Focus Points for Readings and Lectures
© 2007 Richard W. Chadwick
Readings
D&S
  • Rawls' principle of social justice: "All social values--liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-resepct--are to be distributed equally unless an uneual distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone's advantage." Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 62. (re-read D&S p. 136ff) Exemplifies nature of philosophical inquiry. Thinking decision rules through thoroughly, such as standards like this one in terms of possible consequences of application, raises questions both as regards values potentially impacted and how to evaluate those impacts. Focus on general principles of justice like Rawls' raises secondary questions. For instance, what other values should be considered? What theory is available for consequential thinking, for what consequences can be anticipated? What competition might there be for resources needed to implement the principle? Further, even assuming the desirability of a particular standard such as this one, what conditions of society would tend to result is support for it or opposition to it, or increase or decrease its importance or relevance?
    Think about it. Have you ever wondered how to construct a political system that is internally consistent, feasible, and desirable?
  • Rae's inequalities, p. 132ff - read. He distinguishes between equality of opportunity and equality of results. Considering opportunities, he distinguishes between opportunity of "prospects" or equal access or right (the term "probability" is probably misused here), and equal means by which a goal can be obtained. Considering results, he distinguishes between "lots" or equal amounts of some good or service, and personal value, i.e., equal value of some collection of goods and/or services. This explication exemplifies nature and purpose of concept clarification. Note the four meanings of inequality and the likelihood that policies aimed at any one of them are almost sure to be at cross-purposes with the others.
  • Dahl's "normative, empirical, and conceptual analyses" section - see my lecture notes in the right column. Many of the points D&S make about relations between them follow almost as corrolaries of the TDC meta-paradigm.
  • General discussion of applied political analysis, pp. 145-149, esp. Figure 12.1 and references to David Easton. Note the similarity of D&S's Fig. 12.1 to Easton's political system framework.
    J&R
  • Experimentation, pp. 50-64 -- deals with the nature and purposes of experiments and how they are designed. Why assign people "randomly" to two groups rather than divide them arbitrarily? Why put people into two groups in the first place? Answers to these questions are fundamental to experimental methods in the social sciences in general.
  • Hypothesis construction, pp. 113-119. Note the normative criteria for good hypotheses: empirical, general, plausible and specific (directionality, pattern), consistency with data and testable.
    D&S - Chs. 1,2,3
    Ch. 1. Nature of politics: According to D&S, the core idea is that political relations one or more of the following is involved to a "significant" degree: control, influence, power, authority. Lectures will focus on clarifing what is meant here. Specific models will be presented: (1) the GDA, (2) Lasswell's value framework, (3) Easton's systems framework, (4) Aristotle's classification of political systems. We will refer back to Rawl's and Rae's considerations throughout.
    • Lectures

    The TDC Meta-paradigm


    The triangle above hints at basic relations between political theory, culture, and data, and how they are constructed and reshaped by the major paradigms of political philosophy, science, and practice. What all the paradigms have in common is the psychological drive towards "dissonance reduction" (reduction of inconsistencies between what we think of as possible, desirable and real). Theory is used to express our understanding as to what is possible or impossible. Data statements are about what we believe to be real. And our beliefs, values, and attitudes originate in our culture, i.e., our norms and understandings of what is desirable in terms of ends and means. Tensions between beliefs about what is possible or impossible, desirable or undesirable, and real or illusory, motivate us to reflect on the sources of such inconsistencies and motivate us to reconsile them.
    Each paradigm is used to explore a different type of inconsistency; and the results of such exploration through any one of the paradigms reformulate the problems addressed by the other two.
  • Political science attempts to remove inconsistencies between theory and data in two fundamentally different ways: (1) by constructing theory in the data collection process itself through searching for patterns or regularities and using insight (inference or, following Kant, "abduction"), referred to in the literature as the "grounded theory" development approach; (2) by testing theory for consistency with data through accepted data collection and testing procedures.
  • Political practice is the focus of much theorizing about such variables as power, wealth, security, justice and so on. From a practice viewpoint, to quote Lasswell (paraphrased by Dahl), it's about political influence, about "who gets what, when, how." These factors are all part of our political culture; our cultural beliefs, habits, and attitudes shape our collective goals, alternatives and choices as we attempt to influence each other and our environment. Thus political practice aims at reducing the data-culture gap (the gap between what we view as reality and what we view as desirable), in two fundamental ways: (1) use information (data) to adjust our choices of political goals, policies or procedures when we find our attempts at influence are unproductive. (2) attempt to influence and change some aspect of the world to conform it better to our goals or other desires. Simply put, we either adjust to the world or adjust the world to us. The way Carl Jung put it, the world will ask you, who are you; if you don't tell it, it will tell you.
  • Political philosophy attempts to remove inconsistencies between theory and culture, our models of what is possible or impossible and what is desirable or undesirable. Rawls' and Rae's explorations illustrate two fundamentally different approaches. Rawls' is searching for a cultural norm or rule the application of which might result in a greater possibility of social justice. Thus Rawls' formulation of a core social justice value has theoretical implications for what might be possible or impossible. Rae's exploration of the concept of equality, showing that its four different possible meanings are likely in practice to imply contradictory policies, creates a set of cultural dilemmas. Thus Rae's theoretical work--"conceptual clarification" as Dahl puts it--has implications for change in political norms and culture.

    Theory, data, and culture have their own "internal paradigms" through which they "self-structure" so to speak. Procedures such as application of logic and parsimony of formulation for instance, are used to guide theory construction. Procedures for information gathering, organizing, storing and retrieving, transmitting, and testing for reliability and validity, are used to guide the creation and use of data. The procedures, rules or norms employed in the major paradigms are themselves the outgrowth of a society's culture, i.e., the beliefs, attitudes, predispositions or habits, and the training and maintenance practices that assure the transmission of the culture through time. Cultures, too, have embedded in their structure the rules by which they are transmitted and change.

    • © 2007 Richard W. Chadwick
    I created this page January 28, 2007 and last updated it January 28, 2007.
    Students: email me at chadwick@hawaii.edu
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