Realist Claim Research Articles

Natural classes of universals: Why Armstrong's analysis fails1

Realists, D. M. Armstrong among them, claim, contrary to natural class nominalists, that natural classes are analysable. Natural classes of particulars, claim the realists, can be analysed in terms of particulars having universals in common. But for the realist, there are also natural classes of universals. And if the realist's claim that natural classes are analysable is a general claim about natural classes, then the realist must also provide an analysis of natural classes of universals. For Armstrong, the unity (or naturalness) of a natural class of universals is analysed in terms of universals resembling each other. I argue that Armstrong's account fails. His account fails for the same reason all other resemblance accounts of natural classes fail: some arbitrary classes satisfy the analysis for natural classes.

THE ESCHATOLOGICAL CHARACTER OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF GOD

AbstractIn this essay, I show how Thomas Aquinas circumscribes epistemological questions concerning both the possibility and character of our knowledge of God within a larger eschatological framework that acknowledges the beatific vision as the ultimate good that we desire as well as the ultimate end for which we were created. Thus, knowledge of God is possible and actual on Aquinas's view because it is eternally rather than merely temporally indexed—that is, properly attributable to the blessed in heaven and only derivatively attributable to persons of faith. I further argue that interpreting Aquinas's account of faith in the light of his account of the beatific vision allows us to carve out polemical space for the theologically realist claim that there can be and in fact is objectivity in our knowledge of God, whether that knowledge comes through faith (in this life) or the beatific vision (in the next life).

International economic institutions: Formal mechanisms for dealing with resource conflict

States employ international economic institutions as formal mechanisms in resource related conflict management. It is little known that states incorporate water resource management treaties in regional trade agreements (REIs) to jointly manage (1) the multifaceted use of rivers and (2) the territorial implications of rivers as borders. Both can lead to political tensions. I evaluate institutional effectiveness, through REI institutional design, in militarized interstate conflict. The role of trade institutions in geo-politics is a broad theme addressed. African dyads, REIs and conflict from 1950 to 1996 are the focus. I test the liberal hypothesis that institutions diminish the likelihood of militarized interstate conflict. Findings suggest allies that share memberships in REI water treaties with provisions for territorial boundary issues are more likely to fight than are other states. This relationship is weak, however, lending support to realist claims.

The logic of scientific discovery in critical realist social scientific research

Critical realism claims to bring a significant improvement to social science, especially in comparison with empiricist and interpretive approaches. So far, however, it has fallen short of the high expectations it raises. Critical realist arguments are convincing on the philosophical or meta-theoretical level but the contributions of critical realism to social science in terms of research activities at the field level are less clear. Nonetheless, there is no way back. Moving forward requires that the practice of doing social scientific research be no longer perceived as limited to the justification of specific knowledge claims but must be seen as an integral part of the cycle of scientific discovery.

The Logic of Scientific Discovery in Critical Realist Social Scientific Research

Critical realism claims to bring a significant improvement to social science, especially in comparison with empiricist and interpretive approaches. So far, however, it has fallen short of the high expectations it raises. Critical realist arguments are convincing on the philosophical or meta-theoretical level but the contributions of critical realism to social science in terms of research activities at the field level are less clear. Nonetheless, there is no way back. Moving forward requires that the practice of doing social scientific research be no longer perceived as limited to the justification of specific knowledge claims but must be seen as an integral part of the cycle of scientific discovery.

Conspiracy theory and the critical enterprise

This paper explores the argumentative work undertaken in talk and text about conspiracy theory (CT), relating this to recent scholarly debate regarding the significance of critical inquiry in the context of developments in poststructuralist and postmodern social theory. We examine discussion of CT as a site where the transformation between deconstructive, depth analytic critique and its opposite, realist claims takes place. Meta-theoretical formulations attempting to accommodate both such argumentative gestures in a coherent program for the pursuit of dialogue are shown to be inconsistent with the nature of argumentation as an undertaking to resolve ambiguity in accounts. The sharing of concerns on which agreement is to be founded are the outcome, rather than the basis, of dialogue, even if such an encounter is pursued on the grounds of shared presupposition distinct from the shared concerns which emerge from dialogue. Discussion concerning CT is a site where the formulation of motivation is made to bear on the question of an argument’s validity in virtue of either depth analytic or realist assumptions.

Ontological and Epistemic Claims of Realism and Instrumentalism.

Ontological and Epistemic Claims of Realism and Instrumentalism.

Adequacy Conditions for Counterpart Theory

David Lewis's modal realism claims that nothing can exist in more than one world or time, and that statements about how something would have been are to be analysed in terms of its counterpart. I first explain why the counterpart relation depends on de re modal statements in an intensional language, so that intuitive properties of similarity relations cannot be used to show that the counterpart relation is not an equivalence relation. I then look at test sentences in (the intensional) natural language, and show that none of them provide compelling evidence that a counterpart semantics is needed.

