INTRODUCTION My underlying concern in this work is with the sociological analysis and description of members' practical activities and their practical ...

The biofuel boom is placing enormous demands on existing cropping systems, with the most crucial consequences in the agri-food sector. The biofuel industry is responding by initiating private governance and certification. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Cramer Commission, among others, have formulated criteria on “sustainable” biofuel production and processing. This article explores the legitimacy of private governance and certification by the biofuel industry, highlighting opportunities and challenges. It argues that the concept of output based legitimacy is (...) problematic in the case of biofuel as long as no consensus or commonly agreed “best” solution has been established on what sustainable biofuel production is. Furthermore, it shows that the private governance initiatives analyzed fail to adequately include actors from developing countries. Finally, the article argues that we need mechanisms for control and accountability in order to guarantee that the political output of biofuel certification serves the common welfare. (shrink)

The volume is a collection of essays devoted to the analysis of scientific change and stability. It explores the balance and tension that exist between commensurability and continuity on the one hand, and incommensurability and discontinuity on the other. Moreover, it discusses some central epistemological consequences regarding the nature of scientific progress, rationality and realism. In relation to these topics, it investigates a number of new avenues, and revisits some familiar issues, with a focus on the history and philosophy of (...) physics, and an emphasis on developments in cognitive sciences as well as on the claims of “new experimentalists”. The book constitutes fully revised versions of papers which were originally presented at the international colloquium held at the University of Nancy, France, in June 2004. (shrink)

The paper introduces precise definitions of the inevitabilist and contingentist positions. On this basis, it reveals the analytical structure and some inherent difficulties of the contingentist/inevitabilist issue. It then discusses some of these difficulties, relying on the thought-experiment of a ‘divided physics’. Along the way, it investigates the kinds of differences that two alternative physics should present, if they are to give rise to non-benign forms of contingentism.Keywords: Contingency; Inevitabilism; Incommensurability; Theory-comparison; Scientific realism; Constructivism.

This paper deals with calibration in scientific practices which investigate relatively well-understood natural phenomena by means of already standardized instrumental devices. Calibration is a crucial topic, since it conditions the reliability of instrumental procedures in science. Yet although important, calibration is a relatively neglected topic. We think more attention should be devoted to calibration. The paper attempts to take a step in this direction. The aims are two-fold: (1) to characterize calibration in a relatively simple kind of scientific practices; (2) (...) to provide conceptual and taxonomic tools of broader scope that help to get a better understanding of calibration in more complex cases and other kinds of scientific practices. For this purpose, we first provide indications for why a conceptual framework is needed. Second, a bibliographic survey of works dealing with calibration is attempted. Third, we introduce different tools to enable a better understanding of calibration. Fourth, we turn to the elaboration of what we call a “simple exemplar” of calibration, illustrated through the case of the calibration of an equal-arm balance. Fifth, the tools previously introduced, and the framework of the simple exemplar, are applied to a more complex case of calibration: calibration procedures in X-ray experiments. This serves to show the work accomplished by the simple exemplar and to emphasize features of more complex cases of calibration. Eventually, we revisit and specify the nature, status, scope and value of the proposed framework. (shrink)

First published in 1984, this is a study of categorization practices: how people categorize each other and their actions; how they describe, infer, and judge. The book presents a sociological analysis and description of practical activities and makes a cogent contribution to the study of how the moral order actually works in practical communicative contexts. Among the issues dealt with are: collectivity categorizations, the organization of lists and descriptions, moral attribution and inferences, and the relationship between standards of morality and (...) standards of rationality. (shrink)

Czech translation of Marguerite Léna’s Choisir l’ Europe: Constantin Sigov et la dignité humaine.

Featuring contributions from the world’s leading experts on the subject and based partly on several detailed case studies, this volume is the first comprehensive analysis of the scientific notion of robustness as well as of the general ...

