PLURALISM

Sociologyindex, Moral Pluralism, Sociology Books 2009, Pluralism

Pluralism has three principal meanings in the social sciences.

First, pluralism is a model of politics where power is assumed to be widely dispersed to different individuals and interest groups within a society thus ensuring that political processes will be relatively open and democratic and will reflect a spectrum of social interests rather than the domination of particular groups.

Second, pluralism describes a society where individual and group differences are present and are celebrated as enriching the social fabric.

Third, pluralism is a view of the causation of social phenomena, especially of social change, that examines the interaction of a variety of factors rather than relying on a single explanatory cause.

For example, Max Weber in stressing the importance of cultural as well as material forces in creating change within a society offers a more pluralistic framework for explanation than the more exclusively materialist approach of Marx.

Religious Pluralism Versus Social Cohesion?
Normative Fault Lines of Human Rights Jurisprudence in Europe
Daniel Augenstein
University of Edinburgh - School of Law
September 15, 2009 University of Edinburgh School of Law Working Paper No. 2009-23
Abstract: This essay explores the tension between religious pluralism and social cohesion in European human rights jurisprudence. Comparing the German, French, and British interpretation of the ‘social cohesion limitation’ of freedom of religion I argue that, at the national level, concerns for social cohesion stem from negative and defensive societal attitudes towards religious diversity that are difficult to reconcile with the normative premises of religious pluralism in a democratic society. The essay proceeds by analysing how two trans-national European courts, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ), address the tension between religious pluralism and social cohesion identified at the national levels. While the ECtHR pursues a strategy of avoidance that fails to effectively scrutinise national social cohesion limitations of freedom of religion in the light of its own appraisal of religious pluralism, the ECJ must pursue a strategy of integration that confronts this tension in an autonomous way on the basis of the supra-national EU legal order. By way of conclusion, I outline such a strategy of integration that re-interprets the relationship between religious pluralism and social cohesion in European human rights jurisprudence through challenging the association of social cohesion with the containment or suppression of religious diversity.

PLURALISM IN LOGIC
HARTRY FIELD, Philosophy Department, New York University
Abstract: A number of people have proposed that we should be pluralists about logic, but there are several things this can mean. Are there versions of logical pluralism that are both high on the interest scale and also true? After discussing some forms of pluralism that seem either insufficiently interesting or quite unlikely to be true, the paper suggests a new form which might be both interesting and true; however, the scope of the pluralism that it allows logic is extremely narrow.

Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics
Banchoff, Thomas (Editor), Director, Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, Georgetown University
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2009 doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195323405.001.0001
Abstract: Globalization has spawned more active transnational religious communities, creating a powerful force in world affairs. This book explores the patterns of cooperation and conflict that mark this new religious pluralism. Shifting religious identities have encouraged interreligious dialogue and greater political engagement around global challenges, including international development, conflict resolution, transitional justice, and bioethics. At the same time, interreligious competition has contributed to political conflict and running controversy over the meaning and scope of religious freedom. In this volume, leading scholars from a variety of disciplines examine how the forces of religious pluralism and globalization are playing out on the world stage.

Varieties of Healing. 1: Medical Pluralism in the United States
Ted J. Kaptchuk, OMD, and David M. Eisenberg, MD
Annals 7 August 2001, Volume 135 Issue 3 Pages 189-195
Medicine has become interested in unconventional healing practices, ostensibly because of recent demographic research that reveals a thriving medical market of multiple options. This essay presents a historical overview of medical pluralism in the United States. Consistent evidence is examined suggesting that unconventional medicine has been a persistent presence in U.S. health care. Despite parallels with the past, the recent widespread interest in alternative medicine also represents a dramatic reconfiguration of medical pluralism—from historical antagonism to what might arguably be described as a topical acknowledgment of postmodern medical diversity. This recent shift may have less to do with acknowledging "new" survey data than with representing shifts in medicine's institutional authority in a consumer-driven health care environment. This essay is an introduction to a discussion of a taxonomy of contemporary U.S. medical pluralism, which also appears in this issue.

Law, Pluralism and the Family In Kenya: Beyond Bifurcation of Formal Law and Custom
Winifred Kamau, Faculty of Law, University of Nairobi, Kenya
International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family 2009 23(2):133-144; doi:10.1093/lawfam/ebn021
Abstract: Family law in Africa has been is characterized by pluralism where customary, religious and state laws co-exist within the same social context. However, this plurality is marked by a false dichotomization of formal law and custom. Under the law/custom dichotomy, people are deemed to be governed by one system of law to the exclusion of all others and to order their family lives within the boundaries of that system. However, this bifurcation runs counter to the reality on the ground, as people's family lives in Africa constantly traverse the boundaries of legal systems. This is particularly true of cohabitation relationships, which defy conventional categorizations of family law systems. This article examines the ways in which prevailing legal policies and judicial attitudes in Kenya have impacted on women's claims to property and maintenance upon breakdown of the cohabitation relationship. The article argues that the bifurcatory approach stems from an erroneous conceptualization of customary law, manifested in a weak form of legal pluralism that does not give effect to people's experience of the intersection of legal orders. In thinking about reform of family law in the African context, there is need for an approach to legal pluralism that pays attention to people's perception of their normative context and how such perception shapes their attitudes and actions. This would help in developing a legal framework that is more in tune with people's lived reality, particularly that of women.

