This paper gives a philosophical outline of the importance of plausible ontologies in the social sciences and argues how mechanisms and processes should be placed as the foundation in the social world. The argumentation is mainly based on a critical appraisal of the use of mechanisms and processes in the works of Norbert Elias, Charles Tilly, and Jon Elster. I start by elaborating on how inquiries of scientific interest evolve to shed light on cases, facts and the things that constitute (...) such facts, whilst the actual explanation demands the description of mechanisms and processes. Basically, focusing on variation and difference making is not sufficient to sustain claims of ontological plausibility and reasonableness. It is thus pointed out how the practices and proceedings of the social sciences can be ontologically enhanced by embracing the complementary roles of mechanisms plus processes together with difference making, as is performed in a special science such as biology, as well as is informally but promisingly pursued in the works of the discussed social scientists. While discussing their work, it is also argued that we should differentiate between processes and mechanisms in order to formalize this approach, which highlights the role of technologies and institutions as prime building blocks for social explanation. I conclude by presenting a claim that in taking seriously that the purported relations between beings and entities need to make discursive sense and historical sense, the social sciences will increase our cognitive success about the things of the world. (shrink)

Normative theories of argumentation tend to assume that logical and dialectical rules suffice to ensure the rationality of argumentative discourse. Yet, in everyday debates people use arguments that seem valid in light of such rules but nonetheless biased and tendentious. This article seeks to show that the rationality of argumentation can only be fully promoted if we take into account its ethical dimension. To substantiate this claim, I review some of the empirical evidence indicating that people’s inferential reasoning is systematically (...) affected by a variety of biases and heuristics. Insofar as these cognitive illusions are typically unintentional, it appears that arguers may be biased despite their well-intended efforts to follow the rules of critical argumentation. Nevertheless, I argue that people remain responsible for the rationality of their arguments, given that there are a number of measures that they can (and ought to) take to avoid such distortions. I highlight the importance of argumentational virtues and critical thinking to rational debates, and describe a set of indirect strategies of “argumentative self-control”. (shrink)

In this article I argue that most biases in argumentation and decision-making can and should be counteracted. Although biases can prove beneficial in certain contexts, I contend that they are generally maladaptive and need correction. Yet critical thinking alone seems insufficient to mitigate biases in everyday contexts. I develop a contextualist approach, according to which cognitive debiasing strategies need to be supplemented by extra-psychic devices that rely on social and environmental constraints in order to promote rational reasoning. Finally, I examine (...) several examples of contextual debiasing strategies and show how they can contribute to enhance critical thinking at a cognitive level. (shrink)

In this article I argue that most biases in argumentation and decision-making can and should be counteracted. Although biases can prove beneficial in certain contexts, I contend that they are generally maladaptive and need correction. Yet critical thinking alone seems insufficient to mitigate biases in everyday contexts. I develop a contextualist approach, according to which cognitive debiasing strategies need to be supplemented by extra-psychic devices that rely on social and environmental constraints in order to promote rational reasoning. Finally, I examine (...) several examples of contextual debiasing strategies and show how they can contribute to enhance critical thinking at a cognitive level. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza en cuatro tiempos el potencial del acceso incondicional a recursos en la conformación de relaciones productivas libres. En primer lugar, defiende una noción de democracia que exige la presencia de recursos incondicionalmente predistribuidos. En segundo lugar, explora el vínculo entre predistribución y poder de negociación. En tercer lugar, presenta el derecho a la existencia como condición para una cooperación social efectiva que merezca la pena ser cuidada. En cuarto lugar, discute el papel de la renta básica en (...) procesos de nacionalización de la vida económica entendidos como expresión de la voluntad democrática de la ciudadanía. This article analyses in four stages the potential of unconditional access to resources in the conformation of free productive relations. Firstly, it defends a notion of democracy requiring the presence of unconditionally predistributed resources. Secondly, it explores the link between predistribution and bargaining power. Thirdly, it presents the right to existence as a condition for an effective social cooperation worth taking care of. Fourthly, it discusses the role of basic income in processes of nationalisation of economic life understood as the expression of the democratic will of citizenry. (shrink)

This paper combines Alfred Shultz and Herbert Simon's theories of action in order to understand the grey area between dynamic and completely unstructured decision making better. As a result I have put together a specific scheme of how choice elements are represented from an agent's personal experience, so as to create a bridge between the phenomenological and cognitive-procedural approaches of decision making. I first look at the key points of their original models relating Alfred Schutz's “provinces of meaning” and Herbert (...) Simon's “satisficing” mechanism. I then consider the particular concept of intentionality and reasoning by analogy for different choice settings. Finally I have suggested a perspective based on creative behaviour and sense-making for ill-structured conditions. (shrink)

