems. Drawing on data from the World Values Surveys, Haddad establishes a correlation in the United States between preferences for individual responsibility and the proliferation of autonomous or "non-embedded" organizations. In Japan, where citizens are much more inclined to lean on government to tackle social problems, participation in embedded organizations is far more prevalent. In Finland, community norms favoring a sharing of responsibility between individuals and government have shaped a civic environment in which both types of organizations are common. Finally, in Turkey, where citizens harbor moderate attitudes toward governmental and individual responsibility, mixed-type organizations are most common. To explain variations in rates of participation within Japan, Haddad analyzes the experiences of two embedded organizations (volunteer fire departments and the volunteer welfare commissioner system) and one nonembedded organization (elder care groups) in three mid-sized cities. She persuasively argues that building and sustaining volunteer organizations of any kind are dependent on the availability of three sets of resources: legitimacy, organization, and funding. She finds that government is usually the primary supplier of these resources and that embedded organizations tend to receive more of them than nonembedded organizations. She also observes that even among embedded organizations, the rate of civic participation tends to vary across cities depending on the degree to which these resources are present. Haddad applies both quantitative and qualitative research methods to test not only her Community Volunteerism Model but also alternative explanations. In chapter 3, for example, she draws on survey data to establish that variations in education, income, television viewing, and other conventional predictors of individual volunteerism in a community have less influence on aggregate rates of participation in civic organizations than community norms about individual and government responsibility in solving social problems. Stated in more methodological terms, "[c]ivic participation is a collective phenomenon and not just the sum of individual activities" (p. 167). On the basis of this methodological claim, she builds her theoretical argument that these norms shape patterns of civic engagement in a society, while governmental practices that help legitimize, organize, and fund that engagement determine differences in rates of volunteer participation across communities. Haddad backs these observations with the results of numerous statistical tests, leaving detailed descriptions of those...

Semantics and Pragmatics of Humor

AbstractThis article presents the state of the art of semantic‐pragmatic research on humor. The developments in the field are seen as fanning out from two central concepts: the linguistic version of the incongruity/resolution theory of humor (script opposition) and the methodological claim that such a theory was a theory of humor competence. The developments of the theory of humor competence and, more recently, of work on humor performance are seen as lying at the opposite ends of a continuum, with various approaches positioning themselves along that axis. It is argued that a theory encompassing both competence and performance is necessary for the study of humor.

The Diversity of State Benefit Dependent Lone Mothers: The Use of Type Categories as an Analytical Tool

This article provides an empirical examination of how lone mothers who receive state benefits in Germany and Britain create meaning with regards to mothering and state dependency. It uses the concept of individualisation as it requires women to negotiate their own lives. But the concept of individualisation is limited as it insinuates a convergence in men's and women's work identities and aspirations and is in danger of reducing women's identity to their ‘family-work’ preferences that does not encompass the complexity of their lives. The article has both a methodological claim and a substantive claim: Methodologically, it explores how new type categories can be used as an analytical tool to help us understand how lone mothers create meaning and to make sense of the differences between the mothers’ complex identities. Substantively, these type categories demonstrate that there are great variations and dynamics in mothers’ identities despite their state dependency. Based on lone mothers’ perceived choices and constraints they are categorised as pioneers, copers or strugglers. The pioneers view their situation as an opportunity to construct their lives actively in non-traditional ways. In contrast, the coper and the struggler types perceive a lack of choices and tend to have traditional gender role values. While copers view their situation as temporary and improvable, strugglers feel overwhelmed by constraints and perceive themselves to have no choices at all. This article discusses the construction and the characteristics of these categories while detailed case studies bring each type category to life and give them more substance. The data analysis also shows that besides values, lone mothers’ structural background as well as the number and age of their children seems to be related to lone mothers’ creation of meaning.

A threefold ideological analysis of Die Gru¨nen: From ecologized socialism to political liberalism?

