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1
Búrca, Seán de. The network perspective: Theoretical foundations, assumptions and characteristics. Dublin: University College Dublin (Centre for Quality & Services Management), 1994.
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Landau, Friederike, Lucas Pohl, and Nikolai Roskamm, eds. [Un]Grounding. Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.14361/9783839450734.
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Post-foundationalism departs from the assumption that there is no ground, necessity, or objective rationale for human political existence or action. The edited volume puts contemporary debates arising from the »spatial turn« in cultural and social sciences in a dialogue with post-foundational theories of space and place to devise post-foundationalism as radical approach to urban studies. This approach enables us to think about space not only as socially produced, but also as crucially marked by conflict, radical negativity, and absence. The contributors undertake a (re-)reading of key spatial and/or post-foundational theorists to introduce their respective understandings of politics and space, and offer examples of post-foundational empirical analyses of urban protests, spatial occupation, and everyday life.
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Kottler, Jeffrey, and Richard S. Balkin. Myths, Misconceptions, and Invalid Assumptions About Counseling and Psychotherapy. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190090692.001.0001.
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In Myths, Misconceptions, and Invalid Assumptions about Counseling the authors examine the science, art, and certainties and uncertainties of psychotherapy. In this book we have selected several dozen issues in our field, many of which are considered generally accepted principles or operating assumptions. We put them under close scrutiny to examine them more carefully. We’ve considered a wide variety of subjects, ranging from those that relate to our espoused beliefs, theoretical models, favored techniques and interventions, to accreditation and licensing requirements. We have also addressed some of the sanctioned statements about the nature and meaning of empirically supported and evidence based treatments. We even question what we can truly “know” for sure and how we can be certain these things are true. When considering the efficacy of psychotherapy, there is overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of clients are significantly improved as a result of our treatments. Advances in the models, methods, and strategies during the last few decades have allowed us to work more swiftly and efficiently, to reach a much more economically and culturally diverse population. But do we really know and understand as much as we pretend to? Is the foundation upon which we stand actually as stable and certain as we think, or at least claim to believe? Are the major assumptions and “truths” that we take for granted and accept as foundational principles really supported by solid data? And how might these assumptions, beliefs, and constructs we hold so sacred perhaps compromise and limit increased creativity and innovation? These are some of the uncomfortable and provocative questions that we wish to raise, and perhaps challenge, so that we might consider alternative conceptions that might further increase our effectiveness and improve our knowledge base grounded with solid evidence.
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Shepherd, Laura J. Why UN Peacebuilding Discourse Matters. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199982721.003.0006.
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Chapter 6 reflects on the dominant configurations of civil society, women, gender, and peacebuilding in UN peacebuilding discourse and why the author thinks these arguments are significant. It is notable that the foundational resolution that brought forth the UN PBC specifically identifies “women’s organizations”—and only women’s organizations—as a part of “civil society” with which the Commission is encouraged to consult, as noted earlier. This articulation, as discussed earlier, not only feminizes civil society organizations but also reproduces the association between women and civil society. Further, the discursive construction of civil society as a feminized subject in peacebuilding discourse relies on assumptions about women’s capacity to engage meaningfully in peacebuilding-related activities by virtue of their femininity and the concomitant assumption of pacifism and peacebuilding potential. Both of these constructions are problematic in the ways in which they make sense of women’s lived experiences in conflict and post-conflict situations.
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Vanberg, Georg, and Viktor Vanberg. Contractarian Perspectives in Law and Economics. Edited by Francesco Parisi. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199684267.013.020.
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This article sketches the distinct perspective that a contractarian approach can bring to law and economics. It focuses on a particularly important strand of the contractarian tradition: the constitutional political economy (CPE) research program (also known as constitutional economics), developed most fully in the work of Nobel laureate James Buchanan. Like law and economics, the CPE paradigm is primarily concerned with the comparative analysis of social, economic, and political institutions. But its foundational assumptions offer a distinct contrast to the mainstream neoclassical paradigm that has dominated law and economics as a field. The article first provides a brief overview of contractarian approaches. It then describes the central features of the CPE paradigm. It contrasts the foundations of the CPE approach with those of neo-classical economics; explores the implications of these differences for the research foci at the heart of these two traditions; and discusses how mainstream and constitutional economics approaches may be reconciled.
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Silberstein, Michael, W. M. Stuckey, and Timothy McDevitt. The Block Universe from Special Relativity. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807087.003.0003.
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Before explaining how the God’s-eye view resolves the impasse of theoretical physics and foundations of physics created by the ant’s-eye view, the book presents a detailed argument for the block universe. Accordingly, the main thread of chapter 2 shows how the relativity of simultaneity resolves the paradoxes associated with time dilation and length contraction that result from special relativity. A short argument is then presented showing how the relativity of simultaneity implies a block universe, that is, the co-reality or co-existence of the past, present, and future. Philosophy of Physics for Chapter 2 provides a detailed argument for block universe, taking into account all counterarguments and assumptions of the abridged argument in the main thread. Foundational Physics for Chapter 2 shows how the second postulate of special relativity leads to time dilation and length contraction, and it contains the Lorentz transformations for the spacetime events used in the main thread.
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Callicott, J. Baird, and James McRae, eds. Japanese Environmental Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190456320.001.0001.
