This paper develops a media theoretical extension of the communicative view on corporate social responsibility by elaborating on the characteristics of network societies, arguing that new media increase the speed and connectivity, and lead to higher plurality and the potential polarization of reality constructions. We discuss the implications for corporate social responsibility of becoming more polyphonic and sketch the contours of “communicative legitimacy.” Finally, we present this special issue and develop some questions for future research.

Functionalism has long been the dominant paradigm in systems development practice. However, functionalism promotes an innate and immutable instrumental rationality that is indifferent to human values, rights, society, culture and international stability. It, in essence, lacks empathy. Although alternative paradigms have been promoted for decades in the systems development literature to help address this deficit, functionalism remains dominant. This paper reiterates the call for a fundamental paradigm shift away from myopic functionalism and towards a more empathic and human-centred philosophy. It (...) argues that the human-centred tradition offers a philosophically compatible and mature approach that can be practically harnessed for promoting empathy in systems development. The paper investigates the potential of systems development to become truly human-centred using data originally collected as part of a multi-method critical-interpretive study of privacy in information systems development. Multiple methods are used for the data analysis presented, including principal components analysis, hierarchical clustering, Q methodology and descriptive statistics. The multi-method analysis demonstrates that a marked discreteness exists between human-centred sentiments and instrumentally rational ones in systems development praxis. The paper concludes by presenting recommendations on how human-centred values can be practically fostered and engaged to enable greater empathy in contemporary system development and strengthen international stability. (shrink)

This paper investigates how we can enact, collectively, affording food systems. Yet rather than asking simply what those assemblages might look like the author enquires as to how they might also feel. Building on existing literature that speaks to the radically relational, and deeply affective, nature of food the aims of this paper are multiple: to learn more about how moments of difference come about in otherwise seemingly banal encounters; to understand some of the processes by which novelty ripples out, (...) up, and through social bodies; to speak to, and suggest ways to resolve, ontological asymmetries within the agrifood literature pertaining to Cartesian dualisms; and to offer ways forward that allow agrifood scholars to talk about phenomena such as feelings and structures/barriers in the same sentence. The empirical flesh of the paper comes from an admittedly unconventional case study. On December 10, 2012, Amendment 64 was added to Colorado’s constitution making it legal for adults to consume marijuana for recreational purposes. The case examined is not about pot, however. The paper, rather, is about hopeful, hydroponic-inspired, agrifood futures; novel doings, feelings, and thinkings sparked by, among other things, food grown in basements and spare bedrooms. (shrink)

The nurturing that produces love, care, and solidarity constitutes a discrete social system of affective relations. Affective relations are not social derivatives, subordinate to economic, political, or cultural relations in matters of social justice. Rather, they are productive, materialist human relations that constitute people mentally, emotionally, physically, and socially. As love laboring is highly gendered, and is a form of work that is both inalienable and noncommodifiable, affective relations are therefore sites of political import for social justice. We argue that (...) it is impossible to have gender justice without relational justice in loving and caring. Moreover, if love is to thrive as a valued social practice, public policies need to be directed by norms of love, care, and solidarity rather than norms of capital accumulation. To promote equality in the affective domains of loving and caring, we argue for a four-dimensional rather than a three-dimensional model of social justice as proposed by Nancy Fraser. Such a model would align relational justice, especially in love laboring, with the equalization of resources, respect, and representation. (shrink)

In 1992, the global community made a commitment to stabilize ‘greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate sys...

The aim of the 2008 Roundtable was to focus on the progress to date in the many facets—methodological, epistemological and conceptual—of the field of legal semiotics, specifically the contribution of different schools and forms of semiotics as well as emerging and emergent semiotics approaches which can be used in researching and interpreting law and legal phenomena. The participants sought primarily to engage with the epistemological and methodological challenges which the field currently faces and to discuss the implications of these.