This paper defends the need for evidential diversity and the mix of methods that that can in train require. The focus is on causal claims, especially ‘singular’ claims about the effects of causes in a specific setting—either what will happen or what has happened. I do so by offering a template that categorises kinds of evidence that can support these claims. The catalogue is generated by considering what needs to happen for a causal process to carry through from putative cause (...) at the start to the targeted effect at the end. The usual call for mixed methods focusses on a single overall claim and argues that we increase certainty by the use of different methods with compensating strengths and weaknesses. My proposals instead focus on the evidence that supports the great many subsidiary claims that must hold if the overall one is to be true. As is typical for singular causal claims, the mix of methods that will generally be required to collect the kinds of evidence I urge will usually have little claim to the kind of rigour that is now widely demanded in evidencing causal claims, especially those for policy/treatment effectiveness. So I begin with an exploration of what seems to be intended by ‘rigour’ in such discussions, since it is seldom made clear just what makes the favoured methods especially rigorous. I then argue that the emphasis on rigour can be counterproductive. Rigour is often the enemy of evidential diversity, and evidential diversity—lots of it—can make for big improvements in the reliability of singular causal predictions and post hoc evaluations. I illustrate with the paragon of rigour for causal claims, randomised controlled trials (RCTs), rehearsing at some length what they can and cannot do to make it easier to assess the importance of rigour in warranting singular causal claims. (shrink)

In their recent debate, Hubert Dreyfus rejects John McDowell’s claim that perception is permeated with "mindedness" and argues instead that ordinary embodied coping is largely "nonconceptual." This argument has important, yet largely unacknowledged consequences for normative social theory, which this article demonstrates through a critique of Charles Taylor’s Verstehen thesis. If Dreyfus is right that "the enemy of expertise is thought," then Taylor is denied his defense against charges of relativism, which is that maximizing the interpretive clarity of social practices (...) unequivocally makes for better practices. Verstehen social theory, I argue, must consider both the gains and losses of the attempt to make the meaning of our practices explicit. (shrink)

Artikkelen tar utgangspunkt i den norske idrettsmodellen der topp og bredde hører sammen, og der toppidrettsutøvere uvegerlig blir rollemodeller for barn og unge. Den moderne toppidretten er i økende grad preget av egoistiske holdninger der det dreier seg hele tiden om å skaffe seg fordeler. I denne artikkelen tar jeg opp egoisme, rettferdighet og sjenerøsitet som tre grunnleggende holdninger i idrettskonkurranser og drøfter hvorvidt man med inspirasjon fra sjenerøsitetsidealer og praktiske eksempler kan tenke seg en toppidrett som i større grad (...) bygger på sjenerøsitet. Artikkelen starter med en kort presentasjon av den norske idrettsmodellen og jeg skisserer deretter tre kriterier som alle idrettskonkurranser må oppfylle: 1) spille for å vinne, 2) klare regler som følges, og 3) respekt for konkurrenter. Deretter presenterer jeg egoisme, fairness og sjenerøsitet som tre mulige grunnholdninger, og de implikasjonene de har i en idrettslig sammenheng. Etter en gjennomgang av den grunnleggende egoismen i dagens toppidrett, som infiserer ikke bare utøveren, men også hele systemet rundt utøveren, diskuteres muligheten for å utvikle holdninger basert på sjenerøsitet. Det nevnes tre kilder til inspirasjon; engelsk overklassesport, Nietzsches tanker om den overlegne mester, og Arne Næss' sportspraksis og hans saklighetslære for gode diskusjoner. Deretter presenteres empiriske eksempler på sjenerøsitet og hva en spillteoretisk analyse av ulike holdninger gir som resultat. Jeg konkluderer med at en endring i retning av sjenerøsitet vil gi en rikere toppidrett og et bedre grunnlag for en helhetlig idrettsmodell.Nøkkelord: etikk, idrett, egoisme, rettferdighet, sjenerøsitetEnglish summary: From egoism to generosity – can elite sport be reformed?The Norwegian sport model can be visualized as a pyramid with mass sport at the base and elite sport at the top. This means that elite athletes become role models for children and young athletes. However, modern elite sport is increasingly characterized by egoistic attitudes where the goal is to acquire advantages that the other athletes do not have. The article discusses egoism, fairness and generosity as three fundamental attitudes in sporting competitions and discusses whether it is possible to develop an elite sport that is based on generosity to a greater extent than now. The article starts with a presentation of the Norwegian sport model and then sketches three criteria that every sporting competition must fulfill, 1) play to win, 2) clear rules that must be complied with, 3) respect for fellow competitors and opponents. Then there is a delineation of egoism, fairness and generosity as three possible attitudes and the implications they have in the context of sport. Egoism seems to be the basic attitude in elite sport today and it infuses not only the athletes but the whole system around them. The article then looks into the possibilities for generosity in elite sport and draws inspiration from three quite different sources; 1) British upper-class sport in the 19th century, 2) Nietzsche's views of the superior and brilliant masters, and 3) the philosopher Arne Næss' sport philosophy and his rules for good academic debates. This is followed by empirical examples of generosity and a game theoretical illustration of the consequences of egoism and generosity. The conclusion is that a change in the direction of generosity will lead to a richer and more meaningful elite sport and provide a better basis for an organic sport model. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Banks provide a valuable but inherently unstable combination of deposit‐taking and lending functions that were successfully held together for several decades after the New Deal by tough banking rules. The weakening of the rules after the 1970s promoted the displacement of traditional relationship‐based banking with securitized, arms‐length alternatives that encouraged banks to undertake activities about which bankers lacked deep relationship‐based knowledge of the risks. Ironically, this risky behavior, encouraged by loosened regulation, was reinforced by progressively tightened securities regulation, which (...) promoted stock‐market liquidity but also deprived large banks (and other publicly traded companies) of oversight by investors with “insiders’” knowledge. Both the underregulation of banking and the overregulation of securities were underpinned by economic theories that favored blind diversification in liquid, anonymous markets, and that ignored the value of relationship‐based knowledge and case‐by‐case due diligence. (shrink)

