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Explanatory Role (explanatory + role)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	80%

Selected Abstracts

Disability, capacity for work and the business cycle: an international perspective

ECONOMIC POLICY, Issue 63 2010
Hugo Benítez-Silva
Summary Important policy issues arise from the high and growing number of people claiming disability benefits for reasons of incapacity for work in OECD countries. Economic conditions play an important part in explaining both the stock of disability benefit claimants and inflows to and outflows from that stock. Employing a variety of cross-country and country-specific household panel data sets, as well as administrative data, we find strong evidence that local variations in unemployment have an important explanatory role for disability benefit receipt, with higher total enrolments, lower outflows from rolls and, often, higher inflows into disability rolls in regions and periods of above-average unemployment. In understanding the nature of the cyclical fluctuations and trends in disability it is important to distinguish between work disability and health disability. The former is likely to be influenced by economic conditions and welfare programmes while the latter evolves in a slower fashion with medical technology and demographic changes. There is little evidence of health disability being related to the business cycle, so cyclical variations are driven by work disability. The rise in unemployment due to the current global economic crisis is expected to increase the number of disability insurance claimants. --- Hugo Benítez-Silva, Richard Disney and Sergi Jiménez-Martín [source]

A Metaphilosophical Analysis of the Core Idea of Deflationism

METAPHILOSOPHY, Issue 3 2000
Bo Mou
In this paper, I give a metaphilosophical analysis of the core idea of deflationism by discussing some basic conceptual and methodological issues involved in the debate between deflationism and substantivism. In so doing, I argue for three positive points. First, the crux of the dispute between deflationism and substantivism is whether or not truth is substantive in its metaphysical nature and in its explanatory role in philosophical enterprises, rather than whether or not a minimal approach regarding conceptual resources is taken to explain truth; a minimal approach itself is philosophically innocent. Second, there is no intrinsic connection between the core idea of deflationism and the Tarski-style equivalence thesis, which is often identified as implying or supporting the former. Third, there are some unbridged fundamental gaps between the core idea of deflationism and various redundancy theses; these redundancy theses cannot be identified as the former, nor can they be used to justify the former on their own. [source]

Physiological Linguistics, and Some Implications Regarding Disciplinary Autonomy and Unification

MIND & LANGUAGE, Issue 1 2007
SAMUEL D. EPSTEIN
At least current irreducibility of biology, including biolinguistics, stems in at least some cases from the very nature of what I will claim is physiological, or inter-organ/inter-component, macro-levels of explanation which play a new and central explanatory role in Chomsky's inter-componential (interface-based) explanation of certain (anatomical) properties of the syntactic component of Universal Grammar. Under this new mode of explanation, certain physiological functions of cognitive mental organs are hypothesized, in an attempt to explain aspects of their internal anatomy. Thus, the internal anatomy of the syntactic component exhibits features that enable it to effectively interface with (i.e. function in a coordinated fashion with) other ,adjacent' organs, such as the Conceptual-Intensional (C-I) (,meaning') system and the Sensory- Motor (SM) (,sound') system. These two interface systems take as their inputs the assembled outputs of the syntactic component and, as a result of the very syntactic structure imposed by the syntax (as opposed to countless imaginable alternatives) are then able to assign their (linearized) sound and (compositional) meaning interpretations. If this is an accurate characterization, Chomsky's long-standing postulation of mental organs, and I will argue, the advancement of new hypotheses concerning physiological inter-organ functions, has attained in current biolinguistic Minimalist method a significant unification with foundational aspects of physiological explanation in other areas of biology. [source]

Neo-Pragmatist (Practice-Based) Theories of Meaning

PHILOSOPHY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2009
Ronald Loeffler
In recent years, several systematic theories of linguistic meaning have been offered that give pride of place to linguistic practice, or the process of linguistic communication. Often these theories are referred to as neo-pragmatist or new pragmatist; I call them ,practice-based'. According to practice-based theories of meaning, the process of linguistic communication is somehow constitutive of, or otherwise essential for the existence of, propositional linguistic meaning. Moreover, these theories disavow, or downplay, the semantic importance of inflationary notions of representation. I introduce the basic ideas and motives behind some practice-based theories of meaning, and offer some reasons why an eliminativist, non-quietist, epistemic practice-based approach to meaning that 1) disavows any explanatory role for the linguistic community as such, 2) prioritizes sentence meaning over word meaning, and 3) may, in the end, be naturalistic, should be favored over its practice-based competitors. [source]

THE EXPRESSIVE ROLE OF TRUTH IN TRUTH-CONDITIONAL SEMANTICS

THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 229 2007
Claire Horisk
I define ,skim semantics' to be a Davidson-style truth-conditional semantics combined with a variety of deflationism about truth. The expressive role of truth in truth-conditional semantics precludes at least some kinds of skim semantics; thus I reject the idea that the challenge to skim semantics derives solely from Davidson's explanatory ambitions, and in particular from the ,truth doctrine', the view that the concept of truth plays a central explanatory role in Davidsonian theories of meaning for a language. The fate of skim semantics is not determined by the fate of the truth doctrine, so rejecting the truth doctrine does not in itself open the way to skim semantics. I establish my thesis by showing that some recently proposed versions of skim semantics fail because of truth's expressive role. I also discuss the conditions that might permit skim semantics. [source]