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 paper defends the thesis that privacy as a right is derived from fundamental rights to life, liberty, and property and does not permit restricting the commodification of bodily material; however, privacy as life, liberty, property does require conventions that ensure a robust and just market in bodily material. The analysis proceeds by defending a general commitment to liberty and markets, but not in the manner one might expect from a ‘doctrinaire’ libertarian. Ethical concerns about commodification are legitimate in the (...) context of new medical and information technologies, but these concerns are not sufficiently well defined to justify political conclusions, since not every ethical concern is in itself a political concern, and the best way to resolve certain ethical difficulties is to draw up political boundaries that facilitate the discovery and testing of various solutions to our ethical puzzles. To illustrate the point, I will indicate how privacy as life, liberty, property defines such a dynamic solution to the problems of commodification of human bodily material and slippery information in insurance markets. (shrink)

The economists of the Austrian School count among the most consistent supporters of methodological individualism, but they were for the most part strongly opposed to clearly anti-holist trends such as constructivism, reductionism, and positivism. This article discusses why the sort of methodological individualism defended by the Austrians could not, for interconnected reasons, be rendered compatible with any one of these philosophical trends. The manner in which the Austrians managed to reconcile their analysis of economic mechanisms with a strictly subjectivist approach (...) is especially considered. The discussion also underscores some ambiguous dimensions of the debate between holism and individualism. (shrink)

“We need to start by recognising that the company is a contributor to the moral order of society.” Only then can we really and accurately identify the role of business in today's society. The author of this important study is Principal Lecturer in the Business Studies Department, Manchester Metropolitan University.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of attempts to reconstruct Marxian theory in forms that can be assessed by reference to currently received standards in various disciplines. The work has even been said to establish a new paradigm: “analytical Marxism.” One doesn't have to endorse this claim to recognize a good deal of merit in the work. Through creative application of state-of-the-art methods to traditional Marxian issues, researchers have promoted productive cross-fertilization with non-Marxian programs and have revealed many problems (...) that must be resolved for fruitful development of Marxian theory. Marx's work can be relevant to today's problems only if it is examined from vantage points provided by subsequent scientific and philosophical achievements. Moreover, critical engagement with the best science of the day has been an essential part of the Marxian theoretical project from the beginning. (shrink)

In this article I reply to comments made by Agustin Vicente and Giridhari Lal Pandit on Science and the Pursuit of Wisdom (McHenry 2009 ). I criticize analytic philosophy, go on to expound the argument for the need for a revolution in academic inquiry so that the basic aim becomes wisdom and not just knowledge, defend aim-oriented empiricism, outline my solution to the human world/physical universe problem, and defend the thesis that free will is compatible with physicalism.

The significance of German Romantic and Hegelian philosophy for educational practice is not attended to as much as it deserves to be, both as a matter of historical interest and of current importance. In particular, its role in shaping the thought of John Dewey, whose educational philosophy is of seminal importance for discussions on education for citizenship, is of considerable interest, as recent work by Jim Garrison (2006) and James Good (2006; 2007) has shown. This article focuses on the Hegelian (...) concepts of Bildung and Sittlichkeit in order to consider how they may illuminate the purpose and practice of education for citizenship through a conceptualisation of the relationship of individual to society, and, specifically, through the idea of cultural induction. The discussion takes as its principal reference point the Scottish policy context. (shrink)

In spite of the important discoveries made by Adam Smith and later by the economists of the Austrian School, Friedrich Hayek remained intellectually challenged by the miracle of the price mechanism. As it turned out there was still some pioneering to do in describing the price mechanism. This became clear when Hayek identified the dispersal of information relevant to exchange transactions as the central issue of economic study. In the context of his distinction between competition as a state of things (...) and as a process the price mechanism manifests itself as a powerful integrator of information which is at first sight hopelessly dispersed in modern society. In 1945 he pointed out another intellectual challenge which the miracle of the price mechanism poses: How could such a marvelous functionality come into existence? “I am convinced that if it [the price mechanism] were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind”. It is precisely because the free determination of prices is obviously not an invention, and because actors on the market in general do not realize that their decisions are at once also signals for the information-processing system that the market is, that in general this market order is not highly estimated. The market order is nevertheless the best illustration of the dual principle that the most beautiful forms of complex functionality are not deliberately created and are not deliberately maintained. (shrink)

