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| Anouncement: At present, all Philosophy Research Network (PRN) journals are managed by the network's co-directors, Lawrence Becker and Brie Gertler. | ||||||
| 3 Scholarly Papers | ||||||
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Abstract: The transparency impulse in political science arose in the context of scholars' inability to replicate findings published in leading journals. This is a concern especially for positivist approaches to empirical inquiry. The emphasis on replicability presupposes that evidence-based research involves the extraction of objective data, that data can be identically reproduced or copied, and that evidentiary material can be analyzed neutrally, such that the same findings are arrived at by various scholars. Data "extraction" as used here implies evidence that is thing-like, inertly situated in an identifiable place, and ready to be removed or drawn out for examination. Interpretive methods, on the contrary, view data as a product of interpretive encounters, and thus question the adequacy of the extraction metaphor. Interpretivists are interested in the ways in which social meanings are reiterated and power is reproduced, and in how social processes, in the process of iteration, are variously placed at risk. Attuned to the politics of representation, moreover, interpretive scholars analyze how concepts, definitions, measurements, and methods, generative of knowledge about the political world, are themselves data, which is to say, structured by power and laden with social value. Our position on the problem of replicability is that scholars are often talking past each other, that social conventions are by definition iterative, and that the challenges of replication come as no surprise, as in our view there is no such thing as value-free social science. Empirical investigation presupposes conceptual definition, and conceptual definition requires what Wittgenstein calls a "life world." The interpretive methods approach encompasses diverse academic traditions, including critical theory, ordinary language use analysis, hermeneutics, existential phenomenology, genealogy, ethnography, deconstruction, colonial and postcolonial analysis, critical race theory, feminist theory, semiotics, structuralism, poststructuralism, and science and technology studies, among others. In drawing insights from a range of philosophical traditions and debates, interpretivists, not unlike quantitative scholars, operate with often divergent philosophically motivated assumptions and goals. Most converge, however, in rejecting the transparency norms currently on offer in political science. | ||||||
Abstract: Many kinds of relativism have been attributed to Karl Marx. We discuss three broad areas of Marx's thinking from which lessons bearing on relativism emerge: his theories of history, science, and morality. We show that Marx was was committed to a naturalistic approach, which privileged genuine science over other ways of understanding the world, and in which the only kinds of "relativism" that remain are not incompatible with objective knowledge of the world. We also show how some later Marxists have misunderstood Marx's ideas. | ||||||
Abstract: The best explanation of juridical proof has evolved from probabilism to explanationism. In a recent article, Brian Hedden and Mark Colyvan criticize the evolution from probability to explanation based on a sparse review of some of the pertinent literature, joining a cottage industry of experts from cognate disciplines attempting to rescue probability theory from the corroding effects of legal scholarship. Their major point is to "fault" this transformation "for assuming an outdated and inexhaustive catalogue of 'interpretations' of probability. . . which . . . ignores the possibility of integrating the explanatory and other epistemological considerations . . . into a probabilistic framework." This claim is false. The legal literature has vetted the two decades old literature that Hedden and Colyvan refer to as a new development in epistemology, which in any event has no value in resolving the problems the legal literature on juridical proof addresses. A proper understanding of both the dated literature that Hedden and Colyvan refer to, and what actually are "new developments" in epistemology support the progression from probabilism to explanationism as the best explanation of juridical proof. In addition, H&C make a fundamental error about what the conceptual problem is. Together these errors vitiate their criticisms of explanationism as the best explanation of juridical proof at present. Correcting these mistakes and misapprehensions may assist those in other fields in their understanding of what the actual issues are. | ||||||
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