The article is a philosophical response to the oped of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas Krieg und Empörung, published by him in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in April 2022. The oped demonstrates the philosopher’s view on ideological disputes and political debates or “indignation” (Empörung) in public sphere in both Germany and the EU concerning an attempt to develop a unanimous policy to help Ukraine with weapons against Russia’s military aggression. The authors presume that Habermas published the accountable message of a responsible (...) citizen that means it should be also taken as based on his theoretical achievements. The article consists of two parts. The first part sets out the main arguments of the philosopher’s newspaper article, which ends with a recommendation of compromise and partnership negotiations with the aggressor de facto due to the losses of Ukraine. The second part is an attempt by the authors to clarify the main preconditions and premises of Habermas’s communicative philosophy, which demonstrate the fundamental limitation of its explanatory power for this type of radical dissent, which is war. First of all, the authors suggest, it is the idea of pacification in interethnic relations, which forms the intellectual mood after World War II and finds its philosophical expression in the discovery of a priori foundations of understanding (Apel, Habermas) and ideas of developing formal pragmatics of communication. Attention to the latter allows the authors to demonstrate how consistent analysis of a priori (counterfactual) conditions of communication is considered by Habermas primarily in the historical perspective of positive dimensions of social integration - democratic equality, freedom, justice for participants of communicative interaction. The article concludes with a detailed analysis of the significance of the concept “lifeworld” as one of the central concepts within communicative theory and an analogue of “form of life” and “culture”. The authors argue the idea of perspective creating a common lifeworld for all in the processes of communication is fundamental to the works of the philosopher. The article concludes that the regulative idea of the single world as a basic ontological assumption of communicative theory does limit its explanatory capacity in terms of a war situation as a clash of different cultural worlds. (shrink)

The situation of public functioning of philosophy today is being fundamentally changed in comparison with it that even was by the end of last century. The new opportunities of free appeal to philosophical concepts and meanings and their use by every participant of unlimited networks of open communication raise issues of preservation and protection of normative philosophical discourse. The author formulates the need in such normativity as an issue of difference between the context of reproduction and the innovation one or (...) as interdependence of reproduction and elaborating interpretation of normative meanings in philosophy. He takes attention to highlighting the issue of making and recognizing normativity in discourse/communicative practices that could be find out in works of Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas. It helps to clarify a role and place of validity claims in communication actions including their meaning in philosophical discourse. Following Habermas’ theory of both linguistic and contextual depending of discourse’s normative meanings the author pays particular attention to meaning creation role of lifeworld as a cultural context that determines communicators’s understanding. It gives an opportunity to point out a principle role of communicator’s position or his or her self-understanding the lifeworld context they embodied. It also makes it possible to demonstrate clear examples of inconsistency of philosophical discourses depending on the position taken by a philosopher as we can meet radical critical position of Roger Scruton in his assessment of many prominent European philosophers’ works. In conclusion the author stresses on dependence of capacity to get added interpretation value in philosophy not only from a level of theoretical knowledge, but from his or her personal appropriation of own horizon of cultural meanings. Following Habermas's theory of linguistic and contextual dependence of normative values of discourse on context, the author draws attention to the role in the creation of values of the lifeworld as a cultural context that determines the participant's understanding. It gives an opportunity to point out a principle role of communicator’s position or his or her understanding the lifeworld context they embodied. It also allows to demonstrate clear examples of inconsistency of philosophical discourses depending on the position taken by a philosopher as we can meet in radical critical position of Roger Scruton within his assessment of many prominent European philosophers’ works. In conclusion the author stresses capacity to get added interpretation value in philosophy depends not only on a level of theoretical knowledge a person owns, but from his or her personal appropriation of own horizon of cultural meanings. (shrink)

The two aims of the paper were to systematically review and critique social science and linguistic text analyses of nursing records in order to inform future research in this emerging area of research. Systematic searches in reference databases and in citation indexes identified 12 articles that included analyses of the social and linguistic features of records and recording. Two reviewers extracted data using established criteria for the evaluation of qualitative research papers. A common characteristic of nursing records was the economical (...) use of language with local meanings that conveyed little information to the uninitiated reader. Records were dominated by technocratic‐medical discourse focused on patients’ bodies, and they depicted only very limited aspects of nursing practice. Nurses made moral evaluations in their categorisation of patients, which reflected detailed surveillance of patients’ disturbing behaviour. The text analysis methods were rarely transparent in the articles, which could suggest research quality problems. For most articles, the significance of the findings was substantiated more by theoretical readings of the institutional settings than by the analysis of textual data. More probing empirical research of nurses’ records and a wider range of theoretical perspectives has the potential to expose the situated meanings of nursing work in healthcare organisations. (shrink)

During the past decade, patient participation became an important issue in the medical field, and patient participation in biomedical research processes is increasingly called for. One of the arguments for this refers to the specific kind of knowledge, called experiential knowledge, patients could contribute. Until now, participation of patients in biomedical research has been rare, and integration of patients’ experiential knowledge with scientific knowledge—in the few cases it takes place—occurs implicitly and on an ad hoc basis. This is illustrated by (...) describing and analyzing the activities of the German patient group on retinitis pigmentosa. The authors argue that to be able to optimize the use of experiential knowledge of patients in biomedical research, a systematic approach is required. Transdisciplinary research provides such an approach, systematically, explicitly, and deliberately integrating knowledge from different scientific and nonscientific sources. In this article, the concept of transdisciplinarity is elaborated upon. The authors propose a possible procedure, identify necessary conditions and skills, and evaluate the feasibility of its implementation and institutionalization. Finally, the authors introduce a recent research project to further investigate and implement transdisciplinary research in the biomedical field. (shrink)

