THE DEBATE ON LANDMINES HAS BEEN MARKED BY A LACK OF A SHARED CONCEPTUAL VOCABULARY. THE ARGUMENTS FOR A TOTAL BAN ARE COUNCHED PRIMARILY IN MORAL TERMS, WHILE THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST A BAN EMPLOY MILITARY AND STRATEGIC TERMS. THIS GAP COULD BE BRIDGED BY USING THE VOCABULARY OF THE JUST WAR TRADITION. THE JUST WAR TRADITION ALL BUT OUTLAWS LANDMINES SINCE THE GRAVE SIDE-EFFECTS SEEM IMPOSSIBLE TO ELIMINATE COMPLETELY.
Do political leaders learn from historical experience, and do the lessons of history influence their foreign policy preferences and decisions? It appears that decision makers are always seeking to avoid the failures of the past and that generals are always fighting the last war. The "lessons of Munich" were invoked by Harry Truman in Korea, Anthony Eden in Suez, John Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, and George Bush in the Persian Gulf War. The "lessons of Korea" influenced American debates about Indochina, and the "lessons of Vietnam" were advanced in debates about crises in the Persian Gulf and in Bosnia. Statesmen at Versailles sought to avoid the mistakes of Vienna and those at Bretton Woods, the errors of the Great Depression. Masada still moves the Israelis, and Kosovo drives the Serbs. Inferences from experience and the myths that accompany them often have a far greater impact on policy than is warranted by standard rules of evidence. As J. Steinberg argues, in words that apply equally well to the Munich analogy and the Vietnam syndrome, memories of the British capture of the neutral Danish fleet at Copenhagen in 1807 (the "Copenhagen complex") "seeped into men's perceptions and became part of the vocabulary of political life," and it influenced German decision making for a century.
AbstractNow that the advent of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has made the fact of judicial power so obvious, it is important to develop the conceptual vocabulary for describing and assessing this power. One such concept that has been applied to the study of United States and British appeal courts is the notion of "party capability theory," which suggests that different types of litigant will enjoy different levels of success, as both appellant and respondent. Using a data base derived from all reported decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada between 1949 and 1992, this article applies party capability theory to the performance of Canada's highest court, and compares the findings with similar studies of American and British courts.
AbstractGiven the visibility and obvious importance of judicial power in the age of the Charter, it is important to develop the conceptual vocabulary for desribing and assessing this power. One such concept that has been applied to the study of appeal courts in the United States and Great Britain is "party capability", a theory which suggests that different types of litigant will enjoy different levels of success as both appellant and respondent. Using a data base derived from the reported decisions of the provincial courts of appeal for the second and seventh year of each decade since the 1920s, this article applies party capability theory to the performance of the highest courts of the ten provinces; comparisons are attempted across regions and across time periods, as well as with the findings of similar studies of American and British courts.
This study analyzes the language through which journalists comprehend the nature and meaning of the urban community. It employs content analysis and interviews with reporters to critique the discourse of urban pathology - that is, the conceptual system often used to think and write about economically distressed neighborhoods. Rather than suggesting that all the "bad news "from these neighborhoods merely be balanced with "good news," this study promotes a vocabulary of community assets - a set of terms that can enhance the power of journalistic language to describe the community. Such a vocabulary, the study concludes, would make a useful contribution to the practice of civic journalism.
Two groups of classification tasks, verbal and figurative, were presented to 30 blind children and 30 sighted children aged 6–11. Although the younger blind children were significantly less efficient on both groups of tasks and on the vocabulary test, those who were age 11 had reached or were close to the level of the sighted children. The analysis illustrates how the blind children adjusted their conceptual knowledge to their lexicon, or vice versa (borrowing some linguistic patterns from the experimenter, if necessary).
AbstractAlthough scholars' interest in love phenomena has continued to increase in recent years, a common conceptual language for the study of love has not yet emerged, as is evidenced by the large number of love taxonomies and associated vocabularies that have been advocated. A promising avenue for the development of a common scientific vocabulary of love lies in the systematic examination of the love vocabularies of laypersons to identify what varieties of love, if any, their lexicon reflects. Several means by which love researchers have attempted such examinations are described and illustrated with reference to the linguistic expressions "love" and "in love." These methods include direct questioning, autobiographical reports, inferential studies, and the prototype approach, which introduces the probabilistic view of cognitive categorization structure and process to the study of love. Several of the underlying assumptions of the prototype approach are discussed and contrasted to those of the social categorical approach we present here. The social categorical method is described in this approach, respondents place persons in their actual social worlds into social categories, and the associations among the memberships of those categories are examined. Finally, the implications of some of the findings derived from this method for a taxonomy of love and for the study of interpersonal relationships are discussed.
