This paper provides a critical assessment of classical liberals’ view of foreign and security policy. In the United States, the defenders of free enterprise and limited government have embraced a neorealist perspective on international relations, which typically prescribes restraint for a country’s engagement overseas. Neorealism and classical liberalism, however, make strange bedfellows. Neorealism does not share the commitment to methodological individualism embraced by the classical liberal tradition and ignores the problems related to the aggregation of individual preferences into concepts such (...) as the “national interest.” Neorealism also downplays the importance of institutions, understood as rules of the game, in favor of crude power calculus. Finally, neorealism is incompatible with the universalist, cosmopolitan outlook of classical liberalism. (shrink)

Epistemology uses some concepts that are usually understood as normative and evaluative. In recent years a lively debate has unfolded about the nature of epistemic normativity. This book explores the role of ethical factors in Bernard Lonergan’s model of epistemic normativity in the categories and terminology of the contemporary debate. Author offers a reconstruction of Lonergan’s model of epistemic evaluation, epistemic value, and epistemic responsibility, and its interpretation in a critical dialog with the virtue–epistemological models of epistemic normativity. He argues (...) that Lonergan’s model of epistemic normativity is in broad agreement with the virtue responsibilist model, and that they can share similar explanatory and defence strategies. He also indicates the relevance and the specific contribution of Lonergan’s cognitional theory and transcendental method for the study of epistemic normativity in general. (shrink)

This article offers an introduction to the recent debate on the nature of epistemic normativity and its relationship to ethical normativity in analytic epistemology. The revival of that traditional epistemological theme has been mostly welcomed as refreshing in epistemological circles. The aims of the article are to acquaint readers with the questions and terminology of the debate, to indicate the basic positions in the debate and their respective problems, and to suggest some new clarifications for the relevant terms in the (...) debate which are perceived as lacking. Without taking any specific position in the debate, this article hopes to show that the question of ethical elements in epistemic normativity is indeed relevant for epistemology and that it opens that discipline for the more traditional topic of the role of the subject’s responsibility in his or her intellectual life. (shrink)

The paper discusses the role of language and culture in the context of quantitative text analysis in psychological research. It reviews current automatic text analysis methods and approaches from the perspective of the unique challenges that can arise when going beyond the default English language. Special attention is paid to closed-vocabulary approaches and related methods, both from the perspective of cross-cultural research where the analytic process inherently consists of comparing phenomena across cultures and languages and the perspective of generalizability beyond (...) the language and the cultural focus of the original investigation. We highlight the need for a more universal and flexible theoretical and methodological grounding of current research, which includes the linguistic, cultural, and situational specifics of communication, and we provide suggestions for procedures that can be implemented in future studies and facilitate psychological text analysis across languages and cultures. (shrink)