Feldman (Organization Science 11(6): 611–629, 2000) describes the striving mechanism as a mode of routine change driven by successful organizational routines. Striving describes a process by which organization members gain a better understanding of the ideals undergirding their actions. In turn, this insight drives changes within routines. In this paper, I argue that the rational actor model, especially as articulated in Donald Davidson’s (1963) theory of action, is unable to account for the striving mechanism of endogenous routine change identified by (...) Feldman (Organization Science 11(6): 611–629, 2000). Drawing upon Brewer’s (2011) criticisms of propositional theories of desire, the account of meta-language intentional attitudes developed by List and Pettit (2011), and MacIntyre’s (2007) theory of social practices, I introduce an expanded framework for conceptualizing agency at the individual level, and aggregation at the organization level, that better accounts for the striving mechanism as a process of endogenous routine change. (shrink)

This article introduces comparative process tracing as a two-step methodological approach that combines theory, chronology, and comparison. For each studied case, the processes leading “from A to B” are reconstructed and analyzed in terms of ideal-type social mechanisms and then compared by making use of the identified mechanisms and ideal-type periodization. Central elements of CPT are path dependence, critical junctures and focal points, social mechanisms, context, periodization, and counterfactual analysis. The CPT approach is described, discussed, and compared with more formal (...) and deterministic forms of process tracing, which are found to be less fruitful for systematic comparison. (shrink)

Punitive behaviours are often assumed to be the result of an instinct for punishment. This instinct would have evolved to punish wrongdoers and it would be the evidence that cooperation has evolved by group selection. Here, I propose an alternative theory according to which punishment is a not an adaptation and that there was no specific selective pressure to inflict costs on wrongdoers in the ancestral environment. In this theory, cooperation evolved through partner choice for mutual advantage. In the ancestral (...) environment, individuals were in competition to be recruited in cooperative ventures and it was vital to share the benefits of cooperation in a mutually advantageous manner. If individuals took a bigger share of the benefits, their partners would leave them for more interesting partners. If they took a smaller share, they would be exploited by their partners who would receive more than what they had contributed to produce. This competition led to the selection of a sense of fairness, a cognitive adaptation aiming to share equally the benefits of cooperation in order to attract partners. In this theory, punishment is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation. Punitive behaviours are only a way to restore fairness by compensating the victim or penalizing the culprit. Drawing on behavioural economics, legal anthropology, and cognitive psychology, I show that empirical data fit better with this framework than with the theory of group selection. When people punish, they do so to restore fairness rather than to help the group. (shrink)

