Books on the topic 'Descriptivity'
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1
Orilia, Francesco. Singular Reference: A Descriptivist Perspective. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3312-3.
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service), SpringerLink (Online, ed. Singular Reference: A Descriptivist Perspective. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media B.V., 2010.
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Wittgensteinian values: Philosophy, religious belief and descriptivist methodology. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2001.
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McClanahan, Rebecca. Word painting: A guide to writing more descriptively. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer's Digest Books, 1999.
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Filipovic, Tommy Edward. Reinventing the wheel: Towards a more descriptively complete interpersonal circumplex. Sudbury, Ont: Laurentian University, School of Graduate Studies, 2003.
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Prajda, Katalin. Network and Migration in Early Renaissance Florence, 1378-1433. NL Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789462988682.
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This book explores the co-development of political, social, economic, and artistic networks of Florentines in the Kingdom of Hungary during the reign of Sigismund of Luxembourg. Analyzing the social network of these politicians, merchants, artisans, royal officers, dignitaries of the Church, and noblemen is the primary objective of this book. The study addresses both descriptively the patterns of connectivity and causally the impacts of this complex network on cultural exchanges of various types, among these migration, commerce, diplomacy, and artistic exchange. In the setting of a case study, this monograph should best be thought of as an attempt to cross the boundaries that divide political, economic, social, and art history so that they simultaneously figure into a single integrated story of Florentine history and development.
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Bedke, Matthew S. Non-Descriptive Relativism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823841.003.0003.
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This chapter identifies a novel family of metaethical theories that are non-descriptive and that aim to explain the action-guiding qualities of normative thought and language. The general strategy is to consider different relations language might bear to a given content, where we locate descriptivity (or lack of it) in these relations, rather than locating it in a theory that begins with the expression of states of mind, or locating it in a special kind of content that is not way-things-might-be content. One such view is sketched, which posits two different content-fixing cognitive roles for bits of language. One role fixes a descriptive relation to content and another role fixes a non-descriptive relation to content. In addition to non-descriptivity and action guidance, the chapter briefly considers the appearance of mind-independent authoritative force, disagreement, and Frege–Geach concerns.
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Blevins, James P. American Descriptivism (‘Structuralism’). Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199585847.013.0019.
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Nuyts, Jan. Analyses of the Modal Meanings. Edited by Jan Nuyts and Johan Van Der Auwera. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199591435.013.1.
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This article deals with the semantic analysis of the notion of modality, surveying the most important traditional views in linguistics. After pointing out the problems encountered in the literature in trying to define the category, it first discusses the in the literature most common basic types of modality, namely, dynamic modality, deontic modality, and epistemic modality, as well as the less common basic category of boulomaic modality. It then goes on to survey a variety of alternative views on how the semantic domain of modality may be organized. The article also considers the types of criteria that have been proposed to motivate the “cover category” of modality. Finally, it outlines a few features and properties frequently referenced in the literature on modality as characteristic of (some of) the modal categories, including subjectivity vs objectivity or intersubjectivity, performativity vs descriptivity, informational status, and the semantic scope of qualificational dimensions.
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Orilia, Francesco. Singular Reference: A Descriptivist Perspective. Springer, 2010.
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Springer and Francesco Orilia. Singular Reference: A Descriptivist Perspective. Springer Netherlands, 2012.
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Wittgensteinian Values: Philosophy, Religious Belief and Descriptivist Methodology. Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.
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Wittgensteinian Values: Philosophy, Religious Belief and Descriptivist Methodology. Routledge, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315197036.
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Thomas, Emyr Vaughan. Wittgensteinian Values: Philosophy, Religious Belief and Descriptivist Methodology. Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
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Thomas, Emyr Vaughan. Wittgensteinian Values: Philosophy, Religious Belief and Descriptivist Methodology. Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.
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McClanahan, Rebecca. Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively. Writer's Digest Books, 2000.
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Chrisman, Matthew. The Meaning of 'Ought': Beyond Descriptivism and Expressivism in Metaethics. Oxford University Press, 2015.
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Word Painting Revised Edition: The Fine Art of Writing Descriptively. F&W Media, Incorporated, 2014.
