Theoretical Framework Quotes

In this spirit, Marxists recognize that all social analyses, no matter which theoretical framework is used to produce them, are partial and never complete or finished, No one can understand or write the whole story about how a society is structured and how it is changing.

The Velveteen Rabbit is not a compelling theoretical framework for the physical universe,

There are two foundational pillars upon which modern physics rests. One is Albert Einstein's general relativity, which provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the largest of scales: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and beyond to the immense expanse of the universe itself. The other is quantum mechanics, which provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the smallest of scales: molecules, atoms, and all the way down to subatomic particles like electrons and quarks. Through years of research, physicists have experimentally confirmed to almost unimaginable accuracy virtually all predictions made by each of these theories. But these same theoretical tools inexorably lead to another disturbing conclusion: As they are currently formulated, general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right.

The subject of Communism was class. Fascism’s subject was the state, in Italian Fascism under Mussolini, or race in Hitler’s National Socialism. In liberalism, the subject was represented by the individual, freed from all forms of collective identity and any ‘membership’ (l’appartenance). While the ideological struggle had formal opponents, entire nations and societies, at least theoretically, were able to select their subject of choice — that of class, racism or statism, or individualism. The victory of liberalism resolved this question: the individual became the normative subject within the framework of all mankind. This is when the phenomenon of globalisation entered the stage, the model of a post-industrial society makes itself known, and the postmodern era begins. From now on, the individual subject is no longer the result of choice, but is a kind of mandatory given. Man is freed from his ‘membership’ in a community and from any collective identity,

We live in a world in which it is impossible to anticipate most of the contingencies that will arise. Neither the political context, nor the inventions, nor the fashions, nor the weather, nor the climate are precisely specifiable in advance. There is, in the real world, no possibility of working with an abstract space of all the contingencies that may evolve. To do real economics, without mythological elements, we need a theoretical framework in which time is real and the future is not specifiable in advance, even in principle. It is only in such a theoretical context that the full scope of our power to construct our future can make sense.

The importance of right view can be gauged from the fact that our perspectives on the crucial issues of reality and value have a bearing that goes beyond mere theoretical convictions. They govern our attitudes, our actions, our whole orientation to existence. Our views might not be clearly formulated in our mind; we might have only a hazy conceptual grasp of our beliefs. But whether formulated or not, expressed or maintained in silence, these views have a far-reaching influence. They structure our perceptions, order our values, crystallize into the ideational framework through which we interpret to ourselves the meaning of our being in the world.

To be sure, it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the intuitive knowledge that everyone acquires about contemporary wealth and income levels, even in the absence of any theoretical framework or statistical analysis. Film and literature, nineteenth-century novels especially, are full of detailed information about the relative wealth and living standards of different social groups, and especially about the deep structure of inequality, the way it is justified, and its impact on individual lives. Indeed, the novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac paint striking portraits of the distribution of wealth in Britain and France between 1790 and 1830. Both novelists were intimately acquainted with the hierarchy of wealth in their respective societies.

My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us. No philosopher can contemplate this interesting situation without beginning to reflect on what it can mean. The gap between political realities and their public face is so great that the term “paradox” tends to crop up from sentence to sentence. Our rulers are theoretically “our” representatives, but they are busy turning us into the instruments of the projects they keep dreaming up. The business of governments, one might think, is to supply the framework of law within which we may pursue happiness on our own account. Instead, we are constantly being summoned to reform ourselves. Debt, intemperance, and incompetence in rearing our children are no doubt regrettable, but they are vices, and left alone, they will soon lead to the pain that corrects. Life is a better teacher of virtue than politicians, and most sensible governments in the past left moral faults to the churches. But democratic citizenship in the twenty-first century means receiving a stream of improving “messages” from politicians. Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in their exercise of authority—they are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life is the first step towards totalitarianism. We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? Public respect for politicians has long been declining, even as the population at large has been seduced into demanding political solutions to social problems. To demand help from officials we rather despise argues for a notable lack of logic in the demos. The statesmen of eras past have been replaced by a set of barely competent social workers eager to take over the risks of our everyday life. The electorates of earlier times would have responded to politicians seeking to bribe us with such promises with derision. Today, the demos votes for them.

