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.

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.

A very plausible and common view of meaning supposes that linguistic meaning is to be understood in terms of speakers' intentions. This program proposes to analyse the meaning of a sentence in terms of what speakers mean by or in uttering it; and this speaker meaning in turn is to be analysed in terms of the speaker's intentions. This essay argues that intention-based semantics cannot provide an adequate analysis of linguistic meaning: not because of contrived counterexamples, nor because it conflicts with scruples about intentionality which we do or should have. It fails because research in psychology shows that children do not attribute beliefs to others in the way demanded by the theory. Empirical evidence is provided for the claim that two- and three-year-old children do not satisfy the conditions for speaker meaning, and thus cannot be said to mean anything by their utterances. It seems to me that children both mean something by their utterances and that their utterances have linguistic meaning. Hence the intention-based analysis does not provide necessary conditions for meaning.

: At the turn of the twentieth century, comparative studies of human culture (ethnology) gave way to studies of the details of individual societies (ethnography). While many writers have noticed a political sub-text to this paradigm shift, they have regarded political interests as extrinsic to the change. The central historical issue is why anthropologists stopped asking global, comparative questions and started asking local questions about features of particular societies. The change in questions cannot be explained by empirical factors alone, and following Jarvie, this essay argues that political factors motivate the change. Jarvie's understanding of the role played by egalitarian politics is criticized, and the essay develops a new model of how political or moral values can become constitutive of scientific inquiry. On the erotetic view of explanation, whether one proposition explains another depends on the choice of contrast class and relevance criterion. Since political or moral values can motivate these choices, explanation can depend on non-epistemic values. The essay argues that the comparative questions of nineteenth-century ethnology presupposed that Europeans were superior to other races. It closes by arguing that Fanz Boas recognized the political values implicit in nineteenth-century ethnology and rejected its questions on those grounds

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.