The texts (and talk) of engineers take different forms. In this essay, I present and critique several texts written for different purposes and audiences but all intended to convey to the reader the technical details of whatever they are about—whether a textbook passage describing the fundamental behavior of an electrical component, a journal article about a mathematical technique intended for use in design optimization, a memo to co-workers within a firm about a heat transfer analysis of a remotely sited building, (...) or a general introduction to the field of? ergonomics? My aim is to explore how the ways in which engineers describe and document their problems and projects frame what they accept, display and profess as useful knowledge. In this I am particularly interested in how engineers envision the ‘users’ of, or participants in, their productions. Like science, engineering texts are written as if they were timeless and untainted by socio-cultural features. However, a technical treatise is not devoid of metaphor or creative rendering of events; there is always a narrative within which worldly data and instrumental logic is embedded—but it is a story in which the passive voice prevails, history is irrelevant, and the human actor or agent is painted in quantitative parameters fitting the occasion. Whether this rhetoric can be sustained in the face of challenges to traditional ways of doing engineering is an open question. (shrink)

Since the advent of a post-structuralist ethos, the assertion of a notion of truth, conceived as an infallible point d’appui from which a given social order could be evaluated as ideological or non-ideological, seems no longer possible. As Rorty has pointed out ‘[we can now] see ourselves as never encountering reality except under a chosen description as…making worlds rather than finding them’. However, we could still legitimately ask whether or not an inevitable condition of the ‘post-modern world’, that is, a (...) world deprived of a manifest intrinsic meaning, is the renouncement of the assumption of a certain notion of an objective truth for a critique of ideology. I will suggest in this essay that a way to respond to this question is by revisiting Habermas's theory of communicative action, viewed through the lens of the theory of ideology formulated by Slavok Žižek. Furthermore, the main thesis of this work is that by using the notion of the Real or ‘primordial repressed’ taken from a Žižekian reading of Lacan, it would allow the production of a critique of ideology in which the truth — the unmasking of the extra-ideological place — becomes possible as a hypothetical objective category. (shrink)

Since the advent of a post-structuralist ethos, the assertion of a notion of truth, conceived as an infallible point d’appui from which a given social order could be evaluated as ideological or non-ideological, seems no longer possible. As Rorty has pointed out ‘[we can now] see ourselves as never encountering reality except under a chosen description as…making worlds rather than finding them’. However, we could still legitimately ask whether or not an inevitable condition of the ‘post-modern world’, that is, a (...) world deprived of a manifest intrinsic meaning, is the renouncement of the assumption of a certain notion of an objective truth for a critique of ideology. I will suggest in this essay that a way to respond to this question is by revisiting Habermas's theory of communicative action, viewed through the lens of the theory of ideology formulated by Slavok Žižek. Furthermore, the main thesis of this work is that by using the notion of the Real or ‘primordial repressed’ taken from a Žižekian reading of Lacan, it would allow the production of a critique of ideology in which the truth — the unmasking of the extra-ideological place — becomes possible as a hypothetical objective category. (shrink)

In recent times, representatives of American management science have been arguing increasingly for a functionalization of ethics to change economic thinking: what they are seeking is the systematic integration of ethics into the economic paradigm. Using the insights developed by Hirschman, I would like to show how one must first expose the rhetoric of those critics of change (referred to below as conservatives or reactionaries) in order then to implement that which is new (representatives of this approach are referred to (...) below as progressives). Such an ‹unmasking’ works particularly well when one can defuse the arguments of the reactionaries – which is precisely what one achieves by strategically integrating ethics into economics. In his work The Rhetoric of Reaction Hirschman examines three basic forms of reactionary thought: the perversity thesis, the futility thesis, and the jeopardy thesis. According to the perversity thesis, intended goals are transformed into their opposites. The futility thesis argues that the setting of goals is useless since history runs its own course independent of those goals. The jeopardy thesis claims to preserve what already exists since change might substantially endanger that which has already been achieved. The importance of Hirschman’s ideas for the strategic interplay between the academic disciplines can be seen quite clearly in the example of German business ethics. This will be displayed below with reference to Hirschman’s three theses. Finally, implications will be drawn for business ethics in general and for management theory in particular. (shrink)

