Universal Claims Research Articles

Typological diversity in New Englishes

Recent research has aimed to integrate the investigation of vernacular universals in native English dialects with variation in postcolonial varieties of English and cross-linguistic typology (Chambers 2004; Kortmann 2004). This article assumes that any search for universals in bilingual varieties must include an assessment of the grammatical conditioning of features and a comparison with the relevant substrates. Comparing Indian English and Singapore English, I examine three proposed candidates for English universals (Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi 2004), all of which show some presence in the two varieties — past tense omission, over-extension of the progressive, and copula omission. Past tense omission is found to be genuinely similar in the two varieties and accounted for by typological parallels in the substrates, whereas progressive morphology use and copula omission are found to be divergent in the two varieties and accounted for by typological differences in the substrates. All three variable systems are explicable as substrate-superstrate interactions, tempering claims of universality in both distribution and explanation.

War Without End(s): Grounding the Discourse of `Global War'

This article seeks to explain the limits of critical discourses of `global war' and biopolitical framings of `global conflict' that have arisen in response to the globalization of security discourses in the post-Cold War era. The central theoretical insight offered is that `global war' should not be understood in the framework of contested struggles to reproduce and extend the power of regulatory control. `Global war' appears `unlimited' and unconstrained precisely because it lacks the instrumental, strategic framework of `war' understood as a political-military technique. For this reason, critical analytical framings of global conflict, which tend to rely on the `scaling up' of Michel Foucault's critique of biopolitics and upon Carl Schmitt's critique of universal claims to protect the `human', elide the specificity of the international today. Today's `wars of choice', fought under the banner of the `values' of humanitarian intervention or the `global war on terror', are distinguished precisely by the fact that they cannot be grasped as strategically framed political conflicts.

A new age in the history of philosophy

This article argues the following points. (1) It is necessary to affirm that all of humanity has always sought to address certain `core universal problems' that are present in all cultures. (2) The rational responses to these `core problems' first acquire the shape of mythical narratives. (3) The formulation of categorical philosophical discourses is a subsequent development in human rationality, which does not, however, negate all mythical narratives. These discourses arose in all the great urban neolithic cultures (even if only in initial form). (4) Modern European philosophy confused its economic, political and cultural domination, and the resulting crises in other philosophical traditions, with a Eurocentric universality claim, which must be questioned. (5) In any case there are formal universal aspects in which all regional philosophies can coincide, and which respond to the `core problems' at an abstract level. (6) All of this impels entry into a new age of inter-philosophical dialogue, respectful of differences and open to learning from the useful discoveries of other traditions. (7) A new philosophical project must be developed that is capable of going beyond Eurocentric philosophical modernity, by shaping a global trans- modern pluriverse, drawing upon the `discarded' (by modernity) own resources of peripheral, subaltern, postcolonial philosophies.

Middle-Ground Theorizing, Realism, and Objectivity in Psychology

Held's (2007) critical analysis of the ontological and epistemological positions of theoretical psychologists whom she labels “middle-ground theorists” is examined, and her own positions concerning realism, truth, and objectivity in psychology are considered. Several key misinterpretations and misunderstandings are identified in Held's account, and her own theoretical framework is judged to be untenable with respect to the phenomena of psychology. In particular, Held's equation of interpretation with subjectivist anti-objectivism, her commitment to discourse-independent, universal claims to truth with respect to psychological phenomena, and her failure to grasp the nature of constitutive relations between psychological phenomena and the sociocultural practices in which they are embedded cloud her interpretations of the theoretical perspectives she attacks. She is thus prevented from perceiving the impossibility of achieving the kind of de-contextualized, psychological objectivism she desires as a basis for psychological agency.

Personajes cómicos en la <i>Disciplina clericalis<i> y </i>El Conde Lucanor</i>

Los relatos ejemplares fueron un recurso de primera necesidad en la técnica sermonística medieval para lograr la asimilación de la lección edificante. Por otro lado, encubiertos por el lenguaje didáctico propio de una colección de exempla, presentan rasgos que pueden propiciar la risa. En este ensayo intento determinar ciertos motivos cómicos que (con pretensiones de universalidad) pueden servir como marco de referencia para descorrer el velo de la comicidad que existe en la literatura ejemplar de la Baja Edad Media.

