Mark Risjord

Rejecting the category of belief is one of the most striking and profound ideas to emerge from the ontological turn. This essay will argue that the rejection of belief is best understood as part of a broader rejection of representationalism. Representationalism regards thought, speech, and intentionality as depending primarily on the mind’s ability to manipulate beliefs, ideas, meanings, or similar contents. Some central strands of the ontological turn thus participate in the philosophical project of understanding human life without appeal to such representational states. After showing how 20th century anthropology was implicated in the representationalist picture, this essay will critique some of the arguments against belief found among proponents of the ontological turn. It will then try to construct a more robust argument against the use of the category of belief in anthropology. It ends with some reflections on what it means to do anthropology without belief.

Debates over how to conceptualize the nursing role were prominent in the nursing literature during the latter part of the twentieth century. There were, broadly, two schools of thought. Writers like Henderson and Orem used the idea of a self‐care deficit to understand the nurse as doing for the patient what he or she could not do alone. Later writers found this paternalistic and emphasized the importance of the patient's free will. This essay uses the ideas of positive and negative freedom to explore the differing conceptions of autonomy which are implicit in this debate. The notion of positive freedom has often been criticized as paternalistic, and the criticisms of self‐care in the nursing literature echo criticisms from political philosophy. Recent work on relational autonomy and on the relationship between autonomy and identity are used to address these objections. This essay argues for a more nuanced conception of the obligation to support autonomy that includes both positive (freedom to) and negative (freedom from) dimensions. This conception of autonomy provides a moral foundation for conceptualizing nursing in something like Henderson's terms: as involving the duty to expand the patient's capacities. The essay concludes by generalizing the lesson. Respect for autonomy on the part of any health care provider requires both respect for the patient's choices and a commitment to expand the patient's ability to actualize their choices.

_Normativity and Naturalism in the Social Sciences_ engages with a central debate within the philosophy of social science: whether social scientific explanation necessitates an appeal to norms, and if so, whether appeals to normativity can be rendered "scientific." This collection brings together contributions from a diverse group of philosophers who explore a broad but thematically unified set of questions, many of which stem from an ongoing debate between Stephen Turner and Joseph Rouse on the role of naturalism in the philosophy of the social sciences. Informed by recent developments in both philosophy and the social sciences, this volume will set the benchmark for contemporary discussions about normativity and naturalism. This collection will be relevant to philosophers of social science, philosophers in interested in the rule following and metaphysics of normativity, and theoretically oriented social scientists

The problem of apparent irrationality is the central concern of this essay. How is an ethnographer to respond when she comes across beliefs or behavior which seem crazy, foolish, or irrational? The first Chapter attempts to make the question precise and to get a clear view of what makes apparent irrationality problematic. It argues that the issue is an epistemological problem about an ethnographer's grounds for rejecting her current theory and adopting a revised theory. ;The contemporary debate over these issues involves semantics and interpretation theory as well as epistemology. Chapter 2 discusses the truth-conditional view of interpretation and its ramifications for ethnography. Some philosophers have argued that a condition of interpretation is that some beliefs and conceptions must be shared by the ethnographer and the natives. The arguments for this claim are analyzed and rejected. Chapter 3 sketches an alternative view of interpretation. It draws on the work of de Saussure, Wittgenstein, and Ziff to forge a view that does not have the unpalatable consequences of the truth-conditional view. ;It is a consequence of the view developed in Chapter 3 that the study of a language depends crucially on the study of the beliefs, attitudes and culture of the language users. The point is brought to bear against Quine's doctrine of indeterminacy in Chapter 4. It is argued that the dependence of observation on theory requires that an interpretation depend on theories about the native's culture. Interpretation theories are thus analogous to underdetermined theories in the natural sciences. ;An important approach to the problem of apparent irrationality supplements a truth-conditional view of interpretation with a foundationalist epistemology. The final Chapter criticizes the foundationalism of the "neo-rationalist" approach. The conception of coherence played an important role in the view of interpretation developed in Chapter 3 and 4. Chapter 5 gives this conception explicit content. The coherence based view is then applied to the problem of apparent irrationality. The Chapter concludes that a coherence based conceptualization of the epistemology of ethnography is more satisfactory than the neo-rationalist alternative