Cox's Problem-Expreting Theory: The Nature Of Theory And Neuving Theory

This is not a new idea to sociology – and Foucault was more of a structuralist than a postmodernist—but Derrida’s main work centers around “deconstruction” pivoting around the idea of “différance,” essentially declaring that “there is nowhere to begin” when it comes to tracing the universality or truth status of individual “narratives,” whether scientific or political. This is just as applic... ... middle of paper ... ...m the text should be considered. That is to say, concepts such as “human nature” are not really ostensible, stable facts of how the world “really is,” but are contingent on the above factors. Essentially, deconstruction looks into how knowledge is produced. In contrast, the structuralism popular in 1950s and 1960s France focused on the study of the structure of cultural products interpreted through linguistic frameworks.

I. Introduction There are obvious and important ways in which analytic and continental philosophy differ, but this should not make us overlook their thematic and historical similarities. Both traditions had their roots in phenomenalistic theories that attempted to reduce all meaning to the immediately given. Even though phenomenology was more generous in construing what was immediately given, neither phenomenology nor logical positivism could do justice to our understanding of the subjectivity of other people. Heidegger and Wittgenstein each dealt with this problem in unique but complementary ways.

Kant's Attack on the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection ABSTRACT: In the neglected 'Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection,' Kant introduces a new transcendental activity, Transcendental Deliberation (Kemp Smith calls it 'Transcendental Reflection'). It aims to determine to which faculty a representation belongs and does so by examining the representation's relationships to other representations. This enterprise yields some powerful ideas. (1) Some of the relationships studied have great interest, numerical identity in particular. Indeed, seeing Kant discuss it here, one wonders why he did not include it in the Table of Categories.

What the revolutionary achievements of Descartes, Kant, and Fichte have generically in common is to account for the legitimacy of our knowledge claims or, in other words, for the possibility of autonomy. The business of that kind of philosophy is to rationally reconstruct the rightness of judging. For that design the architecture of those authors' theorizing is necessarily opposed to normal experience. (First of all, the common notion of "things affecting us" has to be abandoned.) Transcendental arguments are therefore all but common sense.

Critical theorists rejected both aspects of these philosophers, though they were influenced by them. The Marxian philosophy that is (the relation between a system of production is paralleled by a system of beliefs) was the Critical theorists' starting point. Generally, we could say that for Critical theorists Ideology had to be analyzed as a non-economically reducible form of expression of human rationality, but to Marx it was totally explicable through the underlying system of production. By interpreting rationality as a form of self-reflective action, Critical Theory represents a specific form of rational enquiry capable of distinguishing, immanently, “ideology” from Hegelian “Spirit”. The mission of Critical Theory, though, is not grueling by a theoretical understanding of the social reality; as a matter of fact, there is a strict correlation between critical understanding and transformative action: theory and practice are correlated.

I have shown that Black provides a good start to the problem, but that his solution is ultimately unconvincing to skeptics of induction. And I’ve attempted to address the problem that Salmon brings up; that is, I’ve attempted to show that it is improper and non-valuable to try to provide reasons for induction. My conclusion, then, is that as long as being reasonable is something that is possible to be, humans are, in fact, reasonable. Works Cited 1. Black, Max.

Faced with a style of discourse he finds uncomfortable, he undertakes to set those theorists whom he respects (and himself) apart from the pseudoscientific style. Pure empiricism cannot be his motivation, for that is what he is seeking to define, in an age when the definitions were not altogether clear. There is an unquestionable tone of dissatifaction to his essay - his distaste for the pseudoscientists is politely expressed but unmistakeable - and it can be argued that he, too, is seeking to route out the inelegant in a quest for the elegant.

Through his endeavors to prove that metaphysics is possible, and his analyzing of causality, Kant solved the problems he saw within Hume’s account. Specifically, in the Prolegomena, Kant stated that Hume “justly maintains that we cannot comprehend by reason the possibility of causality.”(57) Kant also attacked Hume’s ideas by describing Hume’s treatment of the concept of causality to be “a bastard of the imagination, impregnated by experience.”(5) Kant succeeded in re- establishing the objectivity of causality, a task that Hume had rejected as impossible.

Form of life is one of Wittgenstein's key concepts in his theory on rules and is linked to rules in some crucial ways. A community cannot agree on arbitrary rules and rules other than some highly selected ones cannot bind a community together. What a community agree or disagree is not an arbitrary game. Kripke presents Wittgenstein's theory on rules in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. The topic is difficult and the presentation seems to inherit some characteristics of the original work, which "is not presented in the form of a deductive argument with definitive theses as conclusions,..." (Kripke, 1982, p.3).

Social theory on the other hand is less concerned with facts and more with reason. In this essay I will be examining the distinction between the two in the social sciences and why Horkheimer feels this distinction is important. Traditional theory contains many propositions that are related due to their consistency with a fact. By separating the facts from the object we are only able to see things as they are and not what they could be. According to Horkheimer, this is limiting.