From the perspective of a realist philosophy of social science, the recent explosion of criticisms of mainstream economics, including reinvigorated Austrian criticism, provides what seems like a rich opportunity to join what are too often disjoined disciplinary interests and inquirers, and also to extend the arguments not only as regards the realist theory of social science, but also as regards the implications of this approach for economics. I begin with a minimum sketch of key features of realist philosophy of science (...) as I understand it. The central difference turns on the role and nature of explanation and of theory, between what is frequently termed ‘deductivism’, and on an alternative in which explanation requires the articulation of a causal mechanism, for example, the mechanism provided by molecular chemistry that gives us an understanding of oxidation. I take the position that in social science, explanation requires social causal mechanisms. I consider the Austrian contribution from this point of view and conclude with some hints regarding how the foregoing bears on our understanding of capitalism and socialism. (shrink)

This paper surveys three controversial new directions in research about the nature of science and briefly summarizes both the intellectual and sociological impact of this work. A bibliographic introduction to the major literature is provided and some fruitful directions for future research are proposed. Philosophers of science are also exhorted to perform 'community service' by correcting misunderstandings of the methods of science fostered by these new approaches.

Corporate responsibility requires a conception of collective agency on which collective agents are able to form moral judgments and act on them. In spite of claims to the contrary, existing accounts of collective agency fall short of this kind of corporate autonomy, as they fail to explain how collective agents might be responsive to moral reasons. I discuss how a recently proposed conception of shared valuing can be used for developing a solution to this problem. Although the resulting conception of (...) corporate autonomy is useful for making sense of corporate responsibility, it also gives rise to what I call ‘the Corporate Autonomy Problem’. Autonomous collective agents are in principle entitled to the same rights as autonomous individual agents. However, at least some individual rights, such as the right to vote, the right to life, and the right not to be enslaved cannot plausibly be attributed to collective agents. This intuition is supported by normative individualism, the position according to which corporate agents are not entitled to non-derivative rights at all. I argue that without a proper solution to this problem—I sketch the available options—saving corporate responsibility requires giving up on normative individualism. (shrink)

Folk ontology seems baroque, compared to the austere ontology of many philosophers. Plausibly, the issue comes down to a choice between existence concepts: the folk and the austere philosophers employ different quantifier meanings. This paper aims to clarify and defend this hypothesis and explore its upshots. How do we choose between the alternative existence concepts; is the austere philosophers’ concept better than the folk’s undiscriminating one? I will argue that contrary to what Ted Sider suggests, the austere existence concept and (...) the corresponding austere answers to existence questions do not prevail in the context of “inquiry”, i.e. the context of practically disinterested pursuit of epistemic excellence. Sider’s suggestion relies on a one-sided idea of epistemic excellence, as beliefs’ conforming to the world. Once we recognize another epistemic aim, namely the agent understanding connections between known facts, ordinary objects will be back in the game. (shrink)

This paper attempts to identify general, cross-cultural cognitive factors that trigger the default commissive interpretation of assertions about one's future action. It is argued that the solution cannot be found at the level of the semantics of the English will, or any other future tense marker, but should be sought in the structure of rational intentions, as combined with the pragmatics of felicitous predictions and with parameters linked to the evolutionary advantage of cooperative behaviour. Some supporting evidence from language development (...) studies is briefly presented. (shrink)

In this recent history of British sociology, Andrew Halsey suggests an intriguing connection between political economic régimes in the twentieth century and the development of sociology as an academic discipline, dividing British sociology into four periods, 1900-1950, 1950-1967, 1968-1975, and 1975-2000. In this way, by connecting disciplinary developments with contemporaneous régimes of economic regulation, Halsey begins to outline a sociology of sociology. However, although much of Halsey's book is informative, especially his description of the period from 1950-1967 when he personally (...) entered the discipline, Halsey ultimately fails to develop his sociology of the discipline sufficiently, especially after 1967. Although it does not claim to be comprehensive, this essay attempts to develop Halsey's sociology of the discipline. Key Words: British sociology • social theory • twentieth century. (shrink)

