This paper offers four main arguments about the nature of causation in the social sciences. First, contrary to most recent work, I argue that there is a unitary conception of causation: a cause rai...

Causation A Unified Framework for the Social Sciences

By carefully examining one of the most famous thought experiments in the history of science-that by which Galileo is said to have refuted the Aristotelian theory that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones-I attempt to show that thought experiments play a distinctive role in scientific inquiry. Reasoning about particular entities within the context of an imaginary scenario can lead to rationally justified conclusions that-given the same initial information-would not be rationally justifiable on the basis of a straightforward argument. 1 Argumentative reconstruction 1.1 The Elimination Thesis 1.2 Clarification of terminology 1.3 The negative argument and the positive argument 1.4 The Dispensability Thesis and the Derivativity Thesis 2 Galileo's thought experiment and its reconstruction 2.1 Galileo's thought experiment 2.2 Reconstruction of the Galileo case 2.3 Four ways out for the Aristotelian 2.4 What the reconstruction misses 3 Denying the Dispensability and Derivativity Theses 3.1 Rejecting reconstruction, what the thought experiment does 3.2 Rejecting the positive argument: what makes these beliefs new ? 3.3 Rejecting the negative argument, what makes these beliefs knowledge 3.4 Constructivism and the contrast with Norton and Brown 4 Conclusion

Galileo and the Indispensability of Scientific Thought Experiment

A companion to rhetoric and rhetorical criticism

By carefully examining one of the most famous thought experiments in the history of science-that by which Galileo is said to have refuted the Aristotelian theory that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones-I attempt to show that thought experiments play a distinctive role in scientific inquiry. Reasoning about particular entities within the context of an imaginary scenario can lead to rationally justified conclusions that-given the same initial information-would not be rationally justifiable on the basis of a straightforward argument.

The purpose of the present article is to present and illustrate two different ways of analysing the normativity and discursivity of classroom communication during education for sustainable development (ESD). The two types of analysis can provide important knowledge for discussions of ESD in relation to morals and democracy. Both methods are based on pragmatism and the later works of Wittgenstein. The first approach was developed to examine the relationship between cultural and psychological processes in environmental ethical meaning-making. It draws on the endeavours of sociocultural research and cultural psychology to take the individual into account, or in other words, the intrapersonal dimension of meaning-making, which is not usually the case in the analysis of ESD. The second method relates to the normativity of ESD. Dewey refers to the apparently implicit socialisation taking place during education as 'collateral learning'. We refer to the content included in subsidiary forms of learning as companion meaning, which either follows on automatically when teaching knowledge content, or becomes collateral learning when one learns scientific meanings. Such meanings can, for example, be concerned with the nature of knowledge and people's relations to nature.

Education for Sustainable Development and Normativity: A Transactional Analysis of Moral Meaning-Making and Companion Meanings in Classroom Communication.

The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy

This Complicated Form of Life. Essays on Wittgenstein

Abstract The great bulk of what we are pleased to deem knowledge comes to us via the words of others. But such knowledge is limited to (mere) information or plain fact. Theoretical, Ethical and Aesthetic discourse are three regions in which, even when we accept the words of others, we transmit content with what I dub prefaces, not flatly, not in our own voice. Explanation of this is suggested: in these regions assertions claim truth without claiming knowledge. So fact-theory and fact-value differ from plain fact for similar reasons, reasons which alleviate the urge to downgrade ethical discourse to the expressive or prescriptive.

The Words of Others

Each row of T/F possibilities represents a possible world. Since atomic propositions are logically independent of one another, they can either all be false together, all true together or mixed up any way you like. So the Ultimate Truth Table extends infinitely from left to right and infinitely from top to bottom. Each row is a possible world. One of them is the actual world. Surely the bottom line is not a possible world. For it would be a world in which the negations of all atomic propositions were the only truths. An atomic proposition we are to understand as the obtaining of a relation between (among) names of objects. An atomic state of affairs is the obtaining of a relation among simple objects, or (better to say) a fact is

The impossible bottom line

In Plato's Meno, there is a famous discussion of desire and evil. This paper is not a contribution to Platonic scholarship, but a direct taking up of the issue whether someone can desire evil. One stock interpretation of the putative impossibility of desiring what is evil or bad is the interpretation which emphasizes an internal or conceptual tie between desire and good. This interpretation compares pairs of terms such as 'fear-danger', 'belief-truth' and 'desire-good'. To fear something is to regard it as, or believe that it is, dangerous (or harmful); to believe something is to regard it as, or believe it to be, true (in this case the connection is trivially obvious); to desire something is to regard it as, to believe it to be, good. Since it is obvious that people believe things which are false, it is maintained that it is equally obvious that people may desire what is (in fact) bad and fear what is (in fact) harmless or of no danger. Let us call this interpretation of the doctrine that it is impossible to desire evil the weak thesis. The weak thesis allows what seems a plain fact of human reality, that people believe falsehoods, fear things that cannot harm them and desire things which are not good. Equally obviously, it allows that people fail to believe truths, fail to desire goods, and fail to fear things that are dangerous. On this weak interpretation, the manner in which wickedness to others and self-destructiveness are due to ignorance is that people are ignorant about the nature of things and ways of acting, ignorant about what it would be like to possess something or ignorant about what it would be like to do something or other. On the weak interpretation it need never be true (except in the case of outright dissembling) to say that someone is speaking falsely when he says things of the form 'I want to have X' or 'I want to do X'. His saying he wants to have or do something and his making efforts that are relevant will settle the matter. The idea is only that if he were better informed about, more experienced in connection with, something or other, he no longer would want to have it or do it. Obviously, this is supposed also to apply to not wanting to have or do something or, more precisely, to wanting not to have and wanting not to do. When the doctrine is interpreted in this manner, paradigms will include the following:

Lloyd Reinhardt

Papers

The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy

This Complicated Form of Life. Essays on Wittgenstein

The Words of Others

The impossible bottom line

Desire, Evil and Grace