To establish evolutionary interrelatedness invariably requires exhibiting similarities between organisms. Within Darwinism, there's only one way to connect such similarities, and that's through descent with modification driven by the Darwinian mechanism. But within a design-theoretic framework, this possibility, though not precluded, is also not the only game in town. It's possible for descent with modification instead to be driven by telic processes inherent in nature (and thus by a form of design). Alternatively, it's possible that the similarities are not due to descent at all but result from a similarity of conception, just as designed objects like your TV, radio, and computer share common components because designers frequently recycle ideas and parts. Teasing apart the effects of intelligent and natural causation is one of the key questions confronting a design-theoretic research program. Unlike Darwinism, therefore, intelligent design has no immediate and easy answer to the question of common descent. Darwinists necessarily see this as a bad thing and as a regression to ignorance. From the design theorists' perspective, however, frank admissions of ignorance are much to be preferred to overconfident claims to knowledge that in the end cannot be adequately justified. Despite advertisements to the contrary, science is not a juggernaut that relentlessly pushes back the frontiers of knowledge. Rather, science is an interconnected web of theoretical and factual claims about the world that are constantly being revised and for which changes in one portion of the web can induce radical changes in another. In particular, science regularly confronts the problem of having to retract claims that it once confidently asserted.

From a nonpatriarchal metaethical standpoint, however, Singer's and Regan's theoretical similarities are as significant as their differences. In particular, both Singer's utilitarian theory and Regan's rights approach are developed within a framework of patriarchal norms, which includes the subordinatin of emotion to reason, the privileging of abstract principles of conduct, the perception of ethical discussion as a battle between adversaries, and the presumption that ethics shoudl function as a means of social control.

How about this?” he said. “For years Mom invested Pupkin with attention and focus and time, and like in The Velveteen Rabbit, love brings things to life. She put all her emotional energy into Pupkin, and some of it bled into the others, and as I believe a great man of science once said, energy can be neither created nor destroyed.” “The Velveteen Rabbit is not a compelling theoretical framework for the physical universe,” Louise said. “It’s a children’s story.” “So’s the Bible,” Mark said. “But you got people making laws and killing each other over it every day.” “That’s a false equivalency,” Louise said. “I don’t subscribe to your Velveteen Rabbit theory of the universe.

Theory is, of course, critical to the development of specific analyses of women’s situation. Explicitly or implicitly, empirical phenomena must be organised in terms of a theoretical construct in order to be grasped conceptually. At the same time, theory is, by its very nature, severely limited. As a structure of concepts, a theoretical framework simply provides guidance for the understanding of actual societies, past and present. However indispensable this theoretical guidance may be, specific strategies, programmes, or tactics for change cannot be deduced directly from theory. Nor can the phenomenon of variation in women’s situation over time, and in different societies, be addressed solely by means of theory. These are matters for concrete analysis and historical investigation.

The practitioners of ‘dry’ art admire myth and symbol, precision and coherence; they would, theoretically, be more excited by an interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s plays which offered them a beautifully plotted, ‘containing’ framework of themes and recurrent symbols, than by one which placed its main emphasis on Shakespeare’s skill in reproducing the accidental, the idiosyncratic happenings of life, or his power to arouse in the audience an immediate emotional attachment to Falstaff.

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students' reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. These are things you don't think about. The students' backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral inten- tion. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society.

[Fables] teach us that human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches. This is what any of the religious texts teach us. They're all tales about characters who must confront life and overcome obstacles, figures setting off on a journey of spiritual enrichment through exploits and revelations. All holy books are, above all, great stories whose plots deal with the basic aspects of human nature, setting them within a particular moral context and a particular framework of supernatural dogmas.

Marxism and intersectionality are intellectual currents or conceptual frameworks that are ultimately oriented toward activism, agitation, and transformational practice. [...] Both of these theories are, first and foremost, ways of reading, understanding, thinking, and dreaming beyond the deep structures of exploitation and oppression that frame our world. Thus, for a book about theory, actual struggles, organizations, and movements appear, not only as phenomena to be interpreted, but as the sources and sites of theoretical production; words, ideas, concepts, and arguments produced in the street are no less theoretical than those produced in the academy, and the former often speak with more clarity and precision.

Hamilton was that rare revolutionary: a master administrator and as competent a public servant as American politics would ever produce. One historian has written, “Hamilton was an administrative genius” who “assumed an influence in Washington’s cabinet which is unmatched in the annals of the American cabinet system.”73 The position demanded both a thinker and a doer, a skilled executive and a political theorist, a system builder who could devise interrelated policies. It also demanded someone who could build an institutional framework consistent with constitutional principles. Virtually every program that Hamilton put together raised fundamental constitutional issues, so that his legal training and work on The Federalist enabled him to craft the efficient machinery of government while expounding its theoretical underpinnings.