In this article, we extend the concept of technology beyond the conventional understanding of systems and artifacts as embodiments of particular functionalities that are variously enacted in local settings. Technological artifacts or systems epitomize operational couplings that extend beyond the human-technology interface. Such couplings entail multiple, unobtrusive, back-staged links that evade human interpretation yet are critically involved in the reproduction and control of social relations. Cast in this light, technologies emerge as complex rationalized embodiments for structuring social relationships and, in (...) this quality, complement and occasionally compete with institutional modes of governance. We explore these ideas in the empirical context of cultural memory organizations (e.g., libraries, archives, museums). As the outcome of the technological developments that have marked the field over the last two decades, the operations of memory institutions increasingly mingle with those of information aggregators and search engines. These developments reframe longstanding professional practices of memory organizations and, in this process, challenge their institutional mandate. (shrink)

Kevin Mulligan a introduit la distinction entre les descriptions épaisses et minces dans la philosophie des relations. Cette distinction lui a permis d’affirmer les thèses suivantes : toutes les relations sont « minces » et internes, et aucune n’est « épaisse » et externe. J’accepte et j’utilise la distinction de Mulligan entre mince et épais afin de soutenir que ce ne sont pas toutes les relations internes qui sont minces. Il existe également des relations internes épaisses, et celles-ci abondent en (...) physique mathématique. Je soutiens en outre qu’il peut y avoir des relations externes minces. Cependant, en introduisant une distinction entre relations fortement et faiblement internes, je suis d’accord pour affirmer avec Mulligan que toutes les relations fortement internes sont des relations minces.Kevin Mulligan has brought the distinction between thick and thin descriptions into the philosophy of relations, and with its help he has put forward the theses that all relations are “thin” and internal, and that none is “thick” and external. Accepting and using Mulligan’s thin — thick distinction, I argue that not all internal relations are thin. There are thick internal relations, too ; and they abound in mathematical physics. Also, I claim that there might be thin external relations. However, introducing a distinction between strongly and weakly internal relations, I agree with Mulligan that all strongly internal relations are thin relations. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to papers on my Manifest Rationality (2000) by Leo Groarke, Hans Hansen, David Hitchcock, and Christopher Tindale presented at the meetings of the Ontario Philosophical Society, October 2000. From the many useful challenges they have directed at my position, I have chosen to focus on two. The dominant issue raised by their papers concerns my definition of argument, and particularly problems with the idea of a dialectical tier. I have selected that as the first strand. (...) Second, several have raised questions that deal with the relationship between logic, rhetoric and dialectic. That is the second strand. (shrink)

I consider the problem of political pluralism for political liberalism: that not everybody agrees on fundamental political principles. I critically examine three defenses of liberal principles in situations of political pluralism—the realist defense, the pragmatic defense, and Gerald Gaus’ “justificatory liberalism”—all of which I find wanting. Instead, I propose a dialectical approach to justifying political liberalism. A dialectical approach is based on engaging contradictory positions through conceptual investigation of key concepts claimed by both sides. Through such dialectical engagement, I seek (...) a way to deal with contradictions between liberal and non-liberal philosophies as conceptual issues, rather than as antagonisms beyond reason. The ambition is to contribute to a more robust liberalism capable of defending itself in contexts of political pluralism. As an example, I apply this dialectical approach to the disagreement between political Islam and political liberalism on t... (shrink)

It is received wisdom in philosophy and the cognitive sciences that individuals can be in emotional states but groups cannot. But why should we accept this view? In this paper, I argue that there is substantial philosophical and empirical support for the existence of collective emotions. Thus, while there is good reason to be skeptical about many ascriptions of collective emotion, I argue that some groups exhibit the computational complexity and informational integration required for being in genuinely emotional states.