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Losee, John. Golden Age of Philosophy of Science 1945 To 2000: Logical Reconstructionism, Descriptivism, Normative Naturalism, and Foundationalism. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2020.
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Losee, John. Golden Age of Philosophy of Science 1945 To 2000: Logical Reconstructionism, Descriptivism, Normative Naturalism, and Foundationalism. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018.
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The Golden Age of Philosophy of Science 1945 to 2000: Logical Reconstructionism, Descriptivism, Normative Naturalism, and Foundationalism. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
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Glasgow, Josh. A Metatheory of Race. Edited by Naomi Zack. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190236953.013.16.
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Arguments from reference are widely used by people who otherwise disagree about race. They are used by people who think that race is an illusion (antirealists). They are used by people who think that race is socially real (constructivists). Theories of race across the disciplines normally define “race” descriptively to defend their views on what race is. This normal approach has come under attack, from two angles: that descriptive definitions are flawed, and that using any semantic arguments is fruitless. However, normal race theory can be defended against these objections, because the mode of reference relevant to race is descriptive and there is no privileged nondescriptive mode of reference that is (can be) relevant to the race debates.
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Bach, Kent. Loaded Words. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198758655.003.0004.
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What, as a matter of linguistic meaning, is added by referring to people with a slurring term rather than with its neutral counterpart? Hybrid expressivism says that slurs have the same descriptive contents as their neutral counterparts and that what distinguishes them is an expressive component. This chapter argues that hybrid expressivism gets the order of explanation backwards and it offers an alternative, loaded descriptivism. This says that the second component of the meaning of a slur is descriptive, not expressive. Using a slur expresses contempt all right (or some such attitude), but not as a matter of meaning. It does so because, thanks to its meaning, using it imputes contemptibility to members of the target group.
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Machery, Edouard. The Method of Cases. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807520.003.0002.
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Many areas of philosophy rely on the method of cases: Philosophers consider actual or hypothetical situations (which cases or thought experiments describe) in order to determine what facts hold in these situations and to bring them to bear on philosophical controversies. Surprisingly, however, the characterization of the method of cases is controversial. Chapter 1 defends a particular characterization of the method of cases and identifies some of the roles it plays in contemporary philosophy. Alternative characterizations, which appeal to notions such as metaphysical or epistemological analyticity, conceptual competence, or intuition, are rejected. Only a minimalist characterization, according to which cases elicit everyday judgments, is philosophically adequate—it does not rely on empty notions or on notions useless to characterize the method of cases—and descriptively adequate—it captures how philosophers really use cases.
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Carter, Scott. Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037665.003.0012.
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This chapter offers a descriptive analysis of the demographic presence and economic activity of the Hispanic population in six core Heartland states: Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma; hereafter referred to collectively as the Heartland 6 (HL6). It gives an overall view of the underlying trends in Hispanic demography, productivity, employment, and other relevant socioeconomic variables from 2000–2007. It shows that the HL6 experienced increased rates of growth in its Hispanic population, a trend consistent with evidence reported in the recent “new destinations” literature. At the same time, traditional growth states vis-à-vis Hispanic presence report decreasing trends in their growth rate. This represents a diffusion, or convergence, of Latin American migrations throughout the United States. Economic performance, income distribution, employment, and the age-gender profile are also descriptively presented.
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Recanati, François. Contextualism and Singular Reference. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198783916.003.0009.
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This chapter discusses the relations between three approaches to the referential/attributive distinction: the Gricean approach advocated by Kripke and others, the two-dimensional approach pioneered by Kaplan and Stalnaker, and the Millian approach favoured by Donnellan. In contrast to the two-dimensional approach, the Millian approach honours the intuitions which led to the rejection of descriptivism, but it is subject to Gricean criticism based on the speaker’s reference/semantic reference distinction. The chapter shows that, suitably elaborated and revised, the Millian approach can be made immune to that criticism. The resulting view, it is argued, applies beyond the case of definite descriptions. It also supports Austin’s and Strawson’s speech act theoretic approach to reference and truth—an approach which Grice initially dismissed and which Travis insightfully attempted to defend and resurrect.
