Comparative law is law’s cybernetics, or “theory of messiness.” It attempts to steer through the messiness of the foreign by reordering it into the language of the familiar without betraying the original. It is needed urgently in contexts of unrecognized metamorphosis, and today metamorphoses are burgeoning in murky areas outside of law’s traditional categories of either the national or the int...

The review by Waxman and Gavrilets illustrates the collision of different mindsets in evolutionary theory. These differences originate from the awe-inspiring complexity of the evolutionary process itself: evolutionary understanding critically depends on processes at many biological levels. Starting out with base pairs and their sequences, scholars of evolution have to consider – in the order of...

Ethnopharmacology is the scientific study of indigenous drugs. Herein, I discuss some of the metaphysical issues at stake when rendering traditional medicines scientifically legible. I draw on my laboratory experience, my limited experience with Amazonian shamanism, and the ethnographic literature to consider drugs as relational entities animated in their particular cosmological milieu, with wi...

OBJECTIVE: Although rehabilitation psychology is more focused on empirical evidence and clinical application than theory development, we argue for the primacy of theory, and explain why theories are needed in and useful for rehabilitation psychology. Impediments to theory development are discussed, including the difficulties of applying psychological theories in multidisciplinary enterprises, a...

Exploration of issues associated with the introduction and the application of various systems thinking methods and techniques in the analysis and design of complex work systems in a large public sector organisation. Action research approach to introducing and skilling people in the use of systems thinking techniques and in exploring the concept of methodological pluralism. Highlights significan...

Pluralism is the coexistence of equivalent theoretical frameworks, either because they are historically entrenched or because they achieve separate insights by viewing the same process in different ways. A recent article by West et al. [Journal of Evolutionary Biology (2007) vol. 20, 415-432] attempts to classify the many equivalent frameworks that have been developed to study the evolution of ...

I argue for sensory pluralism. This is the view that there are many forms of sensory interaction and unity, and no single category that classifies them all. In other words, sensory interactions do not form a single natural kind. This view suggests that how we classify sensory systems (and the experiences they generate) partly depends on our explanatory purposes. I begin with a detailed discussi...

In this article, we consider the tension between unification and pluralism in biological theory. We begin with a consideration of historical efforts to establish a unified understanding of evolution in the neo-Darwinian synthesis. The fragmentation of the evolutionary synthesis by molecular evolution suggests the limitations of the general unificationist ideal for biology but not necessarily fo...

As scholars become more aware of the importance of religion in world affairs, several have begun to ask whether specific religious traditions are compatible with the institutions and values of liberal democracy. With approximately 350 million Orthodox Christians in the world, and given the great political and economic importance of the many countries they call home, an understanding of Orthodox...

This paper is a defense of “explanatory pluralism” (i.e., the view that some events can be correctly explained in two distinct ways). To defend pluralism, I argue that a certain class of macroevolutionary trends (what I call “asymmetrical passive trends”) can be explained in two distinct but compatible ways. The first approach (“actual sequence explanation”) is to trace out the particular force...