Role Of Facts Research Articles

Rawls and Cohen on Facts and Principles

G. A. Cohen has recently argued for a thesis about the relationship between facts and principles. He claims that Rawls denies this thesis, and the truth of this thesis vitiates Rawls's constructivist procedure. I argue against both claims by developing an account of Rawls's justificatory strategy and the role of facts in this strategy, which I claim is similar to the role of facts in some defences of utilitarianism.

The Fact of a Rumor: Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds

This essay joins recent scholarship on the epistemology of realist fiction by investigating the role of facts in the creation of fiction. Close scrutiny of Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds (1872) reveals several different processes of fact-making: legal ones as well as nonlegal communal endeavors such as rumor, gossip, and the regulation of propriety. The neat division whereby legal facts belong to the realm of the empirical and the facts of rumor belong to the communal does not hold in the novel, however: underneath the surface of almost any empirical and legal fact are traces and residues of a communal endeavor. The instability of facts and fact-making in the novel prompts a reconsideration of the epistemology of realist form and of novelistic probability: just how are fictional facts determined? Building on Irene Tucker's understanding of probability as a self-conscious reflection of the empirical, the essay argues that the ostensibly empirical epistemology of fictional probability is also a communal one. Moreover, the secular empirical rules of realism are not as stable—or empirical—as we have come to understand them. In the legal realm, this epistemological reconsideration shows how literary realism has drawn on the law not only to ground its famously empirical discourse but also to anchor novelistic truth in a communal endeavor. The Eustace Diamonds thus problematizes not only the production of fact in the novel but also the empiricist, positive-law tradition from which this concept emerged.

‘Laying a foundation of fact’: Fabianism and the information society thesis

This article explores affinities between postindustrialism and modes of thinking characteristic of the Fabian Society, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. In the hands of Daniel Bell and others, the information society thesis postulates the coming of a postindustrial society marked by the centrality of information and knowledge. While caveats abound in Bell's version, the thesis has been generally optimistic in outlook, portraying postindustrial society as an advanced level of social development. Interestingly, the Fabian Society, a British-based organization highly influential in the twentieth-century project of social democracy, also emphasized information in its advocacy of social progress: ‘laying a foundation of fact’, according to one commentator, was a key ingredient of the Fabian approach. Texts by thinkers such as Sidney Webb and H.G. Wells suggest that ‘informationalism’, a commitment to information in an original sense of hard facts and figures, must indeed be construed as the essence of Fabianism, as that which distinguishes the Fabians from more metaphysical or emotional expressions of socialism. The article traces the link between information-powered politics and the largely successful practice of social engineering in Britain. However, social engineering can, and in the case of some Fabians did, degenerate into a technocratic and even totalitarian mindset. Critiques of Fabianism are therefore also acknowledged here, including those claiming that the Fabian preoccupation with data-gathering and filing, its ‘proceduralism’, actually constituted a major weakness. However, given its noble informational ideal, Fabianism can, the article concludes, illuminate contemporary information society problems. The Fabian tradition contains suggestive materials on such topical themes as fair access to information, the role of facts in progressive politics, and the prospects for an international institutional order.

Causes as events and facts

The paper defends the view that events are the basic relata of causation, against arguments based on linguistic analysis to the effect that only facts can play that role. According to those arguments, contexts let the meaning of the expressions embedded in them shift: even expressions possessing the linguistic form that usually designates an event take a factual meaning. However, defending events as fundamental relata of causation turns out to be possible only by attributing a - different - role to facts as well. The role of facts in causation is characterized as causal responsibility. This relation, and its connection to causation between events, is clarified by way of the analysis of different inference patterns between statements of the two sorts: statements linking events and statements linking facts.

Types of Witnesses

Types of Witnesses

The Royal Navy and the Capital Ship in the Interwar Period: An Operational Perspective

Joseph Moretz's innovative work focuses on what battleships actually did in the inter-war years and what its designed war role in fact was. In doing so, the book tells us much about British naval policy and planning of the time. Drawing heavily on official Admiralty records and private papers of leading officers, the author examines the navy's operational experience and the evolution of its tactical doctrine during the interwar period. He argues that operational experience, combined with assumptions about the nature of a future naval war, were more important in keeping the battleship afloat than conservatism in Navy.

FACT Relieves DSIF/NELF-Mediated Inhibition of Transcriptional Elongation and Reveals Functional Differences between P-TEFb and TFIIH

We report that the chromatin-specific transcription elongation factor FACT functions in conjunction with the RNA polymerase II CTD kinase P-TEFb to alleviate transcription inhibition by DSIF (DRB sensitivity-inducing factor) and NELF (negative elongation factor). We find that the kinase activity of TFIIH is dispensable for this activity, demonstrating that TFIIH-mediated CTD phosphorylation is not involved in the regulation of FACT and DSIF/NELF activities. Thus, we propose a novel transcriptional regulatory network in which DSIF/NELF inhibition of transcription is prevented by P-TEFb in cooperation with FACT. This study uncovers a novel role for FACT in the regulation of transcription on naked DNA that is independent of its activities on chromatin templates. In addition, this study reveals functional differences between P-TEFb and TFIIH in the regulation of transcription.