The concept of the self is embedded in a web of relationships of other concepts and phenomena such as consciousness, self-consciousness, personal identity and the mind–body problem. The article follows the ontological and epistemological roles of the concept of selfconsciousness and the structural co-implication of consciousness and self-consciousness from Descartes and Locke to Kant and Sartre while delineating its subject matter from related inquiries into the relationship between the mind and the body, personal identity, and the question whether consciousness is (...) an irreducible reality sui generis or essentially a neurobiological entity. Over the course of its history, the modern self turns out to become an ever more elusive phenomenon, while its roles as a bearer of individual responsibility and as a subject of reflective endorsement of the truth become ever more pronounced. (shrink)

Should we reduce cell phone emissions to prevent possible cancer, even though the causal link has not been demonstrated? Should an allegedly unsafe vaccine be removed from the market? Can a modest...

Que tipo de reflexão a filosofia pode fazer sobre uma pandemia? Em virtude do caráter singular da COVID-19, proponho uma leitura em termos de uma análise funcionalista das crises. Para chegar nisso, faço primeiro uma avaliação mais ampla do que há de comum ao nosso tempo, apresentando-o nos termos de um processo de consolidação e expansão do neoliberalismo como uma “gramática normativa central” para a organização e reprodução dos sistemas de reprodução social e agindo de forma colonizadora sobre os processos (...) de reprodução simbólica da sociedade. A apresentação do neoliberalismo pretende enfatizar que, antes da pandemia, já vivíamos em crise e que, por isso, seria preciso uma descrição primeira desse “estado de coisas”. Depois, faço uma análise do caráter funcional das sociedades do capitalismo tardio para concluir apontando as perspectivas de aprendizado que a situação de crise permite e como o neoliberalismo impõe uma gramática que contamina esse potencial. (shrink)

The paper offers a modelling of the sense of justice as it is displayed in ordinary situated disputes. While this model accounts for a plurality of legitimate forms of evaluation which are used in the process of critique and justification, it escapes a relativism of values by demonstrating that all these forms satisfy a set of common requirements. The reasonable character of the everyday sense of justice is also anchored in a reality test involving the engagement of objects which qualify (...) for a certain form of evaluation. The paper discusses this model in relation to competing theories of justice, and models of social action and interaction. (shrink)

A hallmark of recent critical social science has been the commitment to methodological and theoretical pluralism. Habermas and others have argued that diverse theoretical and empirical approaches are needed to support informed social criticism. However, an unresolved tension remains in the epistemology of critical social science: the tension between the epistemic advantages of a single comprehensive theoretical framework and those of methodological and theoretical pluralism. By shifting the grounds of the debate in a way suggested by Dewey's pragmatism, the author (...) argues that a thoroughgoing pluralism strengthens, rather than weakens, both the social scientific and political aims of critical social science. Not only does pragmatism offer a plausible interpretation of the epistemic pluralism of the social sciences, but it also provides a way of thinking about their fundamentally practical and political character. With a better normative vocabulary with which to discuss the epistemological issues of such a pluralistic mode of inquiry, the democratic role of critical inquiry and its specifically practical form of verification can be clarified. (shrink)

This article defends methodological and theoretical pluralism in the social sciences. While pluralistic, such a philosophy of social science is both pragmatic and normative. Only by facing the problems of such pluralism, including how to resolve the potential conflicts between various methods and theories, is it possible to discover appropriate criteria of adequacy for social scientific explanations and interpretations. So conceived, the social sciences do not give us fixed and universal features of the social world, but rather contribute to the (...) task of improving upon our practical knowledge of on-going social life. After arguing for such a thorough-going pluralism based on the indeterminacy of social action, I defend it from the post-modern and hermeneutic objections by suggesting the possibility of an epistemology of interpretive social science as a form of practical knowledge. (shrink)

Habermas’s educational importance is usually misconstrued or underestimated, partly because the scope and implications of ideal speech conditions are generally misunderstood. These conditions are only relevant to discursive speech situations, but non-manipulative teaching need not be discursive. And not even discursive teaching is an appropriate occasion for ideal speech conditions. They properly apply to discourse institutions, at the ‘epistemic centre of modernity’. Thus, the concept of ideal speech conditions impinges on the relation of school to higher education and on curricular (...) change as an agency of modernisation, and illuminates the need for access to discourse institutions, if personal autonomy is an aim for school children, students or adults. Neo-Marxists, traditionalists and progressives all misunderstand the importance of discourse institutions. (shrink)