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Marin, Mara. Modeling Commitment for Structural Relations. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190498627.003.0003.
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Chapter 2 extends the concept of commitment from personal to social structural relations and begins the argument that our implication in social structures puts us in relations analogous to those of personal commitments. This analogy has a descriptive and a normative element. Descriptively, this book’s notion of commitment captures the idea that social structures are the accumulated effects of our actions. Normatively, it captures the claim that we owe obligations to each other in virtue of our structural relationships to each other, that is, because our actions, accumulated over time, are responsible for reproducing the structure. It illustrates these claims with the example of a woman who attempts to change the gendered nature of parenting. This view of social structures as commitments is an antidote to the powerlessness we otherwise experience in our relation to unjust structures.
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Prost, Mario. Sources and the Hierarchy of International Law. Edited by Samantha Besson and Jean d’Aspremont. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/law/9780198745365.003.0031.
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This chapter maintains that the doctrine of sources is constructed around a set of shared intuitions and accepted wisdom. One of them is that there exists no hierarchy among sources of international law and that these are, to all intents and purposes, of equal rank and status. The chapter takes a critical look at this ‘non-hierarchy’ thesis, arguing that it is descriptively problematic as it tends to conceal the fact that international legal actors (States, judges, scholars) constantly establish more or less formalized hierarchies of worth and status among law-making processes. These are, admittedly, soft and transient hierarchies that very much depend on contexts, circumstances, the identity of the legal subjects, and the projects they pursue. But these are hierarchies nonetheless inasmuch as that they involve a differentiation of sources ‘in a normative light’.
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Allern, Elin Haugsgjerd, and Tània Verge. Still Connecting with Society? Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198758631.003.0005.
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How parties structure their interaction with social groups is a key determinant of their capacity to provide linkage between the institutions of government and the public at large. This chapter investigates the extent to which modern political parties use formal measures to connect to relevant societal interests and strengthen their anchorage in society. The analysis centres on parties’ use of formal rules governing affiliation and representation to link with externally organized interests and parties’ establishment of sub-organizations with representation rights within the party. The chapter authors develop and test several hypotheses concerning cross-country and within-country sources of variation in formal linkage and test them empirically. In addition, they examine whether formal status and representation rights shape parties’ ability to represent descriptively the associated latent social interests focusing on the case of women and ethnic minorities.
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Sikka, Sonia. Rescuing Religion from Faith. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198738909.003.0002.
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This chapter argues for a broader and more inclusive approach to philosophy of religion. Philosophy of religion has traditionally derived its topics and its concept of religion from Christianity, with the result that this subfield is mainly an evaluation of the elements of Christian faith, and often dominated by Christian apologetics. A broader concept of religion, which takes into account Asian traditions as well as new religious movements, would not be confined to Christian theism. It would also not assume that the task of the philosophy of religion is exclusively to examine what “religion” holds by faith, as if faith, as a special mode of belief, necessarily defines the category of religion. Such a notion of the philosophy of religion, the chapter argues, is both descriptively and normatively inadequate. It is culturally parochial, and fails to offer much needed philosophical guidance in an age of religious questioning and uncertainty.
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Rossi, Enzo. Understanding Religion, Governing Religion. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198794394.003.0005.
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Cécile Laborde has argued that the freedom we think of as ‘freedom of religion’ should be understood as a bundle of separate and relatively independent freedoms. This chapter criticizes that approach by pointing out that it is insufficiently sensitive to facts about the sorts of entities that liberal states are. It argues that states have good reasons to mould phenomena such as religion into easily governable monoliths. If this is a problem from the normative point of view, it is not due to descriptively inadequate accounts of religion, but a problem with a lack of realism about the sort of institutions states are. The chapter’s conclusion is a three-way disjunction: either one must reckon with liberal states’ historically determined limitations in the management of changing social phenomena, or one should direct one’s frustration at the marriage of liberalism and the state, or the very existence of states is normatively problematic.
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Shafir, Eldar. Preference Inconsistency. Edited by Matthew D. Adler and Marc Fleurbaey. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199325818.013.27.
