Social Epistemology, Descriptive and Normative

Social epistemology ought to incorporate both a descriptive element (understanding our actual knowledge practices) and a normative element (assessing and evaluating those practices). While the two dominant traditions of social epistemology research in the last three decades tend to privilege one of these elements over the other, this chapter aims to articulate and defend an approach that can accommodate both and avoid the distortions.

Practical Concepts

This paper is a successor to the author’s ‘In Defence of Thick Concepts’. It asks first whether all thick concepts have a default valence. It then considers how to account for the combination of the descriptive and the evaluative (which is sometimes called ‘interpenetration’) in a thick concept, and suggests that the so-called ‘no-priority’ view fails to do this. We might also wonder why the descriptive element is not always capable of separate instantiation. Various alternative moves are considered. The paper offers a considerably more varied list of supposedly thick concepts than is normal. It ends by suggesting that thick concepts are evaluative because competence with them involves grasp of their evaluative point.

Problems Of Colorative Vocabulary In Modern Linguistics

This article discusses coloration vocabulary that expresses the meaning of a color. The vocabulary denoting color, as a descriptive element, acts in a direct meaning, and can also have an additional figurative meaning. Color coding has been studied by researchers in various aspects. There is a description of the composition the colorative vocabulary and its semantic structure. The research was carried out in ethnolinguistic, comparative-historical and psycholinguistic aspects. Also, proven the psychophysiological influence of color on a person.

Las Narraciones Diferentes del Parto: Las Geometrías Relacionales

Childbirth is no literary genre. As usual, in the story narrated childbirth is a process completed at the entrance or exit of some new characters. In most cases, also maternity is a purely descriptive element. Based on the analysis of selected fragments of literary and artistic works, it is proposed to rethink childbirth as a biographical-relational event. In it, in terms of aesthetic, ethical, social and political, entangle geometric gures that assume vulnerability as a human condition, as a category to build a relationship with the Alterity.

Prescriptivism

Prescriptivism is a theory about moral statements. It claims that such statements contain an element of meaning which serves to prescribe or direct actions. The history of prescriptivism includes Socrates, Aristotle, Hume, Kant and Mill, and it has been influential also in recent times. Moral statements also contain a factual or descriptive element. The descriptive element of morality differs between persons and cultures, but the prescriptive element remains constant. Prescriptivism can allow for moral disagreement, and explain moral weakness. It can also explain better than other theories the rationality and objectivity of moral thinking.

"Let Fair Weather Bring Me Home: A Maltese Story" // "Deja que el buen tiempo me traiga a casa: una historia de Malta"

Let Fair Weather Bring Me Home: A Maltese Story (Excerpt from unpublished novel)Life in itself largely depends on one’s personal relationship with nature. Humankind develops as it discovers new modes of relating more efficiently with whatever surrounds it. Thus both the individual and the social aspects of such a condition greatly depend on each other. Let Fair Weather Bring Me Home is a Maltese novel which strives to portray such a bond in terms of what it entails to live in a traditional village far removed from the center of the country where nature had to succumb to a great extent to the dictates of culture, and mainly to technology. The descriptive element of the novel, as evinced in this excerpt, is meant not only to construct a context within which the villagers live, but also to suggest a sharp contrast with the modern city, impersonal, overcrowded, noisy and inevitably distant from spaces which are considered to be still undeveloped, namely still left in their primeval state. The depiction of such a way of life in such a village, inspired by an environment typical of Southern Europe, may seem to be simply an evocation of the past, as it originally is, but it also recognizes the fact that such a relationship with nature still survives in various parts of various countries. The essential message of the excerpt is that modern ecological considerations are necessarily the expression of humanity’s need to rediscover nature and to return to where it once belonged.

On criticising values

If we cannot agree that evaluations are judgements that both describe things (ascribing properties to them) and express sentiments, we lack any shared understanding of a common topic. If we ever come to agree how the describing and expressing relate, we shall lose a debate. Suppose that evaluation is a mode of description essentially expressive of sentiment, and that some evaluations can be known to be true: then there must exist properties of such a kind that they can be apprehended only from appropriately affective points of view. Alternatively, it may be that evaluation involves some element distinct from description, so that, in principle, one could always accept the descriptive core of an evaluation while distancing oneself from a non-descriptive element that makes it evaluative. We may distinguish the two kinds of view aslumping, or descriptivist-cum-expressivist, andsplitting, or descriptivist-plus-expressivist. Both ascribe to evaluations an expressive aspect as well as a descriptive content; what is at issue is whether the former is integral to the latter, or detachable from it.

Marketing Theory of the Firm

Marketing management is provided with a fundamental logic to guide strategic and operational planning. One descriptive element is a model of the customer. Other descriptive elements feed upon this customer model for informational input in a dynamic process over the life cycle. The five key functions of each company adapt to these changes and to each other in a series of management process innovations. The financial criteria of maximizing shareholder wealth and maximizing viewed as an ideal are the prescriptive elements.