The phrase "attempts to specify" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when discussing efforts to clarify or define something more precisely.
Example: "The report attempts to specify the criteria for evaluating the project's success."
Alternatives: "tries to define" or "seeks to clarify".
It again makes one wonder why he attempts to specify appropriate levels of government intervention, rather than develop means to arrive at political agreements, or rather than simply championing federalism.
Controversy also swirls around attempts to specify the class of beings to whom egalitarian norms apply.
All retributive attempts to specify the penalty schedule linking crimes to their punishments fail because the proportionality principle underdetermines the schedule.
The main attempts to specify what makes a causal-informational state a mental representation are Asymmetric Dependency Theories (e.g., Fodor 1987, 1990a, 1994) and Teleological Theories (Fodor 1990b, Millikan 1984, Papineau 1987, Dretske 1988 , 1995.
For instance, given an action, think about what changes if the action is performed and what does not generally the latter is much more difficult to produce than the former, leading to large, complex attempts to specify the non-effects.
We now turn to our second sort of 'theory of meaning': foundational theories of meaning, which are attempts to specify the facts in virtue of which expressions of natural languages come to have the semantic properties that they have.
Buddhist councils in the first centuries after the Buddha's death attempted to specify which teachings attributed to the Buddha could be considered authentic.
In this study, we attempted to specify the genes regulated by GH in the heart of spontaneous dwarf rat using a microarray analysis.
Many studies have attempted to specify alternative model configurations as fitting empirical data with the aid of structural equation modeling (SEM) method.
He talks about arriving at "a different definition of happiness itself", although he doesn't attempt to specify one, concluding that "these things are excruciatingly hard to put into words".
The best versions of these arguments attempt to specify in some detail what the relevant alternatives are; in such cases, as with Kuhn's arguments about the irresolvability of scientific revolutions, philosophical responses must attend to the details.
