Rival Theories Research Articles

El problema de la elección de teorías revisitado: Popper-Kuhn-Laudan

En este artículo se expone de manera sintética las soluciones que Popper, Kuhn y Laudan ofrecen al problema de la elección de teorías, es decir, la cuestión acerca de los criterios utilizados para determinar de entre dos o más teorías en competencia, cuál es la mejor. La falsación popperiana, el cambio de paradigma o la capacidad para solucionar problemas son los tres aspectos que se consideran a partir de estos autores. Una de las conclusiones que se extraen consiste en señalar los puntos de contacto de estas propuestas, la más importante es el abordaje a través de la historia de la ciencia que hacen estos autores del problema planteado.

Bundle Theory’s Black Box: Gap Challenges for the Bundle Theory of Substance

My aim in this article is to contribute to the larger project of assessing the relative merits of different theories of substance. An important preliminary step in this project is assessing the explanatory resources of one main theory of substance, the so-called bundle theory. This article works towards such an assessment. I identify and explain three distinct explanatory challenges an adequate bundle theory must meet. Each points to a putative explanatory gap, so I call them the Gap Challenges. I consider three bundle-theoretic strategies for meeting these challenges. I argue that none of them goes very far. The upshot is that, absent other strategies for meeting the challenges, bundle theory involves a significant amount of stipulation. This black box makes bundle theory relatively weak with respect to its explanatory power—unless, of course, rival theories of substance are unable to do better.

Out of the Margins: Re-Theorizing the Role of the Informal Economy in Ukraine

The recognition that many inhabitants across the world rely on the informal economy for their livelihood has led to a refutation that this sphere is a leftover from pre-capitalism and the advent of a range of competing theorizations of the informal economy as either reinforcing the disparities produced by the formal economy, a chosen alternative to the formal economy or an involuntary survival practice for those decanted from the formal economy. To evaluate critically these rival theories, a study of the informal sector in four localities in Ukraine is reported. Finding that this is an involuntary survival practice but one that is ubiquitous, rather than confined to the marginalized, and is just as commonly used as the formal sector as a coping practice, the outcome is a call to bring the informal economy out of the margins and more centre-stage in future analyses of East-Central European economies.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb's Institutional Theory of Labor Markets and Wage Determination

Sydney and Beatrice Webb were among the most influential institutional labor economists of the pre‐World War II period yet this portion of their work has fallen out of sight for more than a half‐century. This paper reconstructs the Webbs' theory of labor markets and wage determination and explains how it differs from the rival neoclassical labor theory of Alfred Marshall. Key institutional components of their theory are developed, such as rent theory, institutional pyramid, chain of bargains, inequality of bargaining power, unemployed residuum, and common rule. The Webbs' theory is then used to explain the operation of labor markets and why in the absence of regulation they generate numerous social problems, including widespread poverty wages, excessive work hours and injuries, substantial unemployment, and human capital exploitation. Also described is the set of labor policies the Webbs advocate to solve these problems. Implications for modern labor theory and policy are developed.

Book Review: Security and the Environment: Securitisation Theory and US Environmental Security Policy by Rita Floyd