Patientenverfügungen und andere Arten gesundheitlicher Vorausverfügungen wie Advance Care Planning und in gewisser Hinsicht auch Vorsorgevollmachten und Betreuungsverfügungen schließen evaluativ gehaltvolle Annahmen und Werturteile über den weiteren Verlauf des eigenen Lebens ein, die sich als mehr oder weniger angemessen erweisen können und daher einer ethischen Klärung und Reflexion bedürfen. Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach den Grundlagen dieser Annahmen und Urteile nach und argumentiert, dass für ihre Analyse eine strebensethische Perspektive auf Vorstellungen eines guten Lebens in der Zeit besonders geeignet (...) ist. Dazu geben wir zunächst einen kurzen Überblick über die empirische Forschung zu Einflussfaktoren bei der Abfassung gesundheitlicher Vorausverfügungen, insbesondere der Bedeutung von individuellen Wertvorstellungen und Lebensorientierungen. Im nächsten Schritt wenden wir uns vor diesem Hintergrund der Bewertung von Lebensqualität im Lebensverlauf zu. Wie sich dabei zeigt, verweisen die betreffenden Werturteile in mehrfacher Hinsicht auf umfassendere Vorstellungen eines guten Lebens und seines zeitlichen Verlaufs. Daher nehmen wir im Anschluss die Frage des guten Lebens in der Zeit in den Blick und arbeiten typologisierend unterschiedliche Vorstellungen heraus, an denen sich die Implikationen der zeitlichen Erstreckung und Verlaufsstruktur guten Lebens für gesundheitliche Vorausverfügungen deutlich machen lassen. Der Aufsatz formuliert so nicht nur wichtige Perspektiven für eine eingehendere empirische Erforschung evaluativer Aspekte der Abfassung gesundheitlicher Vorausverfügungen. Die Klärung der Bedeutung der Zeitstruktur guten Lebens für solche Verfügungen eröffnet auch einen theoretischen Zugang zu den grundlegenden strebensethischen Fragen, mit denen sich die Betroffenen innerhalb des Rahmens des sollensethisch gut begründeten, gesellschaftlich weithin anerkannten und gesetzlich abgesicherten Rechtes auf ein selbstbestimmtes Sterben konfrontiert sehen. (shrink)

In the 1980s, philosophical, historical and social studies of science underwent a change which later evolved into a turn to practice. Analysts of science were asked to pay attention to scientific practices in meticulous detail and along multiple dimensions, including the material, social and psychological. Following this turn, the interest in scientific practices continued to increase and had an indelible influence in the various fields of science studies. No doubt, the practice turn changed our conceptions and approaches of science, but (...) what did it really teach us? What does it mean to study scientific practices? What are the general lessons, implications, and new challenges? This volume explores questions about the practice turn using both case studies and theoretical analysis. The case studies examine empirical and mathematical sciences, including the engineering sciences. The volume promotes interactions between acknowledged experts from different, often thought of as conflicting, orientations. It presents contributions in conjunction with critical commentaries that put the theses and assumptions of the former in perspective. Overall, the book offers a unique and diverse range of perspectives on the meanings, methods, lessons, and challenges associated with the practice turn. (shrink)

We conducted two eye-tracking experiments investigating the processing of the Mandarin reflexive ziji in order to tease apart structurally constrained accounts from standard cue-based accounts of memory retrieval. In both experiments, we tested whether structurally inaccessible distractors that fulfill the animacy requirement of ziji influence processing times at the reflexive. In Experiment 1, we manipulated animacy of the antecedent and a structurally inaccessible distractor intervening between the antecedent and the reflexive. In conditions where the accessible antecedent mismatched the animacy cue, (...) we found inhibitory interference whereas in antecedent-match conditions, no effect of the distractor was observed. In Experiment 2, we tested only antecedent-match configurations and manipulated locality of the reflexive-antecedent binding (Mandarin allows non-local binding). Participants were asked to hold three distractors (animate vs. inanimate nouns) in memory while reading the target sentence. We found slower reading times when animate distractors were held in memory (inhibitory interference). Moreover, we replicated the locality effect reported in previous studies. These results are incompatible with structure-based accounts. However, the cue-based ACT-R model of Lewis and Vasishth ( 2005 ) cannot explain the observed pattern either. We therefore extend the original ACT-R model and show how this model not only explains the data presented in this article, but is also able to account for previously unexplained patterns in the literature on reflexive processing. (shrink)