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Comparative environmental philosophy is valuable in many ways. Perhaps it is most valuable because it reveals some of the foundational assumptions that run so deep in the poles of comparison that they might otherwise have gone unnoticed. These revelations may invite us to challenge those assumptions that have led to the kind of thinking responsible for much of the environmental degradation that we see today. Japanese Environmental Philosophy gathers papers focused on the environmental problems of the twenty-first century. Drawing from Japanese philosophical traditions they investigate our relationships with other humans, nonhuman animals, and the environment. The heart of the book consists of chapters written by fifteen top scholars from Japan, the United States, Europe, and Australia. The essays cover a broad range of topics drawn from various strains of Japanese thought—including Zen Buddhism, Shintoism, the Kyoto school, and Japanese philosophy of art and aesthetics—as well as from traditional Japanese culture and the contemporary science of planning for natural disasters. These articles demonstrate that Japanese scientific, philosophical, religious, and cultural traditions can provide meaningful insight to address the current global environmental crisis.
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Crosthwaite, Paul. Fiction and Trauma from the Second World War to 9/11. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198749394.003.0026.
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This chapter looks at how contemporary British and Irish novelists reflect on the spasms of catastrophic violence that have punctuated the twentieth century and continue to define the twenty-first. These events not only traumatized individuals on a mass scale, but also dealt irrevocable damage to foundational assumptions concerning reason, progress, meaning, and language. Such weighty preoccupations, however, took some time to fully coalesce in the fiction of the post-Second World War period. There were few substantial treatments of the war in its immediate aftermath. When such responses began to appear in the 1950s, and swelled in number in the 1960s, they did so predominantly in the form of conventional social realist narratives concerned with the immediate experience of combat and the impact of the conflict on the structures of British and Irish society.
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Samuels, Richard, Eric Margolis, and Stephen P. Stich. Introduction: Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Edited by Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels, and Stephen P. Stich. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195309799.013.0001.
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This chapter offers a high-level overview of the philosophy of cognitive science and an introduction toThe Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science. The philosophy of cognitive science emerged out of a set of common and overlapping interests among philosophers and scientists who study the mind. We identify five categories of issues that illustrate the best work in this broad field: (1) traditional philosophical issues about the mind that have been invigorated by research in cognitive science, (2) issues regarding the practice of cognitive science and its foundational assumptions, (3) issues regarding the explication and clarification of core concepts in cognitive science, (4) first-order empirical issues where philosophers participate in the interdisciplinary investigation of particular psychological phenomena, (5) traditional philosophical issues that aren’t about the mind but that can be informed by a better understanding of how the mind works.
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O'Hara, Kieron, and Wendy Hall. Web Science. Edited by William H. Dutton. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199589074.013.0003.
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This chapter introduces the important technologies and protocols that make up the Web and the social regularities that have helped it flourish. Next, it investigates the foundational assumptions of Web Science. An example that illustrates the role of Web Science in the development of a Web of Linked Data is reported. Web Science, which can help determine which practices and conventions are important, and how they associate to people's willingness to behave in a cooperative fashion, must be related with topography and also the dynamics of the Web. It also needs to take into account the variance of scale between intervention and outcome. Linking data permits the development of an extremely rich context for an inquiry. In general, the aim of Web Science is to develop a research and engineering community within which diverse methods of analysis and synthesis are routinely incorporated.
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Rabin, Gabriel Oak. Grounding Orthodoxy and the Layered Conception. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198755630.003.0002.
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Ground offers the hope of vindicating and illuminating a classic philosophical idea: the layered conception, according to which reality is structured by relations of dependence, with physical phenomena on the bottom, and upon which chemical, then biological, and finally psychological and other phenomena reside. However, ground can only make good on this promise if it is appropriately formally behaved. The paradigm of good formal behavior can be found in the currently dominant grounding orthodoxy, which holds that ground is transitive, anti-symmetric, irreflexive, and foundational. However, heretics have recently challenged the orthodoxy. This paper examines ground’s ability to vindicate the layered conception upon various relaxations of the orthodox assumptions. It is argued that highly unorthodox views of ground can still vindicate the layered conception and that, in some ways, the heretical views enable ground to better serve as a guide to reality’s layering than do orthodox views of ground.
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Raghavan, Pallavi. Establishing the Ministry of External Affairs. Edited by David M. Malone, C. Raja Mohan, and Srinath Raghavan. Oxford University Press, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198743538.013.6.
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This chapter argues that the decision to retain the institutional wisdom of the old External Affairs Department, as well as its predecessors, was taken quite deliberately, with a clear understanding of the problems this posed, as well as the advantages. The author argues that the arguments for retaining this structure were often advanced most persuasively by those who had the highest stakes in its continuance: bureaucrats and officials of the Indian Civil Service. These institutional memories continued to shape the foundational assumptions about both the conduct, as well as content, of Indian foreign policy, well after the transfer of power. Finally, it is argued, it is important to differentiate the various strands of political thought that went into constituting the often monolithically understood ‘Nehruvian foreign policy’: this was constructed by a variety of officials, politicians, and political lobbies who frequently differed with Nehru on the best approach to India’s foreign policy.
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Uranga, Emilio. Essay on an Ontology of the Mexican (1951). Translated by Carlos Alberto Sánchez. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190601294.003.0013.
