In this essay, I describe some of the methodological dimensions of my ongoing research into how parents choose schools. I particularly focus on how philosophical frameworks and analytical strategies have shaped the empirical portion of my research. My goal, in this essay, is to trace and explore the ways in which philosophy of education—as a methodological orientation—may enable researchers to be attentive to the normative dimensions of human experience. In addition, I will argue that philosophically informed empirical research offers new (...) possibilities for making normative arguments that are closely connected to the non-ideal, complex ground of actual experience. (shrink)

School choice positions parents as consumers who select schools that maximize their preferences. This account has been shaped by rational choice theory. In this essay, Terri Wilson contrasts a rational choice framework of preferences with John Dewey's understanding of interest. To illustrate this contrast, she draws on an example of one parent's school decision-making process. Dewey's concept of interest offers an alternative conceptual vocabulary attentive to the complex, value-laden, and evolving process of choosing a school. Her analysis considers how (...) schools might not just appeal to the preexisting preferences of families, but might instead actively shape those interests to democratic ends. (shrink)

Autonomy operates as a key term in debates about the rights of families to choose distinct approaches to education. Yet, what autonomy means is often complicated by the actual circumstances and contexts of schools, families, and children. In this essay, Terri S. Wilson and Matthew A. Ryg focus on the challenges involved in translating an ideal of educational autonomy into the “nonideal” contexts and circumstances that surround families' choices. Drawing on the methodological insights of Elizabeth Anderson and John Dewey, (...) they sketch out a nonideal approach for exploring autonomy. Wilson and Ryg particularly focus on Dewey's notion of an ideal, his treatment of autonomy as a concept, and his view of the self. Such a nonideal approach draws attention toward the specific circumstances, habits, and environments that make autonomy possible. Wilson and Ryg illustrate the salience of this nonideal approach by exploring one example of an empirically engaged study of autonomy. (shrink)

Many scholars have pursued philosophical inquiry through empirical research. These empirical projects have been shaped—to varying degrees and in different ways—by philosophical questions, traditions, frameworks and analytic approaches. This issue explores the methodological challenges and opportunities involved in these kinds of projects. In this essay, we briefly introduce the nine projects featured in this issue and then address two key questions: First, how do these diverse contributors understand their empirical research as a mode of philosophical inquiry? And, second, what is (...) the value in engaging in empirical research oneself, as opposed to drawing on the empirical work of others? As the essays in this issue demonstrate, there is no single answer to these questions. Our hope is that these guiding questions—and the diverse and divergent answers offered within this special issue—might demonstrate the live and pressing methodological questions involved in integrating empirical research and philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

At Michigan Tech, science, technology, and society (STS) was introduced as a means of attracting new students to the school, providing general education courses more attractive to engineering students, and furnishing a focus for an unfocused, multidisciplinary department of the Social Sciences. STS enjoyed very limited success in the first two areas; however, using STS as a focus for a hitherto unfocused department has been highly successful and has led to the creation in the department of two new and successful (...) STS-related graduate programs in industrial archaeology and environmental policy. (shrink)

In his PhD proposal, now published as Seeing Sociological, Garfinkel [2006] formulated action in terms of a mutually constitutive structure—the Noesis-Noema Structures. This structure can be traced to Aaron Gurwitsch’s gestalt psychology and Law of Good Gestalt which theorises how participants prioritise functional Gestalts over other possible meanings of what is perceivable in their surroundings. While Gurwitsch illustrated his theory using images, in this paper we revisit Gurwitsch’s theory in light of the advances in recording real-time interaction to consider Gestalt (...) in spatio-temporality of real-time interaction. We consider the Law of Good Gestalt in terms of the dimensions of time and space, and postulate two analytical principles—the Principle of Good Momentary Gestalt and the Principle of Good Temporal Gestalt—for analysing a multi-angle video segment of a monologue taken from a training event. The analysis examines how the monologue was embedded in a multi-layer projection structure, so that during the time of the monologue, the trainer and trainees can be seen as achieving a transition between one activity to another while sustaining the frame of the training event. Through this, the analysis highlights the multi-layered structure of participants’ field of perception that constitutes their experience of the social activity, and explores a “method” to reconstruct such a structured field of perception through re-coupling meanings to the assemblages of multimodal resources recoverable on video. (shrink)

In five works spanning a decade, Philip E. Tetlock's interest in counterfactuals has changed. He began with an optimistic desire to make social science more rigorous by identifying best practices in the absence of non-imagined controls for experimentation. Soon, however, he adopted a more pessimistic analysis of the cognitive and psychological barriers facing experts. This shift was brought on by an awareness that experts are not rational Bayesians who continually update their theories to keep up with new information; but instead (...) are affected by political, cognitive, and psychological heuristics, including hindsight bias, cognitive conservatism, and the fundamental attribution error. But techniques of computational simulation-involving the rigorous production of large numbers of counterfactual worlds-make it possible to mitigate both problems that Tetlock identifies: that history, produced only once, is a lousy teacher; and that humans, with their collection of non-Bayesian heuristics, are lousy pupils. Tetlock was wrong to reject this approach as theoretically promising but rhetorically and practically impractical. (shrink)