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A discrepancy between standard economic assumptions and observed behavior centers around individual preferences, which are assumed to be well ordered and consistent, but descriptively shown to be inconsistent and malleable. Not having at their disposal a reliable procedure for assigning values to options, people construct their preferences in the context of decision. As a result, the attractiveness of options depends on, among other things, the nature of other options in the set, the procedure used to express preference, the context of evaluation, and the decision-maker’s self-conception. The varieties of psychological experience underlying preference inconsistency are reviewed, and their implications are discussed. Preference inconsistency, it is proposed, is the outcome not of distracted shortcuts or avoidable errors, but of fundamental aspects of mental life that are central to how people process information. Although people endorse basic consistency criteria, their preferences are inherently inconsistent, with important implications for policy and welfare.
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Finlay, Stephen, and David Plunkett. Quasi-Expressivism about Statements of Law. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198828174.003.0002.
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Speech and thought about what the law is commonly function in practical ways to guide or assess behavior. These functions have often been seen as problematic for legal positivism in the tradition of H.L.A. Hart. One recent response is an expressivist analysis of legal statements. This paper advances a rival, positivist-friendly account of legal statements which the authors call “quasi-expressivist”. It combines a descriptivist, “rule-relational” semantics with a pragmatic account of the expressive and practical functions of legal discourse. This approach is at least as well-equipped as expressivism to explain the practical features of “internal” legal statements and a fundamental kind of legal disagreement, while handling better “external” legal statements. The chapter develops this theory in a Hartian framework, and also argues (against Kevin Toh’s expressivist interpretation) that Hart’s own views in The Concept of Law are best reconstructed along quasi-expressivist lines.
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Roth, Martin, and Robert Cummins. Neuroscience, Psychology, Reduction, and Functional Analysis. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199685509.003.0002.
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The pressure for reduction in science is an artifact of what we call the nomic conception of science (NCS): the idea that the content of science is a collection of laws, together with the deductive-nomological model of explanation. NCS in effect identifies explanation with reduction, thus making no room for the explanatory autonomy of function-analytical explanations. When we replace NCS with something more descriptively accurate, however, we find that the kind of explanatory autonomy of functional-analytic explanations is ubiquitous in the sciences. Key to showing this is a distinction between horizontal and vertical explanation. Horizontal explanations explain the capacities of a complex system by appeal to the design of the system. Vertical explanations, by contrast, explain how a design is implemented in a system. We argue that the distinction between horizontal and vertical explanations provides us with a better picture of the relationship between functional analysis and mechanistic explanation.
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Andersson Djurfeldt, Agnes, Fred Mawunyo Dzanku, and Aida Cuthbert Isinika, eds. Agriculture, Diversification, and Gender in Rural Africa. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198799283.001.0001.
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This book contributes to the understanding of smallholder agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa through addressing the dynamics of intensification and diversification within and outside agriculture, in contexts where women have much poorer access to agrarian resources than men. It uses a longitudinal cross-country comparative approach, relying on the Afrint dataset—unique household-level longitudinal data for six African countries collected over the period 2002–2013/15. The book first descriptively summarizes findings from the third wave of the dataset. The book nuances the current dominance of structural transformation narratives of agricultural change by adding insights from gender and village-level studies of agrarian change. It argues that placing agrarian change within broader livelihood dynamics outside agriculture, highlighting country- and region-specific contexts is an important analytical adaptation to the empirical realities of rural Africa. From the policy perspective, this book provides suggestions for more inclusive rural development policies, outlining the weaknesses of present policies illustrated by the currently gendered inequalities in access to agrarian resources. The book also provides country-specific insights from Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia.
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Dowding, Keith. Social and Political Power. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.198.