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Emilio Uranga challenges the underlying assumptions of Samuel Ramos’s popular and controversial thesis regarding the “Mexican inferiority complex.” Uranga’s basic claim, influenced by Heidegger, is that Ramos’s analysis overlooks a more foundational “difference”: that between ontological sufficiency and insufficiency. Ramos’s analysis remains always at an ontic, or philosophically superficial, level of explanation, attributing “inferiority” to the Mexican character without explaining that on which it is grounded. The clue to its grounding lies in fragility, unwillingness, and melancholy, seemingly essential characteristics that define Mexican existence. Thus, fragility is not related to a simple feeling of inferiority, which is itself related to actual intersubjective relationships between Mexicans and their European colonizers, but rather to a more complex emotive life predicated on an unconscious awareness of a primordial relationship to nothingness and non-being. Unwillingness, likewise, is not a simple lack of will, but a refusal to be part of the world.
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Wedgwood, Ralph. The Pitfalls of ‘Reasons’. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198802693.003.0005.
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Many philosophers working on normative issues follow the ‘Reasons First’ program. According to this program, the concept of a ‘normative reason’ for an action or an attitude is the most fundamental normative concept, and all other normative and evaluative concepts can be defined in terms of this fundamental concept. This paper criticizes the foundational assumptions of this program. In fact, there are many different concepts that can be expressed by the term ‘reason’ in English. The best explanation of the data relating to these concepts is that they can all be defined in terms of explanatory concepts and other normative or evaluative notions: for example, in one sense, a ‘reason’ for you to go is a fact that helps to explain why you ought to go, or why it is good for you to go. This implies that none of the concepts expressed by ‘reason’ is fundamental.
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Smith, Wendy K., Marianne W. Lewis, Paula Jarzabkowski, and Ann Langley. Introduction. Edited by Wendy K. Smith, Marianne W. Lewis, Paula Jarzabkowski, and Ann Langley. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198754428.013.30.
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While dating back to ancient philosophy, only recently have organizational scholars started to explore paradox. Drawing from insights across disciplines including psychoanalysis and macro sociology, some provocative theorists urged researchers to take seriously the study of paradox and deepen understanding of plurality, tensions, and contradictions. Scholars responded. Studies of organizational paradox have grown exponentially over twenty years, canvassing varied phenomena, methods, and levels of analysis. As paradox studies grow, new insights challenge foundational ideas, and raise questions around definitions, overlapping lenses, and varied research and managerial approaches. Alternative perspectives highlight divides while inviting complementary approaches. Reflecting on the state of paradox studies, the editors became aware that they were surfacing the paradoxes of paradoxes—contradictory, yet interdependent perspectives on paradox enveloped in the core theoretical assumptions. The introduction surfaces these paradoxes of paradoxes, noting how the chapters in this handbook both engage these tensions, while expanding insight into the field.
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Arkadiev, Peter, and Francesco Gardani, eds. The Complexities of Morphology. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198861287.001.0001.
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The volume deals with the multifaceted nature of morphological complexity understood as a composite rather than unitary phenomenon as it shows an amazing degree of crosslinguistic variation. It features an Introduction by the editors that critically discusses some of the foundational assumptions informing contemporary views on morphological complexity, eleven chapters authored by an excellent set of contributors, and a concluding chapter by Östen Dahl that reviews various approaches to morphological complexity addressed in the preceding contributions and focuses on the minimum description length approach. The central eleven chapters approach morphological complexity from different perspectives, including the language-particular, the crosslinguistic, and the acquisitional one, and offer insights into issues such as the quantification of morphological complexity, its syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic aspects, diachronic developments including the emergence and acquisition of complexity, and the relations between morphological complexity and socioecological parameters of language. The empirical evidence includes data from both better-known languages such as Russian, and lesser-known and underdescribed languages from Africa, Australia, and the Americas, as well as experimental data drawn from iterated artificial language learning.
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Allen, John R., Frederick Ben Hodges, and Julian Lindley-French. Future War and the Defence of Europe. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198855835.001.0001.
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Set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 crisis, Future War and the Defence of Europe considers in the round how peace can be maintained on a continent that has suffered two cataclysmic conflicts since 1914. COVID-19 and the trend-accelerating impact of such pandemics is first considered. The book then weaves history, strategy, policy, and technology into a compelling analytical narrative that sets the scale of the challenge Europeans and their allies will face if Europe’s peace is to be upheld in a transformative century. The book challenges foundational assumptions about how Europe’s defence is organized, the role of a fast-changing transatlantic relationship, NATO, the European Union, and their constituent nation-states. At the heart of the book is a radical vision of a technology-enabling future European defence built around a new kind of Atlantic alliance, an innovative strategic public–private partnership, and the future hyper-electronic European force it must spawn. Europeans should be under no illusion: unless they do far more for their own defence, and very differently, all that Europeans now take for granted could be lost in the maze of hybrid war, cyber war, and hyperwar they must face.
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Foster, Brendan, Zeeya Merali, and Anthony Aguirre. Questioning the Foundations of Physics: Which of Our Fundamental Assumptions Are Wrong? Springer, 2016.
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Taylor, Kenneth A. Meaning Diminished. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198803447.001.0001.