In a recent exchange, John Worrall and Larry Laudan have debated the merits of the model of rational scientific change proposed by Laudan in his book Science and Values. On the model advocated by Laudan, rational change may take place at the level of scientific theory and methodology, as well as at the level of the epistemic aims of science. Moreover, the rationality of a change which occurs at any one of these three levels may be dependent on considerations at (...) the remaining levels. Yet, in spite of the avowedly anti-relativistic motivation of Laudan's model, Worrall criticizes Laudan for irrevocably relativizing scientific rationality to historically variant methodological standards. (shrink)

In ‘Religious Upbringing Reconsidered’ Michael Hand revisits the debate on the right of parents to give their children a religious upbringing in a liberal context. According to him, the logical difficulty lies in the fact that parents cannot both impart religious beliefs and avoid indoctrination. While Peter Gardner and Jim Mackenzie have responded to Hand's paper and raised a number of pertinent issues, what is missing is a fuller treatment of indoctrination and belief inculcation for children. In this paper, I (...) argue that Hand's fallacy lies in his flawed understanding of indoctrination and belief inculcation: the inculcation of non-rational beliefs, far from being indoctrinatory, is in fact necessary for children in the process of growing up. (shrink)

Accountability is a significant factor in the soundness of the organisational environment in Australia, for both the public and private sectors. The accountability process rests on the quality and accessibility of organisational records, the information environment. While the Australian liberal democratic open society and free market system relies on accountability, paradoxically accountability is constrained by the needs of the open society and the market. Setting appropriate mechanisms for accountability while preserving civil liberty and innovative free markets is a difficult task, (...) and is one that falls to government. Governments have a ubiquitous role in implementing accountability in both the public and the private sectors, and the Australian federal system further complicates governments'' difficult role. The 1990s will bring further corporate pathologies, similar to those of the 1980''s. However the public and private sectors can reduce the impact of corporate pathologies in the 1990''s by learning the lessons of the 1980''s, through placing a priority on inculcating ethical and moral behavior, emphasising democratic values, and raising the organisational status of records. (shrink)

Predmet istraživanja su izazovi nastavnika u radu sa učenicima iz osetljivih socijalnih grupa, tokom nastave u vanrednim okolnostima, uslovljenim pandemijom koronavirusa. U radu su prikazani rezultati kvalitativnog istraživanja, sprovedenog krajem 2021. godine, u okviru projekta Pravo na obrazovanje u periodu krize izazvane pandemijom virusa COVID-19 u Srbiji. U polustrukturisanim individualnim intervjuima učestvovalo je 50 nastavnika osnovnih, srednjih i škola za obrazovanje učenika sa smetnjama u razvoju i invaliditetom, iz 14 gradova u Srbiji. Tokom obrazovno-vaspitnog procesa sa učenicima iz osetljivih socijalnih (...) grupa, nastavnici su suočeni sa brojnim izazovima: digitalni jaz prvog i drugog nivoa, diskontinuitet u procesu obrazovanja, neodgovarajuća podrška u učenju od strane roditelja, nemotivisanost učenika za učenje, otežana komunikacija, teškoće u praćenju nastave, nemogućnost sprovođenja epidemioloških mera i individualnih tretmana itd. Sudeći na osnovu izazova nastavnika, učenici iz osetljivih grupa više su pogođeni obrazovnom krizom nego njihovi vršnjaci iz privilegovanih grupa. Neophodno je sprovođenje sistemskih mera podrške u cilju obezbeđivanja inkluzivnog pristupa obrazovanju. (shrink)

