The following brief account of philosophical trends is necessarily selective, leaning toward those philosophical theories that have a stronger content of, or relevance to, descriptive claims about religion.
Are claims about the "semantic structure" of a sentence fundamentally descriptive claims about speakers (or their communities, or their languages)?
Together the normative and descriptive claims provide reasons for working to change the way things are; hence, feminism is not just an intellectual but also a political movement.
The distinction between explanatory and descriptive causal claims is important in part because most of causal-focused research in education emphasizes descriptive claims; however, the same research falls short of articulating valid causal explanations.
Sellars argues that this gets the order of explication exactly wrong: apparently purely descriptive claims about property instantiation are, in fact, misleading ways of communicating norms of linguistic correctness.
Thus, statements about the geometry of space are apparent hypotheses or conventions that appear to be making descriptive claims, however they are actually closer to definitions, though they cannot be reduced to being merely linguistic.
