Realist Claim Research Articles

Principles as Guides: The Action-Guiding Role of Justice in Politics

Although it is widely accepted that a theory of justice ought to be action guiding, we lack a persuasive account of what this role entails. This omission has allowed a number of misleading narratives to emerge, including the realist claim that justice is of little relevance to citizens in practice because it is not action guiding in circumstances of noncompliance. This article seeks to correct this omission in the literature by providing a general account of the action-guiding role of justice. In so doing it makes three contributions to the literature on justice. First, it explains what kind of guidance we should expect a theory of justice to offer citizens. Second, it specifies the criteria that a particular theory of justice needs to satisfy to qualify as action guiding. And third, it demonstrates that, contrary to realist criticisms, justice is action guiding in circumstances of noncompliance and so is of practical use to citizens.

Meaning Representationalism: between Representationalism and Qualia Realism

The purpose of this article is to offer a new view of the key relation between the content and the conscious character of visual experience. The author aims to support the following claims. First, the author rejects the qualia realist claim that conscious character is an intrinsic, nonrepresentational property of visual experience, for example, a pattern of activation of neurons. However, the author also rejects the rival widespread representationalist claim that the conscious character of visual experience is identical to, or supervenes on, any specific property represented by visual experience. The positive proposal is the following. Conscious character is identical with those patterns of activation of neurons that are referentially or representationally alive. Conscious redness, for example, is a pattern of activations of neurons that is created normally only when brains of physical duplicates come in visual contact with some distal property and this pattern of activation is recruited by natural selection to represent that property. This is called meaning representationalism.

Comparing Critical Realism and the Situated Knowledges Approach in Research on (In)equity in Health Care: An Exploration of their Implications

This article compares knowledge claims within critical realism and the situated knowledges approach, and will discuss the implications of adopting these two perspectives in research on inequity in health care. The concept of medical gender bias, as well as two empirical studies on inequity among patients waiting for cataract extractions in Sweden, will be used in order to illustrate the different implications of adopting a critical realist or a situated knowledges perspective. The article suggests that the latter of these two perspectives is compatible with critical realist claims about epistemic relativism, but that it is much harder to combine with the concept of judgmental rationality, at least in so far as this rationality is not treated as being situated itself. The article will also claim that critical realism and the situated knowledges approach emphasize different implications concerning responsibility during processes of knowledge production. Finally, it will suggest that the adoption of a critical realist-based intersectional ontology, in combination with a greater emphasis on the fact that researchers are always situated in various ways, is a fruitful starting point for grounding studies on inequity in health care.

The new realist ontology

Abstract Financial geographers utilise realist economic and rather anti-realist sociologic theories. Yet, theories from both traditions seem to contradict each other metatheoretically. The new realist ontology promises to settle this metatheoretical contradiction by preserving the realist claim on trueness with the concept of fields of sense without rejecting the plurality of human perspectives. This paper exemplarily demonstrates that realist and rather anti-realist theories accord with the new realist ontology. Further, using an empirical example of bank-based small-firm lending it illustrates that the combined use of theories from both traditions advances our understanding of modern finance.

Empirical Realism and the Legitimacy of Ontology: A Dialogue

The purpose of this dialogue between an ‘empirical realist’ and a ‘traditional ontologist’ is to clarify and evaluate the presuppositions of the kind of anti-ontological position exemplified by empirical realism. After ontology is defined and the empirical realist's position explained, the traditional ontologist pursues a series of dialectical developments and criticisms of the empirical realist's claim to have a coherently non-ontological position. The eventual conclusion is that the empirical realist's opposition to ontology just arbitrarily assumes ontology to be associated with infallibilism (by way of logically necessary truth) and incompatible with fallibilism instead of conveying the illegitimacy of ontology itself or convincingly explaining the non-ontological standing of their position. The significance of this dialogue for critical realism is that it extends the case against anti-ontological epistemologies in general and empirical realism in particular by demonstrating the problems that result from the attempt to evade the charge of an implicit ontology.

On a risk model with claim investigation

In this paper, a queue-based claims investigation mechanism is considered to model an insurer’s claim processing practices. The resulting risk model may be viewed as a first step in developing models with more realistic claim investigation mechanisms. Related to claim investigations, claim settlement delays and time dependent payments have been studied in a ruin context by, e.g. Taylor (1979), Cai and Dickson (2002), and Trufin et al. (2011). However, little has been done on queue-based investigation mechanisms. We first demonstrate the impact of a particular claim investigation system on some common ruin-related quantities when claims arrive according to a compound Poisson process, and investigation times are of a combination of exponential form. Probabilistic interpretations for the defective renewal equation components are also provided. Finally, via numerical examples, we explore various risk management questions related to this problem such as how claim investigation strategies can help an insurer control its activities within its risk appetite.