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This book examines the dialectical role of semantic analysis within metaphysical inquiry. It argues that semantic analysis ought to be modest in its metaphysical pretensions in the sense that linguistic and conceptual analysis should not be expected to yield deep insight into either what exists or the nature of what exists. The argument turns on distinctions among narrowly linguistic semantics in the generative tradition and two varieties of broadly philosophical semantics which correspond to broad approaches to semantically infused metaphysical inquiry. In particular it distinguishes ideational semantics and metaphysical inquiry via the way of ideas, on the one hand, from referential semantics and metaphysical inquiry via the way of reference, on the other. It is argued that foundational assumptions of the generative framework are insufficient on their own to support the drawing of metaphysically immodest conclusions from the narrowly semantic premises. But it is shown that if we are determined to bridge the gap between narrowly semantic premise and metaphysical conclusion, we must augment our semantics with additional metasemantic premises. Such additional premises may come either from ideationalist or referentialist metasemantics. A number of arguments for preferring referential metasemantics over ideational metasemantics are offered. It is argued pursuing referentialist metasemantics as opposed to ideationalist metasemantics yields a semantics that is metaphysically modest. Finally it is argued that metaphysically modest should regarded as a feature rather than a bug of a semantic theory, one that serves to bring semantics into closer alignment with the special sciences generally.
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Pomerantz, Anita. Asking and Telling in Conversation. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190927431.001.0001.
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The work contains nine published conversation analytic articles by Anita Pomerantz on asking and telling practices. Each paper explicates complexities involved when people ask or tell something. Asking and telling practices are used to exchange information, share evaluative reactions, offer compliments, and make accusations. The ways in which participants perform the actions reflect how they orient to those actions and to the matter asked about or reported. The timing of asking or telling within a sequence of actions and/or interactional project bears on how the talk and action are formed and understood. Implicit and explicit knowledge claims and expectations are foundational to asking and telling activities. Assumptions are associated with participants’ directly and indirectly seeking or providing information. Reporting or asking about praiseworthy or blameworthy matters implicates an attribution of responsibility. Moral orientations influence asking and telling activities. The conversation analytic papers included in this work range from Pomerantz’s earliest research on preference organization to her more recent work on asking and telling. For each article, there is a lead-in that identifies the research interests that drove the analysis and a commentary that provides her current sense of the analysis. The introductory and concluding chapters discuss the complexities of asking and telling in the light of the articles’ findings, and they illuminate the links the papers have to one another. Pomerantz shares her views about the program of conversation analytic research, a view that is reflected both in the studies and in her commentaries.
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Puranam, Phanish. Behavioral foundations. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199672363.003.0002.
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The diversity of behaviors that human beings exhibit makes it challenging to know what behavioral assumptions to make when building theories about organizations. Fortunately for us, organizational contexts are, to varying degrees, designed. I argue that this introduces a powerful set of levers—sorting, framing and structuring—that can help reduce this diversity of behavioral possibilities to a tractable yet plausible few. In the resulting account of behavior, alternatives need not be given, their consequences need not be known, and the utilities attached to consequences need not be stable. This chapter offers a simplified framework to understand a variety of forms of rational and non-rational individual behavior as special cases.
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Cullity, Garrett. Substantive Moral Theory. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807841.003.0002.
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What is a substantive moral theory? The chapter begins with an answer to this question—one that requires us to distinguish between different kinds of justification in ethics. The sense in which such a theory must have foundations is explained, and the challenges faced by a plural-foundation theory are described. An initial explanation is given of how such a theory could seek to combine insights from rival welfarist, Kantian, contractualist, and perfectionist traditions of moral thought. The book’s epistemological assumptions are laid out.
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Herman, David. Narratology beyond the Human. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190850401.001.0001.
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This book aims to develop a cross-disciplinary approach to post-Darwinian narratives concerned with animals and human-animal relationships. In outlining this integrative approach to storytelling in a more-than-human setting, the study also considers the enabling and constraining effects of different narrative media, examining a range of fictional and nonfictional texts disseminated in print, comics and graphic novels, and film. Focusing on techniques employed in these media, including the use of animal narrators, alternation between human and nonhuman perspectives on events, shifts backward and forward in narrative time, the embedding of stories within stories, and others, the book explores how specific strategies for portraying nonhuman agents both emerge from and contribute to broader attitudes toward animal life. Conversely, emphasizing that stories are, in general, interwoven with cultures’ ontologies, their assumptions about what sorts of beings populate the world and how those beings’ qualities and abilities relate to the qualities and abilities ascribed to humans, promises to reshape existing frameworks for narrative inquiry. Ideas that have been foundational for the field are at stake here, including ideas about what makes narratives more or less amenable to being interpreted as narratives, about the extent to which differences of genre affect attributions of mental states to characters (human as well as nonhuman) in narrative contexts, and about the suitability of stories as a means for engaging with supraindividual phenomena unfolding over long timescales and in widely separated places, including patterns and events situated at the level of animal populations and species rather than particular creatures.
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Gamberini, Andrea. The City Commune and the Assumption of a Public Role. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198824312.003.0003.
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This chapter examines the affirmation of the commune in the context of the urban political scene: first as one of the many forces present in the city (together with the bishop and certain aristocratic families endowed with specific rights and powers), then as a single hegemonic force. In less than a century, the communal citizen passed from an extra legem condition to one of full recognition as a public power—something that took place thanks to a complex conceptual work of elaboration that owed much to the clash with Barbarossa and even more to the encounter with the Roman legal tradition. The chapter shows that it was, in fact, on this terrain that the doctores built the legal foundations of citizen autonomy: a process which, while slow and non-linear, gave rise to exceptional results.
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Hu, Xuhui. Theoretical foundations. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198808466.003.0002.
