Philip Kerr, novelist and recipient of the Bad Sex Award in 1995 for Gridiron, is wary of conclusive theories on judging the good from bad.
These considerations lead to one of the key theses in Rickert's theory of knowledge: "The fundamental problem of the theory of knowledge is the question regarding the yardstick or the object of judging (Rickert 1921a, 131 132).
In contrast to consequentialist theories, deontological theories judge the morality of choices by criteria different from the states of affairs those choices bring about.
It is not a theory of constitutional interpretation but a theory of judging--a prescription for deciding constitutional cases in a way that minimizes the judicial footprint.
The distinction could be used as a wedge between, on the one hand the particularities of where and how theories or hypotheses are arrived at and, on the other, the underlying reasoning scientists use (whether or not they are aware of it) when assessing theories and judging their adequacy on the basis of the available evidence.
A second problem arises when elements of the description of an entity being given by a predecessor theory T are judged wrong from the viewpoint of the successor theory T′.
However, later, once Newton's theory had become accepted and the paradigm by which later theories were judged, the lack of an underlying mechanism for a fundamental force was regarded as no objection, as, for example, in the case of Coulomb's law of electrostatic attraction.
When oil and tobacco trusts loomed over the economic landscape, the perceived enemy was price-fixing, while in the government's theory of Microsoft, adopted by Judge Jackson, the enemy is the ability of a predatory monopolist to strangle innovation.
It is a foundation of America's distinctive theory of judicial review, which makes judges the final arbiters of the meaning of the Constitution.