A large number of legal rules create an obligation to prevent, repair or otherwise mitigate damage to human health or the environment. Many of these rules require that a legally relevant causal relation between human behaviour and the damage at issue is established, and in the establishment of causal relations of this kind scientific information is often pressed into service. This thesis examines this specifically legal use of scientific information. It shows that many legally relevant causal relations cannot be established (...) in this way. It also shows that the legal strategy for dealing with epistemic difficulties by relaxing the standard of proof is of limited value in tackling this problem. Consequently, the legal rules focused upon are less efficient tools for combating damage to human health and the environment than their appearances suggest. Other legal means to achieve this aim should therefore be considered. The thesis begins by presenting a framework which can be used to solve some important problems with communication and the division of labour that arise when scientific information is used to answer legal questions. This framework recognizes both epistemological and ontological differences between law and science. The latter are differences between the kinds of entity which are relevant in distinct theoretical contexts; the former, by contrast, are differences between applicable standards of proof. In subsequent parts of the thesis this framework shapes the discussion of the question: To what extent can legally relevant causal relations, involving legally significant entities, be established through the application of scientific information about other, scientifically relevant entities and legal standards of proof. The thesis concludes with a discussion of some of the ways in which the legal regulation could, potentially, be adapted, so as to counteract damage to human health and the environment more efficiently. (shrink)

Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been interpreted (...) as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing. (shrink)

Definition of the problemAdvance directives involve evaluative assumptions about the further course of one’s life that can be more or less appropriate and thus call for ethical reflection. This contribution focuses on the basis and criteria of such assumptions. We argue that considerations regarding the temporal structure of a good life constitute a particularly relevant perspective in this context.ArgumentsEmpirical studies on the individual composition of advance directives point to the important role of personal values and life plans that can change (...) over time. Therefore, we first contextualize advance directives from the perspective of an ethics of the good life and then discuss their implications with regard to different levels of temporality, comprising fundamental parameters of human existence in time, cultural models of the life course, as well as narratives of the individual trajectory of life.ConclusionConceptions of a good life and its temporal structure represent an important perspective for drafting and interpreting advance directives. Their consideration provides a more nuanced understanding of the evaluative implications of advance care planning. This can benefit individual patients, service providers, as well as policy makers. (shrink)

Emotional AI is an emerging technology used to make probabilistic predictions about the emotional states of people using data sources, such as facial (micro)-movements, body language, vocal tone or the choice of words. The performance of such systems is heavily debated and so are the underlying scientific methods that serve as the basis for many such technologies. In this article I will engage with this new technology, and with the debates and literature that surround it. Working at the intersection of (...) criminology, policing, surveillance and the study of emotional AI this paper explores and offers a framework of understanding the various issues that these technologies present particularly to liberal democracies. I argue that these technologies should not be deployed within public spaces because there is only a very weak evidence-base as to their effectiveness in a policing and security context, and even more importantly represent a major intrusion to people’s private lives and also represent a worrying extension of policing power because of the possibility that intentions and attitudes may be inferred. Further to this, the danger in the use of such invasive surveillance for the purpose of policing and crime prevention in urban spaces is that it potentially leads to a highly regulated and control-oriented society. I argue that emotion recognition has severe impacts on the right to the city by not only undertaking surveillance of existing situations but also making inferences and probabilistic predictions about future events as well as emotions and intentions. (shrink)

Describing the Seas: Writing Practices of the Masters of the Royal Navy in the Long Eighteenth Century. The masters of the Royal Navy in the long eighteenth century are usually associated more with practical knowledge and experience than with an involvement with learned or ‚book‘ knowledge. However, their professional practices were based to a high degree on the usage and production of texts. This article examines how literary practices shaped the production of hydrographic knowledge by masters, in how far these (...) practices resembled those of learned culture at the time, and how masters employed them to gain access to the scientific community. (shrink)

The present study examined the effects of mindfulness training on attention regulation in university students and whether the potential benefits of implementation are influenced by the yoga component of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) and/or by MBI homework practice. In a non-randomized trial with pre- and post-assessments, n = 180 university students were allocated to either mindfulness training (experimental groups), awareness activities (active control group), or no training (passive control group). Mindfulness was taught through two MBIs, one including yoga and the other (...) excluding yoga. Attention regulation was operationalized via behavioral indicators, namely sustained attention, cognitive flexibility, cognitive inhibition, and data-driven information processing. With the exception of speed in a cognitive flexibility task, the results indicated no systematic or differential advantage arising from mindfulness training, with or without yoga, regarding the aspects of attention regulation. There was no consistent influence of homework quantity or quality. The implications for mindfulness training in academic contexts are discussed. (shrink)