Pluralistic Naturalism
[infidels.org/library/modern/nontheism/.../pluralistic.html]
There are two main kinds of naturalism: materialism and pluralistic naturalism. Materialism, or physicalism, is a "monistic" form of naturalism in that it maintains that only one basic kind of stuff exists--physical stuff. Pluralistic naturalism, by contrast, combines naturalism with ontological pluralism, the idea that there is more than just one basic kind of stuff. Thus while materialists reject the reality of (irreducibly) nonphysical stuff, pluralists affirm the existence of at least one kind of (irreducibly) nonphysical stuff.

Value Pluralism and Liberal Political Order: The Diversity Argument
Neal, Patrick
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association
Abstract: Does value pluralism generate a case in support of liberal poilitcal principles? This paper critically analyzes one set of arguments that claim to establish such a case, those offered by George Crowder under the label of the "diversity argument."

Legal pluralism
European University Institute (EUI) cadmus.iue.it
Abstract:     Legal pluralism has become a major theme in socio-legal studies. However, under this very broad denomination, one can identify many different trends which share little but the very basic idea that law is much more than state law. Despite their eclectic character, these many conceptions of legal pluralism also share some common fundamental premises concerning the nature of law, its function, and its relationship with its cultural milieu. This contribution aims at critically addressing these premises and at suggesting some re-specification of the question of law, its plural sources, and the many practices that enfold in relationship with it. In its spirit, this re-specification can be characterised as realistic and praxiological. Indeed, I shall argue that it is at best useless and at worst wrong to start from a label like “legal pluralism” so as to describe something which is presumed to be an instance of such label. My contention here is that law is what people consider as law, nothing more nothing less, and that occurrences of legal plurality are limited to these situations where people explicitly orient themselves to the fragmented spectrum of law. Instead of looking at the hypothetical pluralistic model of law which something like, e.g., Egyptian law, would be an instance of, the task of social scientists is, rather, to describe the situations, the mechanisms and the processes through which people orient to something legal which they identify as pluralistic. This position is grounded on a principle of indifference, by which one seeks to avoid normative and evaluative engagements: the focus is put on the description of practices, not on their evaluation. Moreover, this position is based on the refusal of any ironic standpoint, i.e. the denial that social scientists occupy any kind of overhanging position vis-a-vis the social, by which they would be entitled to “reveal” to “self-deceived people” the truth which is concealed from them because of their “lack of critical distance”, “ignorance” and/or “bad faith”. In a first section, I shall briefly describe the main trends in the field of legal pluralism, from its historical scientific background to its more recent theories. In a second section, I formulate some of the major criticisms which can be addressed to the postulates sustaining these many versions of legal pluralism. These critical stances vis-a-vis the legal pluralistic study of law articulate around three main questions, i.e. the definitional problem, the functionalist premises, and the culturalist conception which undermine existing theories. I shall argue, in the third section, that realism is a possible remedy to these flaws. However, these are best addressed through what I call a praxiological re-specification of the whole issue of legal pluralism, which I shall illustrate through the study of Egyptian cases. In conclusion, I shall formulate some remarks on praxiology as a way to fill the “missing-what” of classical socio-legal studies.

Explanatory Pluralism and Heuristic Identity Theory
Robert N. McCauley, Emory University, philrnm@emory.edu
William Bechtel, Washington University 1n St Louis, bechtel@twinearth.wustl.edu
Explanatory pluralism holds that the sorts of comprehensive theoretical and ontological economies that microreductionists and New Wave reductionists envision and antireductionists fear offer misleading views of both scientific practice and scientific progress. Both advocates and foes of employing reductionist strategies at the interface of psychology and neuroscience have overplayed the alleged economies that interlevel connections (including identities) justify while overlooking their fundamental role in promoting scientific research. A brief review of research on visual processing provides support for the explanatory pluralist's general model of cross-scientific relations and discloses the valuable heuristic role hypothetical identities play in cross-scientific research. That model also supplies grounds for hesitation about the correlation objection to the psychophysical identity theory and complaints about an explanatory gap in physicalist accounts of consciousness. These takes on psycho-neural connections miss both the sorts of considerations that motivate hypothetical identities in science and their fundamental contribution to progressive research. Thus, their focus on the contributions of research at multiple levels of analysis does not bar explanatory pluralists from considering heuristic identity theory (HIT). Arguably, it encourages it.
Theory & Psychology, Vol. 11, No. 6, 736-760 (2001) DOI: 10.1177/0959354301116002

Pattern pluralism and the Tree of Life hypothesis
W. Ford Doolittle and Eric Bapteste
Abstract: Darwin claimed that a unique inclusively hierarchical pattern of relationships between all organisms based on their similarities and differences [the Tree of Life (TOL)] was a fact of nature, for which evolution, and in particular a branching process of descent with modification, was the explanation. However, there is no independent evidence that the natural order is an inclusive hierarchy, and incorporation of prokaryotes into the TOL is especially problematic. Pattern pluralism (the recognition that different evolutionary models and representations of relationships will be appropriate, and true, for different taxa or at different scales or for different purposes) is an attractive alternative to the quixotic pursuit of a single true TOL.