Mark Risjord

This essay argues for a new perspective on the analysis and evaluation of middle‐range theory. The commonly used criteria for theory evaluation in nursing are not as useful as they should be, and the root of the problem is an inappropriate understanding of middle‐range theory. In spite of their name, middle‐range theories should not be analysed and evaluated as concrete or limited versions of more general theories. Rather, they are best understood as models. The latter sections of this essay present a new method for analysing middle‐range theories and new criteria for their evaluation. Analysing and evaluating theories relevant to nursing as models has the capacity to increase their scholarly and clinical usefulness.

Recent philosophical interest in interrogatives and inquiry has far outpaced attention to queries—the speech act of asking a question. In response, this paper develops a normative pragmatic account of queries within the Sellars–Brandom tradition. We offer the commitment-disjunction account, which holds that to ask a question is either to undertake an erotetic commitment (a responsibility to put oneself in an appropriate epistemic position with respect to a direct answer) or to address an apokritic commitment to another (making them responsible for putting the asker in that position). The disjunction is inclusive with queries typically involving both undertaking and addressing commitments. This model identifies the role that erotetic inferences among questions play in structuring these commitments and emphasizes the second-personal character of queries. Most importantly, it accommodates a broad range of query types—information-seeking, self-addressed, topic-giving, addressee-testing, and challenging—outperforming familiar rivals such as desire-expressing, imperative-epistemic, illocutionary-force, and QUD-based accounts. Finally, we suggest that integrating queries into the broader framework of deontic scorekeeping strengthens Brandom’s doxastic-commitment account of assertion by providing a non-assertoric mechanism for challenges and expanding the space of reasons beyond its traditional focus on assertion.

Thick concepts have both descriptive and evaluative dimensions to their meaning. Some have argued that because the descriptive and evaluative dimensions cannot be separated (they are “blended”), the implicit values influence the confirmation of any “mixed claims’’ containing the thick concept. Using the development of the concept of hypersegregation as a case study, we argue for a distinction between the semantic function of definitions and the epistemic function of indicators. While thick concepts are semantically blended, the evaluative meaning of a thick concept does not influence the function of epistemic indicators. Therefore, mixed claims can and should be tested impartially.

Nonhuman animals seem to make inferences and have mental representations. Brandom articulates a Kantian (and Hegelian) account of representation that seems to make nonhuman mental content impossible: animals are merely sentient, not sapient. His position is problematic because it makes it impossible to understand how our cognitive capacities evolved. This essay discusses experimental and ethological work on transitive inference. It argues that to fit such evidence within the Kantian framework, there must be degrees of normativity. This invites us to understand the distinction between sapience and sentience as endpoints of a continuum, not as a dichotomy.

By treating linguistic representation as arising from social interaction, practice-theoretic approaches to language presuppose a capacity for joint action, and this presupposition exposes it to a potential circularity. The presupposition seems to arise when communities are said to endorse or accept rules. Practice theory takes mental representation, including the intentionality of thought and action, to be a consequence or product of linguistic representation, and the intentionality of action is a species of mental representation. Several decades of intensive work on joint action, however, has yielded a range of theories, all of which require sophisticated mental representations, such as propositional attitudes, mind-reading, mutual knowledge, and so on. From the perspective of contemporary social ontology, there is simply no way that practices sufficiently sophisticated to support practice-theoretic accounts of representation could arise without the prior existence of human-like representational capacities. Social accounts of representation in the vein of Wittgenstein, Sellars, or Brandom, one might argue, are simply non-starters. Call this the “social ontology objection” to practice-theoretic accounts of language. The object of this essay is to rebut the social ontology objection by providing a minimalist account of joint action and thereby putting practice theory on a firm social-ontological foundation.

This essay presents a fully inferentialist-expressivist account of scientific representation. In general, inferentialist approaches to scientific representation argue that the capacity of a model to represent a target system depends on inferences from models to target systems. Inferentialism is attractive because it makes the epistemic function of models central to their representational capacity. Prior inferentialist approaches to scientific representation, however, have depended on some representational element, such as denotation or representational force. Brandom’s Making It Explicit provides a model of how to fully discharge such representational vocabulary, but it cannot be applied directly to scientific representations. Pursuing a strategy parallel to Brandom’s, this essay begins with an account of how surrogative inference is justified. Scientific representation and the denotation of model elements are then explained in terms of surrogative inference by treating scientific representation and denotation as expressive, analogous to Brandom’s account of truth. The result is a thoroughgoing inferentialism: M is a scientific representation of T if and only if M has scientifically justified surrogative consequences that are answers to questions about T.

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.

This essay argues for a new perspective on the analysis and evaluation of middle‐range theory. The commonly used criteria for theory evaluation in nursing are not as useful as they should be, and the root of the problem is an inappropriate understanding of middle‐range theory. In spite of their name, middle‐range theories should not be analysed and evaluated as concrete or limited versions of more general theories. Rather, they are best understood as models. The latter sections of this essay present a new method for analysing middle‐range theories and new criteria for their evaluation. Analysing and evaluating theories relevant to nursing as models has the capacity to increase their scholarly and clinical usefulness.