Bodies influence the space that surrounds them; they tell us whatever we can learn about that space. Does this mean that, possibly, there is no such thing as space by itself? Could it be that space is nothing but a theoretical construction invented for the purpose of giving the observed world an ordered framework? Could it be that we perceive as the reality of space is nothing but the influence of abstract laws of nature on the behavior of massive objects or bodies? That space is wedded to these bodies and will vanish if they do? This is a respectable position to take. For more than two thousand years, it has coexisted with the view of space as the primary stage that permits material objects to make their appearance. Natural philosophers who theorized about space can easily be charted on a scale between these two extreme positions. On the left is Thales of Miletus, whose "space" is nothing but one shapeless fluid; on the other side, there is Democritus, with his empty space in which material objects whir around. Leibniz on the left, Von guericke and Newton on the right. Albert Einstein juxtaposed these two concepts of space as, on one hand, the positional qualities of the physical world (left) and, on the other, the container of all physical objects (right) in his left-hand case, there is no space without an object; on the right, such an object cannot be thought of except in conjunction with the space that surrounds it-thereby assigning to space a higher reality than that possessed by objects.

As soon as one considers a system abstractly and theoretically, one puts himself, in effect, on the plane of the universal, thus, of the infinite. That is why reading the Hegelian system is so comforting. I remember having experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel in the impersonal framework of the Bibliotheque Nationale in August 1940. But once I got into the street again, into my life, out of the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no longer of any use to me: what it had offered me, under a show of the infinite, was the consolations of death; and I again wanted to live in the midst of living men. I think that, inversely, existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men. Taking on its own account Descartes' revolt against the evil genius, the pride of the thinking reed in the face of the universe which crushes him, it asserts that, despite his limits, through them, it is up to each one to fulfill his existence as an absolute. Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive. There is a very old saying which goes: "Do what you must, come what may." That amounts to saying in a different way that the result is not external to the good will which fulfills itself in aiming at it. If it came to be that each man did what he must, existence would be saved in each one without there being any need of dreaming of a paradise where all would be reconciled in death.

learning—we have learned how to increase productivity, the outputs that can be produced with any inputs. There are two aspects of learning that we can distinguish: an improvement in best practices, reflected in increases in productivity of firms that marshal all available knowledge and technology, and improvements in the productivity of firms as they catch up to best practices. In fact, the distinction may be somewhat artificial; there may be no firm that has employed best practices in every aspect of its activities. One firm may be catching up with another in some dimension, but the second firm may be catching up with the first in others. In developing countries, almost all firms may be catching up with global best practices; but the real difference between developing and developed countries is the larger fraction of firms that are significantly below global best practices and the larger gap between their productivity and that of the best-performing firms. While we are concerned in this book with both aspects of learning, it is especially the learning associated with catching up that we believe has been given short shrift in the economics literature, and which is central to improvements in standards of living, especially in developing countries. But as we noted in chapter 1, the two are closely related; because of the improvements in best practices by the most innovative firms, most other firms are always engaged in a process of catching up. While the evidence of Solow and the work that followed demonstrated (what to many seems obvious) the importance of learning for increases in standards of living, to further explicate the role of learning, the first three sections of this chapter marshal other macro- and microeconomic evidence. In particular, we stress the pervasive gap between best practices and the productivity of most firms. We argue that this gap is far more important than the traditional allocative inefficiencies upon which most of economics has focused and is related to learning—or more accurately, the lack of learning. The final section provides a theoretical context within which to think about the sources of sustained increases in standards of living, employing the familiar distinction of movements of the production possibilities curve and movements toward the production possibilities curve. Using this framework, we explain why it is that we ascribe such importance to learning. Macroeconomic Perspectives There are several empirical arguments that can be brought to bear to support our conclusion concerning the importance of learning. The first is a simple argument: In theory, leading-edge technology is globally available. Thus, with sufficient capital and trained labor (or sufficient mobility for capital and trained labor), all countries should enjoy comparable standards of living. The only difference would be the rents associated with ownership of intellectual property rights and factor supplies. Yet there is an enormous divergence in economic performance and standards of living across national economies, far greater than can be explained by differences in factor supplies.1 And this includes many low-performing economies with high levels of capital intensity (especially among formerly socialist economies) and highly trained labor forces. Table 2.1 presents a comparison of formerly socialist countries with similar nonsocialist economies in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the state-controlled model of economic activity. TABLE 2.1 Quality of Life Comparisons, 1992–1994 (U.S. $) Source: Greenwald and Khan (2009), p. 30. In most of these cases, at the time communism was imposed after World War II, the subsequently socialist economies enjoyed higher levels of economic development than

In essence, then, the common picture of economic thought after Smith needs to be reversed. In the conventional view, Adam Smith, the towering founder, by his theoretical genius and by the sheer weight of his knowledge of institutional facts, single-handedly created the discipline of political economy as well as the public policy of the free market, and did so out of a jumble of mercantilist fallacies and earlier absurd scholastic notions of a 'just price'. The real story is almost the opposite. Before Smith, centuries of scholastic analysis had developed an excellent value theory and monetary theory, along with corresponding free market and hard-money conclusions. Originally embedded among the scholastics in a systematic framework of property rights and contract law based on natural law theory, economic theory

Weak neighbors, rival neighbors, and refugee communities in which to mobilize are central to the theoretical framework in this book, as they facilitate extraterritorial rebel bases, which in turn make fighting insurgents more difficult.

