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Good Argument (good + argument)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	50%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	33%

Selected Abstracts

A PRAGMATIST DEFENSE OF NON-RELATIVISTIC EXPLANATORY PLURALISM IN HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2008
JEROEN VAN BOUWEL
ABSTRACT Explanatory pluralism has been defended by several philosophers of history and social science, recently, for example, by Tor Egil Førland in this journal. In this article, we provide a better argument for explanatory pluralism, based on the pragmatist idea of epistemic interests. Second, we show that there are three quite different senses in which one can be an explanatory pluralist: one can be a pluralist about questions, a pluralist about answers to questions, and a pluralist about both. We defend the last position. Finally, our third aim is to argue that pluralism should not be equated with "anything goes": we will argue for non-relativistic explanatory pluralism. This pluralism will be illustrated by examples from history and social science in which different forms of explanation (for example, structural, functional, and intentional explanations) are discussed, and the fruitfulness of our framework for understanding explanatory pluralism is shown. [source]

Liberty, equality and the rights of cultures: the marching controversy at Drumcree

BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 1 2000
Shane O'Neill
This article offers a normative-theoretical assessment of a key aspect of the continuing cultural conflict in Northern Ireland. The marching controversy at Drumcree has had a destabilising effect on the peace process and it represents a serious threat to the achievement of the kind of political accommodation outlined in the Good Friday Agreement. The aim is to apply Jürgen Habermas's discourse theory of rights to this dispute so as to assess which, if any, of the conflicting claims should take priority. By seeking to assess the rational acceptability of the better arguments on either side, I reject the view that these claims are irreconcilable. In the concluding section I outline four principles that provide a normative basis for just resolutions to conflicts over contentious marches in Northern Ireland. [source]

Measuring Housing Subsidies: Distortionary and Distributional Effects in the Netherlands

FISCAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2003
Harry Ter Rele
Abstract This paper measures the distortionary and distributional effects of housing subsidies in the Netherlands. Its broad scope allows us to discuss the results in the light of the main justifications for subsidising housing, i.e. the merit,good argument, external effects and the distribution motive. Our measurements reveal some patterns of subsidisation that seem difficult to justify on these grounds. This applies especially to the differences between subsidisation of rental and owneroccupied housing and between mortgage, and equity,financed ownership. Moreover, the inelastic supply of housing in the Netherlands entails that subsidisation has only a limited effect on promoting housing quality. [source]

Transactivation of BARNASE under the AtLTP1 promoter affects the basal pole of the embryo and shoot development of the adult plant in Arabidopsis

THE PLANT JOURNAL, Issue 5 2001
Célia Baroux
Summary Genetically controlled expression of a toxin provides a tool to remove a specific structure and consequently study its role during a developmental process. The availability of many tissue-specific promoters is a good argument for the development of such a strategy in plants. We have developed a conditional system for targeted toxin expression and demonstrated its use for generating embryo phenotypes that can bring valuable information about signalling during embryogenesis. The BARNASE gene was expressed in the Arabidopsis embryo under the control of two promoters, one from the cyclin AtCYCB1 gene and one from the AtLTP1 gene (LipidTransferProtein 1). One-hundred percent seed abortion was obtained with the cyclin promoter. Surprisingly however, the embryos displayed a range of lethal phenotypes instead of a single arrested stage as expected from this promoter. We also show that BARNASE expression under the control of the AtLTP1 promoter affects the basal pole of the globular embryo. Together with reporter expression studies, this result suggests a role of the epidermis in controlling the development of the lower tier of the embryo. This defect was not embryo-lethal and we show that the seedlings displayed a severe shoot phenotype correlated to epidermal defects. Therefore, the epidermis does not play an active role during organogenesis in seedlings but is important for the postgermination development of a viable plant. [source]

The EU Comitology System: Intergovernmental Bargaining and Deliberative Supranationalism?

JCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 4 2009
JENS BLOM-HANSEN
Two images exist of the day-to-day practice of the EU comitology system. The first claims that comitology is deliberation by policy experts in which informal norms, deliberation and good arguments matter more than economic interests and formal voting rules. The second image portrays comitology as an arena for intergovernmental bargaining designed by the Member States to control the Commission. The article systematically investigates these images based on survey evidence from a questionnaire to the Danish and Dutch national representatives on nearly all comitology committees in 2006. The evidence suggests that both images hold and that their relative importance is determined by the nature of the issues dealt with by the individual comitology committees. [source]

Identification and estimation of local average derivatives in non-separable models without monotonicity

THE ECONOMETRICS JOURNAL, Issue 1 2009
Stefan Hoderlein
Summary, In many structural economic models there are no good arguments for additive separability of the error. Recently, this motivated intensive research on non-separable structures. For instance, in Hoderlein and Mammen (2007) a non-separable model in the single equation case was considered, and it was established that in the absence of the frequently employed monotonicity assumption local average structural derivatives (LASD) are still identified. In this paper, we introduce an estimator for the LASD. The estimator we propose is based on local polynomial fitting of conditional quantiles. We derive its large sample distribution through a Bahadur representation, and give some related results, e.g. about the asymptotic behaviour of the quantile process. Moreover, we generalize the concept of LASD to include endogeneity of regressors and discuss the case of a multivariate dependent variable. We also consider identification of structured non-separable models, including single index and additive models. We discuss specification testing, as well as testing for endogeneity and for the impact of unobserved heterogeneity. We also show that fixed censoring can easily be addressed in this framework. Finally, we apply some of the concepts to demand analysis using British Consumer Data. [source]