Denying Descartes and wary of Wittgenstein: Response to Franz

In his article, “‘Are Psychological Attributes Quantitative?’ is not an Empirical Question: Conceptual Confusions in the Measurement Debate,” Franz (2021) concludes that psychological measurement does not rest on empirical hypotheses but rather on linguistic deceptions. His major premise is that psychometrics is inherently Cartesian. History shows otherwise: the mantras of operationism and the rituals of construct validity were intended to exorcise psyche from psychometrics. These mainstays of psychometrics ensured that theoretical constructs were more frequently dispositional concepts than they were mental concepts. It is with the latter, however, especially with attempts to measure currently occurring mental states, such as anxiety, that Franz’s argument looks more promising, but nevertheless it fails because it rests upon Wittgenstein’s views about the grammar of mental discourse. I conclude that conceptual analysis, realistically construed and applied to mental concepts, may show that they exclude quantitative structure. Despite that, it is always possible that empirical research might elicit quantitative-friendly revisions of mental concepts.

Khussa as an Eco-Friendly Footwear Form

The research aims to document the progress of the vegetable tanning of leather hides, involved in the making of local footwear products in Pakistan. The analysis is done specifically on the introduction of Khussa as an environmentally friendly product suitable for the needs of the present target groups. The overall empirical question is to decrease the amount of industrial pollution created in the manufacturing of leather goods through synthetic procedures, especially in the tanning of the leather skins. The observations are based on the pollution intensive environment and spatial urban issues related to trends in technological, economic, social, and political scenario in Pakistan. In the beginning of the paper vegetable tanning and its existence in the leather market of Pakistan will be discussed. Then the involvement of vegetable tanning and manual laborious skills involved in the making of Khussa will be observed to promote ecofriendly procedures in the footwear market. A SWAT analysis at the end of the paper will determine the positioning of Khussa in the present market and how it could be improvised to make it better in future.

“Are psychological attributes quantitative?” is not an empirical question: Conceptual confusions in the measurement debate

Critics of psychological measurement have accused quantitative psychologists of ignoring the empirical hypothesis that psychological phenomena are quantitative (Michell), or have claimed that it is impossible in principle to find out whether psychological phenomena are actually quantitative (Trendler). By drawing on Bennett and Hacker (2003), I argue that both criticisms do not go far enough because they sidestep the fundamental conceptual problem of the measurement debate: It is impossible to give concrete formulations of the question “Are psychological attributes quantitative?” without transgressing the boundaries of meaningful language. Conceptual confusions and questionable philosophical assumptions have contributed to the misguided idea that the quantity of psychological phenomena must or can be demonstrated empirically. First, the measurement debate is characterized by misleading examples and ambiguous terminology. Second, the idea of psychological measurement is inherently Cartesian. In summary, psychological measurement is even more problematic than Michell and Trendler have argued.

Causation and mnemonic roles: on Fernández’s Functionalism

Debates about causation have dominated recent philosophy of memory. While causal theorists have argued that an appropriate causal connection to a past experience is necessary for remembering, their opponents have argued that this necessity condition needs to be relaxed. Recently, Jordi Fernández (2018; 2019) has attempted to provide such a relaxation. On his functionalist theory of remembering, a given state need not be caused by a past experience to qualify as a memory; it only has to realize the relevant functional role in the subject’s mental economy. In this comment, I argue that Fernández’s theory doesn’t advance the debate about memory causation. I propose that this debate is best understood as being about the existence of systems, which support kinds of interactions that map onto the relations dictated by (causal) theories. Since Fernández’s functionalism tells us very little about this empirical question, the theoretical gains from endorsing it are minimal.

Populism and new radical-right parties: The case of VOX

The populist radical-right label brings together parties characterised by their adherence to populism, nativism, and authoritarianism. While the relevance of the label to the family is unquestioned, its popularity, combined with the theoretical affinity between the three core elements, may cause radical-right parties to be systematically considered populist without further examination. This article posits that whether a radical-right party is populist is an open empirical question, and to demonstrate this, we test the importance of populism in the discourse and electoral success of a new radical-right party, Spain’s VOX. Our empirical strategy is based on the holistic grading of core political discourses, and the analysis of innovative survey data that includes populist attitudes and voting intention. Our results indicate that, despite the existence of certain populist elements in both the supply and demand sides of the electoral competition, these should be considered supplemental and subordinate to nationalist and traditionalist elements, which are central to explaining both the discourse and electoral success of VOX. We believe that our findings are a cautionary note against assuming that all radical-right parties are populist, and an invitation to improve empirical techniques able to separate populism, nativism, and authoritarianism in political discourses.