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Adopting the constructivist approach, especially building on Borer’s (2005a, b, 2013a) XS Model, two theoretical elements in the theory of the syntax of events are put forward. The first element concerns the specific constraints on the interaction between conceptual meaning and syntactic derivation. The content of the predicate will be integrated into the interpretation derived from the syntax via a set of Integration Conditions, according to which, the interpretation derived from syntax licenses the legitimacy of the predicate content. The second theoretical assumption is the addition of the DivP to the event phrase (EP) structure. A verbal feature is in nature an [iDiv] feature, which is equivalent to the interpretable feature provided by the classifier in the nominal domain. The stative/dynamic interpretation of an event is tied to the value of the [iDiv] feature, which further explains the grammatical distinction between two types of homogeneous predicates.
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Jenset, Gard B., and Barbara McGillivray. Foundations of the framework. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198718178.003.0002.
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Chapter 2 deals with the foundations of the framework outlined in the book. The basic assumptions of the framework are made explicit, and the chapter continues with three main sections on the major principles of the framework, best practices for conducting research within the framework, and a section on data-driven historical linguistics. The section on principles lays down twelve principles underpinning the framework. These principles are referred to throughout the rest of the book, including the case studies. The aim of these principles is to make historical linguistic research more transparent and reproducible, to facilitate communication across different theoretical paradigms, and to allow researchers to tackle complex problems in a systematic way. The best practices section explains additional methodological points, while the final section discusses the role of corpora in historical linguistics research practice.
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Pearce, Kenneth L. Foundational Grounding and the Argument from Contingency. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198806967.003.0011.
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The argument from contingency for the existence of God is best understood as a request for an explanation of the total sequence of causes and effects in the universe (‘History’ for short). Many puzzles about how there could be such an explanation arise from the assumption that God is being introduced as one more cause prepended to the sequence of causes that (allegedly) needed explaining. In response to this difficulty, this chapter defends three theses. First, it argues that, if the argument from contingency is to succeed, the explanation of History in terms of God must not be a causal explanation; second, that a particular hypothesis about God’s relation to History—that God is what I call the foundational ground of History—is intelligible and explanatory; third and finally, that the explanatory advantages of this hypothesis cannot be had within the confines of naturalism.
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Heath, Joseph. Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197567982.001.0001.
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Although the task of formulating an appropriate policy response to the problem of anthropogenic climate change is one that raises a number of very difficult normative issues, environmental ethicists have not played an influential role in government deliberations. This is primarily due to their rejection of many of the assumptions that structure the debates over policy. This book offers a philosophical defense of these assumptions in order to overcome the major conceptual barriers to the participation of philosophers in these debates. There are five important barriers: First, the policy debate presupposes a stance of liberal neutrality, as a result of which it does not privilege any particular set of environmental values over other concerns. Second, it assumes ongoing economic growth, along with a commitment to what is sometimes called a weak sustainability framework when analyzing the value of the bequest being made to future generations. Third, it treats climate change as fundamentally a collective action problem, not an issue of distributive justice. Fourth, there is the acceptance of cost-benefit analysis, or more precisely, the view that a carbon-pricing regime should be guided by our best estimate of the social cost of carbon. And finally, there is the view that when this calculation is undertaken, it is permissible to discount costs and benefits, depending on how far removed they are from the present. This book attempts to make explicit and defend these presuppositions, and in so doing offer philosophical foundations for the debate over climate change policy.
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Reichmann, Werner. The Interactional Foundations of Economic Forecasting. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198820802.003.0005.
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How do economic forecasters produce legitimate and credible predictions of the economic future, despite most of the economy being transmutable and indeterminate? Using data from a case study of economic forecasting institutes in Germany, this chapter argues that the production of credible economic futures depends on an epistemic process embedded in various forms of interaction. This interactional foundation—through ‘foretalk’ and ‘epistemic participation’ in networks of internal and external interlocutors—sharpens economic forecasts in three ways. First, it brings to light new imaginaries of the economic future, allowing forecasters to spot emerging developments they would otherwise have missed. Second, it ensures the forecasts’ social legitimacy. And finally, it increases the forecasts’ epistemic quality by providing decentralized information about the intentions and assumptions of key economic and political actors.
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Golan, Amos. Foundations of Info-Metrics. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199349524.001.0001.
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This book provides a framework for info-metrics—the science of modeling, inference, and reasoning under conditions of noisy and insufficient information. Info-metrics is an inherently interdisciplinary framework that emerged from the intersection of information theory, statistical inference, and decision-making under uncertainty. It allows us to process the available information with minimal reliance on assumptions that cannot be validated. This book focuses on unifying all information processing and model building within a single constrained optimization framework. It provides a complete framework for modeling and inference, rather than a problem-specific model. The framework evolves from the simple premise that our available information is often insufficient to provide a unique answer for decisions we wish to make. Each decision, or solution, is derived from the available input information along with a choice of inferential procedure. The book contains many multidisciplinary applications that demonstrate the simplicity and generality of the framework in real-world settings: These include initial diagnosis at an emergency room, optimal dose decisions, election forecasting, network and information aggregation, weather pattern analyses, portfolio allocation, inference of strategic behavior, incorporation of prior information, option pricing, and modeling an interacting social system. This book presents simple derivations of the key results that are necessary to understand and apply the fundamental concepts to a variety of problems. Derivations are often supported by graphical illustrations. The book is designed to be accessible for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners across the disciplines, requiring only basic quantitative skills and a little persistence.
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Champollion, Lucas. The stage. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198755128.003.0002.