The Real Value of Equality

This article investigates how political theorists and philosophers should understand egalitarian political demands in light of the increasingly important realist critique of much of contemporary political theory and philosophy. It suggests, first, that what Martin O’Neill has called non-intrinsic egalitarianism is, in one form at least, a potentially realistic egalitarian political project and, second, that realists may be compelled to impose an egalitarian threshold on state claims to legitimacy under certain circumstances. Non-intrinsic egalitarianism can meet realism’s methodological requirements because it does not have to assume an unavailable moral consensus since it can focus on widely acknowledged bads rather than contentious claims about the good. Further, an appropriately formulated non-intrinsic egalitarianism may be a minimum requirement of an appropriately realistic claim by a political order to authoritatively structure some of its members’ lives. Without at least a threshold set of egalitarian commitments, a political order seems unable to be transparent to many of its worse-off members under a plausible construal of contemporary conditions.

Contextualising the Syrian Crisis against Realism and Security Competition in the 21st Century

The objective of this paper is to promote critical engagement with a wide range of theoretical and empirical issues regarding the applicability and relevance of Realism or Realpolitik in the new realities of today’s international politics. It draws on arguments taken from scholars but are reconstructed in a way useful to students of IR. It aims to evaluate the realist claim that international politics revolve around state actors and the pursuit of their national strategic interests in an anarchic international system. To assess this argument, Russian attitude towards the international community’s proposal for a resolution to intervene in the Syrian civil war will be reviewed. This will help to determine the applicability and potency of the core assumptions of Realism in today’s international politics.

How to do realistic political theory (and why you might want to)

In recent years, a number of realist thinkers have charged much contemporary political theory with being idealistic and moralistic. While the basic features of the realist counter-movement are reasonably well understood, realism is still considered a critical, primarily negative creed which fails to offer a positive, alternative way of thinking normatively about politics. Aiming to counteract this general perception, in this article I draw on Bernard Williams’s claims about how to construct a politically coherent conception of liberty from the non-political value of freedom. I do this because Williams’s argument provides an illuminating example of the distinctive nature of realist political thinking and its attractions. I argue that Williams’s account of realist political thinking challenges the orthodox moralist claim that normative political arguments must be guided by an ideal ethical theory. I then spell out the repercussions Williams’s claims about the significance of political opposition and non-moralised accounts of motivation have for our understanding of the role and purpose of political theory. I conclude by defending the realist claim that action-guiding political theory should accordingly take certain features of our politics as given, most centrally the reality of political opposition and the passions and experiences that motivate them. On this reading political realism offers a viable way of thinking about political values which cannot be understood in terms of the categories of intellectual separation – ideal/nonideal or fact-insensitive/fact-sensitive – that have marked political theory in recent years.

What Does Realist Foreign Policy Activism Tell Us About Realist Theory?

Realist scholars have frequently expressed their displeasure at the actual practice of foreign policy and urged states to act in ways that are more consistent with realist insights on the nature of international politics. What does this foreign policy activism tell us about realist theory? For many, realist foreign policy activism suggests that the realist intellectual project is internally contradictory. Realist activism is said to undermine contemporary realism's claims to explain international politics “as it really is” the scientific validity of its predictions, and its rejection of the view that discourse and debate can shape the practice and nature of politics. While this perspective raises important questions about the descriptive-explanatory components of realist thought, it also contributes to a mischaracterization of what realism is primarily about. This article argues that the realist intellectual project is less about building a scientific and empirically valid theory of international relations and more about shaping state behavior to handle the demands and rigors posed by an anarchic international system. Realist foreign policy activism highlights the deeply prescriptive nature of the realist intellectual project.

Towards a new conceptualism in comparative constitutional law, or reviving the German tradition of the Lehrbuch

This article provides a positive reassessment of conceptual thinking for comparative constitutional law. While the realist claim has known a remarkable success story, both in comparative constitutional law and elsewhere, there is a growing unease that the realist approach might fail to capture essential aspects of legal phenomena. Empirical research seems hardly possible without conceptual efforts, and if the line between the empirical and the normative is blurred, concepts can serve as tools to provide an alternative description of reality without being inherently affirmative. The place of the conceptual affects the form through which legal knowledge is presented: for comparative constitutional law, this means that a dialogue ought to take place not only on the content, but also on the form through which comparative efforts are undertaken. The article ends with a short reflection on current scholarship in comparative constitutional law, its forms, and the methodological challenges that lie ahead.