In five works spanning a decade, Philip E. Tetlock's interest in counterfactuals has changed. He began with an optimistic desire to make social science more rigorous by identifying best practices in the absence of non-imagined controls for experimentation. Soon, however, he adopted a more pessimistic analysis of the cognitive and psychological barriers facing experts. This shift was brought on by an awareness that experts are not rational Bayesians who continually update their theories to keep up with new information; but instead (...) are affected by political, cognitive, and psychological heuristics, including hindsight bias, cognitive conservatism, and the fundamental attribution error. But techniques of computational simulation-involving the rigorous production of large numbers of counterfactual worlds-make it possible to mitigate both problems that Tetlock identifies: that history, produced only once, is a lousy teacher; and that humans, with their collection of non-Bayesian heuristics, are lousy pupils. Tetlock was wrong to reject this approach as theoretically promising but rhetorically and practically impractical. (shrink)

Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. All are examples where humanitarian intervention has been called into action. This timely and important new volume explores the legal and moral issues which emerge when a state uses military force in order to protect innocent people from violence perpetrated or permitted by the government of that state. Humanitarian intervention can be seen as a moral duty to protect but it is also subject to misuse as a front for imperialism without regard to international law. (...) In Humanitarian Intervention, the contributors explore the many questions surrounding the issue. Is humanitarian intervention permitted by international law? If not, is it nevertheless morally permissible or morally required? Realistically, might not the main consequence of the humanitarian intervention principle be that powerful states will coerce weak ones for purposes of their own? The current debate is updated by two innovations in particular, the first being the shift of emphasis from the permissibility of intervening to the responsibility to intervene, and the second an emerging conviction that the response to humanitarian crises needs to be collective, coordinated, and preemptive. The authors shed light on the timely debate of when and how to intervene and when, if ever, not to. Contributors: Carla Bagnoli, Joseph Boyle, Anthony Coates, Thomas Franck, Brian D. Lepard, Catherine Lu, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Terry Nardin, Thomas Pogge, Melissa S. Williams, and Kok-Chor Tan. (shrink)

Few scholars have investigated the considerations of over-empowered teams from a non-consequential ethics approach. Leveraging a virtue-based ethics lens of team empowerment, we provide a framework of team ethical orientation and over-empowerment using highly influential market research teams as a basis for our analysis. The purpose of this research is to contrast how teams founded on virtue-based ethics can attenuate ethical dilemmas and negative organizational outcomes from team over-empowerment. We provide a framework of four conditions that include Sophisticated, Suppressed, Contagion, (...) and Impeded to discuss alignment between team ethical orientation and team empowerment. Through this framework, we aim to further our understanding of empowered team behavior between action that is virtuous, moral, and ethical and activity that threatens organizational values and goals. (shrink)

We conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis of 33 cases of internal and external whistleblowers wrongfully fired for reporting wrongdoing. Our results show external whistleblowers have less tenure with the organization, greater evidence of wrongdoing, and they tend to be more effective in changing organizational practices. External whistleblowers also experience more extensive retaliation than internal whistleblowers, and patterns of retaliation by management against the whistleblower vary depending on whether the whistleblower reports internally or externally. We discuss implications for organizations and whistleblowers, (...) and we conclude that researchers need to develop different theoretical explanations of internal and external whistleblowing processes. (shrink)

The ABA has adopted four model policies that address, in one way or another, the issue of foreign lawyer mobility. These policies are the ABA Model Foreign Legal Consultant Rule, which is commonly known as the FLC rule, the ABA Model Rule for Temporary Practice by Foreign Lawyers, which is commonly known as the FIFO rule, ABA Model Rule of Professional Conduct 5.5, which permits foreign lawyers to serve as in-house counsel, and the ABA Model Rule on Pro Hac Vice (...) Admission. All four of the ABA's foreign lawyer mobility recommendations include a requirement that the mobile foreign lawyer is “ subject to effective regulation and discipline by a duly constituted professional body or a public authority .” In other words, these rules set forth requirements regarding the nature of the regulatory system in the foreign lawyer's home jurisdiction. A number of US states have included this requirement in their foreign lawyer mobility provisions, but a number have not. Although the ABA model rules and a number of state rules include this requirement, neither the ABA Model Rules nor any of the state rules have defined what it means for a foreign lawyer to come from a system with “effective regulation and discipline.” Nor is there any evidence that this requirement has been enforced in those states that have included this requirement. This article suggests that the “effective regulation and discipline” requirement has been an elephant in the room that no one has been willing to talk about. The article argues that the time has come to confront this issue head-on. It asserts that either efforts should be undertaken to define and enforce this requirement or that the requirement should be abandoned. The article reviews two “threshold” issues that jurisdictions might want to consider when deciding whether to adopt or retain an “effective regulation and discipline” requirement. It also identifies cross-cultural and cross-professional resources that might be consulted for “benchmarking” purposes if and when US regulators decide to add “meat to the bones” by defining and enforcing the “effective regulation and discipline” requirement found in foreign lawyer mobility provisions. (shrink)

Terry Pinkard draws on Hegel's central works as well as his lectures on aesthetics, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of history in this deeply informed and original exploration of Hegel's naturalism.

The Lysis is one of Plato's most engaging but also puzzling dialogues; it has often been regarded, in the modern period, as a philosophical failure. The full philosophical and literary exploration of the dialogue illustrates how it in fact provides a systematic and coherent, if incomplete, account of a special theory about, and special explanation of, human desire and action. Furthermore, it shows how that theory and explanation are fundamental to a whole range of other Platonic dialogues and indeed to (...) the understanding of the corpus as a whole. Part One offers an analysis of, or running commentary on, the dialogue. In Part Two Professors Penner and Rowe examine the philosophical and methodological implications of the argument uncovered by the analysis. The whole is rounded off by an epilogue of the relation between the Lysis and some other Platonic texts. (shrink)