"It Was My Dream That Screwed Up": The Relativity of Transcendence in On the Road

This paper interrogates Jack Kerouac's appropriation and transformation of a Thoreauvian-style transcendentalism by reading On the Road through Mikhail Bakhtin's discussion of the chronotope. Kerouac's chronotopic resistance to dominant visions of the United States brings with it a problematic identity politics, specifically in terms of the racialization of the representation of transcendent identity. Rather than a personal or specific failure of a particular author or text, this tension can be read as a portrayal of the inevitable failure of social critiques that are based on notions of finding an "authentic" identity in a transcendence beyond, and disconnected from, historical and personal contexts. In other words, On the Road can be seen as a portrayal of the problems of an American romantic notion of identity, which makes universal claims about the transcendental potential of the individual. On the Road thus points to a difficulty surrounding dominant US notions of the self-reliance of the individual per se. À la lecture de On the Road par le truchement de la discussion de Mikhail Bakhtin sur le chronotope, le présent article s'interroge sur l'appropriation et la transformation par Jack Kerouac d'un transcendantalisme dans le style de Thoreau. La résistance chronotopique de Kerouac aux visions dominantes desÉtats-Unis comporte une politique identitaire problématique, plus particulièrement en termes de racialisation de la représentation d'une identité transcendante. Plutô t qu'un échec personnel ou particulier d'un auteur ou d'un texte, on peut évaluer cette tension comme un portrait de l'échec inévitable des critiques sociales basées sur la notion qu'il faut trouver une identité « authentique » dans une transcendance déconnectée qui va au-delà des contextes historiques et personnels. En d'autres mots, on peut considérer On the Road comme la représentation des problèmes d'une notion romantique américaine de l'identité qui élargit le potentiel de transcendance de l'individu à l'échelle universelle. On the Road souligne ainsi la difficulté entourant les notions américaines dominantes de l'autonomie de la personne même.

Locating benefits: Decision-spaces, resource access and equity in US community-based forestry

In the US, the Ford Foundation’s Community-based Forestry Demonstration Program (2000–2005) promoted an internationally prominent model of community forestry centered on the simultaneous, balanced pursuit of ecological, economic and social goals (often symbolized as the “three-legged stool,” or “triple bottom line”). This paper develops an alternative framework for analysis that emphasizes the causal precedence of shifts in power relations, specifically the devolution of resource access and decision-making authority, rather than environmental, social and economic outcomes. These outcomes are not necessarily beneficial, and any benefits realized seldom occur simultaneously. Rather, they can be envisioned as the floors of a house erected sequentially on a foundation of resource access and control. While no universal claim is made, the “house” model proves an apt fit for many community-based forestry initiatives, including the two case studies presented. Who among the differentiated social groups within a community gained access to resources and decision-making influence largely predicted who gained individually. Nonetheless, indirect benefits felt at community and higher scales were significant. The findings further indicate that community forestry generally will not advance social equity unless it specifically targets marginalized groups. Crucially, equity is understood to embrace not only distributional justice, but also capacity-building and empowerment.

From Eschatology to Anthropology: The Development of Pannenberg's Thought Over Christian Ethics

The anthropological turn, which Pannenberg decisively and successfully executed in the early 1980s, has provided his latest ethical argumentation with an extra dimension and increased depth. Pannenberg now believes that ethics has its foundations in anthropology rather than directly in dogmatics. The ethical as a common concern of all humankind must not be isolated and made independent of metaphysics and religion. For only then can the claim of universal validity for ethics be sustained, which in turn Pannenberg sees as the condition of its binding nature for Christians. Our awareness of moral obligations would become vague when it cannot be clarified in terms of any universally valid norms. Our final verdict on Pannenberg's new approach, however, must await greater clarity on whether his universal moral claim can withstand the potent challenge arising in today's increasingly pluralistic world; otherwise, his latest methodology would only bring him from the historicist fringe to the anthropologist margin.

Terrorism, Torture, and Conscience

In our current intellectual climate, the inner moral dialogue of conscience has been subjected to new criticisms. Competing authoritative discourses in the self are often reduced to clashing social power arrangements. Diverse voices in conscience are seen as evidence of a dispersed or divided self without continuing identity. Suspicion of metanarratives and universal claims accompanies emphasis on the particularity of social location. In this context, this essay examines the case of Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, the Marine lawyer who refused to prosecute a suspect at Guantanamo because he became convinced that the prisoner had been tortured. What is proposed is a view of conscience that takes the criticisms seriously without abandoning the authority, identity, and universality that true community fosters.

Grillparzer's “The Poor Musician”: The Artist-Hermit in Search of a Community

A parallel reading of Franz Grillparzer's “The Poor Musician” and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment occasions reflections on the possibility of defining community in aesthetic terms. While aesthetic judgment remains subjective for Kant, even as it formulates a universal claim, Grillparzer shows how a faulty interpretation of universality can disfigure a work of art and deprive unwary readers of their freedom to interpret by charming them with a simulacrum of community. Grillparzer does not merely deplore this, but also sets in the text points of resistance against such invasive interpretations, thus forcing the readers to reflect on both the work and their own judgment. Moreover, the novella's focus on music asks for a reappraisal of Kant's classification of the fine arts, which is based on a quasi-linguistic criterion of communicability and thus restricts their postulated universality.

