Varieties Of Realism Research Articles

Relevanz und Kontext

The article aims to recognize Heidegger’s late phenomenology of language as a situational ontology. It is shown that this approach is motivated by a hitherto unnoticed problem of relevance that goes beyond the traditional frame problem. The problem of relevance is introduced and presented as a novel key to make sense of Heidegger’s concept of language as the “showing” of an involving context. It is demonstrated how both representational and pragmatic-enactive models of language give rise to the problem. Finally, Heidegger’s radical situational approach to language and thinghood is classified as a variant of realism that can be called “Involving Realism” which is contrasted critically against other contemporary forms of Realism such as Enactive Realism or New Realism.

Putting behavioural economics in its place: the new realism of law, economics and psychology and its alternatives

The behavioural turn in economics has spilled over into the field of law and economics. Some scholars even consider behavioural economics a variety of new legal realism, invoking earlier efforts to promote law as a behavioural and social science. In fact, behavioural economics works towards more realistic assumptions about human behaviour by drawing on empirical research methods, namely economic experiments. However, not all realisms are alike. Much of the mainstream of behavioural economics is inspired by cognitive psychology, which entails a move from behaviour to cognition and, ultimately, to brains. For scholars with a socio-legal background, legal realism rather points in the opposite direction: to the social contexts and institutional frameworks that shape individual behaviour. By exploring alternative options for a new realism at the intersection of law, economics, and related disciplines, this article exposes the relative neglect of institutions in behavioural economics and the tendency to reduce them to a corrective for cognitive biases in applications to law. At the same time, it provides a broad overview of different varieties of realism next to behavioural-economic ones.

Great Powers and the Sea: Naval Power in International Relations Theories

This article aims to discuss the role of sea and naval power in “Rise and Fall Realism”; “Defensive Structural Realism”; and “Offensive Structural Realism”, which are respectively represented by the works of Gilpin (2002) and Modelsky and Thompson (1988); Posen (2003) and Mearsheimer (2001). We argue that these scholars mistakenly employ sea and naval power as if they were synonyms. In fact, these scholars are mainly concerned with the military component of sea power, that is, naval power. In addition, we claim that the relative importance of naval power in relation to other sources of power varies in a spectrum that goes from: 1) the consideration of naval power as a necessary and almost sufficient condition to global power raking, 2) moving to the acknowledgment of naval power as historically important to the last two hegemonic powers but not necessarily important in future manifestations of hegemonic power, and 3) reaching the consideration of naval power as only having a supportive role for land power, being this power the necessary and almost sufficient condition to a high placing in the global ranking of powers. Finally, we reflect on the argument established by those variants of Realism on the connection between naval power and wealth.

Varieties of realism and their bearing on psychology

Varieties of realism and their bearing on psychology

Keynes's Treatise on Probability: The First Century

ABSTRACT On the centenary of the Treatise on Probability's publication, this paper explores six related topics: varieties of realism; Ramsey's critique; Keynes's response; radical uncertainty; the continuity/discontinuity question regarding Keynes's philosophy and economics; and the possibility of a non-Platonic interpretation of logical probability. Several new perspectives are presented.

Anarchy is What Students Make of It: Playing Out Wendt’s Three Cultures of Anarchy

This article explores the hidden educational potential in the board game Diplomacy. While commonly recognized as a good low-cost negotiation simulation and a useful teaching platform, the original game version over-emphasizes the conflictual nature of international relations and presents an image of international relations that is not reflective of the state of world politics today. The article reports experiences from developing and teaching a modified version of the game. It suggests a concrete way to integrate International Relations (IR) theories directly into the game. By making three common theoretical approaches an integrated part of the game, as well as expanding game strategies, win conditions and associated payoff tables, Diplomacy can be turned from a tool for teaching one variant of Realism into a flexible platform for teaching a broader range of IR theories, including Liberal-Institutionalism and Constructivism. In this way, the gap between abstract theory and simulated practice can be bridged in a way that students much appreciate as a learning mode. The article thus suggests a partial solution to one of the key challenges of using games and simulations in political science teaching: how to connect the game or simulation with theory.

International Territorial Dispute Preferences in China and the United States

Within international relations theory, there is significant disagreement on the nature and significance of leaders’ dispute outcome preferences. While many variants of realism assume that such preferences are relatively fixed and homogeneous, both the liberal and the constructivist schools view them as significant variables. This debate remains unresolved because, for the standard large-sample conflict data sets, there are no direct measures of leadership preferences over outcomes in given types of international disputes. Using a conflict bargaining experiment, we ask whether, after controlling for the effects of relative power and initial conditions, leadership preferences have a statistically significant impact. We use two different country samples—from China and the United States—to examine whether the impact of leadership preferences varies internationally. We find that realist-style preferences are a special rather than a general case, and that such differences have significant implications for understanding continuities and changes in Chinese and US foreign policies.