This article analyses the transformation of the political ideology of the German Greens in light of the publication in April 2002 of the new fundamental programme replacing the basic programme of 1980--Die Gru¨nen's principal ideological document for two decades. The discussion has two major aims: first, to expose, and explain, the curious ideological shift of the Greens from profound ecosocialist, or New Politics, worldview to classical political liberalism. The latter maintains the private/public separation and is based on individual rights. The former challenges this view and advocates the politicization of the private, communal and cultural spheres, based on collective rights. One major argument put forward is that the Greens' ideological project is in great part an attempt to establish a collective political identity in post-war Germany, hence the centrality of reclaiming classical political liberalism. However, the very impetus of the New Politics--second-wave feminism, New Left and the New Social Movements--is thereby sacrificed. Thus, the private/public dichotomy, rejected by 'the personal is the political', is being reinstated: the concept of civil society becomes a core concept while the economy and the role of the state, which characterized the Greens' political worldview, are reduced to a peripheral conceptual role. The second aim is to advocate an integrative methodological approach to the study of political ideology, by performing three kinds of analysis--diachronic, discursive and conceptual--integrated into a synthetic approach. The methodological claim is that fundamental aspects of political phenomena are revealed through using mixed-qualitative approaches to the study of ideology, thus exposing crucial, often concealed, dimensions of the political process.

Lndividualism and Holism in the Social Sciences

Abstract Harold Kincaid’s Individualism and the Unity of Science is a subtle and nuanced analysis of the interlocking themes and issues surrounding the struggle between ‘holists’ and ‘individualists’ in the social sciences. Two major claims, one substantial and one methodological, emerge from this analysis. The substantial claim is a defense of a ‘non-reductive unity’ of the sciences. The methodological claim is that the disputes between reductionists and pluralists or between individualists and holists are empirical and not conceptual disputes. In this paper, I focus on what I take to be Kincaid’s central theses.

Monothéisme et Mémoire: Le Moïse de Freud et la tradition biblique

Dans son dernier livre, L'hommeMoïseet le monothéisme, Sigmund Freud établit une relation surprenante entre le monothéisme, la mémoire et le traumatisme. C'est le phénomène qu'il appelle le retour du refoulé, soit le processus qui, combinant le traumatisme et la mémoire, confère selon Freud à la religion monothéiste son pouvoir coercitif sur les masses et lui procure « le privilège d'être affranchie de la contrainte de la pensée logique » Pour Freud, l'histoire de la religion se présente donc comme un processus psycho-dynamique du refoulement et du souvenir. Ce qui se montre à la surface comme un travail d'archive gigantesque, la codification, la tradition et l'interprétation de textes canonisés, se dévoile au regard « archéologique » de l'analyste pénétrant la surface comme un drame psychique dont les origines remontent beaucoup plus loin que l'invention de l'écriture, plus loin même que la formation du langage, jusqu'à la première phylogenèse de l'humanité.

Morally Serious Critics of Moral Intuitions

I characterize moral intuitionism as the methodological claim that one may legitimately appeal to moral judgments in the course of moral reasoning even when those judgments are not supported by inference from other judgments. I describe two patterns of criticism of this method: ‘morally unserious’ criticisms, which hold that ‘morality is bunk’, so appeals to moral intuitions are bunk as well; and ‘morally serious’ criticisms, which hold that morality is not bunk, but that appeals to moral intuition are nonetheless misguided. I consider morally serious criticisms of Kantian and Aristotelian provenance, but defend the intuitionist method from both.

