Mark Risjord

Emory University
University Of Hradec Kralove
  •  15
    This volume concerns philosophical issues that arise from the practice of anthropology and sociology. The essays cover a wide range of issues, including traditional questions in the philosophy of social science as well as those specific to these disciplines. Authors attend to the historical development of the current debates and set the stage for future work.
  •  15
    Corrigendum
    with Stephen Turner, Deborah Tollefsen, Paul Roth, Kareem Khalifa, and David Henderson
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 53 (2): 163-163. 2023.
  • Radical alterity, representation, and the ontological turn
    In Inkeri Koskinen, David Ludwig, Zinhle Mncube, Luana Poliseli & Luis Reyes-Galindo (eds.), Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science, Routledge. 2021.
  •  298
    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 repres…Read more
  •  18
    Anthropology without Belief: An Anti-representationalist Ontological Turn
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 50 (6): 586-609. 2020.
    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 proje…Read more
  •  46
    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 pre…Read more
  •  174
    Handbook of Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology (edited book)
    with Stephen P. Turner
    Elsevier. 2006.
    This volume concerns philosophical issues that arise from the practice of anthropology and sociology. The essays cover a wide range of issues, including traditional questions in the philosophy of social science as well as those specific to these disciplines. Authors attend to the historical development of the current debates and set the stage for future work.
  •  218
    Who are ‘We’? Dissolving the Problem of Cultural Boundaries
    Modern Schoolman 84 (2-3): 205-215. 2007.
  • Semantics, Culture, and Rationality: Toward an Epistemology of Ethnography
    Dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 1990.
    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 …Read more
  •  1161
    Inference, Explanation, and Asymmetry
    Synthese (Suppl 4): 929-953. 2018.
    Explanation is asymmetric: if A explains B, then B does not explain A. Tradition- ally, the asymmetry of explanation was thought to favor causal accounts of explanation over their rivals, such as those that take explanations to be inferences. In this paper, we develop a new inferential approach to explanation that outperforms causal approaches in accounting for the asymmetry of explanation.
  •  84
    Inferentialist-Expressivism for Explanatory Vocabulary
    In Ondřej Beran, Vojtěch Kolman & Ladislav Koreň (eds.), From rules to meanings. New essays on inferentialism, Routledge. 2018.
    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-expressiv…Read more
  •  92
    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 p…Read more
  •  3596
    The Philosophy of Social Science: A Contemporary Introduction examines the perennial questions of philosophy by engaging with the empirical study of society. The book offers a comprehensive overview of debates in the field, with special attention to questions arising from new research programs in the social sciences. The text uses detailed examples of social scientific research to motivate and illustrate the philosophical discussion. Topics include the relationship of social policy to social sci…Read more
  •  15
    Nursing and human freedom
    Nursing Philosophy 15 (1): 35-45. 2014.
    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 ex…Read more
  •  307
    Evolution and the Kantian Worldview
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 44 (S1): 72-84. 2006.
    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, t…Read more
  •  1
    Ethnography and Culture
    In Stephen Turner, Mark Risjord, John Woods & Paul Thagard (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, Elsevier. 2007.
  •  217
    The limits of cognitive theory in anthropology
    Philosophical Explorations 7 (3). 2004.
    The cognitive revolution in psychology was a significant advance in our thinking about the mind. Philosophers and social scientists have looked to the cognitive sciences with the hope that the social world will yield to similar explanatory strategies. Dan Sperber has argued for a programme that would conceptualize the entire domain of anthropological theory in cognitive terms. Sperber's 'epidemiology' specifically excludes interpretive, structuralist and functionalist theories. This essay evalua…Read more
  •  19
    Models of culture
    In Harold Kincaid (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science, Oxford University Press. pp. 387. 2012.
  •  62
    Is there such a thing as a language?
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22 (2): 163-190. 1992.
    ‘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 Dav…Read more
  •  32
    Uncovers the methodological principles that govern interpretive change
  •  13
    Relativism and the Possibility of Criticism
    Cogito 12 (2): 155-160. 1998.
  •  16
    Naturalism and Normativity. Columbia Themes in Philosophy
    Nursing Philosophy 13 (3): 230-231. 2012.
  •  29
    Further reflections on the sensible foundation: Replies to Leavitt and Griffin
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 22 (4): 665-672. 1991.
  •  32
    Relativism and the social scientific study of medicine
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 18 (2): 195-212. 1993.
    Does the social scientific study of medicine require a commitment to relativism? Relativism claims that some subject (e.g., knowledge claims or moral judgments) is relative to a background (e.g., a culture or conceptual scheme) and that judgments about the subject are incommensurable. Examining the concept of success as it appears in orthodox and nonorthodox medical systems, we see that judgments of success are relative to a background medical system. Relativism requires the social scientific st…Read more
  •  145
    The politics of explanation and the origins of ethnography
    Perspectives on Science 8 (1): 29-52. 2000.
    : 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 questio…Read more