Security and the Environment: Securitisation Theory and US Environmental Security Policy by Rita Floyd. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 230. $99 (Hardback). ISBN: 9780521197564[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http: //www, trans formativestudies. ors ©2013 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved. JThe aim of the book Security and the Environment: Securitisation Theory and US Environmental Security Policy is to devise a stronger and even more compelling securitization theory. This book proposes a revision of the Copenhagen School's influential securitisation theory that both allows insights into the intentions of securitising actors and enables the moral evaluation of securitization and desecuritisation in the environmental sector of security. Securitisation theory holds that in international relations, an issue becomes a matter of emergency politics/a security issue not because something constitutes an objective threat to the state or to some other entity, but rather because a powerful securitising actor argues that something constitutes an existential threat to some object that needs to be dealt with immediately if the object is to survive.The idea that security is a self-referential practice is not only the essence of securitisation theory; it is also the secret of the theory's popularity and its explanatory potency. More readily than rival security theories, it allows the security analyst to account for the essentially contested nature of security where one and the same concept may mean entirely different, and even opposing, things. Yet although this is a clear, strong point on the part of securitisation theory, the Copenhagen School's preoccupation with it two major shortcomings. According to Floyd, a Fellow at the Institute for Environmental Security and British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, the securitisation analyst studies who can securitise on what issues, under what conditions, and with what effects, whilst questions beyond the practice of security, such as those concerning the intentions of securitising actors (e.g. 'why do actors securitise?'), are ignored.And also, the idea that security is a self-referential practice allows no conceptual room for the theorising of what really is a security issue, nor for what ought to be securitised. Under the Copenhagen School's theoretical framework, the security analyst and the securitising actor are 'functionally distinct' entities with the security analyst in no position to assume the role of the securitising actor at any point of the analysis. This, however, does not mean that the Copenhagen School feels 'obliged to agree' with any given securitisation. On the contrary, the school holds strong views about the value of both securitization and also of desecuritisation. They argue that, in all but a few circumstances, securitisations are morally wrong, whereas desecuritisations are morally right. Notably, they arrive at these conclusions by way of what they take to be the effects or consequences of either action.In the case of securitisation, they take the consequences to be dedemocratisation, depoliticisation, the security dilemma and conflict. In the case of desecuritisation, they expect politicisation, understood as a general opening up of debate. Although it is not the securitization analyst's aim to bring about desecuritisation, the securitisation analyst is potentially able, by providing insights into the effects of securitisation, to reduce both the scale and number of escalations and security dilemmas found in the world. The Copenhagen School anticipates that the securitisation analyst will arrive at the very same conclusions regarding the outcomes of securitisation and desecuritisation.This book, by use of the example of the environmental sector of security, shows that securitisations are not categorically morally wrong, but, rather, that depending on the beneficiary of environmental security policies, securitisation can be morally permissible. …

Children’s Rights and Theories of Rights

This essay revisits themes touched upon in an influential debate on the nature of rights between two of the leading jurists of the past century – H. L. A. Hart and Neil MacCormick. Consideration is given to how MacCormick uses children’s rights as a basis for a critique of Hart’s version of the will theory of rights towards support of MacCormick’s version of the rival interest theory of rights. While MacCormick argues, in some respects persuasively, that children’s rights and ‘rights’ apparently grounded in the criminal law present significant challenges to Hart’s version of the will theory of rights, these challenges – including the notion that Hartian will theory, in a sense, ‘disenfranchises’ children – are shown to have less force in the light of careful reassessment. It is also maintained that MacCormick’s version of the interest theory is itself significantly challenged by difficulties, including possible conflicts of interest, inherent in practical mechanisms – such as those enabling adult representatives to act on behalf of children – which the law provides to ensure that children’s rights may be properly exercised.

The Health of Undocumented Mexicans in New York City

In partnership with the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies, andin collaboration with diverse institutions and individuals, the Centerfor Community Problem Solving completed a study of the health of 431 undocumented Mexicans in New York City. Informed by a robustly democratic rebellious vision of problem solving and by adecidedly unorthodox rival theory of undocumented Mexican migra- tion, the study reveals patterns that, if fortified by further investigation, might well change how we think about the health of undocumented Mexicans, how we allocate resources, and how we target interventions. In this Article, Professor Gerald P. López analyzes how this study – more accurately, the effort of which the study is a part – aims at once to close two gaps: the gap between what we now know and what we might learn about the health of undocumented Mexicans in New York City, and the gap between what we typically do now through our practices and what we might do through a rebellious vision of problem solving.