Søren Kierkegaard, in his essay "The Present Age," takes a hostile stance towards the press. This is because he maintains that the press prepares the ground for the emergence of nihilism. Hubert Dreyfus extends this idea to other information technologies, especially the Internet. Since Kierkegaard-Dreyfus’ attitude towards various forms of information technology originates from philosophical anthropology and a particular conception of the meaning of life, assessing the viability of the attitude they hold requires further critical scrutiny. This paper aims to (...) show that, although, Kierkegaard’s and Dreyfus' insights are important in understanding the dangers of information technology their approach concerning the meaning of life and human identity is a one-sided analysis of the problem situation; In particular, their reliance on "Unconditional Commitment" could bring about new undesired consequences. This paper emphasizes that an appropriate stance towards information technology needs, among other things, a richer and more effective philosophical anthropology; one that by utilizing religious-moral wisdom in a sensible manner, provides an effective way to safely benefit from various types of technology without falling into the abyss of nihilism. The paper further argues that we also need to provide an institutional control of technology through piecemeal social engineering in a democratic process. (shrink)

This paper utilizes the framework of Karl Popper’s 3-world ontology to make the case that forensic science is a specialized coding system that establishes meaningful connections between the world of biology and the world of human society . Forensic science is a cross-disciplinary endeavor that uses scientific methods to determine what transpired in a crime so the legal system can determine how to prosecute the offender. On a Popperian analysis of forensic science, world 1 consists of evidence gathered at the (...) crime scene, which enables investigators to develop a detailed reconstruction of the incident for consideration under the legal and ethical codes of society, which are products of world 3. Understanding forensic science in this way serves two purposes: first, it extends Marcello Barbieri’s code biology into the realm of philosophical considerations in science, law and ethics; and second, it situates forensic science within the larger context of debates in contemporary philosophy of science. (shrink)

I offer an examination of trust relations in scientific inquiry as they seem to contrast with a lack of trust in an example of knowledge imposed from above by an unaccountable institutional power structure. On this basis I argue for a re-reading of John Hardwig's account of the place of trust in knowledge, and suggest that it translates less well than social epistemologists and others have assumed into a model for democratic epistemic practice.

This chapter offers a concise discussion of classic utilitarianism which is the prototypical moral doctrine of the utilitarian family. It starts with an analysis of the classic utilitarian criterion of rightness, gives an overview over its virtues and vices, and suggests an overall assessment of its adequacy as a theory of morality. Furthermore, it briefly discusses whether classic utilitarianism holds promise as a philosophy for doing business.

Age of automation entails freedom from most of the common working roles. Signs are changes in employment, unemployment, professional structures, relevance of services, entertainment industry, working hours, and the nature of social relations. Warnings are suggested against voluntaristic interventions, neglect of social, historical relations. New approaches are required in the fields of lifelong education and in the education of socially disadvantaged people. The changes in evolutionary inherited motivations and life styles are critical challenges to mankind. Open society and lessons of (...) system control are recommended. (shrink)

The paper shows how Karl Popper's critique of 'historicism' is permeated by psychoanalytic discourse regardless of his critique that psychoanalysis is one of the exemplars of pseudoscience. Early on, when he was formulating his philosophy of science, Popper had an apparently stringent criterion, viz. falsifiablity, and painstaking analysis. The central argument of this paper is that despite his representation of psychoanalysis as the principal illustration of the category he dubs as 'pseudoscience', Popper's analysis has been infused with psychoanalysis when it (...) comes to his social and political philosophy. Besides, not only was his interpretation of the proponents of 'historicism' and the 'closed' society mediated by the very concepts of a field which he indicted as pseudoscientific but also he frequently slipped into vacuous and unverifiable accusations forgetting the jurisdiction he formerly accorded to empirical adequacy and logical consistency when examining and assessing theories. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first we outline a version of non-descriptivism, ‘minimal expressivism’, leaving aside certain long-standing problems associated with conventional expressivist views. Second, we examine the way in which familiar expressivist results can be accommodated within this framework, through a particular interpretation that the expressive realm lends to a theory of meaning. Expressivist theories of meaning address only a portion of the classical problems attributed to this position when they seek to explain why the expressions they (...) deal with have a given meaning. A position can nevertheless be termed ‘expressivist’ – in the minimal sense that we favor – based simply on the following key features of the meaning of these expressions: they can be used as functions of propositions, and they are not used to describe the way the world is. (shrink)