What makes humans moral beings? This question can be understood either as a proximate question or as an ultimate question. The question is about the mental and social mechanisms that produce moral judgments and interactions, and has been investigated by psychologists and social scientists. The question is about the fitness consequences that explain why humans have morality, and has been discussed by evolutionary biologists in the context of the evolution of cooperation. Our goal here is to contribute to a fruitful (...) articulation of such proximate and ultimate explanations of human morality. We develop an approach to morality as an adaptation to an environment in which individuals were in competition to be chosen and recruited in mutually advantageous cooperative interactions. In this environment, the best strategy is to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation equally. Those who offer less than others will be left out of cooperation; conversely, those who offer more will be exploited by their partners. In line with this mutualistic approach, the study of a range of economic games involving property rights, collective actions, mutual help and punishment shows that participants' distributions aim at sharing the costs and benefits of interactions in an impartial way. In particular, the distribution of resources is influenced by effort and talent, and the perception of each participant's rights on the resources to be distributed. (shrink)

The kinds of real or natural kinds that support explanation and prediction in the social sciences are difficult to identify and track because they change through time, intersect with one another, and they do not always exhibit their properties when one encounters them. As a result, conceptual practices directed at these kinds will often refer in ways that are partial, equivocal, or redundant. To improve this epistemic situation, it is important to employ open-ended classificatory concepts, to understand when different research (...) programs are tracking the same real kind, and to maintain an ongoing commitment to interact causally with real kinds to focus reference on those kinds. A tempting view of these non-idealized epistemic conditions should be avoided: that they signal an ontological structure of the social world so plentiful that it would permit ameliorated classificatory schemes to achieve their normative aims regardless of whether they defer to real-kind classificatory schemes. To ground these discussions, the essay appeals to an overlooked convergence in the systematic naturalistic frameworks of Richard Boyd and Ruth Millikan. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Fine examination of our accumulated cultural knowledge is especially helpful in studying the emotions, which are only tangentially accessible to experimental manipulation. Here I use the six properties of emotions that Elster has summarized to suggest how they show a need for changes in the science of motivation. The apparent adaptive purpose of emotions lies in their action tendencies – what they add to the cold calculation of advantage. Subjectively they stand out by their intrusiveness, the duration of which (...) often has a half-life. Emotions each have a valence, which suggests that they are not only motivating but also motivated, an implication that requires re-examination of how negativity works. Emotions are also experienced as ‘triggered’, but are so malleable that triggering cannot mean a simple conditioned reflexiveness. Emotions are not only triggered – or motivated – by beliefs, but motivate beliefs in turn, and can be fed back on themselves in a ‘wildfire’ phenomenon. These feedback effects are further evidence against emotions being reflexive. With regard to the three great revolutions, I argue that enthusiasm differs from romantic love only in its object, and urgency comes from the dysphoria of using response suppression for self-control. I can add nothing further to Elster’s masterful history. (shrink)

Although solidarity is a key issue in sociology, surprisingly little attention has been given to the question what constitutes solidarity from a sociological perspective. In this paper I suggest a concept of solidarity which might work as a general framework for theoretical and empirical investigations. The central idea is that solidarity norms make up the core of the concept. Solidarity norms demand from their addressees that they transfer resources without compensation either to a collective or to individuals. It is argued (...) that there are two levels of solidarity to be distinguished: (1) the level of social systems where solidarity is manifested in solidarity norms and (2) the level of individuals where solidarity is embedded in commitment to solidarity norms. I differentiate between four universal solidarity norms which can be found in associations on every level of social aggregation: norms of provision, of sharing, of supporting, and of loyalty. (shrink)

This book chapter is not available in ORA, but you may download, display, print and reproduce this chapter in unaltered form only for your personal, non-commercial use or use within your organization from the ANU E Press website.

In this chapter we first discuss the main principles of justice and note the standard objections to them, which we believe necessitate a hybrid approach. The hybrid account we defend is primarily based on the distributive principle of sufficientarianism, which we interpret as the idea that each country should have the means to provide a minimally decent quality of life for each of its citizens. We argue that sufficientarian considerations give good reason to think that what we call the ‘ability (...) to pay objection’ should be taken much more seriously in this debate. Following this, our account emphasises what we believe are the two most important moral desiderata in any attempt to distribute responsibility for dealing with climate change: the ability to mitigate the problem and the making of culpable contributions to the problem. After noting that our proposal includes enough detail to be a useful start for policy makers, we defend our account against some potential objections. (shrink)