The theoretical frameworks we bring to our praxis and our own experiences as scholars of color coalesce with a fundamental assumption in ACL, that identity is central to our praxis as leaders, and that our work as scholars advocating for increased diversity of leadership in spaces of higher learning is very much informed by our own identities.

Perhaps it is conceivable that, in the future, some different kind of 'computer' might be introduced, that makes critical use of continuous physical parameters-albeit within the standard theoretical framework of today's physics-enabling it to behave in a way that is essentially different from a digital computer.

Science works by taking theoretical ideas and trying to find ways to expose them to observation. The scientific strategy is to construe ideas, to embed them in surrounding conceptual frameworks, and to develop them, in such a way that this exposure is possible even in the case of the most general and ambitious hypotheses about the universe.

When scientific proposals are brought forward, they are not judged by hunches or gut feelings. Only one standard is relevant: a proposal's ability to explain or predict experimental data and astronomical observations. Therein lies the singular beauty of science. As we struggle toward deeper understanding, we must give our creative imagination ample room to explore. We must be willing to step outside conventional ideas and established frameworks. But unlike the wealth of other human activities through which the creative impulse is channeled, science supplies a final reckoning, a built-in assessment of what's right and what's not. A complication of scientific life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is that some of our theoretical ideas have soared past our ability to test or observe. String theory has for some time been the poster child for this situation; the possibility that we're part of a multiverse provides an even more sprawling example. I've laid out a general prescription for how a multiverse proposal might be testable, but at our current level of understanding none of the multiverse theories we've encountered yet meet the criteria. With ongoing research, this situation could greatly improve.

I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I have found a theoretical framework that helps me understand the gap between the world I live in and the world I want to live in.

As Cosmic Vibration, all things are one; but when Cosmic Vibration becomes frozen into matter, it becomes many--including man's body, which is a part of this variously divided matter.* (*footnote: Recent advances in what theoretical physicists call 'superstring theory' are leading science toward an understanding of the vibratory nature of creation. Brian Greene, Ph.D., professor of physics at Cornell and Columbia Universities, writes in The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: Vintage Books, 2000): 'During the last thirty years of his life, Albert Einstein sought relentlessly for a so-called unified field theory--a theory capable of describing nature's forces within a single, all-encompassing, coherent framework...Now, at the dawn of the new millennium, proponents of string theory claim that the threads of this elusive unified tapestry finally have been revealed...' 'The theory suggests that the microscopic landscape is suffused with tiny strings whose vibrational patterns orchestrate the evolution of the universe,' Professor Greene writes, and tells us that 'the length of a typical string loop is...about a hundred billion billion (1020) times smaller than an atomic nucleus.')

Gender studies' own Theoretical frameworks currently hinder it from producing scholarship of value to the cause of social justice. This is the price it pays for its "increasing sophistication.

Discussions about how God reveals himself to people have little meaning in a purely theoretical framework.

Once you have organized your data, you will need to identify the meanings and categorize them accordingly. This could be based on patterns of behaviour, regulations, and critical events. The final step is your interpretation – what is the general nature of the group and its practices? You can use an existing theoretical framework for structure and support during the interpretation process (Leedy and Ormrod, 2010: 140).

Almost all official statistics and policy documents on wages, income, gross domestic product (GDP), crime, unemployment rates, innovation rates, cost of living indices, morbidity and mortality rates, and poverty rates are compiled by governmental agencies and international bodies worldwide in terms of both total aggregate and per capita metrics. Furthermore, well-known composite indices of urban performance and the quality of life, such as those assembled by the World Economic Forum and magazines like Fortune, Forbes, and The Economist, primarily rely on naive linear combinations of such measures.6 Because we have quantitative scaling curves for many of these urban characteristics and a theoretical framework for their underlying dynamics we can do much better in devising a scientific basis for assessing performance and ranking cities. The ubiquitous use of per capita indicators for ranking and comparing cities is particularly egregious because it implicitly assumes that the baseline, or null hypothesis, for any urban characteristic is that it scales linearly with population size. In other words, it presumes that an idealized city is just the linear sum of the activities of all of its citizens, thereby ignoring its most essential feature and the very point of its existence, namely, that it is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions. Cities are quintessentially complex adaptive systems and, as such, are significantly more than just the simple linear sum of their individual components and constituents, whether buildings, roads, people, or money. This is expressed by the superlinear scaling laws whose exponents are 1.15 rather than 1.00. This approximately 15 percent increase in all socioeconomic activity with every doubling of the population size happens almost independently of administrators, politicians, planners, history, geographical location, and culture.