Philosophy lacks criteria to evaluate its philosophical theories. To fill this gap, this essay introduces nine criteria to compare worldviews, classified in three broad categories: objective criteria (objective consistency, scientificity, scope), subjective criteria (subjective consistency, personal utility, emotionality), and intersubjective criteria (intersubjective consistency, collective utility, narrativity). The essay first defines what a worldview is and exposes the heuristic used in the quest for criteria. After describing each criterion individually, it shows what happens when each of them is violated. From the (...) criteria, it derives assessment tests to compare and improve different worldviews. These include the is-ought, ought-act, and is-act first-order tests; the critical and dialectical second-order tests; the mixed-questions and first-second-order third-order tests; and the we-I, we-it, and it-I tests. The essay then applies these criteria and tests to a concrete example, comparing the Flying Spaghetti Monster deity with Intelligent Design. For another application, it draws more general fruitful suggestions for the dialogue between science and religion. (shrink)

This article sets out the basic principles of a new theory of intellectual interventions centred round the notion of positioning. Intellectual interventions are seen as ways in which intellectuals locate themselves in the socio-political and intellectual field, thereby also positioning others. The existing contributions to the study of intellectuals often take the self-concepts or dispositions of intellectuals to be fixed, and they tend to focus on the causes and motivations behind intellectual interventions. Challenging this perspective, the theory proposed substitutes a (...) vocabulary of effects for the existing vocabulary of intentions and causes: rather than speculating on the sociological determinants or purposes that underlie an intellectual intervention, this theory explores its effects for the symbolic and institutional recognition of the author(s) and for the diffusion of the ideas propagated. (shrink)

Many models of (un)ethical decision making assume that people decide rationally and are in principle able to evaluate their decisions from a moral point of view. However, people might behave unethically without being aware of it. They are ethically blind. Adopting a sensemaking approach, we argue that ethical blindness results from a complex interplay between individual sensemaking activities and context factors.

Discussions of Karl Popper's falsificationist philosophy of science appear regularly in the recent literature on economic methodology. In this literature, there seem to be two fundamental points of agreement about Popper. First, most economists take Popper's falsificationist method of bold conjecture and severe test to be the correct characterization of scientific conduct in the physical sciences. Second, most economists admit that economic theory fails miserably when judged by these same falsificationist standards. As Latsis states, “the development of economic analysis would (...) look a dismal affair through falsificationist spectacles.”. (shrink)

Ethical notions such as good and bad, are often treated as though they were ?symmetric? in the sense of having the same moral ?weight?, one in a positive the other in a negative sense. I argue that they are in fact ?asymmetric? and that the negative members of such pairs of notions are more fundamental and definite, logically speaking, and operationally more important than the positive members. Detailed arguments are given to show this for some non?moral notions, such as life (...) and death, health and illness; some semi?moral notions such as pleasure and pain; and finally for the moral notions of happiness, benevolence, right, and good and their negative counterparts. One of the intentions of the article is to show that a systematic view of such asymmetries may have consequences for one's view of the proper or desirable structure of a general theory of ethics: norms stating prohibitions and norms stating permissions will be seen to be, in a sense defined in the text, more fundamental and important than norms stating ('positive') obligations. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the relations between Austrian Praxeology and sociology. It argues that Praxeology is not only a codification and ramification of pure market economics but also to some degree the Austrian school's variant or proxy of sociology. This argument particularly applies to Mises' Praxeology as the general theory of human action, with Weber's sociology understood as the science of social action, taken as Mises' acknowledged sociological source, inspiration or anticipation. The essay develops and substantiates the argument by identifying certain (...) sociological premises, concepts and observations in Mises' Praxeology, which are classified into the fields of general sociology, economic sociology and political sociology. The essay builds on and contributes to the growing economics and sociological literature on the relationship between Austrian economics and Weberian (and other) sociology. (shrink)