Models of idealistic societies pervade the history of political thought from ancient times to the present. How can these models contribute to our thinking about political life in our non-ideal world? Not, as many political theorists have hoped, by performing a normative function -- by giving us reasons to accept particular political principles for the purpose of regulating our thought and behavior. Even still, idealistic models can sharpen our thinking about politics by performing a conceptual function -- by helping us (...) clarify and interpret the concepts we use to describe and evaluate political behavior and institutions. These insights point to a more incisive and judicious approach to political inquiry, in which explanatory and normative modes of thought are tightly intertwined. (The manuscript is under review. I have uploaded the table of contents, chapters 1 and 2, and the bibliography. Chapter summaries are available from my website.). (shrink)

Standing institutions have a continuous existence: examples include the United Nations, the British Parliament, the US presidency, the standing committees of the US Congress, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Intermittent institutions have a discontinuous existence: examples include the Roman dictatorship, the Estates-General of France, constitutional conventions, citizens' assemblies, the Electoral College, grand and petit juries, special prosecutors, various types of temporary courts and military tribunals, ad hoc congressional committees, and ad hoc panels such as the 9/11 Commission and base-closing commissions. (...) Within the class of intermittent institutions, one may distinguish periodic from episodic institutions. The former come into being on a schedule set down in advance, while the latter come into being at unpredictable intervals. The Electoral College is a periodic institution, while the Roman dictatorship is an episodic one. This article attempts to identify the benefits and costs of intermittent institutions, both as a class and in their periodic and episodic varieties. The largest goals are to state some general conditions under which intermittent institutions prove superior or inferior to standing institutions, and to illuminate the temporal dimension of institutional design. (shrink)

Our best social scientific theories try to tell us something about the social world. But is talk of a “social world” a metaphor that we ought not take too seriously? In particular, do the denizens of the social world—cultural values like the Protestant work ethic, firms like ExxonMobil, norms like standards of dress and behavior, institutions like the legal system, teams like FC Barcelona, conventions like marriages—exist? The question is not merely academic. Social scientists use these different social entities to (...) explain social phenomena such as the rise of capitalism, the decline in oil prices, or the effect of unions on the sports labor market. But how could these explanations possibly work if social entities don’t exist? (shrink)

Accounts of ontic explanation have often been devised so as to provide an understanding of mechanism and of causation. Ontic accounts differ quite radically in their ontologies, and one of the latest additions to this tradition proposed by Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden and Carl Craver reintroduces the concept of activity. In this paper I ask whether this influential and activity-based account of mechanisms is viable as an ontic account. I focus on polygenic scenarios—scenarios in which the causal truths depend on (...) more than one cause. The importance of polygenic causation was noticed early on by Mill (1893). It has since been shown to be a problem for both causal-law approaches to causation (Cartwright 1983) and accounts of causation cast in terms of capacities (Dupré 1993; Glennan 1997, pp. 605-626). However, whereas mechanistic accounts seem to be attractive precisely because they promise to handle complicated causal scenarios, polygenic causation needs to be examined more thoroughly in the emerging literature on activity-based mechanisms. The activity-based account proposed in Machamer et al. (2000, pp. 1-25) is problematic as an ontic account, I will argue. It seems necessary to ask, of any ontic account, how well it performs in causal situations where—at the explanandum level of mechanism—no activity occurs. In addition, it should be asked how well the activity-based account performs in situations where there are too few activities around to match the polygenic causal origin of the explanandum. The first situation presents an explanandum-problem and the second situation presents an explanans-problem—I will argue—both of which threaten activity-based frameworks. (shrink)

How should we theorize about the social world? How can we integrate theories, models and approaches from seemingly incompatible disciplines? Does theory affect social reality? This state-of-the-art collection addresses contemporary methodological questions and interdisciplinary developments in the philosophy of social science. Facilitating a mutually enriching dialogue, chapters by leading social scientists are followed by critical evaluations from philosophers of social science. This exchange showcases recent major theoretical and methodological breakthroughs and challenges in the social sciences, as well as fruitful ways (...) in which the analytic tools developed in philosophy of science can be applied to understand these advancements. The volume covers a diverse range of principles, methods, innovations and applications, including scientific and methodological pluralism, performativity of theories, causal inferences and applications of social science to policy and business. Taking a practice-orientated and interactive approach, it offers a new philosophy of social science grounded in and relevant to the emerging social science practice. (shrink)