David versus Goliath Asymmetry lies at the heart of network-based competition. The larger or smaller network will be at different stages of the Cold Start framework and, as such, will gravitate toward a different set of levers. The giant is often fighting gravitational pull as its network grows and saturates the market. To combat these negative forces, it must add new use cases, introduce the product to new audiences, all while making sure it’s generating a profit. The upstart, on the other hand, is trying to solve the Cold Start Problem, and often starts with a niche. A new startup has the luxury of placing less emphasis on profitability and might instead focus on top-line growth, subsidizing the market to grow its network. When they encounter each other in the market, it becomes natural that their competitive moves reflect their different goals and resources. Startups have fewer resources—capital, employees, distribution—but have important advantages in the context of building new networks: speed and a lack of sacred cows. A new startup looking to compete against Zoom might try a more specific use case, like events, and if that doesn’t work, they can quickly pivot and try something else, like corporate education classes. Startups like YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and many other products have similar stories, and went through an incubation phase as the product was refined and an initial network was built. Trying and failing many times is part of the startup journey—it only takes the discovery of one atomic network to get into the market. With that, a startup is often able to start the next leg of the journey, often with more investment and resources to support them. Contrast that to a larger company, which has obvious advantages in resources, manpower, and existing product lines. But there are real disadvantages, too: it’s much harder to solve the Cold Start Problem with a slower pace of execution, risk aversion, and a “strategy tax” that requires new products to align to the existing business. Something seems to happen when companies grow to tens of thousands of employees—they inevitably create rigorous processes for everything, including planning cycles, performance reviews, and so on. This helps teams focus, but it also creates a harder environment for entrepreneurial risk-taking. I saw this firsthand at Uber, whose entrepreneurial culture shifted in its later years toward profitability and coordinating the efforts of tens of thousands. This made it much harder to start new initiatives—for better and worse. When David and Goliath meet in the market—and often it’s one Goliath and many investor-funded Davids at once—the resulting moves and countermoves are fascinating. Now that I have laid down some of the theoretical foundation for how competition fits into Cold Start Theory, let me describe and unpack some of the most powerful moves in the network-versus-network playbook.

These scholars, whose influence far outweighs their numbers, generally trained or work in elite Western academia and operate according to a densely theoretical framework that originated in France and proliferated in the United States and the United Kingdom. Their work is of very little practical relevance to people living in previously colonized countries, who are trying to deal with the political and economic aftermath. There is little reason to believe that previously colonized people have any use for a postcolonial Theory or decoloniality that argues that math is a tool of Western imperialism,48 that sees alphabetical literacy as colonial technology and postcolonial appropriation,49 that views research as the production of totalizing meta-texts of colonial knowledge,50 or that confronts France and the United States about their understanding of big black butts.51

Coincidentally, the recent excitement in astrophysics over the discovery of dark matter and energy reached a similar conclusion. That is, if present cosmological models are correct, then the entire theoretical edifice for the origins and structure of the universe rests upon 4 percent of the detectable universe, leaving 96 percent completely unknown. Similarly, the scientific framework for biology firmly rests upon DNA, but as much as 96 percent of DNA has no known biological function, earning it the label “junk” DNA. Such fundamental unknowns will likely yield to future scientific advances, but the present state of ignorance should remind us to cultivate humility about what we think we understand. The fact is that the more science discovers about the nature of reality, the more we discover how little we actually understand.

gender and power relations have been central to theoretical frameworks that attempt to understand prostitution

Underdetermination—where two different theories give the same predictions—is rarely an all-or-nothing affair, because the distinction between theoretical and observational claims is blurry. Apparent cases of underdetermination often get resolved over time as one theory turns out to be more powerful as a framework. The only realistic cases of exact underdetermination seem to be where two theories are mathematically equivalent; in these cases, physicists—and some, but not all, philosophers of physics—regard them as the same theory.

This view of a single, overarching science of culture, unified around a Darwinian evolutionary framework and incorporating anthropology, archaeology, economics, history, linguistics, psychology, and sociology, may seem naive. Anyone who has studied a social science subject at university level will probably be aware that there is little theoretical common ground, or even communication, between many of the different branches of the social sciences.