A Typology of War Ethics

ABSTRACTInterdisciplinary communication on war is impeded by doctrinal gaps concerning its morality, immorality, and amorality. Much is written on ad bellum ethical standards for military force by states, mainly in the fields of international politics and religious studies. However, a necessary first step in comparing these different approaches to war ethics with each other is to develop a system for classifying them. The classification system offered in this paper places war ethics on a grid with two scales. One axis of the grid ranges from permissiveness to restrictiveness. The other axis ranges from regard for self to regard for others. Twelve forms of war ethics are assigned points within the grid, including pacifism, just war, holy war, UN Charter obligations, several variants of realism, cost–benefit analysis, isolationism, and various ideological war ethics such as communist and fascist approaches. In doing so, this paper lays the groundwork for “quantifying” war ethics, to enable measurements of their effects against other state-level characteristics and outcomes of interaction.

What’s New About New Realism? Mereology and the Varieties of (New) Realism

The paper set up a small “philosophical lab” for thought experiments using Digital Universes as its main tool. Digital Universes allow us to examine how mereology affects the debate on New Realism of Ferraris (2012) and shed new light on the whole notion of Realism. The semi-formal framework provides a convenient way to model the varieties of realism that are important for the program of New Realism: we then draw the natural consequences of this approach into the ontology of our world (may it be digital or not), arguing that the same considerations that apply to Digital Universe would hold for chess, institutions and social objects as well. Once a particular version of mereology is chosen, there are unavoidable consequences that the very underlying structure of social (and non-social) ontology. We then propose a new New Realism to tackle social objects: social objects turn out to be nothing more than mereological sums, picked up by some (possibly intentional) description.

The Islamic Realism of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi (1926–) and Sayyid Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah (1935–2010)

The article sheds light on the core realist assumptions—regarding international anarchy, the centrality of power to international relations and human nature—that underpin the international relations perspectives of two leading contemporary Islamist thinkers, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi (1926–) and the late Sayyid Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah (1935–2010). It further asserts that the law of mutual restraining—which Qaradawi and Fadlallah derive from the Qur’an—bears a major affinity to realism’s balance of power principle. It argues that Qaradawi and Fadlallah articulate a non-western variant of realism that this article refers to as Islamic realism. After defining Islamic realism, the article compares it to four strands of realism: structural, neoclassical, classical and Christian realism. The conclusion suggests that realism should not be viewed as exclusively a product of European experiences and western ‘secular’ thought, but as a mode of theorizing about international relations that transcends cultural boundaries. In addition, it underscores the links between religion and realism, calling for research into the likely sources of realism in the three Abrahamic religions.

Realismo científico y entidades inconsistentes. Críticas a la metafísica de Colyvan

According to Mark Colyvan, certain mature scientific developments (specifically, Newtonian cosmology, descriptive oceanography, early calculus and Dirac's quantum theory) contain contradictory assumptions, and this enables the prima facie adoption of certain naturalized realism of inconsistent entities. An exotic aspect of Colyvan's proposal is the claim that the resulting variety of realism emerges from the mere application of the parameters of theory evaluation involved in Quine's epistemology. While this is a highly controversial claim in itself, it will not be analyzed in this paper. My intention is to show that the theories put forward by Colyvan do not exhibit the properties required to promote a philosophically respectable metaphysics of contradictory entities. The theses defended are: (i) neither Newtonian cosmology nor descriptive oceanography exhibits any genuine contradiction; (ii) the apparent inconsistencies in early calculus and Dirac's quantum theory respectively exhibit a weak enough methodological effectivity so that their use do not rationally demand a realistic recovery.

Approaches to Realism

Scientific realism asserts that the methods of science, combined with the intellectual powers of human beings can give us reliable knowledge of states of the world beyond the limits of perception. Among the varieties of realism, policy realism is based on the principle that taking plausible theories to be putative descriptions of actual states of affairs is the best way to design experiments and to advance our knowledge. We carve out the umwelt from the welt by the use of our instruments and apparatus. The key procedure in science has been and still is the invention and testing of models---plausibility and empirical adequacy are the marks of a theory based on a model capable of supporting policy realism.