This article explores the celebratory aspect of psychological theories. In particular, it examines the celebration of dialogue, argumentation, and negativity, which is contained within recent critical theories of psychology. This psychological approach is compared with cognitive psychology's celebration of monologue. The relations between dialogical/rhetorical psychology and feminist critiques are examined. Following Habermas, it is suggested that it is necessary to point to instances of unconstrained argumentation in order to show that the utopian elements in the celebration of argument are based (...) upon a realized psychology. It is suggested that one can look to the voices of women for such instances, in order to avoid incorporating patriarchal structures into the celebration. One such instance reveals the self-reflexivity of argumentation, and that the celebration of argument also involves preserving argumentation's ‘other’. Thus, the resulting argumentative psychology should not only be self-reflexive but should itself express and preserve its own sense of otherness. (shrink)

On Jaeggi’s reading, the immanent and progressive features of ideology critique are rooted in the connection between its explanatory and its normative tasks. I argue that this claim can be cashed out in terms of the mechanisms involved in a functional explanation of ideology and that stability plays a crucial role in this connection. On this reading, beliefs can be said to be ideological if (a) they have the function of supporting existing social practices, (b) they are the output of (...) systematically distorted processes of belief formation, (c) the conditions in which distorting mechanisms trigger can be traced back to structural causal factors shaped by the social practice their outputs are designed to support. Functional problems thus turn out to be interlocked with normative problems because ideology fails to provide principles to regulate cooperation that would be accepted under conditions of non-domination, hence failing to anchor a stable cooperative scheme. By explaining ideology as parasitic on domination, ideology critique points to the conditions under which cooperation stabilizes as those of a practice whose principles are accepted without coercion. Thus, it seems to entail a conception of justice whose principles are articulated as part of a theory of social cooperation. (shrink)

This paper defends a position that parts ways with the positivist view of legal certainty and reasonableness. I start out with a reconstruction of this view and move on to argue that an adequate analysis of certainty and reasonableness calls for an alternative approach, one based on the acknowledgement that argumentation is key to determining the contents, structure, and boundaries of a legal system. Here I claim that by endorsing a dialec-tical notion of rationality this alternative account espouses an ambitious (...) approach to rea-soning in law and conceives of the theory of legal argumentation as the vantage point from which to analyze legal systems and tackle the main problems connected with their existence. Next, I look at what this alternative approach does for the way we should go about treating certainty and reasonableness, considered singularly as well as in their recip-rocal relationship. I conclude on this basis that when argumentation receives its due emphasis in law we have to redefine certainty and reasonableness and recast their connection as non-conflictive. (shrink)

This paper defends a position that parts ways with the positivist view of legal certainty and reasonableness. I start out with a reconstruction of this view and move on to argue that an adequate analysis of certainty and reasonableness calls for an alternative approach, one based on the acknowledgement that argumentation is key to determining the contents, structure, and boundaries of a legal system. Here I claim that by endorsing a dialectical notion of rationality this alternative account espouses an ambitious (...) approach to reasoning in law and conceives of the theory of legal argumentation as the vantage point from which to analyze legal systems and tackle the main problems connected with their existence. Next, I look at what this alternative approach does for the way we should go about treating certainty and reasonableness, considered singularly as well as in their reciprocal relationship. I conclude on this basis that when argumentation receives its due emphasis in law we have to redefine certainty and reasonableness and recast their connection as non-conflictive. (shrink)

The work of Jacques Ellul is useful in understanding and evaluating the implications of rapidly changing technologies for human values and democracy. Ellul developed three powerful theses about technology: technological autonomy, technological determinism, and technological bluff. In this essay, the authors explicate these views of technology, and place the work of Ellul in dialogue with the ides of other important theorists of technology. Ellul’s too-often overlooked theses about technology are relevant to our present technological society.

One branch of Alvin Goldman's proposed "scientific epistemology" is devoted to the scientific study of how folk epistemic evaluators acquire and deploy the concepts of knowledge and justified belief. The author argues that such a "descriptive epistemology," as Goldman calls it, requires a more sophisticated theory of interpretation than is provided by the simulation theory Goldman adopts. The author also argues that any adequate account of folk epistemic concepts must reconstruct the intersubjective conceptual roles those concepts play in discursive practices. (...) In other words, descriptive epistemology also requires a theory of communicative action and an account of the practical abilities agents must have to engage in discursive practices. (shrink)