Should we be concerned with, or alarmed or outraged by, the insincerity and hypocrisy of politicians who apologize for historical injustice? This paper argues that the correct reply to this question is: sometimes, but not always. In order to establish what types of insincerity must be avoided, Judith Shklar?s hierarchy of ordinary vices is critically revisited. Against Shklar?s overly benign account of hypocrisy, the paper then tries to demonstrate that only institutional and harmful forms of hypocrisy must be rejected in (...) political apologies for historical injustice. Employing Melissa Nobles? ?membership theory?, this paper defends the claim that the sincerity standard for political apologies is, in stark contrast to apologies between individuals, agent independent. This means that in political apologies, rather than focusing on the remorse and regret of the agent who apologizes, we must primarily examine the apology?s consequences in terms of renegotiating the legal, political and affective dimensions of citizenship. In domestic affairs, the paper shows that apologies can only be considered sincere if they push the polity towards a more inclusive conception of membership in the political community. (shrink)

A collective volume in memoriam Mihail Radu Solcan.

In his book Processual Sociology (2016), Andrew Abbott proposes a radically new theoretical perspective for sociology. This review essay discusses the strengths and weaknesses of his “processual” approach, in comparison with other dynamic perspectives in sociology such as, in particular, Norbert Elias’s “process sociology.” It critically questions central ideas and arguments advanced in this book: the reduction of social processes to “events,” the focus on stability as the central explanandum of sociological theory, the implicit separation of individual and social processes, (...) the proposition that the social world changes faster than the individual, the idea that “excess” rather than “scarcity” is the central problematic of human affairs, the strong emphasis on the inherent normativity of sociological concepts, the focus on values as the core of human social life, the neglect of human interdependence, power, coercion, and violence, and the distinction between “moral facts” and “empirical facts.” Detailed criticisms of the arguments in various chapters are given, and alternative viewpoints are proposed. The conclusion is that Processual Sociology fails to provide a fruitful approach for understanding and explaining social processes, and that it even represents, in several respects, theoretical regression rather than progress. (shrink)

It is conventional wisdom among political philosophers that ideal principles of justice must guide our attempts to design institutions to avert actual injustice. Call this the ideal guidance approach. I argue that this view is misguided— ideal principles of justice are not appropriate "guiding principles" that actual institutions must aim to realize, even if only approximately. Fortunately, the conventional wisdom is also avoidable. In this paper, I develop an alternative approach to institutional design, which I call institutional failure analysis. The (...) basic intuition of this approach is that our moral assessment of institutional proposals is most effective when we proceed from a detailed understanding of the causal processes generating problematic social outcomes. Failure analysis takes the institutional primary design task to be obviating or averting institutional failures. Consequently, failure analysis enables theorists to prescribe more effective solutions to actual injustice because its focuses on understanding the injustice, rather than specifying an ideal of justice. (shrink)

Many political philosophers hold the Feasible Alternatives Principle (FAP): justice demands that we implement some reform of international institutions P only if P is feasible and P improves upon the status quo from the standpoint of justice. The FAP implies that any argument for a moral requirement to implement P must incorporate claims whose content pertains to the causal processes that explain the current state of affairs. Yet, philosophers routinely neglect the need to attend to actual causal processes. This undermines (...) their arguments concerning moral requirements to reform international institutions. The upshot is that philosophers’ arguments must engage in causal analysis to a greater extent than is typical. -/- [Supplement: Handout available at http://db.tt/fyuVW3Xv]. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud Some Views of Humankind Scientism and the Freudian Model of Personality The Social Sciences beyond Freud Evolution and the Social Sciences Freud and Revolutions in Thought Reading List Essay Questions.

In this review essay, I examine the central tenets of sociologist Dave Elder-Vass’s recent contribution to social ontology, as put forth in his book The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency. Elder-Vass takes issue with ontological individualists and maintains that social structures exist and have causal powers in their own right. I argue that he fails to establish his main theses: he shows neither that social structures have causal powers “in their own right” (in any sense of (...) this expression) nor that they exist. (shrink)

In Elder-Vass’s response to my critical discussion of his social ontology, it is maintained (1) that a social object is not identical with but is merely composed of its suitably interrelated parts, (2) that a social object is necessarily indistinguishable in terms of its causal capacities from its interrelated parts, and (3) that ontological individualism lacks an adequate ontological justification. In this reply, I argue that in view of (1) the so-called redescription principle defended by Elder-Vass ought to be reformulated (...) and renamed; that the conjunction of (1) and (2) renders social objects causally redundant; and that ontological individualism can be coherently formulated and theoretically justified within Elder-Vass’s own metaphysics of objects with causal powers. (shrink)