This paper is motivated by Davis’ [14] theory of the individual in economics. Davis’ analysis is applied to health economics, where the individual is conceived as a utility maximiser, although capable of regarding others’ welfare through interdependent utility functions. Nonetheless, this provides a restrictive and flawed account, engendering a narrow and abstract conception of care grounded in Paretian value and Cartesian analytical frames. Instead, a richer account of the socially embedded individual is advocated, which employs collective intentionality analysis. This provides (...) a sound foundation for research into an approach to health policy that promotes health as a basic human right. (shrink)

This paper urges that if we wish to give social intelligence to our agents, it pays to look at how we acquired our social intelligence ourselves. We are born with drives and motives that are innate and deeply social. Next, as children we are socialized to acquire norms and values and to understand rituals large and small. These social elements are the core of our being. We capture them in the acronym GRASP: Groups, Rituals, Affiliation, Status, Power. As a consequence, (...) economic rationality or logical reasoning do not suffice when it comes to social intelligence. Basic features of our social behaviour, of the kind that one sees early in the lives of children, need to be prominent. These include fear, love, and aggression. They extend to the combination of these drives with basic social clues from the environment such as big and small, good and bad, as well as culture-specific specializations of these. This will make agents respond differentially to inferred attributes such as gender, age, group membership. This level of universality in social intelligence should receive our full attention. The general insights gained can then be re-used in myriad implementations to specific modelling issues. (shrink)

Attributing moral responsibility to an agent requires that the agent is a capable member of a moral community. Capable members of a moral community are often thought of as moral reasoners (or moral persons) and, thus, to attribute moral responsibility to collective agents would require showing that they are capable of moral reasoning. It is argued here that those theories that understand collective reasoning and collective moral agency in terms of collective decision-making and commitment – as is arguably the case (...) with Christian List and Philip Pettit’s theory of group agency – face the so-called “problem of the first belief” that threatens to make moral reasoning impossible for group agents. This paper introduces three possible solutions to the problem and discusses the effects that these solutions have in regard to the possibility of attributing moral responsibility to groups. (shrink)

This paper draws from two central intuitions that characterize modern western societies. The first is the normative claim that our identities should be recognized in an authentic way. The second intuition is that our common matters are best organized through democratic decision-making and democratic institutions. It is argued here that while deliberative democracy is a promising candidate for just organization of recognition relationships, it cannot fulfil its promise if recognition is understood either as recognition of ‘authentic’ collective identities or as (...) recognition of too atomistic or individualized subjects. If deliberative democracy is to be understood as successfully providing authentic recognition of individual identities, it requires a specific understanding of how individuals’ recognition needs and desires are collectively and institutionally constituted. Furthermore, it is argued that even if deliberative democracy can provide the necessary circumstances for individual self-realization, it comes with homogenizing tendencies and cannot fully avoid the problems of multiculturalism. (shrink)

. In his work on language John Searle favors an Austinian approach that emphasizes the speech act as the basic unit of meaning and communication, and which sees speaking a language as engaging in a rule-governed form of behavior. He couples this with a strident opposition to cognitivist approaches that posit unconscious rule following as the causal basis of linguistic competence. In place of unconscious rule following Searle posits what he calls the Background, comprised of nonintentional (nonrepresentational) mental phenomena. I (...) argue that these two aspects of his philosophy of language cannot be reconciled. In order to preserve his view of language as a rule-governed activity, he must embrace the cognitivist idea of unconscious rule following. Finally, I try to show how such an accommodation would be far less traumatic to Searle’s philosophical system than it might otherwise seem. (shrink)

Although the principle of informed consent is well established and its importance widely acknowledged, it has met with criticism for decades. Doubts have been raised for a number of different reasons. In particular, empirical data show that people regularly fail to reproduce the information provided to them. Many critics agree, therefore, that the received concept of informed consent is no more than a myth. Strategies to overcome this problem often rest on a flawed concept of informed consent. In this paper, (...) it is suggested that informed consent is a communicative act between two persons. The challenge is to elucidate the norms and constraints for successfully performing such a communicative act. The view developed here has major consequences with regard to the standards for information disclosure as well as for the general scope of informed consent. (shrink)