Hermeneutics and narration: a way to deal with qualitative data This article focuses a hermeneutic approach on the interpretation of narratives. It is based on the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's theory of interpretation but modified and used within a caring science paradigm. The article begins with a presentation of the theoretical underpinnings of hermeneutic philosophy and narration, as well as Ricoeur's theory of interpretation, before going on to describe the interpretation process as modified by the authors. The interpretation process, which (...) consists of several stages, is exemplified and discussed using a single case from a larger study on suffering. The results of that study indicate that the struggle of suffering is perceived as a struggle formed between shame and dignity, and that nurses must engage in the process of preserving and restoring the dignity of their suffering patients. The authors suggest that Ricoeur's theory of interpretation is useful when trying to understand narrative data if the researcher realises that the process of distanciation, although central in Ricoeur's thinking, is not the goal of the process but rather a means to deal with the researcher's pre‐understandings. According to Ricoeur, distanciation is accomplished by putting the context aside and dealing with the text ‘as text’ and thereby explaining its meaning. Explanation thus becomes the dialectic counterpart to understanding in the interpretation process. The researchers further argue that distanciation must be followed by reflection, where the interpretations are linked back to the empirical context. (shrink)

First published in 1984, this is a study of categorization practices: how people categorize each other and their actions; how they describe, infer, and judge. The book presents a sociological analysis and description of practical activities and makes a cogent contribution to the study of how the moral order actually works in practical communicative contexts. Among the issues dealt with are: collectivity categorizations, the organization of lists and descriptions, moral attribution and inferences, and the relationship between standards of morality and (...) standards of rationality. (shrink)

What kinds of norms constrain mechanistic discovery and explanation? In the mechanistic literature, the norms for good explanations are directly derived from answers to the metaphysical question of what explanations are. Prominent mechanistic accounts thus emphasize either ontic or epistemic norms. Still, mechanistic philosophers on both sides agree that there is no sharp distinction between the processes of discovery and explanation. Thus, it seems reasonable to expect that ontic and epistemic accounts of explanation will be accompanied by ontic and epistemic (...) accounts of discovery, respectively. As we will show here, however, recent discovery accounts implicitly rely on both ontic and epistemic norms to characterize the discovery process. In this paper, we develop an account that makes explicit that, and how, ontic and epistemic norms work together throughout the discovery process. By describing mechanism discovery as a process of pattern recognition we demonstrate that scientists have to develop epistemic activities to distinguish a pattern from its background. Furthermore, they have to determine which epistemic activities successfully describe how the pattern is implemented by identifying the pattern’s components. Our approach reveals that ontic and epistemic norms are equally important in mechanism discovery. (shrink)

The evaluation of the European Moral Case Deliberation Outcomes project (Euro-MCD) has resulted in a revised evaluation instrument, knowledge about the content of MCD (moral case deliberation), and the perspectives of those involved. In this paper, we report on a perspective that has been overlooked, the facilitators’. We aim to describe facilitators’ perceptions of high-quality moral case deliberation and their Euro-MCD sessions. The research took place in Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands using a survey combined with interviews with 41 facilitators. (...) Facilitators’ perceived that attaining a high-quality MCD implies fostering a safe and respectful atmosphere, creating a wondering mode, being an attentive authority, developing moral reflective skills, reaching a common understanding, and ensuring organisational prerequisites for the MCD sessions. Our central conclusion is that efforts at three levels are required to attain a high-quality MCD: trained and virtuous facilitator; committed, respectful participants; and organizational space. Furthermore, managers have a responsibility to prepare MCD participants for what it means to take part in MCD. (shrink)

Results from studies on gender differences in emotion recognition vary, depending on the types of emotion and the sensory modalities used for stimulus presentation. This makes comparability between different studies problematic. This study investigated emotion recognition of healthy participants (N = 84; 40 males; ages 20 to 70 years), using dynamic stimuli, displayed by two genders in three different sensory modalities (auditory, visual, audio-visual) and five emotional categories. The participants were asked to categorise the stimuli on the basis of their (...) nonverbal emotional content (happy, alluring, neutral, angry, and disgusted). Hit rates and category selection biases were analysed. Women were found to be more accurate in recognition of emotional prosody. This effect was partially mediated by hearing loss for the frequency of 8,000 Hz. Moreover, there was a gender-specific selection bias for alluring stimuli: Men, as compared to women, chose “alluring” more often when a stimulus was presented by a woman as compared to a man. (shrink)