RésuméJe me penche sur un aspect de la philosophie sociale de Popper, à savoir les principes d'évaluation des interprétations historiques. Ma thèse globale est que suivant la perspective poppèrienne, notre choix parmi des interprétations historiques doit user d'au moins deux des critères qu'applique Popper au choix parmi diverses théories scientifiques : une interprétation devrait logiquement se prêter à une réfutation et elle devrait être consistante. Afin de montrer la pertinence et la fécondité de cette approche, je me concentre sur l'interprétation (...) historique des causes de la montée du nazisme que propose Erich Fromm, en particulier dansEscape from Freedom.Je montrerai que l'application de notions psychanalytiques dans le cadre de son interprétation historique a une valeur explicative faible, voire nulle. Son échec à expliquer certaines questions sociales tient à plusieurs raisons. Premièrement, l'auteur ne fournit pas, quoi qu'il en dise, d'explication causale convaincante. Ensuite, les concepts et les multiples hypotheèsesad hocauxquels il a recours tendent è rendre son interprétation irréfutable. Enfin, Fromm s'appuie sur des assomptions théoriques contradictoires. Mon analyse est basée sur la notion fondamentale de Popper voulant que la connaissance scientifique empirique exige au strict minimum une ouverture des interprétations historiques à la critique intersubjective. C'est cette exigence qui permet de les critiquer — c'est-à-dire les accepter, les réfuter et les corriger — sur une base rationnelle. (shrink)

The epistemic attitudes of scientists, such as epistemic tolerance and authoritarianism, play important roles in the discourse about rivaling theories. Epistemic tolerance stands for the mental attitude of an epistemic agent, e.g., a scientist, who is open to opposing views, while epistemic authoritarianism represents the tendency to uncritically accept views of authorities. Another relevant epistemic factor when it comes to the epistemic decisions of scientists is the skepticism towards the scientific method. However, the question is whether these epistemic attitudes are (...) influenced by their sociopolitical counterparts, such as the researcher’s degree of conservatism. To empirically investigate the interplay between epistemic and sociopolitical attitudes of scientists, we conducted a survey with researchers (N = 655) across different disciplines. We propose scales for measuring epistemic tolerance and epistemic authoritarianism, as well as a scale for detecting the participants' readiness to question the scientific method. Furthermore, we investigate the relationship between epistemic tolerance and epistemic authoritarianism on the one hand, and career stage and sociopolitical views on the other hand. Interestingly, our study found only small correlations between the participants' degree of conservatism and their epistemic attitudes. This suggests that political views, against common argumentation, actually do not play an important role in one’s scientific decisions. Moreover, social scientists scored higher on the epistemic tolerance and lower on the epistemic authoritarianism scale than natural scientists. Finally, the results indicate that natural scientists question the scientific method less than social scientists. (shrink)

Besides pure declarative arguments, whose premises and conclusions are declaratives, and pure imperative arguments, whose premises and conclusions are imperatives, there are mixed-premise arguments, whose premises include both imperatives and declaratives, and cross-species arguments, whose premises are declaratives and whose conclusions are imperatives or vice versa. I propose a general definition of argument validity: an argument is valid exactly if, necessarily, every fact that sustains its premises also sustains its conclusion, where a fact sustains an imperative exactly if it favors (...) the satisfaction over the violation proposition of the imperative, and a fact sustains a declarative exactly if, necessarily, the declarative is true if the fact exists. I argue that this definition yields as special cases the standard definition of validity for pure declarative arguments and my previously defended definition of validity for pure imperative arguments, and that it yields intuitively acceptable results for mixed-premise and cross-species arguments. (shrink)

This paper challenges a foundational conjecture of the Religion in Education Dialogue or Conflict (REDCo) project, that increased interest in religion in public and political life as manifested particularly in education is evidence of counter-secularisation. The paper argues that rather than representing counter-secularisation, such developments represent an emergent and secularising European civil religion facilitated through European religious education.