How is the tension between conflict and deliberation resolved in shareholder engagement? We address this question by studying shareholder engagement as a deliberative process with three stages: establishing dialogue, solution development, and solution implementation. We theorize that two interactionist mechanisms, deliberative interaction and the voicing of disagreement, play different roles at different stages of the process. We test our hypotheses with a proprietary database of 169 environmental, social, and governance engagements with US public companies over 2007–12. We find that while (...) deliberative interaction does not help advance the engagement process, it positively moderates the effect of disagreement in the solution development stage. By contrast, in the solution implementation stage, deliberative interaction amplifies the negative effect of disagreement, thus hindering progress in the engagement. Our article contributes to shareholder engagement, deliberation theory, and interactionist organization theory by establishing that engagement effectiveness is an interactional achievement shaped by both deliberation and disagreement. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy is often celebrated and endorsed because of its promise to include, empower, and emancipate otherwise oppressed and excluded social groups through securing their voice and granting them impact in reasoned public deliberation. This article explores the ability of Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy to accommodate the demands of historically excluded social groups in democratic plural societies. It argues that the inclusive, transformative, and empowering potential of Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy falters when confronted with particular types of historical (...) injustices. It falters because it pays little attention to the historical dimension of injustices and the demands to which it gives rise. The historical dimension of longstanding injustices, it is argued, gives rise to a set of distinctive demands, such as collective memory of exclusion, acknowledgement of historical injustices, taking responsibility, and offering apology and reparations for causing these injustices, which go beyond the type of democratic inclusion that is often offered by deliberative democracy. Yet, the solution is not to abandon the model of deliberative democracy. Quite the contrary, it remains a valuable basis for forward-looking political decision making. The article concludes that in order to achieve inclusive, empowering and transformative deliberation in consolidated democracies that have experienced historical injustices, the politics of reconciliation is indispensable. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Academic administration is not to be construed simply as a technical practice, the development of efficient management systems, nor as reactive, as response to the collective views of the academic community, nor in terms of academic leadership, the establishment and implementation of institutional aims. A full account of academic administration will provide a sense of the integral relationship between the academic administrator and the academic community. For that, a prior notion of the academic community is required. Such a notion, (...) giving a central place to structured discourse, can be derived from the German idea of the university and particularly from the writings of von Humboldt, Karl Jaspers and Jurgen Habermas. (shrink)

It is a challenge in teaching early modern philosophy to balance historical faithfulness to the arguments and concerns of early modern philosophers and interpreting them as relevant to the kinds of thinking that contemporary undergraduate students find plausible. Early modern philosophy is unique, however, in applying modern scientific method directly to problems concerning nonphysical aspects of reality that our contemporary scientific thought, and with it mainstream contemporary culture, no longer find amenable in their own, independent right to reliable reasoned approaches. (...) At the same time, early modern philosophy often also takes seriously purely conceptual or logically consequential thought in the investigation of these topics, as our mainstream contemporary culture does not. This kind of thought, we argue, is distinctive of philosophy in general and appropriate to nonphysical aspects of reality. Early modern philosophy, then, offers a bridge between the kind of reasoned, objective thought our mainstream culture finds plausible and thought about nonphysical reality or, in general, the thought that characterizes philosophy. (shrink)

The paper recalls my response to Berger’s and Luckmann’s book on reading it shortly after its initial publication. It seeks to convey why it was that I failed to make use of the book at that time, even though I recognised it as an outstanding contribution to my intended field of research, and how later I came to see that this may have been a lost opportunity. The story touches upon diverse important issues including the relationship between epistemology and the (...) sociology of knowledge; the epistemic authority of the natural sciences; the relevance of causal accounting as topic and resource in sociology; the importance of Durkheim in the sociology of knowledge; and the great value of Berger’s and Luckmann’s book as a corrective to the undue individualism that has long been a feature of the social sciences in the English-speaking world. Even so, the paper is more recollection than analysis, and unreliable recollection at that, after many decades in which there has been time to forget, or even to reconstruct, a very great deal. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to elaborate two concerns: those of maternal ethics, and notions of making things public. I attempt to bring these two concerns together and think them alongside one another, in hopefully productive ways. I want, in other words, to think about the ethics of what mothers ‘make public’, whether this is understood in its most rudimentary form, of enabling a child to express something, to make public an affective state, for instance, even if it is only (...) the mother who is there to witness or receive it, through to more overt and material forms of ‘publication’ glimpsed when mothers parent in spaces we call ‘public’. This paper focuses on what happens to us all when we encounter ‘mothering’ – not in the enclosed, private, secluded spaces where we imagine mothering to take place, but in what Marc Augé has termed the ‘non-places of supermodernity’, where much of the day-to-day material practices of mothering in Western late-modern urban contexts actually occurs. As is often the case, it is when experience is dislodged from the contexts in which we expect to find it that its contours are shown up in relief, and we are called on to re-configure our understandings of experiences in ways that also shift our understandings of the contexts in which they occur. In this sense, mothering, that I am claiming ‘makes things public’, as well as occurring frequently and importantly ‘in public’, not only shows up something we may overlook about the maternal, but also deforms and reforms our understandings of ‘the public’ itself. (shrink)

