Essential Contestability and Evaluation

Evaluative and normative terms and concepts are often said to be "essentially contestable". This notion has been used in political and legal theory and applied ethics to analyze disputes concerning the proper usage of terms like "democracy", "freedom", "genocide", "rape", "coercion", and "the rule of law". Many philosophers have also thought that essential contestability tells us something important about the evaluative in particular. Gallie (who coined the term), for instance, argues that the central structural features of essentially contestable concepts secure their evaluativeness. I'll argue that these (widely held) central features are exemplified by many evaluative and non-evaluative terms alike, owing to more general factors (such as multidimensionality) which have nothing in particular to do with being evaluative. The role of these factors in semantic interpretation is subject to a certain kind of "metasemantic" disputes which have the features of the disputes characteristically admitted by essentially contestable concepts (whether evaluative or not) and which can be similarly substantive and worthwhile. In closing I'll discuss how my argument shows that our understanding of evaluative disagreement needs refinement. The overall upshot is that essential contestability shows nothing deep or distinctive about the evaluative in particular

Living with a body separate from the self. the experience of the body in chronic benign low back pain: an interpretative phenomenological analysis

This paper presents an in‐depth, idiographic study exploring the personal experience of chronic benign low back pain in relation to the participant's body and sense of self. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with patients and the resultant transcripts subjected to interpretative phenomenological analysis. One theme is presented in detail: ‘Living with a body separate from the self’, whereby when out of pain the body has little salience to the self yet when in pain it is consciously excluded from the self. The complex and paradoxical relationship between the body, chronic pain and the self is explored and evidence is provided to argue that the embodied unpleasantness of chronic pain involves an assault upon and a defence of a preferred or desirable self. The results are considered in relation to relevant themes in the extant literature