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

In this essay, we extend earlier inferentialist-expressivist treatments of traditional logical, semantic, modal, and representational vocabulary (Brandom 1994, 2008, 2015; Peregrin 2014) to explanatory vocabulary. From this perspective, Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) appears to be an obvious starting point. In its simplest formulation, IBE has the form: A best explains why B, B; so A. It thereby captures one of the central inferential features of explanation. An inferentialist-expressivist treatment of “best explains” would treat it as a logical operator. Analogous to the inferentialist-expressivist treatment of other logical operators, this essay aims to provide introduction and elimination rules for “best explains.” Indeed, by exhibiting a form of detachment, IBE superficially looks like an elimination rule. The sequent calculus LEA+, described in Section 5 below, makes good on this intuition. By showing how “A best explains why B” is related to the underlying, scientific inference “A, so B,” we can purchase the inference ticket of IBE for no more than the cost of science’s material inferences

Many epistemologists take Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) to be “fundamental.” For instance, Lycan (1988, 128) writes that “all justified reasoning is fundamentally explanatory reasoning.” Conee and Feldman (2008, 97) concur: “fundamental epistemic principles are principles of best explanation.” Call them fundamentalists. They assert that nothing deeper could justify IBE, as is typically assumed of rules of deductive inference, such as modus ponens. However, logicians account for modus ponens with the valuation rule for the material conditional. By contrast, fundamentalists account for IBE with an ill-defined set of relations that happen to furnish their favorite set of inductive inferences. To our eye, this seems a little too convenient—there is too much room for ad hoc, just-so stories about the “striking” correspondence between our explanatory and inductive practices. We will argue that the (explanatory) pluralism adopted by the leading theorists of the best explanation—philosophers of science—undermines fundamentalism. Section 1 clarifies fundamentalism’s key tenets. Section 2 presents pluralism’s challenge to fundamentalism. Section 3 considers a potential fundamentalist reply to this challenge. Sections 4 through 6 canvass the leading candidates for developing this fundamentalist reply, showing each to be unsatisfactory.

To explain an intentional action one must exhibit the agent’s reasons. Donald Davidson famously argued that the only clear way to understand action explanation is to hold that reasons are causes. Davidson’s discussion conflated two issues: whether reasons are causes and whether reasons causally explain intentional action. Contemporary work on explanation and normativity help disentangle these issues and ground an argument that intentional action explanations cannot be a species of causal explanation. Interestingly, this conclusion is consistent with Davidson’s conclusion that reasons are causes. In other words, reasons are causes, but rationalizing explanations are not causal explanations. Key Words: action theory • explanation • causal explanation • rationality • Donald Davidson.

Functional explanation in the social sciences is the focal point for conflict between individualistic and social modes of explanation. While the agent thought she was acting for reasons, the functional explanation seems to reveal the hidden strings of the puppet master. This essay argues that the conflict is merely apparent. The erotetic model of explanation is used to analyze the forms of intentional action and functional explanations. Two explanations conflict if either the presuppositions of their respective why-questions conflict or the typical answers identified by their relevance criteria conflict. While a functional explanation may have the same topic and foil as an intentional action explanation, both the why-questions and their typical answers are compatible

Methodological triangulation is the use of more than one method to investigate a phenomenon. Nurse researchers investigate health phenomena using methods drawn from the natural and social sciences. The methodological debate concerns the possibility of confirming a single theory with different kinds of methods. The nursing debate parallels the philosophical debate about how the natural and social sciences are related. This article critiques the presuppositions of the nursing debate and suggests alternatives. The consequence is a view of triangulation that permits different methods to confirm a single theory. The article then explores the consequences for the philosophy of social sciences.

‘There is no such thing as a language,’ Donald Davidson tells us. Though this is a startling claim in its own right, it seems especially puzzling coming from a leading theorizer about language. Over the years, Davidson’s important essays have sparked the hope that there is a route to a positive, nonskeptical theory of meaning for natural languages. This hope would seem to be dashed if there are no natural languages. Unless Davidson’s radical claim is a departure from his developed views, the Davidsonian program appears to have undermined itself.In a recent book, Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language: An Introduction, Bjorn Ramberg promises to establish that Davidson's startling claim is not an aberration. Rather, it 'emerges as a natural development of his theory of meaning'. He reads the claim that there is no such thing as a language as the claim that the concept of a language has no useful theoretical role. Like the concepts of meaning and reference, it is a 'ghost of reification' which Davidson attempts to 'exorcise' from our philosophical thinking about linguistic communication. All three concepts can be seen as mere ladders to be kicked away once the edifice of a Davidsonian theory of linguistic communication is properly erected on the sole foundation of the concept of truth. The result, he assures us, ‘is not a theory which undercuts itself, but a comprehensive, coherent account of the phenomenon of linguistic communication’.

A theory is value-neutral when no constitutive values are part of its content. Nonneutral theories seem to lack objectivity because it is not clear how the constitutive values could be empirically confirmed. This article analyzes Franz Boas’s famous arguments against nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology and racial theory. While he recognized that talk of "higher civilizations" encoded a constitutive, political value with consequences for slavery and colonialism, he argued against it on empirical and methodological grounds. Boas’s arguments thus provide a model of how, under the right conditions, scientific inquiry can provide empirically objective grounds for political critique. Key Words: value-freedom • Franz Boas • race • objectivity • neutrality.