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Power is a complex topic that is viewed in entirely different ways by different writers. Power can be seen as a property of agents, with some agents having more power than others. It can be seen as a property of social systems, where structures hold power. It can also be seen in terms of specific actions by people to coerce or dominate, or it can be regarded as a subliminal force that leads people to think and behave in one way rather than another. It can be analyzed descriptively to try to explain how it is distributed, and critically to argue for changing structures to provide a more egalitarian and fairer distribution.Power studies flourished in the great community power studies of the 1950s and 1960s. Some of these works suggested that democratic nations were controlled by powerful elites who ruled in their own interests; some that power was more widely distributed and elites could not simply rule for themselves; others that in capitalist societies, despite some counterexamples, elites generally ruled in favor of developers and capitalists. Later studies examined how people’s interests are defined in terms of the structural positions in which they find themselves, and how the very ways in which we think and express ourselves affect our individual powers.
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Ye, Zhengdao, ed. The Semantics of Nouns. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198736721.001.0001.
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This volume represents state-of-the-art research on the semantics of nouns. It offers detailed and systematic analyses of scores of individual nouns across many different conceptual domains—‘people’, ‘beings’, ‘creatures’, ‘places’, ‘things’, ‘living things’, and ‘parts of the body and parts of the person’. A range of languages, both familiar and unfamiliar, is examined. These include Australian Aboriginal languages (Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara), (Mandarin) Chinese, Danish, English, French, German, Koromu (a Papuan language), Russian, Polish, and Solega (a Dravidian language). Each rigorous and descriptively rich analysis is fully grounded in a unified methodological framework consistently employed throughout the volume, and each chapter not only relates to central theoretical issues specific to the semantic analysis of the domain in question, but also empirically investigates the different types of meaning relations holding between nouns, such as meronymy, hyponymy, taxonomy, and antonymy. This is the first time that the semantics of typical nouns has been studied in such breadth and depth, and in such a systematic and coherent manner. The collection of studies shows how in-depth meaning analysis anchored in a cross-linguistic and cross-domain perspective can lead to extraordinary and unexpected insights into the common and particular ways in which speakers of different languages conceptualize, categorize, and order the world around them. This unique volume brings together a new generation of semanticists from across the globe, and will be of interest to researchers in linguistics, psychology, anthropology, biology, and philosophy.
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Thomasson, Amie L. Norms and Necessity. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190098193.001.0001.
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This book develops a new approach to understanding our claims about what is metaphysically necessary or possible: modal normativism. While claims about what is metaphysically necessary or possible have long played a central role in metaphysics and other areas of philosophy, such claims are traditionally thought of as aiming to describe a special kind of modal fact or property, or perhaps facts about other possible worlds. But that assumption leads to difficult ontological, epistemological, and methodological puzzles. Should we accept that there are modal facts or properties, or other possible worlds? If so, what could these things be? How could we come to know what the modal facts or properties are? How can we resolve philosophical debates about what is necessary or possible? The normativist rejects the assumption that modal claims aim to describe modal features or possible worlds, arguing instead that they serve as useful ways of conveying, reasoning with, and renegotiating semantic rules and their consequences. By dropping the descriptivist assumption, the normativist is able to unravel the notorious ontological problems of modality, and provide a clear and plausible story about how we can come to know what is metaphysically necessary or possible. Most importantly, this approach helps demystify philosophical methodology. For we are able to see that resolving metaphysical modal questions does not require a special form of philosophical insight or intuition. Instead, it requires nothing more mysterious than empirical knowledge, conceptual mastery, and an ability to explicitly convey and renegotiate semantic rules.
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Gómez-Torrente, Mario. Roads to Reference. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846277.001.0001.
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How is it that words (such as “Aristotle”) come to stand for the things they stand for (such as Aristotle)? Is the thing that a word stands for, its reference, fully identified or described by conventions known to the users of the word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the reference of a word and the conventions that determine or fix it? Do words like “water,” “three,” and “red” refer to appropriate things, just as the word “Aristotle” refers to Aristotle? If so, which things are these, and how do they come to be referred to by those words? In Roads to Reference, Mario Gómez-Torrente provides novel answers to these and other questions that have been of traditional interest in the theory of reference. The book introduces a number of cases of apparent indeterminacy of reference for proper names, demonstratives, and natural kind terms, which suggest that reference-fixing conventions for them adopt the form of lists of merely sufficient conditions for reference and reference failure. Arguments are then provided for a new anti-descriptivist picture of those kinds of words, according to which the reference-fixing conventions for them do not describe their reference. The book also defends realist and objectivist accounts of the reference of ordinary natural kind nouns, numerals, and adjectives for sensible qualities. According to these accounts, these words refer, respectively, to “ordinary kinds,” cardinality properties, and properties of membership in intervals of sensible dimensions, and these things are fixed in subtle ways by associated reference-fixing conventions.
