The Difficult Reception of Rigorous Descriptive Social Science in the Law

Mutual disdain is an effective border patrol at the demarcation lines between disciplines. Social scientists tend to react with disdain when they observe how their findings are routinely stripped of all the caveats, assumptions and careful limitations once they travel into law. Likewise, lawyers tend to react with disdain when they read all the laborious proofs and checks for what looks to them like a minuscule detail in a much larger picture. But mutual disdain comes at a high price. All cross-border intellectual trade is stifled. This paper explores the social science/law border from the legal side. The natural barriers turn out to be significant, but not insurmountable. Specifically the paper looks at the challenges of integrating rigorous descriptive social science into the application of the law in force by courts and administrative authorities. This is where the gap is most difficult to bridge. The main impediments are implicit value judgments inherent in models, conceptual languages and strictly controlled ways of generating empirical evidence; the difference between explanation, hypothesis testing and prediction, on the one hand, and decision-making, on the other; the ensuing difference between theoretical and practical reasoning, and the judicial tradition of engaging in holistic thinking; last but not least, the strife of the legal system for autonomy, in order to maintain its viability. If a legal academic assumes the position of an outside observer, she may entirely ignore all these concerns and simply follow the methodological standards of descriptive social science. This is, for instance, what most of law and economics does. The legal academic may, instead, choose to contribute to the making of new law. She will then find it advisable to partly ignore the strictures of rigorous methodology in order to be open to more aspects of the regulatory issue. But it is not difficult, at least, to follow the standards of the social sciences for analysing the core problem. The integration is most difficult if an academic does doctrinal work. But it is precisely here where the division of intellectual labour between legal practice and legal academia is most important. Academics who themselves are versatile in the respective social science translate the decisive insights into suggestions for a better reading of statutory provisions or case law.law and economics, law and statistics, explanation vs. decision-making, practical reasoning, psychology of judicial decision-making

An Ontological Basis for Design Methods

This paper presents a view of design methods as process artefacts that can be represented using the function-behaviour-structure (FBS) ontology. This view allows identifying five fundamental approaches to methods: black-box, procedural, artefact-centric, formal and managerial approaches. They all describe method structure but emphasise different aspects of it. Capturing these differences addresses common terminological confusions relating to methods. The paper provides an overview of the use of the fundamental method approaches for different purposes in designing. In addition, the FBS ontology is used for developing a notion of prescriptiveness of design methods as an aggregate construct defined along four dimensions: certainty, granularity, flexibility and authority. The work presented in this paper provides an ontological basis for describing, understanding and managing design methods throughout their life cycle. Keywords: Design Methods; Function-Behaviour-Structure (FBS) Ontology; Prescriptive Design Knowledge</p

On a landscape approach to design and eco-poetic approach to Landscape

For Landscape Architecture to become an academic discipline it must present its own coherent theory and methodology for the planning, designing and management of (built) landscapes. This also requires not only an articulated if difficult differentiation of planning, design and management and the interrelationship between them, but also clarification of the term landscape itself

Context Dependence, MOPs,WHIMs and procedures Recanati and Kaplan on Cognitive Aspects in Semantics

After presenting Kripke’s criticism to Frege’s ideas on context dependence of thoughts, I present two recent attempts of considering cognitive aspects of context dependent expressions inside a truth conditional pragmatics or semantics: Recanati’s non-descriptive modes of presentation (MOPs) and Kaplan’s ways of having in mind (WHIMs). After analysing the two attempts and verifying which answers they should give to the problem discussed by Kripke, I suggest a possible interpretation of these attempts: to insert a procedural or algorithmic level in semantic representations of indexicals. That a function may be computed by different procedures might suggest new possibilities of integrating contextual cognitive aspects in model theoretic semanti

Learning in evolutionary environments

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Public Participation in Environmental Planning in the Great Lakes Region

The need for greater public involvement in environmental decision-making has been highlighted in recent high-profile research reports and emphasized by leaders at all levels of government. In some cases, agencies have opened the door to greater participation in their programs. However, there is relatively little information on what can be gained from greater public involvement and what makes some programs work while others fail. This paper addresses these questions through an evaluation of public participation in environmental planning efforts in the Great Lakes region. The success of participation is measured using five criteria: educating participants, improving the substantive quality of decisions, incorporating public values into decision-making, reducing conflict, and building trust. The paper then discusses the relationship between success and a number of contextual and procedural attributes of a variety of cases. Data come from a "case survey," in which the authors systematically extract information from previously published studies of 30 individual participation cases. The authors conclude that public participation can accomplish important societal goals and that success depends, in large part, on the actions and commitment of government agencies.

The Descriptive/Procedural Distinction is Flawed

The traditional distinction between descriptive and procedural markup is  flawed; it conflates two different dimensions — mood and domain — which in fact can vary independently. An adequate markup taxonomy must, among other things, incorporate distinctions such as those developed in contemporary “speech-act theory”. This will substantially complicate, although in interesting ways, the development of an adequate theory of markup semantics, as formalization will require modal operators and additional axiomatic relationships. In addition, these reflections reveal that there are foundational issues in markup theory that are not yet resolved, in particular the precise relationship between markup and text.Ope

Patent Institutions: Shifting Interactions Between Legal Actors

This contribution to the Research Handbook on Economics of Intellectual Property Rights (Vol. 1 Theory) addresses interactions between the principal legal institutions of the U.S. patent system. It considers legal, strategic, and normative perspectives on these interactions as they have evolved over the last 35 years. Early centralization of power by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, newly created in 1982, established a regime dominated by the appellate court\u27s bright-line rules. More recently, aggressive Supreme Court and Congressional intervention have respectively reinvigorated patent law standards and led to significant devolution of power to inferior tribunals, including newly created tribunals like the USPTO\u27s Patent Trial and Appeals Board. This new era in institutional interaction creates a host of fresh empirical and normative research questions for scholars. The contribution concludes by outlining a research agenda

Reassessing the conceptual–procedural distinction

My aim in this paper is to reassess the conceptual–procedural distinction as drawn in relevance theory in the light of almost thirty years of research. In Section 1, I make some comparisons between approaches to semantics based on a conceptual–procedural distinction and those based on a distinction between truth conditions and conditions for appropriate use. In Section 2, I present a brief history of the conceptual–procedural distinction as drawn in relevance theory. In Section 3, I consider the nature of procedural encoding and discuss whether it is best seen as semantic or pragmatic. In Section 4, I outline some parallels and differences between procedural and use-conditional accounts of interjections. In Section 5, I discuss the implications of the conceptual–procedural distinction for lexical pragmatics and consider some recent proposals about how it might be extended. In Section 6, I reassess the conceptual–procedural distinction in the light of current evolutionary approaches to cognition and point out some future directions for research