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This chapter focuses on the issue of causal inference in perception and action, arguing that ambiguous sensory cues only make sense when the brain understands their causes. It takes a normative view, which focuses on how the nervous system could optimally infer properties of the body or world for perception and sensorimotor control given assumptions about noise in the body and the environment. The normative approach aims to understand why the nervous system works the way it does and not the specific mechanisms that give rise to behavior. Specifically, it asks how the nervous system should estimate the causal relation of events (e.g., errors and movements) and then compare the predictions of these optimal inference models to the way humans actually behave.

This chapter explores four rival perspectives or approaches to conceptualizing criminal procedure and evidence designated: doctrinal-conceptualist; epistemological; institutional; and normative. These four ideal-types are intended to represent core strands in contemporary common law scholarship, viewed from a British perspective. This chapter, in other words is largely an exercise in sympathetic reconstruction of existing theory and practice rather than a building from the ground up of conformity with an ideal theoretical blueprint. Any purported contrast between ‘procedure’ and ‘evidence’ is slippery at the best of times; and readers may need temporarily to suspend belief in their own jurisdiction's conceptual, disciplinary, and pedagogic taxonomies.

This chapter discusses the role of essentialist and normative elements in the study of Pentecostalism. In studying Pentecostalism, essentialist and normative tendencies stem from the identity of Pentecostalism itself and from its perception by others. Any scholar studying this form of Christianity must therefore reflect on them, especially when interdisciplinary work is proposed. The overview given in this chapter serves to raise scholarly awareness of the pitfalls connected with essentialist and normative approaches. Yet, both essentialist and normative tendencies can be shown to have a challenging, useful side as well, and so essentialist and normative elements cannot be avoided in the study of Pentecostalism. The chapter provides a short checklist that is meant to make scholars aware of the options available.

This chapter explores some issues surrounding the “normative” approach to moral responsibility in connection with the “metaphysical” approach to moral responsibility. One issue is about whether the freedom required for moral responsibility is an “alternative possibilities” or “actual-sequence” sort of freedom. “Normative” approach holds that the notion of freedom is linked to our conception of agents as practical deliberators; thus, acting freely is a matter of acting in accordance with one's values, rather than mere preferences. On the other hand, “metaphysical” approach states that under causal determinism, all choices and behavior are the consequences of the past plus the laws of nature. The chapter also presents the contours of the theories that have been considered “normative”.

This chapter aims to measure the respect for the recipient's right to personal development in the schemes under analysis. As seen earlier, this normative approach states that every individual has a right to exploit his or her talents, which can be exercised while performing a social function in society, such as paid employment, unpaid work in social economy organisations or providing care to dependent family members, or improving his/her human capital through education or training. In order to secure this right, social institutions and actors must: 1) meet the individual's basic consumption needs; 2) provide the individual with opportunities to exploit his or her talents; 3) eliminate direct and indirect constraints on the individual's choices in the best way to exploit his or her talents; and 4) enforce through the use of restitutive sanctions the individual's obligation to develop his or her talents so as to enable the personal development of others. In the next sections of the chapter, the institutional features that mirror this normative approach are examined and explored. The chapter concludes by combining these various schemes into an index of respect of the right to personal development.

Muna Tatari presents her personal and autobiographical encounter with comparative theology. We learn that at the beginning of her work in comparative theology, she came to realize that not only did she need to learn much about Christian theology, its doctrines and methods; she had too a quantitative and a qualitative lack of knowledge of her own Muslim religious tradition. Tatari elaborates two theological categories, justice and mercy, in order to demonstrate how comparative insights are fruitful in developing kalām as the way of study and reflection that illuminates these categories. To elucidate her method, Tatari discusses five major insights arising in her dissertation that were inspired by comparative theology; she shows how she used tools and insights from Christian theology and late-modern philosophy to reconstruct Islamic thought on a specific topic.

This concluding chapter returns to the question of coalition as an alternative to normative and utopian approaches, and it offers some final thoughts about the importance of queer migration politics as a lens for thinking about politics. This activist rhetoric has provided an opportunity to view and understand the complexity and variety of coalitional moments. It has also supplied a way to witness the possibilities that coalitional moments engender for practicing and envisioning politics and making lives more livable. The chapter further remarks on the status of a rhetorical perspective for intervening in constructions of national rhetorical imaginaries that can both open and limit the possibilities for political orientations, modes of belonging, and tactical strategies.