Measuring replication rates across different experiments requires that research be reviewed in some fashion. Research reviews can be classified into four types. A type 1 review simply identifies and discusses recent developments in a field, usually focusing on a few exemplar experiments. Such reviews are often found in popular-science magazines such as Scientific American. They are also commonly used in skeptical reviews of psi research because one or two carefully selected exemplars can provide easy targets to pick apart. The type 2 review uses a few research results to highlight or illustrate a new theory or to propose a new theoretical framework for understanding a phenomenon. Again, the review is not designed to be comprehensive but only to illustrate a general theme. Type 3 reviews organize and synthesize knowledge from various areas of research. Such narrative reviews are not comprehensive, because the entire pool of combined studies from many disciplines is typically too large to consider individually. So again, a few exemplars of the “best” studies are used to illustrate the point of the synthesis. Type 4 is the integrative review, or meta-analysis, which is a structured technique for exhaustively analyzing a complete body of experiments. It draws generalizations from a set of observations about each experiment.1 Integration Meta-analysis has been described as “a method of statistical analysis wherein the units of analysis are the results of independent studies, rather than the responses of individual subjects.”2 In a single experiment, the raw data points are typically the participants’ individual responses. In meta-analysis, the raw data points are the results of separate experiments.

The primacy of cognition over affect was a cornerstone of the theoretical framework that organized the work of early cognitive behavioral therapists

The prefix abhi- means ‘above’ or ‘for the sake of, with regard to’, so the title is usually understood to mean ‘that which is above the Dharma’ or ‘the higher or special teaching’. However, it could also be construed as meaning ‘for the sake of the Dharma’ or ‘the ancillary to the Dharma’. The Abhidharma was regarded as special in the sense that it presents the Dharma in a pure, theoretical framework, rather than in a historical context, as do the sūtras – though whether this is an advantage could be disputed. It is regarded as a ‘higher’ Dharma because it is thought to be offering an explanation of these terms superior to that offered by the sūtras themselves.

A worldview (or vision of life) is a framework or set of fundamental beliefs through which we view the world and our calling and future in it. This vision need not be fully articulated: it may be so internalized that it goes largely unquestioned; it may not be explicitly developed into a systematic conception of life; it may not be theoretically deepened into a philosophy; it may not even be codified into creedal form; it may be greatly refined through cultural-historical development. Nevertheless, this vision is a channel for the ultimate beliefs which give direction and meaning to life. It is the integrative and interpretative framework by which order and disorder are judged; it is the standard by which reality is managed and pursued; it is the set of hinges on which all our everyday thinking and doing turns.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn observed that scientists spend long periods taking small steps. They pose and solve puzzles while collectively interpreting all data within a fixed worldview or theoretical framework, which Kuhn called a paradigm. Sooner or later, though, facts crop up that clash with the reigning paradigm. Crisis ensues. The scientists wring their hands, reexamine their assumptions, and eventually make a revolutionary shift to a new paradigm, a radically different and truer understanding of nature. Then incremental progress resumes.

THE ABHIDHARMA IS NOT A SCHOOL AS SUCH, but rather a body of literature. Not all the early schools had such a body of literature, but when they did they incorporated it into the canon. In essence it is an ordering and explanation of the key terms and categories of analysis that appear in the sūtras. The prefix abhi- means ‘above’ or ‘for the sake of, with regard to’, so the title is usually understood to mean ‘that which is above the Dharma’ or ‘the higher or special teaching’. However, it could also be construed as meaning ‘for the sake of the Dharma’ or ‘the ancillary to the Dharma’. The Abhidharma was regarded as special in the sense that it presents the Dharma in a pure, theoretical framework, rather than in a historical context, as do the sūtras – though whether this is an advantage could be disputed. It is regarded as a ‘higher’ Dharma because it is thought to be offering an explanation of these terms superior to that offered by the sūtras themselves.

Marxism provides a theoretical and institutional framework through which they can project their own limitations and weaknesses onto “the system” and their “oppressors” rather than take responsibility for their own real or perceived plight.