A realist and internalist response to one of Mackie’s arguments from queerness

If there is such a thing as objectively existing prescriptivity, as the moral realist claims, then we can also explain why—and we need not deny that—strong (conceptual) internalism is true. Strong conceptual internalism is true, not because of any belief in any magnetic force thought to be inherent in moral properties themselves, as Mackie argued, but because we do not allow that anyone has (in the practical sense) ‘accepted’ a normative claim, unless she is prepared to some extent to act on it (to see to it that it is satisfied).

The 2008 Russian–Georgian war via the lens of Offensive Realism

The Russian intervention in Georgia's breakaway republic of South Ossetia in August 2008, Moscow's first-ever use of military force against a sovereign state in the post-cold war period, deserves a theoretical explanation. By following the tenets of Offensive Realism, this article will argue that the US–Russian competition in the South Caucasus is the main cause of the 2008 Russian–Georgian war. During the 1990s, the USA passed the buck to Turkey to contain Russian influence in the South Caucasus. In the early to mid-2000s, however, the Russian–Turkish relations were improved so rapidly that the USA opted, through NATO expansion, to step in as an offshore balancer. Following Bush administration's decision to support the Georgian candidacy for NATO membership and Georgia's ill-fated attempt to seize South Ossetia, Moscow went to war to re-establish hegemony in the South Caucasus. In this way, as the theory of Offensive Realism claims, the Kremlin believes that Russian state will enhance its chances of survival in the anarchical international system.

Burge’s Defense of Perceptual Content

1 The term “content view” has been used by Siegel (2010a) and Brewer (2011). Schellenberg (2011) speaks instead of the content thesis. Siegel’s characterization of the content view is too weak for our purposes here. The content view she defends is neutral with regard to the nature of sensory states, and Burge is explicitly defending a claim about what certain sensory states are. Siegel suggests that the deeper issue at stake in disputes with naIve realists over the content view is whether perceptions ought to be individuated by reference to the particular things perceived. Our understanding of the debate is different. Burge is not at odds with the naIve realist claim that perceptions are individuated by reference to particulars in the environment. He allows that perceptual states are individuated by their contents and that the representational content of perception constitutively possesses a singular element (2010a, pp.379-381). In defending the content view, Burge is opposed to those, like naIve realists, who identify perception with something other than sensory representation.

The reactionary art of murder: Contemporary crime fiction, criticism and verisimilitude

One way in which specific crime fiction texts achieve prominence is through critical discourses which promote those texts’ ‘superior’ realism, valorizing the texts and setting them apart from neighbouring generic narratives. This article goes back to the 1921 analysis by Roman Jakobson which identifies a small number of strategies by which arguments about realism proceed. Particularly important for crime fiction criticism is that approach to realism, described by Jakobson, which focuses on contiguous details in narrative. In contrast to the claims of realism is the analytic concept of verisimilitude, based on the ‘rules of the genre’ and ‘public opinion’ or doxa. Verisimilitude, it is argued, has the capacity to address the important issue of generic stagnation, an example of which in crime fiction is the increasing reliance on murder (serial, single or repeated) to propel a narrative. Amidst the conformity in the genre, the article identifies complicity in the promotion of realism and the catalytic occurrence of murder as the key constituents of crime fiction. It also points to some exceptions to this tendency.

Democratic international relations: Montesquieu and the theoretical foundations of democratic peace theory

The article examines the extent to which Montesquieu's doux commerce thesis, which claims that commerce leads to softening of manners and therefore favours international peace, presents a challenge to democratic peace theory. It argues that Montesquieu's claim that peace may be due to commerce, and not democracy, provides a theoretical challenge to those scholars who argue that there is a Kantian virtuous triangle of democracy. The practical implication of this theoretical challenge concerns the way democratic peace theory has influenced the practice of international politics, especially American foreign policy. The article argues that Montesquieu's doux commerce thesis mediates between the contending claims of realism and liberal internationalism over the merits of democratisation as an essential means for securing peace.