Southern Theory Perspective and Career Development

This paper offers a preliminary exploration of Connell's idea of southern theory and its potential application to career development. Four assumptions of metropolitan (northern) social theory are described: (a) the claim of universality, (b) reading from the centre, (c) gestures of exclusion, and (d) grand erasure. These assumptions are challenged by reframing Super's long-standing career stages model, showing parallels between the model and social theories Connell critiques.

Strange Bedfellows: Appropriations of the Vernacular by Photographic Artists

The article discusses a range of artworks that appropriate, emulate, or copy the photographic works of amateur photographers, especially the photographic album. Examining a variety of processes that have generated such works and taking issue with critical claims for originality and universality, the article questions whether anything of vernacular photography's specificity and private nature can survive its transformation into a public work of art.

WND-CHARM: Multi-purpose image classification using compound image transforms

We describe a multi-purpose image classifier that can be applied to a wide variety of image classification tasks without modifications or fine-tuning, and yet provide classification accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art task-specific image classifiers. The proposed image classifier first extracts a large set of 1025 image features including polynomial decompositions, high contrast features, pixel statistics, and textures. These features are computed on the raw image, transforms of the image, and transforms of transforms of the image. The feature values are then used to classify test images into a set of pre-defined image classes. This classifier was tested on several different problems including biological image classification and face recognition. Although we cannot make a claim of universality, our experimental results show that this classifier performs as well or better than classifiers developed specifically for these image classification tasks. Our classifier’s high performance on a variety of classification problems is attributed to (i) a large set of features extracted from images; and (ii) an effective feature selection and weighting algorithm sensitive to specific image classification problems. The algorithms are available for free download from http://www.openmicroscopy.org.

Theory, Identity, Vocation: Three Models of Christian Legal Scholarship

Recognizably Christian scholarship is becoming more commonplace in the American legal academy, yet little systematic attention has been given to fundamental questions of approach. This article highlights moments of continuity and discontinuity between Christian legal scholarship and its secular counterparts. Contrary to the expectations generated by contemporary political debate, the distinctive contribution of Christian legal scholarship is not primarily to provide ammunition for political programs of the right or the left, but to situate law and human legal practices within a larger story about the world. This article develops three models of Christian legal scholarship - theory, identity and vocation. I employ these models - each with its own set of strengths and weaknesses - to argue that failure to address foundational questions about knowing and learning undermines much of the potential distinctiveness of Christian scholarship because that scholarship remains unconsciously subject to modern/postmodern assumptions. Specifically, Christian legal scholars have sometimes acted as if they believed that human beings could attain godlike knowledge, assuming a posture of transcendence over and above the world rather than of participation within it. This tendency is exhibited primarily in the theory model. Christian legal scholarship that loses touch with the participatory nature of human knowing leaves insufficient place for disagreement on legal and political arrangements and easily degenerates into theologically unwarranted claims about what God requires of the legal system. Identity models of Christian legal scholarship follow the lead of postmodern critics of the enlightenment in asserting that reason and objectivity are not neutral, self-defining ideas. While this move helps scholars avoid the making of unwarranted universal claims, its besetting temptation is undue skepticism and nihilism. Even so, the identity model helpfully calls attention to particulars of the Christian narrative that help explain our legal practices. The model also frames human law in a particular historical perspective that is at odds with both modernity's undue epistemological optimism and postmodern despair. Finally, a vocation model emphasizes that legal scholarship is one of many human (and not merely Christian) callings, the point of which, as with other such callings, is the glory and enjoyment of God. In order to know what pleases God, the scholar will need to study the Scriptures and theology; he or she will need the church. But the scholar will also need to study God's creation, including not only the world God has made directly, but also those relevant human institutions that, in God's providence, inhabit it. On this view, there is no reason to prescribe a uniform methodology for Christian legal scholars, nor should we necessarily expect widespread agreement among Christians on contestible legal issues.

Trauma, justice and the politics of emotion: the violence of sentimentality in education

This article interrogates the sentimentality, resentment or desensitization in education as a result of the politics of emotion in the circulation of trauma narratives. Such an interrogation advises a different analysis of trauma narratives, one that acknowledges the politics of trauma and the dangers from its rhetoric. Sentimental education takes its strength by framing normative emotional responses to all traumas; it is grounded on empty empathy and unfounded optimism while giving the illusion of a just response. The tension between claims for universality or particularity of trauma requires a different pedagogical treatment of trauma narratives – one that moves beyond such a duality. It is argued that this tension needs to be critically interrogated in schools, and educators and students need to consider what it would mean to subvert sentimental responses to trauma narratives.