A Dynamic Defense of Cooperative Federalism

The battle over federalism theory has yet to yield a victor. It is safe to say that dual federalism is dead, but recent commentators, particularly Robert Schapiro, have promulgated shiny new theories of federalism to take its place. What the current literature lacks is a concise, useful comparison of the rival theories. This Article compares the three major competing families of federalism theory: dual, cooperative, and dynamic. Adopting Schapiro’s normative framework, I analyze these three models in light of their instrumental utility. The assessment leads to a surprising and ironic conclusion: Schapiro’s polyphonic theory fails under his very own analytic rubric. Cooperative federalism, by contrast, outshines its competitors in two ways. First, within a framework of shared regulatory sovereignty, cooperative federalism optimally distributes segments of legislative authority by allowing the national government to enunciate broad, first-order norms and allowing the states to craft complementary regulations within those boundaries. Second, recent work in cooperative federalism shows that it can step outside the obsolete realm of sovereignty tug-of-war. In this way, cooperative federalism empowers states to realize their policy goals even in the absence of strict regulatory autonomy.

Four-Dimensionalist Theories of Persistence

I demonstrate that the theory of persistence defended in Sider [2001] does not accommodate our intuitions about counting sentences. I develop two theories that improve on Sider's: a contextualist theory and an error theory. I argue that the latter is stronger, simpler, and better fitted to some important ordinary language judgments than rival four-dimensionalist theories of persistence.

How much ambiguity aversion?

Experimental results on the Ellsberg paradox typically reveal behavior that is commonly interpreted as ambiguity aversion. The experiments reported in the current paper find the objective probabilities for drawing a red ball that make subjects indifferent between various risky and uncertain Ellsberg bets. They allow us to examine the predictive power of alternative principles of choice under uncertainty, including the objective maximin and Hurwicz criteria, the sure-thing principle, and the principle of insufficient reason. Contrary to our expectations, the principle of insufficient reason performed substantially better than rival theories in our experiment, with ambiguity aversion appearing only as a secondary phenomenon.

The Musical Expression of Emotion: Metaphorical-As versus Imaginative-As Perception

The paper begins with an overview of various well-known accounts of the musical expression of emotion that have been proposed in recent years. But rather than proceeding to assess the merits and faults of these accounts the paper examines whether a radically new theory by Christopher Peacocke is superior to all of them. The theory, which certainly has a number of attractive features, is based on the idea of metaphorical-as perception. The notion of metaphorical-as perception needs to be elucidated and the examination of Peacocke’s theory takes place by playing it off against a rival theory that is based on a different kind of perception, imaginative-as perception. The paper argues that, as the basis of an account of the musical expression of emotion, imaginative-as perception has all the advantages and none of the apparent defects of metaphorical-as perception.

Testing theories of party competition

In this article, we test rival theories of party competition. Previous research predicting party policy positions is limited to a small (and arguably biased) sample of countries. Using new data from the 2008 Austrian National Election Study, we test the proximity and directional model of voting, Grofman’s discounting model and Kedar’s compensational model of voting. We find that Grofman’s discounting model performs best predicting party policy positions. Yet, not all party policy positions are predicted equally well. The most obvious misrepresentation is that the rightist FPÖ is placed close to the centre of the policy space. This centripetal bias, which has also been found in earlier work, may result from simplifying assumptions of the algorithm used to derive Nash equilibria of party policy positions that need to be challenged. Our findings emphasize the necessity to test models of party competition using new data and to motivate further research explaining party position-taking.

Patriot and Prophet: John Dube's 1936 Biography of the South African Churchman Isaiah Shembe

In 1936, Zulu patriot, John Dube, wrote a biography of local Natal prophet, Isaiah Shembe. Dube's biography – ‘UShembe’ – contained multiple authorial voices. Partly written by Dube, material was also contributed by Shembe and his followers. This collaborative literary method illuminates how rival theories of civic virtue interacted in early twentieth-century South Africa.

Each Man For Himself? Rival Theories of Alliance Economics in The Early State System

When military alliances are expensive, they naturally raise distributional issues. This article considers two theories to explain how much a state will voluntarily contribute to the economic burdens of defense. Empirical work has relied largely on data from the twentieth century. This article provides an out-of-sample test to evaluate the models. Using data on the Quintuple Alliance, the results are more consistent with the predictions of the joint products model than the pure public goods model. Due to credible commitment problems, and intra-alliance cleavages, I argue that we should not expect substantial free riding in most conventional military alliances.