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This chapter presents a distilled picture of the crucial issues in the theoretical background assumptions and develops the framework on which strata theory is built. This framework is essentially a synthesis of the work by Lønning (1987), Link (1998), Krifka (1998), Landman (2000), and others. Its mathematical foundation is classical extensional mereology, which is presented and discussed at length. The overview in this chapter is intended as a reference point for future researchers, and spells out the relevant background assumptions as explicitly as possible, especially in the case of points where the literature has not yet reached consensus on a preferred analysis. Issues discussed in this chapter include the meaning of the plural morpheme, the question whether the meanings of verbs are inherently pluralized, the formal properties of thematic roles, and the compositional process.
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Timothy, Endicott, and Oliver Peter. Part VI Constitutional Theory, C Key Debates in Constitutional Theory, Ch.44 The Role of Theory in Canadian Constitutional Law. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/law/9780190664817.003.0044.
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Canadian constitutional law has been shaped by tacit assumptions about the philosophical foundations of the Constitution, and also by the articulate theorizing of judges, legal scholars, and legal practitioners. We discuss the assumptions behind the country’s choice in 1867 of a distinct form of federalism, a parliamentary form of government very different from American republicanism, and a role for judges (particularly in adjudicating the federal division of powers, and in their innovative reference jurisdiction) that judges had never had in the United Kingdom Constitution. The principles of parliamentary government and of federalism, while giving the Constitution a remarkably robust framework, developed in a changing context with the end of Imperial governance. We discuss those developments, and ways in which the judges’ role as theorists of the Constitution—enhanced by the Constitution Act, 1982—has burgeoned in that changing context, through their approach to the principles of the Constitution.
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Rauhut, Heiko. Game Theory. Edited by Wim Bernasco, Jean-Louis van Gelder, and Henk Elffers. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199338801.013.7.
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Game theory analyzes strategic decision making of multiple interdependent actors and has become influential in economics, political science, and sociology. It provides novel insights in criminology because it is a universal language for the unification of the social and behavioral sciences and allows deriving new hypotheses from fundamental assumptions about decision making. This chapter first reviews foundations and assumptions of game theory, basic concepts, and definitions. This includes applications of game theory to offender decision making in different strategic interaction settings: simultaneous and sequential games and signaling games. Next, the chapter illustrates the benefits (and problems) of game theoretical models for the analysis of crime and punishment by providing an in-depth discussion of the “inspection game.” The formal analytics are described, point predictions are derived, and hypotheses are tested by laboratory experiments. The chapter concludes with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications of results from the inspection game.
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Agha, Saleh J. Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr (d. 1979) on the Logical Foundations of Induction. Edited by Khaled El-Rouayheb and Sabine Schmidtke. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199917389.013.31.
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Mohammad Baqir as-Sadr’s book on the logical foundations of induction is an attempt to solve “the problem of induction,” with the ultimate aim of establishing that faith in God is based on the same rational principles as science. The book argues against two main attempts to solve that problem—the Aristotelian/rationalist and the empiricist attempts, rejecting both as inadequate. The book argues for a new epistemological theory that distinguishes between an objective and a subjective axis along which knowledge can grow, based on an analysis of knowledge into an objective content and a subjective attitude. Objective growth relies on the theory of probability, while subjective growth is a matter of increasing certainty. Sadr’s solution of the problem of induction operates at the subjective level and fundamentally relies on an inadequate assumption. The project ultimately fails; but its execution is highly instructive and introduces new methods into Islamic philosophy.
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Angner, Erik. Subjective Measures of Well‐Being: Philosophical Perspectives. Edited by Don Ross and Harold Kincaid. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195189254.003.0021.
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The goal of this article is to explore some fundamental assumptions underlying subjective measures of well-being, as compared to more traditional economic measures. Its main thesis is that psychologists and economists have sharply different philosophical commitments, a fact that is seldom made explicit. Although it is perfectly reasonable for social and behavioral scientists to be wary of spending too much time thinking about the philosophical foundations of their enterprise, there are moments when it is eminently useful to do so. In this case, this article maintains, there is good reason to attend to these foundations, since they are directly relevant to the assessment of the various measures. A better grasp of fundamental commitments, this article argues, goes a long way toward explaining why psychologists' and economists' efforts to measure welfare or well-being are so different, and why there is relatively little fruitful communication and collaboration across fields.
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Rogers, Adam. The Development of Towns. Edited by Martin Millett, Louise Revell, and Alison Moore. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697731.013.042.
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This chapter examines urban foundation and development in the Roman period and the issues relating to town origins and purpose in Britain. It focuses on the chartered towns and reviews relating to the three main types of urban settlement—the coloniae, municipia and civitas-capitals—and the practice of settlement categorization. The chapter also contextualizes debate on urban development by discussing aspects of the history of approach to the documentation and interpretation of Roman town foundation in Britain. It discusses the practicalities of town construction and then moves on to emphasizing the need for Roman urban studies to embrace archaeological theory in order to avoid normative assumptions in interpreting urban material and town life. In particular it argues for greater recognition of the relationship between the development of urban spaces, the lived experience within towns, and the existing significance attached to places and landscapes in prehistory.
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Shaw, Daron R., Brian E. Roberts, and Mijeong Baek. The Appearance of Corruption. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197548417.001.0001.