Theory of mind development in Chinese children: A meta-analysis of false-belief understanding across cultures and languages.

Theory of mind is claimed to develop universally among humans across cultures with vastly different folk psychologies. However, in the attempt to test and confirm a claim of universality, individual studies have been limited by small sample sizes, sample specificities, and an overwhelming focus on Anglo- European children. The current meta-analysis of children's false-belief performance provides the most comprehensive examination to date of theory-of-mind development in a population of non-Western children speaking non-Indo-European languages (i.e., Mandarin and Cantonese). The meta-analysis consisted of 196 Chinese conditions (127 from mainland China and 69 from Hong Kong), representing responses from more than 3,000 children, compared with 155 similar North American conditions (83 conditions from the United States and 72 conditions from Canada). The findings show parallel developmental trajectories of false-belief understanding for children in China and North America coupled with significant differences in the timing of development across communities-children's false-belief performance varied across different locales by as much as 2 or more years. These data support the importance of both universal trajectories and specific experiential factors in the development of theory of mind.

A genetic future for coronary heart disease?

This paper is concerned with changing conceptions of genetic disease. It is based on an analysis of biomedical literature and focuses on the treatment of coronary heart disease (CHD) in four published commentary papers. The aim of this analysis is to explore the ways in which CHD is constructed as genetic and the place of genetic discourses in the wider set of ideas that circulate about the disease. This analysis is then used to consider some of the claims of the geneticisation thesis (Lippman 1991, 1992). The analysis suggests that a genetic vision for understanding and managing CHD has emerged, which has many of the hallmarks of the geneticisation imagined by Lippman. However, a number of alternative and competing models of CHD are also supported within the biomedical discourse. These are related to the different disciplines with a stake in the field of CHD, and their struggles for authority. In conclusion, it is suggested that the geneticisation thesis, as a universal claim, is at odds with the diffuse and distributed nature of biomedical knowledge and practice. Rather than analysing geneticisation in a literal way, it may be more fruitful to see the thesis, itself, as a form of boundary work (Gieryn 1983).

Justifying group-specific common morality

Some defenders of the view that there is a common morality have conceived such morality as being universal, in the sense of extending across all cultures and times. Those who deny the existence of such a common morality often argue that the universality claim is implausible. Defense of common morality must take account of the distinction between descriptive and normative claims that there is a common morality. This essay considers these claims separately and identifies the nature of the arguments for each claim. It argues that the claim that there is a universal common morality in the descriptive sense has not been successfully defended to date. It maintains that the claim that there is a common morality in the normative sense need not be understood as universalist. This paper advocates the concept of group specific common morality, including country-specific versions. It suggests that both the descriptive and the normative claims that there are country-specific common moralities are plausible, and that a country-specific normative common morality could provide the basis for a country's bioethics.

COOPERATING AGAINST SMALL-STATE MARGINALIZATION

AbstractEmploying postcolonial critical international relations theory as its theoretical bedrock, this article uses the U.N.-U.S.-French-led humanitarian intervention in Haiti in 2004 to examine top-tier states' claims to universal human rights and bottom-tier states' claims to sovereign national democratic rights. This article critically interrogates both the theoretical and policy assumptions of an emergent interventionism by the North into the South, and examines Haitian social forces and their pan-African allies (CARICOM, the AU, and CBC), who are opposed to the universalist appropriation and imposition of a rights domain that curtails freedom in the international arena.

The Belated Time of Reading, or Inconsolable Ethics

As both an ardent reader all my life and a long-time student of Emmanuel Levinas’s work, I found a deep resonance with Ann Chinnery’s approach to reformulating the relation between moral education and literature. Drawn by the eloquent and quiet tone of the essay, I was especially thankful for her skill at tugging literature away from the sentimental grip of certain thinkers who seem to believe that what we have to learn from fiction can be reduced to rather trite formulations of identification, empathy, and compassion. It is not that such powerful emotions do not take place when we read, but to educate on the basis that they ought to happen because they lead us to a better engagement with the world suggests that we seem to know beforehand what kind of response is appropriate to any given text. The risk is not only that we lose a sense of the texture and diversity of possible responses, but that we turn literature into a mere purveyor of universal claims about the world, into a treatise rather than a work of art. As Thomas Hardy once wrote, “a novel is an impression not an argument.”