Reliable Partners: How Democracies Have Made a Separate Peace

Democracies often go to war but almost never against each other. Indeed, democratic has become a catchphrase among scholars and even U.S. Presidents. But why do democracies avoid fighting each other? Reliable Partners offers the first systematic and definitive explanation. Examining decades of research and speculation on the subject and testing this against the history of relations between democracies over the last two centuries, Charles Lipson concludes that constitutional democracies have a contracting advantage - a unique ability to settle conflicts with each other by durable agreements. In so doing, he forcefully counters realist claims that a regime's character is irrelevant to war and peace. Lipson argues that because democracies are confident their bargains will stick, they can negotiate effective settlements with each other rather than incur the great costs of war. Why are democracies more reliable partners? Because their politics are uniquely open to outside scrutiny and facilitate long-term commitments, they cannot easily bluff, deceive, or launch surprise attacks. While this transparency weakens their bargaining position, it also makes their promises more credible - and more durable, for democracies are generally stable. Their leaders are constrained by constitutional rules, independent officials, and the political costs of abandoning public commitments. All this allows for solid bargains between democracies. When democracies contemplate breaking their agreements, their open debate gives partners advance notice and a chance to protect themselves. Hence, agreements among democracies are less risky than those with nondemocratic states. Setting rigorous analysis in friendly, vigorous prose, Reliable Partners resolves longstanding questions about the democratic peace and highlights important new findings about democracies in world politics, from rivalries to alliances. Above all, it shows conclusively that democracies are uniquely adapted to seal enduring bargains with each other and thus avoid the blight of war.

Empirisme, Postmodernisme en Godsdienstwijsbegeerte De postmoderne kritiek op het empiristische denken en de consequenties voor de godsdienstwijsbegeerte*Ik dank Luco van den Brom voor zijn commentaar op een eerdere versie van dit artikel (ter gelegenheid van zijn ‘response paper’ op de lezing die ik voor de Nederlandse Vereniging voor de Godsdienstwijsbegeerte in juni 2000 heb gehouden). Verder dank ik Marcel Sarot,

In section 1 of this article, it is stated that an empiricist frame of reference limits the possibilities of theorising in religion in counterproductive ways. Empiricism has resulted in an ‘obsession with experience’ which philosophers of religion, such as Alston, overlook to the detriment of their own theorising. In section 2, the postmodernist (R. Rorty’s) criticism of empiricism and of realism is discussed. In section 3, an alternative to Rorty is suggested which shares his criticism of empiricism but provides the resources to accommodate stronger realist claims, viz. a coherentist holism (thesis 2). It is argued that such a holistic version of realism can accommodate the strong features of postmodernism, e.g. its criticism of empiricism, while being capable of avoiding its shortcomings, e.g. its antirealism.

Legal Realism and the Canonss Revival

In the middle of the twentieth century, legal realist Karl Llewellyn largely persuaded the legal community that the canons of construction are indeterminate, and judges use them to justify reasoning by other means. Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, the canons enjoyed a strong revival, both with the federal judiciary and across a surprisingly broad range of legal academies. This essay offers a hypothesis about the canons’ revival. Llewellyn is justly regarded as a lion of the realist movement, and his critique of the canons is one of the most influential realist works of the last century. But the early success of his critique may, in fact, relate to the declining post-World War II fortunes of legal realism in statutory interpretation theory. In the same period in which he made his critique of the canons, most judges and legal scholars came to the view judges could meaningfully resolve textual ambiguity by consulting the legislature's intent or purpose, to be derived in no small part from legislative history. Conversely, the impact of Llewellyn’s critique of the canons impact began to wane in the 1980s, when influential textualist and pragmatist scholars revived (for quite different reasons) broader realist claims about the inaccessibility and unreliability of legislative intent or purpose as organizing principles in statutory construction. In economists' terms, canons of construction and intent or purpose may be substitutes, rather than complements, in determining statutory meaning. On that view, the canons' revival may simply be the flip side of the growing perception that the early realists were correct in arguing that it is hard to get inside “Congress's mind.” The essay elaborates on this point and then briefly suggests preliminary implications of this conclusion.

International Distributive Justice

The literature on global justice contains a number of distinct approaches. This article identifies and reviews recent work in four commonly found in the literature. First there is an examination of the cosmopolitan contention that distributive principles apply globally. This is followed by three responses to the cosmopolitanism, – the nationalist emphasis on special duties to co-nationals, the society of states claim that principles of global distributive justice violate the independence of states and the realist claim that global justice is utopian and that states should advance national interest.