This paper deals with the questions of whether the law should be coherent and what this coherence would amount to. In this connection so‐called “integrated coherentism” is introduced. According to integrated coherentism, an acceptance set is coherent if and only if it contains everything that should rationally be accepted according to what else one accepts and does not contain anything that should rationally be rejected according to what else one accepts. Such an acceptance set is ideally a theory of everything, (...) including amongst others standards for rational aceptance. On the assumption that the law, as a social phenomenon, is what the best theory about the law says it is, the law must be coherent, because the best theory of the law is part of an integratedly coherent theory of everything. This view is compatible with Raz's view that the law stems from different sources that need not be coherent in the sense that they consistently elaborate the same underlying principles or policies. Raz's view is not a consequence of integrated coherentism, however. (shrink)

This paper aims at providing an account of juridical acts that forms a suitable starting point for the creation of computational systems that deal with juridical acts. The paper is divided into two parts. Because juridical acts will be analyzed as intentional changes in the world of law, the ‘furniture’ of this world, that consists broadly speaking of entities, facts and rules, plays a central role in the analysis. This first part of the paper deals with this furniture and its (...) philosophical underpinnings, and at the same time introduces most of the logical apparatus that will be used to deal with it. The focus in the first part is on static and dynamic legal rules and their interplay in constituting the world of law. (shrink)

The assumed difference and continuing estrangement between political philosophy and political science is a relatively recent development. Both fields sprang from closely entwined concerns about democracy and matters of social and political justice, and today both must still confront their practical as well as cognitive relationship to their subject matter. This issue, however, has receded into the background of these discourses. Ludwig Wittgenstein's vision of philosophy is in effect a vision of social inquiry. His work, when viewed from this perspective, (...) prompts us to reconsider the logical status of various modes of political inquiry: how can these practices, descriptively and normatively, do justice to their subject matter? How can they deal with such foundational issues as the nature of social phenomena, the concepts of representation and interpretation, the problem of knowledge of other minds and what is involved in making explanatory and evaluative judgments about the objects of inquiry? (shrink)

I answer the questions raised by commentators, and clarify what Understanding Institutions tried to achieve.

The subject of interest of this article is procedural acts considered as double-conventionalized acts. It is assumed in this article that in the case of procedural acts, one can distinguish two levels of conventionalization: the level of a speech act and the level of a procedural act. Both above-mentioned levels affect each other in various ways, what is discussed in the article. As assumed in the article, the analysis of acts characterized by this particular trait and with due account of (...) this trait allows one to observe phenomena that can be hard or even impossible to notice in the process of analyzing acts that are deprived of this trait. Furthermore, it seems that the description of this type of acts may particularly enrich the current discussion on some properties of speech acts held on the grounds of philosophy of language or pragmalinguistics. The research material used in this article as an illustration consists of actual utterances of participants of Polish court proceedings used by them at a hearing. (shrink)

This paper argues that the historical character of our knowledge is compatible with both ontological and epistemological realism. The first part critically analyses the thesis according to which the situated nature of our cognitive practices implies that they do not refer to an extra-linguistic reality. The second section explores the claim that realism is a necessary presupposition of our communicative practices and the final part outlines the principles of a pluralist realism.

John Searle’s argument that social-scientific laws are impossible depends on a special open-ended feature of social kinds. We demonstrate that under a noncontentious understanding of bridging principles the so-called "counts-as" relation, found in the expression "X counts as Y in (context) C," provides a bridging principle for social kinds. If we are correct, not only are social-scientific laws possible, but the "counts as" relation might provide a more perspicuous formulation for candidate bridge principles.

