When Can Radical Change Be Too Radical

Can Pragmatism Be Radical? Richard Posner and Legal Pragmatism

ions such as justice, fairness, and equality. Posner argues that “academic philosophy” is “a field that has essentially no audience among judges and lawyers—let alone among politicians—even when philosophy is taken up by law professors . . . who think it should influence law.” Legal pragmatists reject “abstract theorizing of which professors of constitutional 62. See J.M. Balkin, The Declaratio...

Testing Can Be Formal, Too

The paper presents a theory of program testing based on formal specifications. The formal semantics of the specifications is the basis for a notion of an exhaustive test set. Under some minimal hypotheses on the program under test, the success of this test set is equivalent to the satisfaction of the specification. The selection of a finite subset of the exhaustive test set can be seen as the i...

Can We Be Too Careful?

Heisenberg and radical theoretic change

Heisenberg, in constructing quantum mechanics, explicitly followed certain principles exemplified, as he believed, in Einstein's construction of the special theory of relativity which for him was the paradigm for radical theoretic change in physics. These were the principles of (i) scientific realism, (ii) stability of background knowledge, (iii) E-observability, (iv) contextual re-interpretati...

Radical Change by Entrepreneurial Design

This article offers a conceptual framework to understand radical change. It opens with a typology that defines change in terms of its pace and scope, and defines radical change as the swift transformation of an entire system. How radical change in public policy has occurred in the past is then documented. We find examples of radical change by chance, radical change by consensus, radical change ...