People typically remember emotionally negative words better than neutral words. Two experiments are reported that investigate whether emotionally enhanced memory for negatively arousing words is based on a storage or retrieval advantage. Participants studied non-word–word pairs that either involved negatively arousing or neutral target words. Memory for these target words was tested by means of a recognition test and a cued-recall test. Data were analysed with a multinomial model that allows the disentanglement of storage and retrieval processes in the present (...) recognition-then-cued-recall paradigm. In both experiments the multinomial analyses revealed no storage differences between negatively arousing and neutral words but a clear retrieval advantage for negatively arousing words in the cued-recall test. These findings suggest that EEM for negatively arousing words is driven by associative processes. (shrink)

This paper presents methodological reflections on power sharing and shifts of power in various interview situations. Narratives are said to be shaped by our attempts to position ourselves within social and cultural circumstances. In an interview situation, power can be seen as something that is created and that shifts between the interviewer and the interviewed. Reflexivity is involved when we as interviewers attempt to look at a situation or a concept from various perspectives. A modified form of discourse analysis inspired (...) by subject positioning was used to reflect on power relations in four different interview situations. The analyses indicate that reflection on the power relations can lead to other forms of understanding of the interviewee. The main conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that power relations are created within an interview situation and therefore it is important to be aware of dominant perspectives. Researchers and nurses face the challenge of constantly raising their level of consciousness about power relationships, and discursive reflexivity is one way of doing this. Thus, reflexivity is an important part of the qualitative research process. (shrink)

Our article examines how journalistic reports and online comments have made sense of computational politics. It treats the discourse around data-driven campaigns as its object of analysis and codifies four main perspectives that have structured the debates about the use of large data sets and data analytics in elections. We study American, British, and German sources on the 2016 United States presidential election, the 2017 United Kingdom general election, and the 2017 German federal election. There, groups of speakers maneuvered between (...) enthusiastic, skeptical, agnostic, or admonitory stances and so cannot be clearly mapped onto these four discursive positions. Coming along with the inconsistent accounts, public sensemaking was marked by an atmosphere of speculation about the substance and effects of computational politics. We conclude that this equivocality helped journalists and commentators to sideline prior reporting on the issue in order to repeatedly rediscover the practices they had already covered. (shrink)

This paper focuses on English yes-no interrogatives of the type Would you like/Do you want [NP]? and their elliptical variants You like/You want [NP]?, Like/Want [NP]? and [NP]?. The central question is what type of theoretical relationship can be assumed between the different forms. A theoretical discussion of different traditional approaches and their limitations is followed by the presentation of an explorative corpus search in the BNC, which can reveal interesting differences between the different stages of initial reduction, in particular (...) regarding the semantic class of the NP head nouns: While the possible lexemes found in the full forms and intermediate reductions seem only restricted by pragmatic constraints, the highly reduced [NP]? question displays only lexemes related to the semantic class of consumption goods. Construction Grammar (CxG) is suggested as a useful approach to explain the internal relationships between the different forms, especially because it offers the option of lexically open idiomatic structures, assumes a usage-based, hierarchical network with different degrees of independence between single constructions, and allows for an integration of pragmatic features into a grammatical model. (shrink)

This article examines the recent transformations of the Italian welfare state from a familist welfare model to what I term transnational market familism. In this model, families buy in care labour, commonly provided by migrant workers. There is now a growing literature exploring both the transformations of the Italian welfare model and the experiences of migrant workers providing care in Italy. However, what has been overlooked in the current literature is the ethical aspect of this model of welfare provision, which (...) is part of the transnational political economy of care. The article analyses the ethical implications of the migrant-in-the-family model, which transforms the care relationship between the caregiver and care receiver into a complex relationship between the family member organising care, the migrant caregiver and the dependent care receiver. The context of such welfare provision is transnational. Examining this care triangle, I draw on care ethics and individualization perspective for an analysis of how social policies safeguard, or overlook, human interaction and care relationships in the context of global hierarchies. The article draws on ethnographic data gathered in Naples, Italy, during 2004–2005, including interviews with Neapolitan employers and elderly care-receivers, interviews with migrant workers, as well as participant observations. (shrink)