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Cohn, Margit. A Theory of the Executive Branch. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198821984.001.0001.
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The executive branch in Western democracies has been handed a virtually impossible task. Expected to ‘imperially’ direct the life of the nation through thick and thin, it is concurrently required to be subservient to legislation meted out by a sovereign parliament. Drawing on a general argument from constitutional theory that prioritizes dispersal of power over concepts of hierarchy, the book argues that the tension between the political dominance of the executive branch and its submission to law is maintained by the adoption of various forms of fuzziness, under which a guise of legality masks the absence of substantive limitation of power. Under this 'internal tension' model, the executive branch is concurrently subservient to law and dominant over it, while concepts of substantive legality are compromised. Drawing on legal and political science research, the book classifies and analyses thirteen forms of fuzziness, ranging from open-ended or semi-written constitutions to unapplied legislation. The study of this unavoidable yet problematic feature of the public sphere is addressed descriptively and normatively. Adding detailed examples from two fields of law, emergency and air-pollution law, in two systems (the UK and the US), the book ends with a call for raising the threshold of judicial review, grounded in theories of participatory and deliberative democracy. This innovative book, concerned with an area that has been surprisingly under-researched on a general level beyond extensive studies of national executives, offers a theoretical foundation that should ground all analyses of the arguably most powerful branch of modern government.
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Mitchell, Neil J. Why Delegate? Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190904197.001.0001.
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Why Delegate? investigates the incentives to delegate and the risks that one takes in doing so. From mundane interactions like choosing a plumber to weightier tasks like the running of a country, and from recreational enjoyments to the protection of human rights, the world turns on delegation. Where it is successful, delegation brings efficiency, shared responsibility, and even happiness. Where it is not, it brings conflict, corruption, and an absence of accountability. One may hear of Saudi hit squads loose in Istanbul, rogue software engineers creating pollution scandals at Volkswagen, and individuals at FIFA selling the rights to host the World Cup, but one may question whether these individuals were out of control. One wonders about the chronic indifference of the Catholic Church to child abusers, and why those in charge ignore the misbehavior of security officials and even the war crimes of their soldiers. Is it can’t control, or won’t control? An understanding of the structure of the delegation relationship, more or less as economists have described it, simplifies a myriad of important and seemingly disparate problems in private and public life. Yet in the collision of principal-agent theory with the practice of delegation, there are further important insights to be found where the principal behaves in ways that are unexpected and puzzling to a rational-choice eye. A broader, more descriptively useful logic of delegation offers a fresh take on a wide variety of issues, whether corruption in sports organizations, war crimes, or the church’s child abuse scandal.
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Bernini, Marco. Beckett and the Cognitive Method. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190664350.001.0001.
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How can literature enhance, parallel or reassess the scientific study of the mind? Or is literature instead limited to the ancillary role of representing cognitive processes? Beckett and the Cognitive Method argues that Beckett’s narrative work, rather than just expressing or rendering cognition and mental states, inaugurates an exploratory use of narrative as an introspective modeling technology (defined as “introspection by simulation”). Through a detailed analysis of Beckett’s entire corpus and published volumes of letters, the book argues that Beckett pioneered a new method of writing to construct (in a mode analogous to scientific inquiry) “models” for the exploration of core laws, processes, and dynamics in the human mind. Marco Bernini integrates models, problems, and interpretive frameworks from contemporary narrative theory, cognitive sciences, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind to make a case for Beckett’s modeling practice of a vast array of processes including: the (narrative) illusion of a sense of self, the hallucinatory quality of inner speech, the dialogic interaction with memories and felt presences, the synesthetic nature of inner experience and mental imagery, the developmental cooperation of language and locomotion, the role of moods and emotions as cognitive drives, the layered complexity of the mind, and the emergent quality of consciousness. Beckett and the Cognitive Method also reflects on how Beckett’s “fictional cognitive models” are transformed into reading, auditory, or spectatorial experiences generating through narrative devices insights on which the sciences can only discursively or descriptively report. As such, the study advocates for their relevance to the contemporary scientific debate toward an interdisciplinary co-modeling of cognition.
