In this last section I would like to reconstruct Arendt's conception of citizenship around two themes: (1) the public sphere, and (2) political agency and collective identity, and to highlight the contribution of Arendt's conception to a theory of democratic citizenship.
As Friedman (1999) and others have discussed in detail (Ryckman, 2005), Reichenbach's innovation, a modification of the Kantian conception of synthetic a priori principles, rejecting the sense of "valid for all time" while retaining that of "constitutive of the object (of knowledge)", led to the conception of a theory-specific "relativised a priori".
Horkheimer goes on to suggest that such a conception of theory has an inherent tendency to move toward "a purely mathematical system of symbols".
This conception is based on a theory of causality known as the satkaryavada, according to which an effect is implicitly pre-existent in its cause prior to its production.
However, how are teachers, in Florida and elsewhere, to help their students replace the flitch of Bacon with a conception of "theory" that is scientifically kosher?
But, as he acknowledges at once, the task he has set himself for this book requires him to have what he calls "a theory or conception of racism".
In 1973 he published The Central Questions of Philosophy, in which he returned to familiar topics in the theory of knowledge and presented a commonsense conception of the world as a theory founded on the basis of sense-data.
For ease of reference, let us call this the "traditional" conception of the task of a theory of explanation.
Furthermore, we would expect this conception to be associated with a theory of inheritance that included the idea "traits that arise as a result of need can be inherited" (i.e., their ideas would be connected and cohesive).
This differentiation of a general theory of language from universal regularities of linguistic phenomena corroborates Osgood's (1966: 300) conception of theory as "a higher level description", defined as "a set of principles, which economically and elegantly, encompasses the whole set of functions" displayed by human languages.