In 2012, chief nursing officers (CNO) in England published a policy on compassion in response to serious criticisms of patients’ care. Because their objective is fundamentally to shape nursing, this study argues, following Popper, that the policy should be analysed. An appraisal tool, developed from Popper, Gadamer, Jauss and Thiselton, is the framework for this analysis. The CNO policy document identified six values and behaviours, termed ‘6Cs’, required by all nurses, midwives and care staff. The document contains no data, references (...) or acknowledgements, but is similar to the 6Cs defined by the Canadian nursing nun, Sister M. Simone Roach, in her theory of caring published 30 years earlier. Roach considered caring and the components of it, including compassion, to be moral virtues, an inner motivation to care. This study suggests that without explicit reference to Roach's ideas, and her underlying theoretical base, the CNO requirement has the effect of turning virtues into commodities and a form of external control, described by Ritzer as a McDonaldized dehumanization. This study, which has international relevance beyond England and the UK, suggests that the CNO revise their policy by acknowledging Roach's 6Cs and openly discuss the implications of her work for their policy. (shrink)

I discuss the historical roots of the landscape problem and propose criteria for its successful resolution. This provides a perspective to evaluate the possibility to solve it in several of the speculative cosmological scenarios under study including eternal inflation, cosmological natural selection and cyclic cosmologies.Invited contribution for a special issue of Foundations of Physics titled Forty Years Of String Theory: Reflecting On the Foundations.

Gender greatly impacts access to opportunities, potential, and success in corporate leadership roles. We begin with a general presentation of why such discussion is necessary for basic considerations of justice and fairness in gender equality and how the issues we raise must impact any ethical perspective on gender in the corporate workplace. We continue with a breakdown of the central categories affecting the success of women in corporate leadership roles. The first of these includes gender-influenced behavioral factors, such as the (...) requirements and expectations of gendered verbal and nonverbal communication styles as well as appearance. We move on to address the impact of family on corporate leadership opportunities and success, discussing the asymmetrical evaluation of an individual’s potential, authority, and competence based on gender stereotypes of familial obligations and expectations. Finally, we address how gender impacts access to networking and sponsorship opportunities and the long-term effects of systematic limitations on women’s inclusion in the upper echelons of corporate leadership. We conclude with a summary of the questions and issues raised by our discussion and direct individuals to consider how different ethical systems and moral requirements might influence their interpretations of gender and leadership in the corporate workplace. (shrink)

(1997). Refocussing the subject: The anarchopsychological tradition revisited. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 89-106. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.1997.tb00530.x.

Le présent article veut (1) montrer que la théorie qualitative de la vérisimilarité exposée par Karl R. Popper dansConjectures and RefutationsetObjective Knowledgeest compatible avec sa méthode des conjectures, corroborations et réfutations; (2) faire voir pourquoi cette théorie apparaît néanmoins trop forte d'un point de vue intuitif; (3) montrer comment le système poppérien permet de contourner la preuve formelle présentée par Pavel Tichy en 1974 à l'encontre de la théorie qualitative de la vérisimilarité; (4) proposer une nouvelle définition de la vérisimilarité (...) qui apparaisse non seulement logiquement fondée, mais plus intuitivement acceptable et davantage liée à la méthodologie poppérienne que la définition originelle. (shrink)

“Historicism” has become a ubiquitous and equivocal term. A classification is given here of five separate uses of the term currently in vogue, each provided with a unique qualifying adjective to help keep them distinct. I then offer a few objections to some of the more radical conclusions which have been drawn by proponents of a specific version of historicism, one associated with “postmodernism “. The positions of Rorty and Putnam are contrasted as examples of strong and weak degrees of (...) historicism, respectively. (shrink)

This article argues that pseudoscience lacks an adequate philosophical analysis. Using conspiracy theories as a case study, it is claimed that such an analysis needs to go beyond a mere epistemological approach. In the first part, it is shown that the existing philosophical literature shares the assumption that conspiracy theories are primarily deficient scientific hypotheses. This claim is contested, because such an approach can only understand what conspiracy theories fail to be, but not what they are and why people tend (...) to endorse them. To develop an alternative, the second part starts from recent sociology of science, applied to conspiracy theories, that claims that both true and false theories are in need of a symmetrical social explanation. However, this opens the path to relativism because it does not allow for a significant distinction between scientific and conspiracy theories. In the third section an alternative analysis of conspiracy theories is offered, which does not abandon this distinction. Moreover, it is claimed that the most important element of conspiracy theories is not their truth value but rather their symbolic structures of meaning. The aim of conspiracy theories, and perhaps of pseudoscience in general, is then not to know facts about the world, but rather to offer a meaningful framework within which to live. (shrink)