THE PASTS

ABSTRACTThis essay offers a reconfiguration of the possibility‐space of positions regarding the metaphysics and epistemology associated with historical knowledge. A tradition within analytic philosophy from Danto to Dummett attempts to answer questions about the reality of the past on the basis of two shared assumptions. The first takes individual statements as the relevant unit of semantic and philosophical analysis. The second presumes that variants of realism and antirealism about the past exhaust the metaphysical options (and so shape the epistemology as well). This essay argues that both of these assumptions should be rejected. It develops as an alternative an irrealist account of history, a view based in part on work by Leon Goldstein and Ian Hacking. On an irrealist view, historical claims ought to be treated as subject to the same conditions and caveats that apply to any theory of empirical or scientific knowledge. Irrealism argues for pasts as made and not found. The argument emphasizes the priority of classification over perception in the order of understanding and so verification. Because nothing a priori anchors practices of classification, no sense can be attached to claims that some single structure must or does determine what events take place in human history. Irrealism denies to realism the very intelligibility of any imagined view from nowhere, that is, a determinately configured past subsisting sub specie aeternitatis. A plurality of pasts exists because constituting a past always depends to some degree on socially mediated negotiations of a fit between descriptions and experience.

Realism and international law: the challenge of John H. Herz

The proliferation, globalization, and fragmentation of law in world politics have fostered an attempt to re-integrate International Law (IL) and International Relations (IR) scholarship, but so far the contribution of realist theory to this interdisciplinary perspective has been meagre. Combining intellectual history, the jurisprudence of IL and IR theory, this article provides an analysis of John H. Herz’s classical realism and its perspective on international law. In retrieving this vision, the article emphasizes the political and intellectual context from which Herz’s realism developed: the study of public law in Germany during the interwar period and in particular the contribution of Hans Kelsen and the pure theory of law to the study of international law. Herz was deeply inspired by Kelsen but he criticized the pure theory for ignoring the sociological foundations of law. Following his emigration to the United States, Herz embraced realism but without disregarding international law. Indeed, his mature, globally oriented realism offers a balanced, fruitful perspective for thinking about the relationship between politics and law that is deeply relevant for contemporary theory: it challenges modern, law-blind variants of realism and holds considerable potential for contributing to the approaches that have most successfully studied the law–politics nexus.

Is a realist interpretation of Shamanic ‘non-physical’ worlds logically incoherent?

Previous research concerning the relationship between the shaman’s conscious experiences and the ‘spirit world’ suggests that shamans are realists in the sense that they conceptualize their multi-layered universe (e.g., upper, middle and lower world) as real, objective and independent of the perceiver. However, these studies have neglected to analyze the logical coherence of a realist interpretation of these shamanic ‘nonphysical.’ worlds (NPWs). We address this lacuna first by determining which variant of realism is most consistent with the shaman’s purported views concerning the ontological status of the aforementioned NPWs. Subsequently, we consider sk.a-ma-nic journeying imagery with regards to the key definitional elements of the term ‘mental image.’ Finally, we formulate three premises pertaining to shamanic journeying imagery and NPWs with the aim of assessing the logical coherence of the shaman’s realist ontology. We conclude that if sk.a-ma-nic journeying images constitute mental images, then this does not necessarily preclude shamanic NPWs from existing independently of the percipient’s mindbody state(s).

Invisible Realms: Canadian Speculative Drama

Science has never been a popular subject for Canadian playwrights. Prior to the 1960s, few if any Canadian plays of note dealt directly with topics in science, and, with a handful of exceptions – albeit some of them very prominent exceptions (in particular, John Mighton) – few contemporary Canadian playwrights have dealt directly with issues rooted in technology. There have been even fewer examples of Canadian playwrights consistently producing work in the genre in which science and technology have always flourished as subjects: science fiction or, more specifically in this article, speculative fiction (SF). For the most part, the dominant formats in Canadian drama over the past century have been varieties of realism and naturalism. Kitchen sinks, family dysfunction, a host of social ills and the harshness of the land or the city have consistently trumped works of sheer imagination in terms of critical and, apparently, audience appeal.

The State Is Dead, Long Live the State

Privatizing the State. Edited by Beatrice Hibou. Translated by Jonathan Derrick. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 279 pp., $37.00 (ISBN: 0-231-13464-9). Privatizing the State , by Beatrice Hibou, consists of a series of essays by French academics on the international political economy. The theoretical focus of the book concerns the “decline of the state” thesis, that is, the assertion that the modern state is withering away as a result of private agents of the global economy. The relentless introduction by Hibou and smart conclusion by Yves Chevrier effectively lay out the case against the thesis of state decline and challenge neoliberal assumptions about privatization and politics. The case chapters, drawn from transitional and developing economies, are especially good at elaborating the informal ways in which state power is increasingly exercised in countries that are said to have weak or failed states. At another level, Privatizing the State is a contemporary incarnation of the long-running feud between the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment and the French–German counter-Enlightenment. Is society the aggregation of rational individuals or the organic arrangement of communities? Is human behavior based on reason or culture? Is the state a set of neutral institutions providing law and order, or is it the embodiment of a national experience providing meaning and identity? In this regard, the book helps articulate a postmodern view of the state that is unconventional in Anglo-US scholarship, in which “neo” variants of realism, Marxism, and liberalism prevail. Part I of Privatizing the State explores the privatization of state enterprises. Chapters on Poland and China offer evidence that privatization does not automatically lead to “free market” behavior among enterprise managers. Indeed, politics remains relevant for at least some managers, and past behaviors, like corruption, are still to be found. For …

Can realists know that they know?