Legal Realism Untamed

What makes hard cases hard, and what makes easy cases easy? A common response to H.L.A. Hart’s (mis)reading of Legal Realist is that the Realists offered their arguments solely in the context of the hard or indeterminate cases likely to find their way into appellate courts. Llewellyn, for example, made clear that his claims were restricted to “any case doubtful enough to make litigation respectable,” and Max Radin limited his Realist claims to “marginal cases.” Thus, a “tamed” version of Realism limits the Realists’ claims to the self-selected but non-representative group of disputes that are the stuff of reported appellate decisions. And this version is “tamed” because it is compatible with the view that standard legal sources determine the outcome in the cases that are not doubtful and would be futile to litigate. Indeed, the version is so tamed that it is largely compatible with Hart’s own response to the Realists. But although many commentators, including this author, have at times subscribed to this effort to tame Realism, that effort may understate the magnitude of the Realist challenge by understating the effect of the gap between paper rules and real rules, to use Llewellyn’s terminology, on the makeup of the array of cases that are or are not doubtful. If, as Llewellyn and others argued, factors other than the standard (or literal) reading of standard legal sources determine the outcome even when the standard legal sources are clear, then the existence of such non-standard sources will make cases that are not doubtful under the traditional picture doubtful – and thus worth litigating. And if this is so, then the divergence between real rule and paper rule will be relevant not only in doubtful cases, but also in determining which cases are doubtful and which not. Realism would then be a claim not merely about doubtful cases, but a claim pervading the entire operation of a system of legal rules. To the extent that the claim is true, therefore, it represents a serious attack on the traditional picture of law throughout its operation, and not simply in the doubtful cases. To the extent that easy cases are easy not because of the plain meaning of the language of a written-down or black-letter legal rule, and thus to the extent that hard cases are hard not because of the indeterminacy of the language of such rules, the entire array of cases selected for litigation, and deselected from litigation, will be determined by factors not to be found in the paper rules. In this sense, American Legal Realism constitutes a less bounded -- and thus untamed -- attack on the traditional picture of law, although the ultimate soundness of the challenge still depends on empirical facts about the relationship, if any, between the paper rules and the real rules.

The Tributary System as International Society in Theory and Practice

How have different cultures and peoples constructed their political communities and organized their international life in history? In which ways has order been differently conceptualized and pursued through a diverse range of institutional practices in different cultural and world historical contexts, and why? What were world orders like before the rise of capitalism and the expansion of Europe and the imposition of the Westphalian model? How is it possible to explain why different international societies, as we understand them today, have created different fundamental institutions and adopted radically different institutional designs in their pursuit of peace and cooperation across space and time? Why is it important to consider the transformation of international orders beyond European history in theorizing International Relations? From where does the current global order emerge in deep world historical terms? These are among a number of key questions raised in collective critical reflections on and re-evaluation of the theorizing enterprise within the discipline of International Relations (IR). They are questions that have been explored and interrogated during the last two decades as part of our efforts to understand the still unfolding systemic transformation of international relations. The search for answers to these questions marks a discernible turn in the studies of IR to History. Ostensibly, this historical turn in IR theorizing is a critique of the Realist claim of ‘timeless wisdom’ and, more broadly, of the failure of mainstream IR theories to take history seriously. It is an expression of dissatisfaction with universalizing IR theories. Contemporary IR is said to be ‘historophobic’, as ‘it views historical analysis as superfluous, or exogenous, to

Attracting Neighbors: Soft Power Competition in East Asia

This article explores the dynamics of competition by means of soft power among two key regional states, China and Japan. It demonstrates that, in their embrace of regionalism, each has concentrated soft power on East Asian neighbors by competitively proposing regional visions that would best position it in the regional leadership stakes. China took the initiative, Japan responded quickly, and China is now striking back. This does not necessarily mean that the liberal claim that East Asia is "ripe for cooperation" is misplaced. Nor does it suggest that the realist claim of "ripe for rivalry" better represents the reality. Rather, this article argues that regional powers compete in order to attract neighbors. Since this contest involves embracing others, it is not necessarily a zero-sum game. This article evaluates the success, or lack thereof, of the two countries` efforts in order to learn what they imply for Korea.

An Eliminativist Theory of Suspense

Suspense realism claims suspense is itself a genuine, distinct emotion. While current theories of suspense are suspense realist theories, I argue for a suspense eliminativist theory according to which suspense is not itself a genuine, distinct emotion but a subspecies of an emotion, or the class comprising all and only those subspecies, chiefly demarcated by the necessity of uncertainty and primarily the province of (primarily fictional) narrative encounters. There are several prima facie compelling reasons to think suspense eliminativism is capable of grounding a theory equally if not better able to resolve the principal concerns suspense theory must address.