There is an enormous amount that we still don’t understand—because, as always, what we don’t know is vastly greater than what we know. But we are learning. Perhaps in a curious way, transporting ourselves back to our natural reality, which for Price has its roots in pragmatism and in a respect for what we have learned about reality thanks to scientific rationalism, ends up bringing us closer to the intuitions of Nietzsche, which along a different route have led to the excesses of postmodernism: before being a rational animal, man is a vital animal—“It is our needs that interpret the world . . . Every instinct has its thirst for dominion.” True, but our reason also emerges from this magma, and emerges as our most effective weapon. Price’s book argues with strength and rigor for a humble and complete naturalism: we are natural creatures in a natural world, and these terms give us the best conceptual framework for understanding both ourselves and the world. We are part of this tremendous and incredibly rich nature about which we still understand little, albeit enough to know that it is sufficiently complex to have given rise to all that we are, including our ethics, our capacity for knowledge, our sense of beauty and our ability to experience emotions. Outside of this there is nothing. For a theoretical physicist such as myself, for an astronomer accustomed to thinking about the endless expanse of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each one consisting of more than a hundred billion stars, each one with its garland of planets, on one of which we dwell for a brief and fugitive moment, like specks of infinitesimal dust lost in the endlessness of the cosmos, this seems no more than obvious. Every anthropocentrism pales into insignificance in the face of this immensity. This is naturalism. Emptiness Is Empty: Nāgārjuna December 8, 2017 We rarely come across a book with the capacity to influence our way of thinking.

Once I saw this trend, the paper quickly wrote itself and was titled “Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?” As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2009 in an article on my Jackson Hole presentation: Incentives were horribly skewed in the financial sector, with workers reaping rich rewards for making money but being only lightly penalized for losses, Mr. Rajan argued. That encouraged financial firms to invest in complex products, with potentially big payoffs, which could on occasion fail spectacularly. He pointed to “credit default swaps” which act as insurance against bond defaults. He said insurers and others were generating big returns selling these swaps with the appearance of taking on little risk, even though the pain could be immense if defaults actually occurred. Mr. Rajan also argued that because banks were holding a portion of the credit securities they created on their books, if those securities ran into trouble, the banking system itself would be at risk. Banks would lose confidence in one another, he said. “The inter-bank market could freeze up, and one could well have a full-blown financial crisis.” Two years later, that’s essentially what happened.2 Forecasting at that time did not require tremendous prescience: all I did was connect the dots using theoretical frameworks that my colleagues and I had developed. I did not, however, foresee the reaction from the normally polite conference audience. I exaggerate only a bit when I say I felt like an early Christian who had wandered into a convention of half-starved lions. As I walked away from the podium after being roundly criticized by a number of luminaries (with a few notable exceptions), I felt some unease. It was not caused by the criticism itself, for one develops a thick skin after years of lively debate in faculty seminars: if you took everything the audience said to heart, you would never publish anything. Rather it was because the critics seemed to be ignoring what was going on before their eyes.

Case studies provide individual reflection through an in-depth perusal of a given problem to be understood and at the same time boost interactions among students and instructors, thus leveraging the overall learning process. From the instructor´s perspective, case studies may be particularly useful when tackling complex phenomena. Indeed, by using an inductive approach, instructors can start from a real situation and help students to understand and combine different theoretical constructs to analyze not only the case under scrutiny but also other analogous situations.

Psychologists have generally ignored the epistemology, that is, theoretical framework, that drives Piaget’s work. Philosophers, on the other hand, have dismissed the relevance of Piaget’s empirical work for epistemological questions because “philosophical and psychological questions…are different from each other, and…there are no grounds for the belief that philosophical questions can be answered by appeal to empirical evidence or vice versa” (Hamlyn, 1971, p. 19).

Like the psychological model outlined above, the psychiatric understanding of ’organised paedophilia’ is a framework that is focused primarily on individual psychological factors and overlooks the role of violence in criminal groups and the contexts in which such groups emerge. The underlying assumption of literature on ‘organised paedophilia’ is that members of sexually abusive groups are motivated by a pathological sexual interest in children but this does not accord with evidence that suggests that abusive groups can simultaneously abuse children and women. It is increasingly recognised that sexual offenders may not specialise in one particular victim category, and a significant proportion of child sexual abusers have also offended against adults (Cann et al. 2007, Heil et al. 2003). Furthermore, many of the behaviours of abusive groups appear to be designed to elicit fear and pain from the victim rather than to generate sexual pleasure for the perpetrator per se., are not mutually exclusive, but there is a sadistic dimension to organised abuse that is not explicable as ‘paedophilic’. A survivor of organised abuse from Belgium, Regina Louf, made this point clearly when she said: I find the expression ‘paedophile network’ misleading. For me paedophiles are those men who go to playgrounds or swimming pools, priests…I certainly don't want to exonerate them, but I would rather have paedophiles than the types we were involved with. There were men who never touched the children. Whether you were five, ten, or fifteen didn’t matter. What mattered to them was sex, power, experience. To do things they would never have tried with their own wives. Among them were some real sadists. (Louf quoted in Bulte and de Conick 1998) A credible theoretical account of organised abuse must necessarily (a) account for the available empirical evidence of organised abuse, (b) address the complex patterns of abuse and violence evident in sexually abusive groups, and (c) explain the ways in which sexually abusive groups form in a range of contexts, including families and institutions.