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The sanctity of political speech is a key element of the U.S. Constitution and a cornerstone of the American republic. When the Supreme Court linked political speech to campaign finance in its landmark Buckley v. Valeo (1976) decision, the modern era of campaign finance regulation was born. In practical terms, this decision meant that in order to pass constitutional muster, any laws limiting money in politics must be narrowly tailored and serve a compelling state interest. The lone state interest the Court was willing to entertain was the mitigation of corruption. In order to reach this argument the Court advanced a sophisticated behavioral model, one with key assumptions about how laws will affect voters’ opinions and behavior. These assumptions have received surprisingly little attention in the literature. This book takes up the task of identifying and analyzing empirically the Court’s presumed links between campaign finance regulations and political opinions and behavior. In so doing, we rely on original survey data and experiments from 2009–2016 to openly confront the question of what happens when the Supreme Court is wrong, and when the foundation of over forty years of jurisprudence is simply not true.
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Walter, Meyerstein F., Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. Departament de Filosofia., and Seminar on Cosmological Models (1987 : Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), eds. Foundations of big bang cosmology: Reflections by a group of physicists and philosophers from the universities of Barcelona and Paris on the basic assumptions underlying contemporary cosmology : Barcelona, Spain, Sept.-Dec. 1987. Singapore: World Scientific, 1989.
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Lenard, Patti Tamara, and David Miller. Trust and National Identity. Edited by Eric M. Uslaner. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190274801.013.36.
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This article examines evidence from social psychology and comparative social science on the trust-related effects of having a national identity. The starting hypothesis is that identities provide a foundation for extending trust by permitting those who share them to make assumptions about the motivations and intentions of others. The discussion in the article establishes that this hypothesis is empirically supported, and examines the trust-related effects of national identities in particular. We are attentive to the strength and quality of these identities, which correlate with how inclusive or exclusive they are. We then propose that public policy steers national identities in a culturally civic direction, emphasizing elements that are accessible to newcomers and minorities and downplaying those that are not.
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Cook, Pam. No Fixed Address. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036613.003.0002.
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This chapter draws on post-structural conceptions of the mutability of gendered and sexualized identities in order to question cinematic identification with one's gendered like, an assumption underpinning categorization of genres by gender. Speculating that we go to the cinema to lose rather than confirm identities, it opens a conceptual space for male masochism and female violence, thus challenging a dominant binary in feminist thinking. In questioning the gendering of genres, the chapter notes shared structures and affects between the western and women's picture, normally posed in antithetical terms. Arguably, such similarities can be traced to their common foundation in melodrama conceived as a mode underpinning Hollywood's genre system.
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Hoffmann, Thomas, and Graeme Trousdale, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195396683.001.0001.
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This handbook presents a comprehensive account of current work on Construction Grammar, its theoretical foundations, and its applications to and relationship with other kinds of linguistic enquiry. This volume is divided into five sections. The first section highlights the fundamental assumptions shared by all constructionist approaches; the second describes the particular frameworks in which the notion of constructions plays a central role; the third illustrates how constructionist approaches can be used for the analysis of all types of (morpho)syntactic phenomena from the lexicon?syntax cline; the fourth discusses the psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic underpinnings of Construction Grammar; and the final section considers the relation of Construction Grammar to language variation and change. The handbook also traces the history of Construction Grammar and explains its distinction from Chomskyan Mainstream Generative Grammar.
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Morris, Lorenzo. African American Representatives in the United Nations. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038877.003.0009.
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This chapter seeks to identify the assumptions and expectations that have historically surrounded African Americans in the United Nations, and determine whether they significantly affect or have affected African Americans in senior positions in the United Nations in the execution, interpretation, or evaluation of their responsibilities. The chapter focuses on the role of the ambassador, but it begins with Ralph Bunche, whose role as a “first” and whose breadth of responsibilities in the U.N.'s foundation helped define the parameters in which race is likely to pass between insignificance and prominence. Building on continuing issues exposed by Bunche's experience, the experiences of the three African American U.S. ambassadors to the U.N.—Andrew Young, Donald McHenry, and Susan Rice—can each be examined on the basis of similar issues.
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Guymer, Sheila. Eloquent Performance. Edited by Danuta Mirka. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199841578.013.0023.
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This chapter explores how skilled performers use topical analysis in their interpretative decision-making, presenting material from lesson-interviews conducted with fortepianists Robert Levin and Bart van Oort. Drawing on treatises by Türk, Quantz, Kirnberger, Koch, and Leopold Mozart, it examines some historical foundations of Leonard Ratner’s topics, their connections with eighteenth-century concepts of musical character and expression, and topics’ limitations as tools in the process of analysis and interpretation. The chapter takes the Allegro movements of Mozart’s Sonata K. 333 as two case studies. It concludes that awareness of topical references in this repertoire aids performers in systematically identifying and executing contrasts, enabling more expressive and communicative performance. It suggests that a sensitive understanding of historically informed performance practices benefits topic theorists, as analyses may be undermined by anachronistic assumptions about how the music sounds in performance.
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Beaney, Michael. Wittgenstein on Language: From Simples to Samples. Edited by Ernest Lepore and Barry C. Smith. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199552238.003.0002.
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The so-called ‘linguistic turn’ that took place in philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century is most strongly associated with the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). If there is a single text that might be identified as the source of the linguistic turn, then it is Wittgenstein's first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in German in 1921 and in an English translation in 1922. Throughout his work, Wittgenstein was concerned with the foundations of language; the crucial shift lay from the appeal to simples to the appeal to samples, and a corresponding shift from assumptions about what lies hidden to an appreciation of what is visible to all in our linguistic practices. This article first outlines the main elements of Wittgenstein's early conception of language, before considering his critique of that conception and his later views.