Social capital is frequently offered up as a variable to explain such educational outcomes as academic attainment, drop-out rates and cognitive development. Yet, despite its popularity amongst social scientists, social capital theory remains the object of some scepticism, particularly in respect of its explanatory ambitions. I provide an account of some explanatory options available to social capital theorists, focussing on the functions ascribed to social capital and on how these are used as explanatory variables in educational theory. Two of the (...) most influential writers in this field are Coleman and Bourdieu. I explore their commonalities and differences, both in respect of their writing and in respect of some of the many theorists they have influenced. I argue that social capital theorists have made substantial progress in responding to sceptically minded critics, but that significant questions remain, especially about the success of the more ambitious explanatory variants as these apply to educational outcomes—functional explanation in particular. Functional explanation, and its association with Bourdieu, is discussed in ‘Bourdieu and functional explanation’; thereafter I discuss the more modest ambition of identifying the functions associated with social capital. In ‘Coleman, intergenerational closure and educational outcomes’ I show how Coleman provides resources for revealing how social structure features in social explanation in an educational context, and in ‘Inequality, class and ethnicity’ I suggest that some of the questions raised in his account are most satisfactorily responded to by educational theorists who adopt Bourdieu’s emphasis on social class and inequality. (shrink)

Ian Hacking uses the looping effect to describe how classificatory practices in the human sciences interact with the classified people. While arguably this interaction renders the affected human kinds unstable and hence different from natural kinds, realists argue that also some prototypical natural kinds are interactive and human kinds in general are stable enough to support explanations and predictions. I defend a more fine-grained realist interpretation of interactive human kinds by arguing for an explanatory domain account of the looping effect. (...) First, I argue that knowledge of the feedback mechanisms that mediate the looping effect can supplement, and help to identify, the applicability domain over which a kind and its property variations are stably explainable. Second, by applying this account to cross-cultural case studies of psychiatric disorders, I distinguish between congruent feedback mechanisms that explain matches between classifications and kinds, and incongruent feedback mechanisms that explain mismatches. For example, congruent mechanisms maintain Western auditory experiences in schizophrenia, whereas exporting diagnostic labels inflicts incongruence by influencing local experiences. Knowledge of the mechanisms can strengthen explanatory domains, and thereby facilitate classificatory adjustments and possible interventions on psychiatric disorders. (shrink)

David Lewis’ Convention has been a major source of inspiration for philosophers and social scientists alike for the analysis of norms. In this essay, I demonstrate its usefulness for the analysis of some moral norms. At the same time, conventionalism with regards to moral norms has attracted sustained criticism. I discuss three major strands of criticism and propose how these can be met. First, I discuss the criticism that Lewis conventions analyze norms in situations with no conflict of interest, whereas (...) most, if not all, moral norms deal with situations with conflicting interests. This criticism can be answered by showing that conventions can emerge in those contexts as well. Secondly, I discuss the objection that this type of conventionalism, inspired by Lewis, presents moral norms as fundamentally contingent, whereas most, if not all, moral norms are not. However, such critics fail to appreciate that conventions are not radically contingent. Moreover, if one distinguishes the question as to why an individual should comply with a norm from the question whether the norm in question itself can be justified, a core element of the complaint of contingency disappears. The third objection to conventionalism concerns the way in which conventionalists justify norms. I argue that reflection upon the way in which according to Lewis norms are justified reveals a fundamental tension in his theory. Possible solutions to this tension all have in common that the complaint of contingency returns in some form. Therefore, this third complaint cannot be avoided altogether. (shrink)

In this article we discuss the political and economic consequences of the contemporary legal theory of incorporation. We argue that incorporation has developed historically in a way that makes it internally inconsistent, but that this inconsistency is useful for the powerful because of its legal and economic effects. The corporation can “shape shift,” which is very helpful for claiming some rights and disavowing certain responsibilities. Of course this flexibility comes at the expense of consistent concepts and this leads to the (...) creation of what we term an “ideal‐type reified singular representation.” We go on to show the far‐reaching effects of this representation for legal studies, economics, and political theory, and show it worked in the pro‐corporate decision in the recent Citizens United case. We conclude by providing several alternative ways to think about the nature of corporate organization. (shrink)