Unravelling the sources of adolescent substance use: A test of rival theories

Unravelling the sources of adolescent substance use: A test of rival theories

On the “tension” inherent in self-deception

Alfred Mele's deflationary account of self-deception has frequently been criticised for being unable to explain the “tension” inherent in self-deception. These critics maintain that rival theories can better account for this tension, such as theories which suppose self-deceivers to have contradictory beliefs. However, there are two ways in which the tension idea has been understood. In this article, it is argued that on one such understanding, Mele's deflationism can account for this tension better than its rivals, but only if we reconceptualize the self-deceiver's attitude in terms of unwarranted degrees of conviction rather than unwarranted belief. This new way of viewing the self-deceiver's attitude will be informed by observations on experimental work done on the biasing influence of desire on belief, which suggests that self-deceivers don’t manage to fully convince themselves of what they want to be true. On another way in which this tension has been understood, this account would not manage so well, since on this understanding the self-deceiver is best interpreted as knowing, but wishing to avoid, the truth. However, it is argued that we are under no obligation to account for this since it is a characteristic of a different phenomenon than self-deception, namely, escapism.

Data, problems, heuristics and results in cognitive metaphor research

Cognitive metaphor research is characterized by the diversity of rival theories. Starting from this observation, the paper focuses on the problem of how the unity and diversity of cognitive theories of metaphor can be accounted for. The first part of the paper outlines a suitable metascientific approach which emerges as a modification of B. von Eckardt’s notion of research framework. In the second part, by the help of this approach, some aspects of the sophisticated relationship between Lakoff and Johnson’s, Glucksberg’s, and Gentner’s theories are discussed. The main finding is that the data, the problems, the heuristics and the hypotheses which have been partly shaped by the rivals contribute to the development of the particular theories to a considerable extent.

Defining Investment Under the ICSID Convention and BITs: Of Ordinary Meaning, Telos, and Beyond

A number of commentators, including Michael Hwang and Jennifer Fong who were featured in a recent issue of this journal,1 have contributed to an ongoing debate about the definition of investment by expressing their support for an objectivist theory or the “outer limits” approach as advocated inSalini v. Morocco.However, this article argues that neither theSalinitest nor the rival subjectivist theory can offer an internally consistent and viable legal framework for determining the existence of an investment. After critically examining existing approaches to defining investments in arbitral practice, international investment treaties, European Union (EU) law, and international trade law, the article considers the role of ordinary and effective interpretation and a telos behind investment treaty instruments in coining a meaningful definition.

Tracing the Progress of Process Tracing

Building on a Lakatosian approach that sees Social Science as an endeavour that confronts rival theories with systematic empirical observations, this article responds to probing questions that have been raised about the appropriate ways in which to conduct systematic process analysis and comparative enquiry. It explores varieties of process tracing, the role of interpretation in case studies, and the relationship between process tracing and comparative historical analysis.

How the European Legal System Works: Override, Non-Compliance, and Majoritarian Activism in International Regimes

A striking feature of European integration and governance over the past fifty years has been the crucial role played by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The ECJ is a Trustee court, rather than a simple Agent of the Member States, with the power to determine the scope of its own authority. In a recent paper, Carrubba et al., having examined the ECJ rulings on some 3,176 legal questions rendered over an 11-year period, claim that the decision-making of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has been constrained - systematically - by the threat of override on the part of Member State Governments, acting collectively, and the threat of non-compliance on the part of any single State. They also purport to have found strong evidence in favor of Intergovernmentalist, but not Neofunctionalist, integration theory. We undertake original analysis of the same data. We conclusively demonstrate that the threat of override is not credible, and that the legal system is activated, rather than paralyzed, by noncompliance. We also explore what happened when MSG sought to override the Court - they failed - and organize a contest between the rival theories. In a head-to-head showdown, Neofunctionalism wins in a landslide. Finally, the analysis provides statistical support for the view that the ECJ engages in majoritarian activism. When Member States urge the Court to censor a defendant State for noncompliance, the ECJ tends to do so. The conclusion draws out implications of our findings for research on the two other international regimes that exhibit effective judicial review: the World Trade Organization and the European Convention on Human Rights.A revised and shorter version of this paper has been accepted for publication in the American Political Science Review.