'Courage Not Under Fire': Realism, Anti-realism, and the Epistemological Virtues

This article offers a critical perspective on two lines of thought in recent epistemology and philosophy of science, namely Michael Dummett?s anti-realist approach to issues of truth, meaning, and knowledge and Bas van Fraassen?s influential programme of ?constructive empiricism?. While not denying the salient differences between them (the one a metaphysical doctrine premised on logicolinguistic considerations, the other a thesis primarily concerned with the scope and limits of empirical inquiry) it shows how they converge on a sceptical outlook concerning the realist claim that truth might always transcend the restrictions of some given (or indeed some future best-possible) state of knowledge. The author puts the case that such sceptical arguments, if followed through consistently, must involve giving up all claim to account for our knowledge of the growth of scientific knowledge. He also takes issue with Dummett?s idea of truth as nothing more than a matter of ?warranted assertibility? and with van Fraassen?s likewise verificationist conception of empirical warrant as the most we can have by way of epistemic justification. Thus it is wrong to suppose that the realist is merely indulging in a display of ?courage not under fire? when she assumes ontological commitments in excess of the observational data. This disavowal of realism in favour of a theory which ?saves the (empirical) appearances? has a less-than-distinguished prehistory in the range of compromise strategies adopted by upholders of a dominant metaphysics or world-view, starting out with the orthodox Catholic attempt to defuse the implications of the heliocentric hypothesis advanced by Copernicus and Galileo. Such theological motives are nowadays not so prominent although ? it is suggested ? they do emerge at certain points in Dummett?s writing. More constructively, this article presents a case for objectivism with regard to scientific truth and also for inference to the best causal explanation ? on both the micro- and the macrophysical scale ? as the only approach with an adequate claim to make sense of the history of advancements in scientific knowledge to date.

Start the Evolution without Us

In his provocative article Bringing in Darwin: Evolutionary Theory, Realism, and International Politics, Bradley Thayer appropriates arguments from sociobiology to provide a basis for realist international relations theory, and in so doing he follows a recent trend in the social sciences.1 Thayer's argument is straightforward. First, traditional realist microfoundations are dependent on unacceptably metaphysical or theological assumptions about human nature (pp. 126-130). Second, findings in sociobiology about human nature provide transhistorical, universal, and sufficiently robust foundations for realist claims about international politics (pp. 131-138). We welcome Thayer's contribution to this debate, but we dispute both his specific formulation of sociobiology and the general project of explaining political phenomenon through biological theories. First, we disagree that evolutionary theory offers a widely accepted explanation of human behavior (p. 138). Instead, we argue that sociobiology remains the object of considerable and ethical controversy, and that sociobiological approaches contain numerous methodological flaws. Second, we contend that even if sociobiology could overcome its inherent limitations, the microfoundations that a sociobiologically informed theory of international politics produces are indeterminate and contradictory. For this reason, sociobiological microfoundations provide no additional analytical leverage in explaining and understanding international politics. Finally, we contend that current microfoundations in the social sciences, including structural realist and rational actor approaches, can be just as scientific from the perspective of philosophy of science without importing sociobio-

Coping with Things-in-themselves: A Practice-Based Phenomenological Argument for Realism

Against Davidsonian (or deflationary) realism, it is argued that it is coherent to believe that science can in principle give us access to the functional components of the universe as they are in themselves in distinction from how they appear to us on the basis of our quotidian concerns or sensory capacities. The first section presents the deflationary realist's argument against independence. The second section then shows that, although Heidegger pioneered the deflationary realist account of the everyday, he sought to establish a robust realist account of science. Next, the third section develops two different sides of Heidegger's thinking. Resources developed by Thomas Kuhn are drawn on to work out Heidegger's account of plural worlds. This argument shows that it makes sense to talk about things-in-themselves independent of our practices, but falls short of the robust realist claim that we can have access to things as they are in themselves independent of our practices. So, secondly, Saul Kripke's account of rigid designation is drawn on to work out Heidegger's account of formal designation. On the basis of a Heideggerian elaboration of rigid designation, it is argued that we do indeed have practices for achieving access to things independent of all our practices. But this second argument leaves us unable to reject metaphysical nominalism. So, thirdly, it is proposed that the currently most persuasive philosophical argument for nominalism depends on a logico-mathematical space of possibilities. But the proto-theoretical space opened by the pre-scientific access practices has features that provide reasons for believing that the independent stuff to which we have access has a determinate structure and specific causal powers.