The Burdens of Qualified Immunity: Summary Judgment and the Role of Facts in Constitutional Tort Law

Individuals may file damages actions against public officials who violate their constitutional rights. The Supreme Court, however, has held that officials are entitled to qualified immunity from such actions if no reasonable official would have believed their conduct violated clearly established constitutional rights. This doctrine is largely driven by the goal of minimizing the social costs of constitutional tort litigation. This Article challenges the conventional understanding of qualified immunity, arguing that the Court has created an analytical paradox by promoting early pretrial resolution of qualified immunity claims on summary judgment, while simultaneously articulating the relevant legal directive as a reasonableness standard, which requires an inevitably fact-intensive inquiry. The Article argues that the confluence of this fact-based immunity standard and conventional summary judgment doctrine has burdened the federal courts and civil rights litigants in their comprehension and application of the doctrine in civil rights litigation. By disaggregating the distinct doctrinal components of qualified immunity and summary judgment, the Article illustrates how these two gatekeeping mechanisms create a confusing and self-contradictory doctrinal structure that makes pretrial resolution of immunity claims unlikely. Moreover, even where qualified immunity's factual nature does not entirely preclude summary resolution of constitutional tort claims, it substantially increases litigation costs, thus conflicting with the doctrine's central objective. The modest step of acknowledging qualified immunity's factual nature will lead to a clearer understanding of the doctrine and may promote a reconsideration of its benefits and burdens.

Speculation and Reality: The Role of Facts in Judicial Protection of Fundamental Rights

Speculation and Reality: The Role of Facts in Judicial Protection of Fundamental Rights

Planning and the play of power: Resource acquisition among criminal justice agencies

The article reports a portion of the findings of a national study of manpower planning in criminal justice. The study and its findings have been reported more fully elsewhere. The present article reexamines and reconsiders the data specifically with respect to public policymaking, the behavior of public organizations, and the role of fact and value in the allocation of government resources.

The Science of Aspects: The Changing Role of Fact in the Work of Coleridge, Ruskin, and Hopkins

The Science of Aspects: The Changing Role of Fact in the Work of Coleridge, Ruskin, and Hopkins

Shelley: A Critical Reading; S. T. Coleridge; Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age: Abstraction and Critical Theory; The Science of Aspects: the Changing Role of Fact in the Work of Coleridge, Ruskin and Hopkins; Poetry Towards Novel

Shelley: A Critical Reading; S. T. Coleridge; Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age: Abstraction and Critical Theory; The Science of Aspects: the Changing Role of Fact in the Work of Coleridge, Ruskin and Hopkins; Poetry Towards Novel

Learning: The Role of Facts and Generalizations

Previous articleNext article No AccessLearning: The Role of Facts and GeneralizationsRobert L. Buser and Gene E. RoozeRobert L. Buser Search for more articles by this author and Gene E. Rooze Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Elementary School Journal Volume 71, Number 3Dec., 1970 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/460623 Views: 3Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1970 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Md Abul Bashar, Yuefeng Li, Yan Shen, Mubarak Albathan Interpreting Discovered Patterns in Terms of Ontology Concepts, (Aug 2014): 432–437.https://doi.org/10.1109/WI-IAT.2014.67

Tape for Space

* RED TAPE has been one of the greatest hindrances to the U.S. space program, but without another kind of tape-the magnetic variety-space research would have ground to a halt years ago. During the first 20 minutes of a typical space shot, for example, three times as many 'words as there are in the entire Encyclopedia Britannica must be recorded on tape. Actually these are not words as such but their equivalent in digital bits, the language of electronic computers. The Library of Congress estimates that about 30 bits are the equivalent of an average English word. The first data from a pilotless flight was recorded by a much more austere system. In 1929, Dr. Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, built a small rocket in which he mounted a thermometer and a barometer. Facing the meterological data acquisition system, as it would probably be called today, was a camera. When the rocket had climbed to a height of 100 feet, the camera shutter was automatically tripped. Afterwards the rocket floated back to earth with its prize. Magnetic tape has given data handling a much more complicated rolein fact, it now has three roles. Briefly, they are monitoring the condition of the spacecraft, giving it operational instructions, and recording the information that it collects on its mission. As space missions have expanded since Goddard's pioneering experiments, new problems have cropped up, some of them almost unheard of only a few years ago. One problem, especially with longdistance flights, is that data must be sent back to earth slowly. Since the small power supplies permissible on space vehicles produce only small voltages for the playing back of data, transmissions from spacecraft must be kept to a very narrow band of frequencies. Otherwise the available power would be too diluted to do any good. The result of all this is that only so much data can be pushed through to earth in a given time. This is the reason Mariner 4's photos of Mars took only minutes to record but days to play back. These difficulties beset only one of magnetic tape's three jobs. Back on earth, where millions of dollars worth of electronic computers carry on twoway data-talks with their spacecraft, magnetic tape has had no such stumbling blocks. Development has gone on unfettered at a prodigious rate, and the United States' ribbon of tape grows longer, and longer, and longer.