Instead of seeking out communities that almost guarantee the potential for large successful churches, the best planters are asking questions like, “which are the greatest pockets of darkness that most need an infusion of Christ’s light?” They are moving to the urban core, newly in love with cities.

The Intellectual Vacuum of Current Moral Thought Toward the beginning of this chapter we made the statement that the centuries-long attempt to devise a morality from within merely human resources has now proven itself a failure. Now we want to return to this point in the light of Jesus’ exposition of the rightness of the kingdom heart. What is the basis of such a statement? Simply this: that, as noted in the opening of chapter 1, there is in fact no body of moral knowledge now operative in the institutions of knowledge in our culture. This is the outcome of the now centuries-long effort to develop a moral guide to life within the framework of human thought and experience alone, unassisted by revelation. By contrast, the Christian teaching about moral goodness that derives from the principles laid down by Jesus does have a historical, theoretical, and practical claim to constitute the true body of moral knowledge. This is not said to encourage blind acceptance but precisely the opposite. It is said to encourage the toughest of testing for those teachings in all areas of thought and real life. We saw in chapter 1 the young lady who went to Professor Coles on her way out of Harvard and said to him, “I’ve been taking all these philosophy courses, and we talk about what’s true, what’s important, what’s good. Well, how do you teach people to be good?” Then she added, “What’s the point of knowing good, if you don’t keep trying to become a good person?” But, as we pointed out, knowing good is not seriously proposed in college or university courses today. Any “knowing” in such matters is thought to be totally impossible. In fact, both knowing good and being good are for the most part treated with open scorn in the academic settings which determine so much of our lives. That is the outcome of the long effort to establish a secular ethic in the modern period. But the concern for becoming good and being good remains, as the words of both President Bok and Professor Coles show, for it is a real-life issue that will never go away. And it is with regard to this issue of what kind of people we are to be that the teachings of Jesus about the rightness of the kingdom heart show him to be the unrivaled master of human life. Any serious inquirer can validate those teachings in his or her own experience. But they cannot invalidate them by simply refusing to consider them and hiding behind the dogmas of modern intellect.

There is a theoretical framework that explains ethnocentrism. As the Belgian authority on ethnic relations Pierre L. van den Berghe put it more than 25 years ago, “The degree of cooperation between organisms can be expected to be a direct function of the proportion of the genes they share; conversely, the degree of conflict between them is an inverse function of the proportion of shared genes.” Van den Berghe used the word “organisms” because he found this principle true in animals as well as people. When there is great genetic distance between strangers—in the case of humans, when they are of different races—conflicts are sharper. It is easy to understand the first part of van den Berghe’s proposition. People everywhere make great sacrifices for their families. The evolutionary explanation is that everyone shares more copies of his distinctive genes with close kin than with strangers. All forms of life can be viewed as striving to pass on their genes to future generations. Each individual therefore has a “genetic interest” in close relatives, which helps explain solidarity and cooperation within families.

These examples do not show that theoretical knowledge is worthless. Quite the reverse. A conceptual framework is vital even for the most practical men going about their business. In many circumstances, new theories have led to direct technological breakthroughs (such as the atom bomb emerging from the Theory of Relativity). The real issue here is speed. Theoretical change is itself driven by a feedback mechanism, as we noted in chapter 3: science learns from failure. But when a theory fails, like say when the Unilever mathematicians failed in their attempt to create an efficient nozzle design, it takes time to come up with a new, all-encompassing theory. To gain practical knowledge, however, you just need to try a different-sized aperture. Tinkering, tweaking, learning from practical mistakes: all have speed on their side. Theoretical leaps, while prodigious, are far less frequent.

The organization presented here, however, works for many student research projects. Keep in mind that advisors, committee members, and potentially external reviewers will evaluate the final proposal on clarity, content, and whether specified guidelines are met. The following is the content and organization I recommend: 1.   A cover page, which contains the title, your name, committee member names, and the date 2.   An introduction to the problem describing the general scope of the project and why it is important 3.   A literature review synthesizing prior research and describing the theoretical framework of your research 4.   Specific objectives or research questions and hypotheses (when appropriate) your proposal addresses 5.   A detailed description of your research methods, including data collection and analytical approaches 6. Project significance and implications 7.   An annotated time line for the anticipated completion of the research 8. An alphabetized list of references 9. Appendix (optional)

The Velveteen Rabbit is not a compelling theoretical framework for the physical universe,” Louise said. “It’s a children’s story.” “So’s the Bible,” Mark said. “But you got people making laws and killing each other over it every day.