The use of the nomer ‘corporate’ is hardly an issue in contemporary scholarship on corporate governance. I will argue that this nomer is important for two main reasons. First, the corporate form distinguishes itself from any other form of business representation. In this sense, it is important to know exactly how this form is different to understand how conceptions of ‘corporate governance’ relate to different forms of representation. Second, it is my contention that the use of a particular understanding of (...) incorporation directly informs the concept of internal governance in terms of constituency, structure, ownership and the locus of corporate agency. It is in this sense that I argue that the identification of corporate constituencies and the allocation of agency and ownership is a precondition of business ethics. With this aim in mind, I explore the governance in corporations as the result of the legal understanding of incorporation and the separate legal entity. I explore two historical positions from which five legal positions on the separate legal entity can be derived. These five positions provide reference points for the attribution of ownership and agency between the separate legal entity and the aggregation of individuals that together make up the corporation. Incorporation, as the legal act that constitutes the corporation, can then be shown to adopt multiple and mutually exclusive positions. These positions are central to the debate on the respective claims to agency and ownership between the separate legal entity and the aggregation of individuals. I then end the article by arguing that all concepts of incorporation create legal and economic issues regarding the allocation of ownership and agency, which makes their understanding and the choice behind them important for theories of governance. (shrink)

This article challenges the common view that improvements in critical thinking are best pursued by investigations in informal logic. From the perspective of research in psychology and neuroscience, hu-man inference is a process that is multimodal, parallel, and often emo-tional, which makes it unlike the linguistic, serial, and narrowly cog-nitive structure of arguments. At-tempts to improve inferential prac-tice need to consider psychological error tendencies, which are patterns of thinking that are natural for peo-ple but frequently lead to mistakes in judgment. (...) This article discusses two important but neglected error ten-dencies: motivated inference and fear-driven inference. (shrink)

El presente artículo se basa en la teoría de la creatividad artística de Jon Elster para tratar de ofrecer un esbozo de definición del concepto de arte, así como las bases para una teoría del valor artístico. Se sostiene que una obra de arte es una creación humana realizada con la intención de provocar una experiencia estética, así como que el principal valor de una obra de arte radica en su capacidad para producir emociones estéticas y no estéticas. Dicha concepción (...) pone en dificultades a algunas importantes formas de arte contemporáneo, como el arte conceptual. (shrink)

To what extent should we focus on implicit bias in order to eradicate persistent social injustice? Structural prioritizers argue that we should focus less on individual minds than on unjust social structures, while equal prioritizers think that both are equally important. This article introduces the framework of transactive memory into the debate to defend the equal priority view. The transactive memory framework helps us see how structure can emerge from individual interactions as an irreducibly social product. If this is right, (...) then debiasing interventions are structural interventions. One upshot is that the utility of the individual versus structural distinction is not apparent for the purposes of intervention. (shrink)

This paper explores the social and emotional consequences of three major assumptions about human action underpinning breastfeeding promotion campaigns in the UK. Drawing on Joas's critique of instrumental accounts of rational action, the paper illustrates the ways in which these campaigns firstly contribute to the moralisation of motherhood; secondly value highly individualised, de-contextualised forms of action; and thirdly promote an objectified view of the human body as a pliable instrument of human intentions. The consequences of these assumptions, as they shape (...) the efforts of mothers to care for their babies and young children in complex, unpredictable and often uncontrollable situations, provides the focus of discussion. The paper concludes that a target-driven health-promotion policy, relying on a mechanistic account of social and emotional life, is contributing to the burden of early motherhood in ways that are not conducive to infant and maternal health and attachment. (shrink)

For more than a century, methodological diversity within the social sciences has been the source of recurrent paradigm wars, and no obvious winner seems to be in sight. The aim of this article is to explore the contingencies underlying this diversity. It is argued that the shared condition of complexity forces us to adopt a pragmatic perspective from which even relevant ontological and epistemological assumptions should be thought of as contextual rather than absolute. In particular, the extent to which social (...) causality is perceived as stable and universal vs. dynamic and contextual and the extent to which research-related reflexivity is an issue appear to set apart the different approaches. Towards the end of the article examples of methodological fit and misfit are provided to illustrate the relevancy of the “contingent eclecticism” observed in practice. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between various different conceptions of behaviour and action before exploring an accompanying variety of distinct things that ‘action explanation’ may plausibly amount to viz. different objectives of action explanation. I argue that a large majority of philosophers are guilty of conflating many of these, consequently offering inadequate accounts of the relation between actions and our reasons for performing them. The paper ends with the suggestion that we would do well to opt for a pluralistic understanding of action (...) and its explanations. (shrink)