Robert Alexy’s theory of legal argumentation is among the notable contributions made to mainstream jurisprudence in the last three decades. Remaining true to its rational discursive mission, it engages with both analytical positivism and natural law theories. A recent collection of essays edited by George Pavlakos explores Alexy’s theory from a number of philosophical standpoints, revealing its theoretical potential and flaws. By doing so, this volume helps us to gain a better understanding of the implications of Alexy’s theory of legal (...) argumentation, but also to identify new areas of research within the discourse theory of law. Although this collection is concerned with a critical examination of various aspects of Alexy’s work, it nonetheless draws attention to the dual characteristics of positive law, that is, the problematic separation of facts from values, law from morality, legal certainty from justice, which continue to preoccupy legal theory. In what follows I shall attempt to examine the debate between Alexy and the contributors to Pavlakos’s volume in order to gain a deeper understanding of the role of dichotomies in legal theory. Part 1 starts by explaining the theoretical background against which I have read the debate on Alexy’s theory of legal argumentation. I have explored the role of dichotomies in socio-legal research elsewhere. However, in the following pages, I shall use Alan Norrie’s critical examination of antinomies to throw light on some of the shortcomings of Alexy’s theory and also to discuss the concerns of mainstream jurisprudence. In that sense, this essay presents both Norrie’s and Alexy’s works, using the former to critically assess the latter. In Part 2, I briefly sketch the layout of Pavlakos’s collection to provide an overview of the type of questions that are discussed by the various contributors. Parts 3 and 4 bring into focus two issues that loom large in the collection. The first issue is Alexy’s central thesis on law’s claim to correctness, while the second concerns the duality of law exemplified by the attempts of mainstream jurisprudence to cope with the tension between the positivist notion of law and the idea of justice. In Part 5, I conclude the essay by reflecting on some of the implications of Alexy’s thesis. (shrink)

Busca-se acompanhar o desenvolvimento da teoria evolucionária no pensamento de Habermas, a partir da afirmação colhida no prólogo de Problemas de Legitimação do Capitalismo Tardio, de 1973: "O caráter programático evidencia que uma teoria da evolução social hoje se encontra apenas esboçada, mas que, no entanto, deveria constituir a base da teoria da sociedade". A atenção é direcionada à forma como Habermas reorienta o sentido evolucionário do desdobramento histórico à luz do conceito de mundo da vida, como esfera de realização (...) da ação comunicativa. Objetiva-se investigar como é projetada nesse modelo de ação, por meio da linguagem, a tarefa de produção e reprodução simbólica do consenso normativo entre os participantes do mundo social, ao mesmo tempo em que Habermas sinaliza haver um telos de integração social imanente à própria prática comunicativa. Nesse sentido, procurar-se-á demonstrar que, assim como a pragmática universal serve de base teórica para a análise de processos de distorção da linguagem e de socialização anormais, a teoria da evolução social serve de parâmetro para uma teoria social crítica com intenção emancipatória de avaliar o desdobramento empírico e contingente da dinâmica histórica. We seek to follow the development of evolutionary theory in the thought of Habermas, starting with the statement taken from the Prologue of Legitimation Crisis, 1973: "The programmatic character of Part I of this book makes clear that a theory of social evolution, although it must be the basis of social theory, is today still scarcely at all developed." Attention is directed to how Habermas reorients the evolutionary meaning of historical development in light of the concept of lifeworld as the sphere of the realization of communicative action. We seek to investigate how Habermas' model assigns, by means of language, the task of symbolic production and reproduction of the normative consensus among participants in the social world, while at the same time indicating that there is a telos of social integration immanent in the communicative practice itself. In this sense, we seek to demonstrate that just as universal pragmatics serves as the theoretical basis for the analysis of processes of abnormal socialization and the distortion of language, the theory of social evolution serves as a parameter for a critical social theory with the emancipatory intent of evaluating the empirical and contingent unfolding of historical dynamics. (shrink)

