A rapidly growing body of scholarship shows that we can gain new insights into theories and policies by understanding and increasing their systemic structure. This paper will present an overview of this expanding field and discuss how concepts of structure are being applied in a variety of contexts to support collaboration, decision making, learning, prediction, and results. Next, it will delve into the underlying structures of logic that may be found within those theories and policies. Here, we will go beyond Toulmin’s logics of claim and proof that have not proven useful for advancing the social sciences and focus on five structures of “causal logic.” The results suggest a useful and more comprehensive approach to developing deeper understanding of our conceptual systems such as theory and policy.

Ontological Relativity and Other Essays

Structures of Logic in Policy and Theory: Identifying Sub-systemic Bricks for Investigating, Building, and Understanding Conceptual Systems

Montagovian semantics treats word meanings in terms of intensions and extensions which are meant to capture speakers' ability to decide which words are to be used for what objects, properties, events, etc. The aim of the present paper is to refine this view in order to model facts about language change, acquisition, and knowledge of language. I will reconstruct intensions in terms of (a) given core referents, and (b) contextually determined ways to generalize these to full sets of (real or counterfactual) extensions. This reconstruction of word meanings is clarifying in several ways. It can explain how speakers can install the meanings of new words in a language on the basis of a limited set of intended referents, it makes clear how the limited knowledge of single speakers allows them to grasp the meaning of words in their language, and it allows to model certain types of historical meaning change and creative language use. The approach will finally be related to conceptual semantics, prototype theory, and classical truth value based semantics.

background

On the underlying mechanics of certain types of meaning change

In the debate over the reality of race, a three-way dispute has become entrenched: race is biologically real, socially real, or simply not real. These three theses have each enjoyed increasingly sophisticated defenses over roughly the past thirty years, but we argue here that this debate contains a lacuna: there is a fourth, mostly neglected, position that we call ‘basic racial realism.’ Basic racial realism says that though race is neither biologically real nor socially real, it is real all the same. Our goal is to establish this theory's credentials and provide it with initial support. It appears to be in a strong dialectical position and to nicely capture what many want from a theory of race.

Basic Racial Realism

The study of symbolism can employ three different perspectives. These ‘orders’ are each characterized by a distinct ontology. One is a realistic exploration of the social grounding of symbolism. Another concerns iconic codes and their use in the building of possible worlds, so creating their own realities. The discursive order is the ongoing conversation about the world and implies an ontology grounded in the use of language. Parallel investigations, each based on incompatible ontological presuppositions, also raise the question whether phenomena delineated within one such universe can have an influence in another. Do we in social life meet ‘hybrid’ versions of symbolism, both discursive, iconic and realist, springing from the simultaneous use of entirely different communicative and expressive codes?

The Symbological Project

I examine the thesis that Otto Neurath anticipated the programme of naturalised epistemology already at the time of the Vienna Circle and consider the relation between Neurath's proposals and those of two contemporary theorists whose research programmes he would thus have broadly anticipated. The thesis is confirmed by reference to Neurath's own writings. The connection between Neurath's programme and the programmes of his two successors considered here, however, is found to be highly indirect in one case and nonexistent in the other — despite their undeniable overlap.

Ontological Relativity and Other Essays

Citations

Structures of Logic in Policy and Theory: Identifying Sub-systemic Bricks for Investigating, Building, and Understanding Conceptual Systems

On the underlying mechanics of certain types of meaning change

Basic Racial Realism

The Symbological Project

Neurath's Programme for Naturalistic Epistemology

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