Executive Orders

This chapter lays out the data set of executive orders created for this book, drawn from archival sources spanning the Roosevelt to George W. Bush administrations. It provides comprehensive data regarding the making of those orders and a scheme coding their relative centralization. In so doing it answers a basic empirical question: How are executive orders actually formulated? The most frequent answer is, with lots of participation by different agencies.

The Effects of Contract Detail and Prior Ties on Contract Change: A Learning Perspective

Despite the large literature on alliance contract design, we know little about how transacting parties change and amend their underlying contracts during the execution of strategic alliances. Drawing on existing research in the alliance contracting literature, we develop the empirical question of how contract detail and prior ties influence the amount, direction, and type of change in such agreements during the collaboration. We generated a sample of 115 joint ventures (JVs) by distributing a survey to JV board members or top managers and found that the amount of contract change is negatively associated with the level of detail in the initial contract but is positively associated with the number of prior ties between alliance partners. In relation to the direction of contract change, we find that the level of detail of the initial agreements negatively correlates with the likelihood of removing or weakening existing provisions and that prior collaborative experience positively correlates with the likelihood of strengthening of existing provisions or adding of new ones. We also find that prior ties affect the type of change in that JV parents prefer to change enforcement provisions more so than the coordination provisions in the contract. Our paper generates new insights on the complementarities between relational governance and transaction cost economics perspectives on alliance contracting.

ON MENTAL ILLNESS AND BROKEN BRAINS

ABSTRACTWe often hear that certain mental disorders are disorders of the brain, but it is not clear what this claim amounts to. Does it mean that they are like classic brain diseases such as brain cancer? I argue that this is not the case for most mental disorders. Neither does the claim that all mental disorders are brain disorders follow from a materialist world-view. The only plausible way of understanding mental disorders as brain disorders is a fairly modest one, where we label brain differences we find in mental illness as pathological based on their link to mental dysfunction. How many mental disorders will turn out to be brain disorders on this understanding is an empirical question.

Hungary, Poland, and Romania

This chapter compares the respective answers of the Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian systems of administrative liability. It begins by noting that after 1989, all such countries modified their constitutions, which now regulate government liability in tort differently from the past. Not only do they admit government liability, but they also lay down general principles about it, although they variably construct the right to compensation. There are, instead, some relevant differences in their rules concerning administrative procedure. In particular, unlike Hungary and Poland, Romania has no such thing as a procedural code. However, the crucial empirical question is whether the same, or similar solutions are given to the issues raised by the hypothetical cases. Despite the fact that the European Convention on Human Rights influences the three legal systems, not always is the disregard of procedural constraints, such as prior notice and hearing, in itself sufficient to make administrative action unlawful and, thus, to give rise to liability. Sometimes, claimants fail to get redress for wrongful failures to grant licences or exercise a discretion in the issuing of general or individual orders. The reason is not only that administrative authorities enjoy discretionary powers, but also that sometimes the courts seem reluctant to abandon the idea that those who govern cannot be held liable.

Code-switching alone cannot explain intraspeaker syntactic variability: Evidence from a spoken elicitation experiment

We address the question whether speakers activate different grammars when they encounter linguistic input from different registers, here written standardised language and spoken dialect. This question feeds into the larger theoretical and empirical question if variable syntactic patterns should be modelled as switching between different registers/grammars, or as underspecified mappings from form to meaning within one grammar. We analyse 6000 observations from 26 high school students from Tromsø, comprising more than 20 phonological, morphological, lexical and syntactic variables obtained from two elicited production experiments: one using standardised written language and one using spoken dialect as the elicitation source. The results suggest that most participants directly activate morphophonological forms from the local dialect when encountering standardised orthographic forms, suggesting that they do not treat the written and spoken language as different grammars. Furthermore, the syntactic variation does not track the morphophonological variation, which suggests that code/register-switching alone cannot explain syntactic optionality.