We investigate how the selection of assurance topics and the format of their communication influence the credibility perception of sustainability report readers. This is important because misleading communication may discredit ethical sustainability assurance practices. Based on signaling theory and using an experimental approach, we are the first to examine false credibility signals in the context of sustainability assurance. We find that two variables related to sustainability assurance, reference explicitness and assurance depth, jointly influence the assurance signal and the perceived credibility (...) of a sustainability report. Our findings indicate that readers are not at risk of false signaling but can make incorrect interpretations of the assurance signal and might respond negatively to well-intentioned signals. The main implications of our findings are that firms should refrain from increasing reference explicitness and should select only the most material topics. Taken together, our results provide new insights on the unethical practice of false signaling and provide an example of an incorrect signal interpretation by readers. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe paper compares Mead’s and Quine’s behaviouristic theories of meaning and language, focusing in particular on Mead’s notion of sympathy and Quine’s notion of empathy. On the one hand, Quine seems to resort to an explanation similar to Mead’s notion of sympathy, referring to ‘empathy’ in order to justify the human ability to project ourselves into the witness’s position; on the other hand, Quine’s reference to the notion of empathy paves the way to a more insightful comparison between Mead’s behaviourism (...) and an explanation of the emergence of the linguistic from pre-linguistic communication based on empathic identification processes. However, Mead is less ambiguous than Quine in his use of the notion of sympathy finds a fecund parallel in the current neuroscientific and neuro-phenomenological hypothesis on ‘empathy’. The article contends that the ambiguity in Quine’s account of empathy is due to the exigency of trying to elucidate the link between the rules of language in a cultural context and... (shrink)

Most democratic theorists agree that concentrations of wealth and power tend to distort the functioning of democracy and ought to be countered wherever possible. Deliberative democrats are no exception: though not its only potential value, the capacity of deliberation to ‘neutralise power’ is often regarded as ‘fundamental’ to deliberative theory. Power may be neutralised, according to many deliberative democrats, if citizens can be induced to commit more fully to the deliberative resolution of common problems. If they do, they will be (...) unable to get away with inconsistencies and bad or private reasons, thereby mitigating the illegitimate influence of power. I argue, however, that the means by which power inflects political disagreement is far more subtle than this model suggests and cannot be countered so simply. As a wealth of recent research in political psychology demonstrates, human beings persistently exhibit ‘motivated reasoning’, meaning that even when we are sincerely committed to the deliberative resolution of common problems, and even when we are exposed to the same reasons and evidence, we still disagree strongly about what ‘fair cooperation’ entails. Motivated reasoning can be counteracted, but only under exceptional circumstances such as those that enable modern science, which cannot be reliably replicated in our society at large. My analysis suggests that in democratic politics – which rules out the kind of anti-democratic practices available to scientists – we should not expect deliberation to reliably neutralise power. (shrink)

In attempting to provide protection to individuals and communities, childhood immunization has benefits that far outweigh disease risks. However, some parents decide not to immunize their children with some or all vaccines for reasons including lack of trust in governments, health professionals, and vaccine manufacturers. This article employs a theoretical analysis of trust and distrust to explore how twenty-seven parents with a history of vaccine rejection in two Australian cities view the expert systems central to vaccination policy and practice. Our (...) data show how perceptions of the profit motive generate distrust in the expert systems pertaining to vaccination. Our participants perceived that pharmaceutical companies had a pernicious influence over the systems driving vaccination: research, health professionals, and government. Accordingly, they saw vaccine recommendations in conflict with the interests of their child and “the system” underscored by malign intent, even if individual representatives of this system were not equally tainted. This perspective was common to parents who declined all vaccines and those who accepted some. We regard the differences between these parents—and indeed the differences between vaccine decliners and those whose Western medical epistemology informs reflexive trust—as arising from the internalization of countering views, which facilitates nuance. (shrink)

This article considers Theodor W. Adorno’s thesis of the ‘liquidation of the individual’ as a contribution to the critique of political economy insofar as it links structural economic imperatives o...

This article argues that philosophers and laypeople commonly conceptualize moral truths or justified moral beliefs as discoverable through intuition, argument, or some other purely cognitive or affective process. It then contends that three empirically well-supported theories all predict that this ‘Discovery Model’ of morality plays a substantial role in causing social polarization. The same three theories are then used to argue that an alternative ‘Negotiation Model’ of morality—according to which moral truths are not discovered but instead created by actively negotiating (...) compromises—promises to reduce polarization by fostering a progressive willingness to ‘work across the aisle’ to settle moral issues cooperatively. This article then examines potential methods for normatively evaluating polarization, arguing there are prima facie reasons to favor the Negotiation Model over the Discovery Model based on their hypothesized effects on polarization. Finally, I outline avenues for further empirical and philosophical research. (shrink)