Realists typically suppose that nonepistemic truth is an independent condition on propositional knowledge. Few philosophers, however, have seriously questioned the meta-epistemic consequences of combining alethic and epistemic variants of realism. In this paper I aim to show that the truth condition in the customary definition of knowledge presents an important problem for the realist at higher epistemic levels. According to my argument, traditional epistemic-logical analyses of metaknowledge fail because of their extensionalism and certain presuppositions they have about the satisfaction of the truth condition. I further suggest that we need a different approach to metaknowledge if (1) we want to retain alethic realism, and (2) we want our epistemological accounts to adequately explicate the meta-epistemic states of actual, evidence-bound cognitive agents.

Economic Nationalism as a Challenge to Economic Liberalism? Lessons from the 19th Century

What kind of challenge does nationalism pose to liberalism in today's global political economy? Conventional wisdom holds that nationalism is an outdated ideology in this age of globalization and liberalization. But this argument rests on understandings of nationalism that are increasingly being called into question by recent scholarship. In this article, I show how the history of nationalism in the 19th century provides strong support for two important but potentially controversial arguments made in recent literature about the nature of nationalism: (1) that this ideology is most properly defined by its nationalist content (rather than as a variant of realism or as an ideology of protectionism), and (2) that it can be associated with a wide range of policy projects, including the endorsement of liberal policies. With these two points established through historical analysis, I conclude that nationalism should be seen still to be a powerful ideology in the current period, but that its relationship to the policy goals of liberals is an ambiguous one, just as it was in the 19th century. With the collapse of the Marxist political project in the ex-Soviet bloc, many observers have concluded that liberalism faces no serious political challenges as a dominant ideology in international policymaking. But when liberals were last such a central global political force during the 19th century, they faced challenges not just from Marxists but from nationalists too. What kind of a challenge does nationalism pose to liberalism in today's global political economy? This question is a difficult one to answer because it presumes a clear understanding of the term economic Although the ideologies of liberalism and Marxism are well understood within the field of international political economy (IPE), nationalism has received much less attention and has been analytically confused within scholarly literature for most of the 20th century. In the past few years, more serious attention has finally been given to the task of sharpening the analytical concept of nationalism. Two important arguments have emerged from this literature. First, a number of scholars have argued that the main fault of traditional definitions of the concept is that they have neglected the nationalist content of the ideology. Second, if this Author's note: I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for helping to finance some of the research for this article. For their very helpful comments, I would also like to thank the editors of this journal, three anonymous reviewers, George Crane, James Mayall, and Andreas Pickel.

Notes on Contributors

Brian GrantAssociate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. His main areas of interest are epistemology and the philosophy of mind. He has a recent book in the latter area, The Condition of Madness.Rom HarréEmeritus Fellow of Linacre College Oxford and Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington DC. His published work includes studies in the philosophy of the physical sciences, such as Varieties of Realism (1986) and in the philosophy of psychology, such as The Singular Self (1988). His One Thousand Years of Philosophy was published last year.Joel J. KuppermanProfessor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. His most recent books are Learning from Asian Philosophy, Value É And What Follows, and Classic Asian Philosophy: A Guide to the Essential Texts.Tony LynchLectures in Philosophy and Politics at the University of New England, Armidale. His research interests are in the areas of moral psychology and liberal politics.Gordon GrahamRegius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He has contributed to Philosophy on several occasions. His most recent books include the Internet: a philosophical inquiry (Routledge, 1999) and Evil and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2000).Mark T. Nelson Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He is the co-editor of Christian Theism and Moral Philosophy and the author of articles on ethics, philosophy of religion, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind.Nicholas Maxwell Emeritus Reader in Philosophy of Science at the University of London. Among his publications are From Knowledge to Wisdom (Blackwell, 1984), The Comprehensibility of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 1998), and The Human World in the Physical Universe (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming).Sophie BotrosFellow in the Department of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her previous publications include ‘Precarious Virtue’ (Phronesis) and, for this journal, ‘Acceptance and Morality’ and ‘Acts, Omissions and Keeping Patients Alive in a Persistent Vegetative State’. She is presently working on Hume's practicality argument.