The Structure of the Chinese Language and Ontological Insights: A Collective-Noun Hypothesis

In this essay, through a comparative case analysis regarding the Chinese language, I will discuss how the structure and functions of a natural language would bear upon the ways in which some philosophical problems are posed and some ontological insights are shaped. In doing this, I suggest and argue for a mereological collectivenoun hypothesis about the denotational semantics of Chinese nouns. My discussion begins with a puzzle: why has the classical Platonic one-many problem in the Western philosophical tradition not been consciously posed in the Chinese philosophical tradition, and why, generally speaking, do classical Chinese philosophers seem less interested in debating the relevant ontological issues? Before I move on, let me give a specification of the Platonic one-many problem. This problem begins with the following observation: objects around us share features with other objects, and many particular individuals-say, horses-bear the same name 'horse'. The Platonic one-many problem presupposes that there is one single universal entity that is common or strictly identical across all these particular concrete horses and by virtue of which many individual horses bear the same name 'horse';' the single universal entity is labeled 'horseness'.2 The Platonic one-many problem is how to characterize the status of universals and the ways by which particulars share universals. Under the aforementioned presupposition, there is the debate among Platonic realism, other versions of realism, and conceptualism; for example, Platonic realism claims that single universal entities are universal properties shared or instantiated by, but are separated from, particulars, while conceptualism insists that single universal entities are universal concepts (mental representations) shared by the mind. In the Western philosophical tradition, nominalism appears as a challenge to the very presupposition of the Platonic one-many problem: there are no universals except for general words like 'horse' and 'dog'. The debate between Platonic realism and nominalism is thus metaphilosophical. One suspects that the structures and uses of different languages might play their roles in pushing philosophical theorization in different directions; the ways of speaking and writing of the Chinese language might reveal and reflect Chinese folk ideology and then influence the ways in which certain philosophical questions are posed and certain ontological insights are formed. This issue is significant because it

Ontology According to van Fraassen: Some Problems with Constructive Empiricism

This paper argues the case for ontological realism as against various present‐day forms of conventionalist, instrumentalist, cultural‐relativist, or anti‐realist doctrine. In particular it takes issue with Richard Rorty’s writings on philosophy of science – where these ideas receive their most extreme and provocative statement – and with Bas van Fraassen’s more moderate ‘constructive empiricist’ approach. This latter entails ontological commitment to whatever shows up through trained observation or empirical research. However, it refuses to countenance realist claims concerning the existence of (as yet) unobserved entities and their role in explanatory theories premised on putative laws of nature. I maintain that van Fraassen’s position is: (1) inadequate to account for our knowledge of the growth of scientific knowledge; (2) self‐refuting since often undermined by examples which he himself supplies; and (3) incapable of mounting resistance to other, more wholesale (e.g., Rortian) varieties of anti‐realist argument. Only by combining causal realism with a principle of inference to the best explanation can philosophy of science avoid these kinds of hyperinduced sceptical doubt.

Environmental Values, Anthropocentrism and Speciesism

Ethical reasoning of all types is anthropocentric, in that it is addressed to agents, but anthropocentric starting points vary in the preference they accord the human species. Realist claims about environmental values, utilitarian reasoning and rights-based reasoning all have difficulties in according ethical concern to certain all aspects of natural world. Obligation-based reasoning can provide quite strong if incomplete reasons to protect the natural world, including individual non-human animals. Although it cannot establish all the conclusions to which anti-speciesists aspire, it may establish many of them with some clarity.

Environmental Values, Anthropocentrism and Speciesism

Ethical reasoning of all types is anthropocentric, in that it is addressed to agents, but anthropocentric starting points vary in the preference they accord the human species. Realist claims about environmental values, utilitarian reasoning and rights-based reasoning all have difficulties in according ethical concern to certain all aspects of natural world. Obligation-based reasoning can provide quite strong if incomplete reasons to protect the natural world, including individual non-human animals. Although it cannot establish all the conclusions to which anti-speciesists aspire, it may establish many of them with some clarity.

The prepared mind: Marie Nyswander, methadone maintenance, and the metabolic theory of addiction

Marie Nyswander was the co-discoverer of methadone maintenance. In the 1960s she and Vincent Dole carried out clinical trials and established the first officially sanctioned methadone clinics, which became models for maintenance programs throughout the world. In 1967 she and Dole theorized that heroin addicts had undergone a permanent metabolic change. They needed narcotics in a visceral way, which explained why abstinence was not a realistic goal-a claim that remains hotly disputed. Nyswander's work in the 1960s marked an abrupt shift in her thinking about addiction. Her previous approach had been centered on psychoanalysis. Her embrace of methadone maintenance and the metabolic theory amounted to an intellectual conversion. Nyswander was prepared for that conversion by years of patient relapse; she was frustrated with orthodox therapy. At the same time the success of such drugs as chlorpromazine suggested that psychiatric disorders might yield more readily to chemotherapy than talking therapy. Her own heavy smoking may have led her to question whether addiction was a psychiatric disorder in the first place. Finally, Nyswander had a long history of self-reinvention, having previously changed her politics, her medical specialty, and even her name. She was temperamentally suited for a conversion experience.