Identifying (with) the queerness of Melville's Pierre

Identifying (with) the Queerness of Melville’s Pierre Neill Matheson (bio) James Creech. Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s Pierre. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. James Creech’s Closet Writing/Gay Reading is a remarkable book in several ways. First, it offers a significantly new interpretation of Melville’s enigmatic novel Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), which has increasingly been viewed as marking a crucial turning point in Melville’s career, gaining the status of a major if equivocal work of nineteenth-century American fiction. Creech’s reading of Pierre adds much to previous work on homosexuality in Melville’s writings, making an important contribution to the history of Melville criticism. Supported by a shrewd, detailed analysis of the novel, and some surprising extratextual evidence, he argues compellingly that Pierre is preoccupied with the closeting of gay identity and with the tenuous possibilities for homosexual self-expression in a repressively heterosexual culture. Nevertheless, as its subtitle suggests, Pierre is a work that advertises its own ambiguity with a high degree of ironic self-awareness. Creech’s claims about it, made with a certain bravado, though accompanied by many hesitations and caveats, seem at times to diminish the complexity with which the novel itself explores the problem of identity. In addition to its interest as a reading of Pierre, Closet Writing/Gay Reading also represents a provocative statement within the wider context of critical and theoretical work on homosexuality, staking out a position that resists both the problematizing of identity performed by queer theory and the historicizing aims of much recent gay studies work. Creech elaborates the notion of “identificatory” or “camp reading” with great self-consciousness about its place in the critical landscape, so that it is as much a reaction to various theoretical positions as a stance in its own right. It is the combination of this critical hyperawareness, as if continually looking over one’s shoulder, and a kind of willed innocence with respect to interpretive problems that is most extraordinary, and it is worth exploring further. If one of the book’s aims is to add to a theory of the closet, it is also concerned with describing a poststructuralist theory that is in complicity with the suppression or emptying-out of homosexual meaning. Creech’s argument that deconstruction in particular has been blind to homosexual content contains in its margins a personal narrative of his own emergence from a theory closet. One of the strategies of Creech’s reading is to make his coming-out story converge with the one that he attributes to Pierre: his unambiguous claim for Pierre’s gay identity is simultaneously an avowal of a critical approach no longer in conflict with his own sexual identity. He alludes to his early and lingering attraction to deconstruction, the subsequent discovery that its influence, inhibiting unequivocal identity claims, prevented him from affirming his sexuality, and his tentative, incomplete, but increasingly assured rejection of that influence. Creech [End Page 30] asserts more than once that an analysis of Pierre’s impossible mourning would be valuable, but the story of his own critical history begins to sound like an account of the identifications, losses, and self-reproaches typical of melancholia. In this light Closet Writing/Gay Reading is interesting not because it is itself representative of recent gay criticism, but because it is a highly original, idiosyncratic, and suggestive response to a representative set of critical pressures surrounding the problem of identity. The central methodological claim of Closet Writing/Gay Reading is that identification is the form of reader response necessary to bring closeted homosexual meaning to light. Creech argues that the task of gay literary criticism is to counter the reductiveness of traditional, straight criticism by “putting homosexuality back in its rightful place, reimagining the text from which it has been censored, within which it has only been allowed an encrypted and ciphered status, or out of which it has been abstracted” [29]. Gay literary criticism faces the interpretive problem of recovering homosexual meaning that may have become nearly invisible through the combined effects of the restrictive cultural imperatives under which the author was writing and the reductiveness of later criticism...

Historical Contextualism Revisited

To deal with the methodological problems of historical contextualism, it is useful to distinguish between (1) Text, (2) Context, (3) History, (4) Contextualism and (5) Historicism.1 A text is by turn the outcome, and object, of all writing or research. A context is any perspective on a text, including the background data that one may append to it. History is a narrative, a story, which is focused upon a text or context - in as far as the two are the same, viewed as propositions. ‘Contextualism’ is a methodological claim that valid history is only secured or demonstrated via the reconstruction of ‘the context’ - especially where the latter is to do with a perspective on the background to a text. Historicism is disinclined either to extract present moral judgements from, or apply them to, the past; it resists more broadly any form of social generalisation over extended units of chronological time2; it thereby displays a liability to overrate the importance of the sometimes ‘spectacular differences’ (Popper 1960: p.101) between various historical periods. Historical contextualism may be construed as a new variety of historicism. The emphasis of the present account is more broadly upon the logical futility of historical contextualism in general, and less upon its specifically historicist character.