An immediacy condition is elaborated. It is argued that a Kantian intuition is immediate both in the sense that it is direct in its way of representing and in the sense that it is presentational in acquainting the perceiver with its object. It can thus be said to be both of and as of, in present-day terminology. It is representation of, or referential, by virtue of its “intuitive marks,” which are singular, and it is representation as of, or attributive, by virtue of its “predicates of intuition,” which are general. This has been overlooked by most Kant commentators. It may also have contributed to the epistemic downgrading of perceptions that has been ascribed to Kant. It is argued that an empirical intuition hooks on to tropes in the perceived scene by way of the intuitive marks, and that there is also perceptual attribution of proper and common sensibles to the concrete particulars by means of it. Finally, it is discussed how information that is carried by intuitions can be “unpacked” and thought through concepts in cognition of objects “in the proper sense.”

Chapter 2 outlines the book’s conceptual and theoretical frameworks. It bridges studies of regulatory styles with scholarship on legal and political opportunity structures to detail indicators of legalistic governance, which serve as a guide for the subsequent paired case studies. It also theorizes five causal mechanisms that elucidate how activism contributes to more legalistic governance. Finally, it discusses, in probabilistic terms, the conditions under which activism is more likely to contribute to legalistic modes of governance.

The introduction outlines the book’s two main puzzles: First, why is legalistic governance emerging in South Korea and Japan, which were long known for their non legalistic regulatory styles? Second, what accounts for the varieties of legalism observed in Korea and Japan? Legalism describes a style of regulation that relies on more formal, detailed, and enforceable laws and regulations, as well as more participatory policy design and implementation processes. This book argues that activists and lawyers are often-overlooked societal drivers behind the emergence of legalism and the broader judicialization of politics in Korea and Japan.

The second chapter identifies and conceptualizes political atomization. Political atomization explains two outcomes better than existing literature: why incremental expansions in social policy can entrench inequality and how authoritarian states sometimes use public service provision as a tool of social control. It also accounts for how policies said to expand workers’ rights end up undermining their claims to benefits owed to them in China. Alternative explanations are inadequate, and the research design, methods, and sources of the book offer different insights. The theory of political atomization is situated within the literatures on authoritarianism, immigration, and welfare states and elucidates in detail how the process works and why it persists. There are trade-offs and risks to this approach, but embedded inequality ultimately serves the state. Unpacking political atomization illuminates how everyday marginalization of people works on the ground in their lived experiences.

Chapter 2 presents the bounded accountability theory of incumbency bias and its main empirical predictions and outlines the core empirical strategy for testing the theory across the country–office cases. After offering a conceptualization and typology of incumbency bias, the chapter explains how the nature of the information environment encourages retrospective voting and leads to the emergence of incumbency bias. Based on this general mechanism, the chapter predicts that the alignment of policy scope and fiscal institutions explains why some democracies exhibit incumbency advantage while others display an incumbency disadvantage, and demonstrates how exogenous shocks may lead to within-country changes in incumbency bias. The chapter also derives predictions about why there are differences between personal and party incumbency bias. It concludes by developing a novel estimation framework that extends the close-election regression discontinuity design to measure incumbency bias in different political systems and document variation in direction and type within them.

This chapter defines the most important basic notions and concepts figuring in the analysis of the system of qualifications of states of affairs and their expression in language, as they are used in the book. It defines the semantic categories figuring in the domain of qualifications of states of affairs (often called TAM categories), often in a preliminary fashion as some of them are elaborated or modified in later chapters. It introduces the notion of a hierarchy present in the system of qualificational dimensions, accounting for their semantic scope properties – an analytical concept central in the book. It moreover discusses the notion of a ‘semantic paradigm,’ as a system of expressive devices for a single qualificational category in which each member has slightly different functional characteristics, and it motivates the correlated function-to-form approach adopted in the study for analyzing qualificational categories and their expressions. The chapter moreover does some groundwork for the theoretical issue of the position of the hierarchical system in cognition, arguing that it is conceptual, not linguistic, in nature.

This chapter returns to the theoretical concerns of the study, and to the principles at the heart of a cognitive-functional approach to modeling the cognitive processes in language use. Central are the basic principles of depth and dynamism, and the three issues emerging from them when comparing cognitive and traditional functionalist approaches in current linguistics: the (non)concern with conceptualization in linguistic analysis, the processual vs. representationalist concept of grammar, and the complex meaning-form relationship. The chapter rounds up and reflects on what the analyses of the attitudinal and other semantic and functional dimensions in the preceding chapters have shown with relevance to these principles and issues. Moreover, it uses these insights to dwell on wider implications, beyond the analysis of the qualificational dimensions, for our understanding of the cognitive systems involved in language use.

Theory is the essential foundation on which an empirical network study is built. A network theory stipulates a certain, carefully defined network and offers a reason why it relates to other variables. Pinning down what the precise network of theoretical interest is and fleshing out a reason why it matters is what makes up the key preliminary work in empirical networks research design. It can be tempting to rush through this preliminary step, especially when data are readily available. Note that doing so comes with risks. Design blunders are more debilitating in networks research than in other data collection endeavors. Thinking through all aspects of a theoretical setup takes time, but is part of the real work of research design. Taking the time early is an investment in avoiding wasted effort later. This chapter presents a framework to help construct a theory that is maximally useful for guiding empirical research design.

Chapter 5 delves into metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor exists as a collection of mappings between source and target conceptual domains, and the relationships established by these mappings are licensed by systematic similarities between entities in the conceptual domains. When we say, “he needs to blow off some steam” or “she made my blood boil,” we use our physical experience of boiling water to express the abstract emotion of anger (Lakoff, 1987). Metonymy functions within a single conceptual domain and establishes a mapping between two parts of that domain on the basis of physical or functional adjacency. For example, metonymy enables the use of the term White House to refer to the executive branch of the US government, and the name of the national capital Beijing to refer to China. This chapter compares patterns of metaphor and metonymy available in English and Chinese, illustrates how metonymy functions as a basis for character formation in Chinese, and suggests how metaphor and metonymy can be incorporated into L2 Chinese classrooms.

Eventful analysis employs the most unfrozen and hence the most exploratory strand of CHA. It employs historical comparisons and explores transformation patterns, that is, patterns of qualitative change. It uses two key tools: historical description and conceptualization. The aim of historical description is to figure out what is going on, to gain a basic understand of a phenomenon before proceeding to explain it. Often this involves de-redescribing a phenomena that has qualitatively changed over time. Historical description, in turn, involves six concrete steps: fact gathering, chronicling, concatenation, periodizing, looking for intercurrence patterns, and rethinking research questions. Conceptualization serves to make historical description more comparativist and to explore broader patterns. The chapter discusses how to replace proper names with broader concepts by defining both the positive and the negative pole of concepts. It lists criteria for assessing the content and temporcal validity of concepts.

Chapter 3 offers an inventory of contributions to knowledge. In order to get started it is helpful to understand where one wishes to end up, i.e., what the completed study is intended to accomplish. We show that there are many ways to make your mark. Contributions may focus on (a) phenomena, (b) concepts, (c) data and measures, (d) causes, (e) mechanisms and frameworks, (f) research designs, or (g) empirical refinements and extensions.