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Stapleton, Jane. Three Essays on Torts. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192893734.001.0001.
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These essays champion tort scholarship that puts the judges at centre stage: what they do, how they understand their role, the heterogeneous reasons they give for their decisions, and their constitutional responsibility to identify and articulate the ‘living’ and ‘evolving’ common law. This is ‘reflexive tort scholarship’. Reflexive tort scholars seek dialogue with Bench and Bar. Their approach is very different from the currently fashionable academic search for ‘Grand Theories’ that descriptively assert that tort law is fundamentally ‘all about one thing’, a unifying idea that alone explains and justifies the whole of tort law. The book illustrates the advantages and pay-offs of the reflexive style of scholarship by showing how it illuminates various key features of tort law. Essay 2 identifies a principle of tort law (the ‘cooperative principle’) that is latent in the cases and that vindicates the value of collaborative human arrangements. Identifying this principle calls into question, in disputes between commercial parties, the reasoning used to support one of the most entrenched lines of authority in tort law—that based on the famous case of Hedley Byrne v Heller. Essay 3 deploys the reflexive method to argue that the iconic ‘but-for’ test of factual causation is inadequate and narrower than the concept actually utilised in the cases. Application of the method also prompts a reassessment of the ‘scope of duty’ concept and of the appropriate characterisation of the much-discussed decision in SAAMCO. These essays clearly demonstrate the value of scholarship that ‘takes the judges seriously’.
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Wikle, Christopher K. Spatial Statistics. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.710.
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The climate system consists of interactions between physical, biological, chemical, and human processes across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Characterizing the behavior of components of this system is crucial for scientists and decision makers. There is substantial uncertainty associated with observations of this system as well as our understanding of various system components and their interaction. Thus, inference and prediction in climate science should accommodate uncertainty in order to facilitate the decision-making process. Statistical science is designed to provide the tools to perform inference and prediction in the presence of uncertainty. In particular, the field of spatial statistics considers inference and prediction for uncertain processes that exhibit dependence in space and/or time. Traditionally, this is done descriptively through the characterization of the first two moments of the process, one expressing the mean structure and one accounting for dependence through covariability.Historically, there are three primary areas of methodological development in spatial statistics: geostatistics, which considers processes that vary continuously over space; areal or lattice processes, which considers processes that are defined on a countable discrete domain (e.g., political units); and, spatial point patterns (or point processes), which consider the locations of events in space to be a random process. All of these methods have been used in the climate sciences, but the most prominent has been the geostatistical methodology. This methodology was simultaneously discovered in geology and in meteorology and provides a way to do optimal prediction (interpolation) in space and can facilitate parameter inference for spatial data. These methods rely strongly on Gaussian process theory, which is increasingly of interest in machine learning. These methods are common in the spatial statistics literature, but much development is still being done in the area to accommodate more complex processes and “big data” applications. Newer approaches are based on restricting models to neighbor-based representations or reformulating the random spatial process in terms of a basis expansion. There are many computational and flexibility advantages to these approaches, depending on the specific implementation. Complexity is also increasingly being accommodated through the use of the hierarchical modeling paradigm, which provides a probabilistically consistent way to decompose the data, process, and parameters corresponding to the spatial or spatio-temporal process.Perhaps the biggest challenge in modern applications of spatial and spatio-temporal statistics is to develop methods that are flexible yet can account for the complex dependencies between and across processes, account for uncertainty in all aspects of the problem, and still be computationally tractable. These are daunting challenges, yet it is a very active area of research, and new solutions are constantly being developed. New methods are also being rapidly developed in the machine learning community, and these methods are increasingly more applicable to dependent processes. The interaction and cross-fertilization between the machine learning and spatial statistics community is growing, which will likely lead to a new generation of spatial statistical methods that are applicable to climate science.