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Sciberras, Colette. Buddha, Aristotle, and Science. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190456023.003.0002.
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This chapter compares Western philosophical and scientific foundations with Buddhist philosophies on the topic of flourishing in nature. It argues that flourishing is good by querying the purpose of nature, the existence of God and the good. Defining flourishing in terms of Aristotle’s final cause, and questioning some of the assumptions of the founders of modern science, the chapter presents a common quandary—whether science and faith are reconcilable. Through attempting to steer a Middle way between belief in eternal souls, gods and divine purposes, and the depressing conclusions of nihilists and (some) atheists, it suggests that Buddhism can be seen as scientific, if the definition of what counts as an ‘observation’ is widened. Then, by weaving together Buddhism and Aristotle, the chapter makes the case for the positive value of flourishing in nature and among humans.
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Johnson, Dominic D. P. Strategic Instincts. Princeton University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691137452.001.0001.
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A widespread assumption in political science and international relations is that cognitive biases — quirks of the brain we all share as human beings — are detrimental and responsible for policy failures, disasters, and wars. This book challenges this assumption, explaining that these nonrational behaviors can actually support favorable results in international politics and contribute to political and strategic success. By studying past examples, the book considers the ways that cognitive biases act as “strategic instincts,” lending a competitive edge in policy decisions, especially under conditions of unpredictability and imperfect information. Drawing from evolutionary theory and behavioral sciences, the book looks at three influential cognitive biases — overconfidence, the fundamental attribution error, and in-group/out-group bias. It then examines the advantageous as well as the detrimental effects of these biases through historical case studies of the American Revolution, the Munich Crisis, and the Pacific campaign in World War II. The book acknowledges the dark side of biases — when confidence becomes hubris, when attribution errors become paranoia, and when group bias becomes prejudice. Ultimately, it makes a case for a more nuanced understanding of the causes and consequences of cognitive biases and argues that in the complex world of international relations, strategic instincts can, in the right context, guide better performance. The book shows how an evolutionary perspective can offer the crucial next step in bringing psychological insights to bear on foundational questions in international politics.
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Sugden, Robert. The Inner Rational Agent. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198825142.003.0004.
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Chapter 4 reviews ‘behavioural welfare economics’—the approach to normative analysis that is favoured by most behavioural economists. This approach assumes that people have context-independent ‘true’ or ‘latent’ preferences which, because of psychologically-induced errors, are not always revealed in actual choices. Behavioural welfare economics aims to reconstruct latent preferences by identifying and removing the effects of error on decisions, and to design policies to satisfy those preferences. Its implicit model of human agency is of an ‘inner rational agent’ that interacts with the world through an imperfect psychological ‘shell’. I argue that there is no satisfactory evidence to support this model, and no credible psychological foundation for it. Since the concept of true preference has no empirical content, the idea that such preferences can be reconstructed is a mirage. Normative economics needs to be more radical in giving up rationality assumptions.
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Proctor, Kim. Measuring Group Consciousness. Edited by Lonna Rae Atkeson and R. Michael Alvarez. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190213299.013.33.
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Although group consciousness is an important concept in explaining political behavior, both theoretical guidance on how to measure group consciousness and empirical consensus regarding its operationalization are lacking. This has the potential to lead to both diverging results and inaccurate empirical conclusions, which greatly limits the ability to understand the role that group consciousness plays in politics. Using data from Pew’s 2013 “Survey of LGBT Americans,” this analysis provides a foundation for measuring group consciousness using item response theory (IRT). Through an examination of dimensionality, monotonicity, model fit, and differential item functioning, the results demonstrate that many assumptions about measuring group consciousness have been incorrect. Further, the findings suggest that previous conclusions about subgroup differences may be the result of survey bias, rather than actual between-group differences. Moving forward, scholars of political behavior should use IRT to measure latent constructs.
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Coolidge, Frederick L. Evolutionary Neuropsychology. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190940942.001.0001.
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This book is designed to introduce the evolutionary origins of the human brain’s present structures and functions. Evolutionary neuropsychology is a new multidisciplinary science that embraces and uses empirical findings from the fields of evolution, neuroscience, cognitive sciences, psychology, anthropology, and archaeology. This book is designed for the intellectually curious, but styled especially for academics at any level and psychologists focusing on various aspects of human behavior. The bedrock foundation of evolutionary neuropsychology is the assumption that functionally specialized brain regions are adaptations naturally selected in response to various environmental challenges over the course of billions of years of evolution. These adaptations and their brain regions and circuitry may now serve new functions, which are called exaptations, and they are particularly involved in higher cognitive functions.
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Beisbart, Claus. Philosophy and Cosmology. Edited by Paul Humphreys. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199368815.013.36.
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Cosmological questions (e.g., how far the world extends and how it all began) have occupied humans for ages and given rise to numerous conjectures, both within and outside philosophy. To put to rest fruitless speculation, Kant argued that these questions move beyond the limits of human knowledge. This article begins with Kant’s doubts about cosmology and shows that his arguments presuppose unreasonably high standards on knowledge and unwarranted assumptions about space-time. As an analysis of the foundations of twentieth-century cosmology reveals, other worries about the discipline can be avoided too if the universe is modeled using Einstein’s general theory of relativity. There is now strong observational support for one particular model. However, due to underdetermination problems, the big cosmological questions cannot be fully answered using this model either. This opens the space for more speculative proposals again (e.g., that the universe is only part of a huge multiverse).