This article argues that theorists of black/african diasporas should interrogate the specific ways in which ‘race’ is used to engage people in diasporic projects, and that such projects are intimately intertwined with specifically gendered, sexualized, and generational class relations and positionalities in specific national contexts and spaces. Attention to these intersections can help us better understand hierarchies of power between and among diasporic individuals and communities. This article focuses on historically specific Swedish meanings of racialized femininities and the different forms (...) of agency women use to negotiate the gendered processes of racialization they encounter in a variety of settings and sources. It draws on interviews and fieldnotes conducted between 1994 and 2007, together with analysis of popular culture (music and radio programmes) and ethnographic material collected by Swedish ethnologist Viveca Motsieloa, and maps out some of the complexities utilized by different generations of Swedish women of African heritage in a changing Swedish landscape of racial formations. Their negotiations show how tensions and differences between ‘second-generation’ migrants and those of the ‘first generation’ are expressed through gender, sexuality, and differing understandings of ‘race’ (and the place of ‘racial mixture’). (shrink)

Introduction Harry Collins is internationally recognized as a distinguished sociologist of science who writes creatively on a substantial number of varied subjects. He is acknowledged as one of the prominent specialists on the topic of tacit knowledge and has played an important role in the introduction of this topic into science studies. He has investigated the topic extensively, most famously through several case studies of physics [Collins 1974, 1984, 1985, 1990, 2001a,b, 2004], [Collins &...

Cities and local governments loom large on the sustainability agenda. Networks such as Fair Trade Towns International (FTT) and the Organic Cities Network aim to bring about global policy change from below. Given the new enthusiasm for local approaches, it seems relevant to ask to what extent local groups exercise power and in what form. City networks present their members as “ethical places” exercising _power with_, rather than _power over_ others. The article provides an empirical analysis of the power of (...) FTT and Organic Cities in Germany. In both cases, we found cities that are eager to emphasize their inclusive potential. Their willingness to compromise is demonstrated most illustratively by the fact that several cities are members of both networks: While the FTT campaign aims to address problems of international trade but does not abandon it, Organic Cities advocate for a new localism based on food supply from farmers in the same region. In both cases, city networks use their purchasing power to increase the share of certified products. By doing so, the city networks reproduce privileged positions of consumers benefitting from the global capitalist order (_power over_). However, our analysis revealed that networks also make citizens reflect upon agri-food challenges and allow developing alternatives for more sustainable systems (_power with_). (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy of science, the consensus view seems to be that scientific explanations describe mechanisms responsible for the phenomena to be explained. Two kinds of explanatory relevance figure in mechanistic accounts of explanation: causal and constitutive. Following prominent accounts, it seems natural to analyze both these relations in terms of systematic interventions into some factor X with respect to another factor Y. However, such interventions are tailored to uncover causal relations only. Construing the constitutive relationship between parts and wholes (...) in terms of interventions thus raises metaphysical, conceptual, and epistemological questions. We here review the barriers that intervention-based inquiry into mechanisms encounters and consider some solutions. (shrink)

edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics.

Against influential strands of feminist theory, I argue that there is nothing essentialist or homogenising about the category ‘women’. I show that both intersectional claims that it is impossible to separate out the ‘woman part’ of women, and deconstructionist contentions that the category ‘women’ is a fiction, rest on untenable meta-theoretical assumptions. I posit that a more fruitful way of approaching this disputed category is to treat it as an abstraction. Drawing on the philosophical framework of critical realism I elucidate (...) the nature of the vital and inevitable process of abstraction, as a means of finding a way out of the theoretical and methodological impasse that the ‘ban’ on the category ‘women’ has caused. Contrary to many contemporary feminist theorists, I contend that, although the category ‘women’ does not reflect the whole reality of concrete and particular women, it nevertheless refers to something real, namely the structural position as woman. (shrink)

The paper argues that the debate between objectivist criticism and postmodern critique represents a fracturing of the modes of mundane social and linguistic practice. The two together miss the open-textured character of language-in-use and the reflexive properties of situated human practice. Both difference and agreement are grounded in the multiplicity of criteria that are a feature of the logical grammar of language, and therefore of everyday praxis, including that of critique. To escape the duality of foundationalism on the one hand, (...) and radical relativism on the other, attention to the praxiological details of human action and reasoning is needed. The paper draws on Wittgensteinian philosophy and ethnomethodological studies of reasoning to make its case. (shrink)