This article presents Durkheim as a Neo-Kantian social thinker and a source of the theory of emotional contagion. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is examined as Durkheim’s paradigm case of Neo-Kantianism. He is first considered among the intellectual context of French Neo-Kantianism and its figures Charles Renouvier, Émile Boutroux, and Octave Hamelin, all whom were influential in his formative years. Durkheim’s Neo-Kantianism in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is then juxtaposed to the Neo-Kantian legal philosophy of Emil Lask (...) and Hans Kelsen. Agued is that Durkheim’s notions of distortion and emotional contagion are his leading contributions to Neo-Kantianism. (shrink)

In this work, it is argued that one of the foundations of NiklasLuhmann’s theory of social systems, namely that it has no ontology, would prevent the elaboration of explanations in sociology. Because the theory has a formal-logical foundation, which does not presuppose ontology, there are insurmountable obstacles to achieving this objective. For this reason, it is valid to wonder about the merit of a theory that, after 20 years, insists on not aligning itself with ontological premises in a robust way (...) and suggests, therefore, a refusal to integrate sociology within the set of factual sciences. However, we think that the richness of Luhmann’s work allows a dialogue with the mainstream of contemporary theoretical practice. Three rules about what “should not be done” are revalidated from this analysis to philosophically base a theory in sociology and a key suggestion to overcome the problem of explanation in Luhmann’s sociology: social science seeks and directs its activity towards discovery and the use of substantive, real distinctions that also enrich the factual content of statements about social reality. (shrink)

After arguing that truth-making is properly construed as a partnership between truth bearers and truth-makers, I focus on two prominent arguments against the category of fact as one of the key relata in the truth-making relation. After rejecting those arguments, I go on to examine a more difficult issue, one that might force us to appreciate more fully the robust role that thought has in “creating” truth.

In this paper, I examine the manner in which analyses of the action of single agents have been pressed into service for constructing accounts of collective action. Specifically, I argue that the best analogy to collective action is a class of individual action that Carl Ginet has called 'aggregate action.' Furthermore, once we use aggregate action as a model of collective action, then we see that existing accounts of collective action have failed to accommodate an important class of (what I (...) shall call) 'unintentional collective actions.'. (shrink)

Joint action among human beings is characterized by using elaborate cognitive feats, such as representing the mental states of others about a certain state of affairs. It is still debated how these capacities evolved in the hominid lineage. I suggest that the consolidation of a shared practice over time can foster the predictability of other’s behavior. This might facilitate the evolutionary passage from inferring what others might know by simply seeing them and what they are viewing towards a mutual awareness (...) of each other’s beliefs. I will examine the case for cooperative hunting in one chimpanzee community and argue that it is evidence that they have the potential to achieve common ground, suggesting that the consolidation of a practice might have supported the evolution of higher social cognition in the hominid lineage. (shrink)

Will there be any joint future for science and Islam? Although such questions have recently received considerable attention, more basic questions are often ignored. This article aims at addressing some of those more basic questions through exploring the assumptions that underlie different possible understandings of the question about the future of Islam and science. By investigating the relation between conceptualizations of religion and the question about the future of Islam and science, it will be argued that different understandings of the (...) concept of religion (i.e., whether it denotes real objects, whether it is universal, and whether it is belief centered) lead to extremely different readings of the question. Besides, it will be argued that different answers to the question about the future of Islam and science can be understood in terms of the inference to best theological explanation; thus, the criteria that one assumes for the best theological explanation result in different criteria for evaluation of the answers. (shrink)

The article investigates characteristics of legal concepts as found in academic articles, focusing upon the knowledge base of legal experts. It is a cognitively oriented study of one of the semiotic basics of communication for academic legal purposes. The purpose is to study the structure of knowledge elements connected to the concept of “Criminal liability of corporations” from US law in and across individual experts in order to look for individual differences and similarities. The central concern is to investigate the (...) conditions for the observable efficiency of semiosis in academic discourse. In a first basic section I discuss aspects relevant for a cognitively oriented study of academic discourse. The empirical part of the article consists of an analysis of text passages from two articles in American law journals. The results of the study support the assumption that high efficiency and precision of semiosis is due rather to the use of specific cognitive processing skills than to total identity of cognitive structures across individual experts. (shrink)

Moral naturalism, as I use the term here, is the view that there are moral facts in the natural world – facts that are both natural and normative – and that moral claims are true or false in virtue of their corresponding or not to these natural facts. Moral naturalists argue that, since moral claims are about natural facts, we can establish the truth about moral claims through empirical investigation. Moral knowledge, on this view, is a form of empirical knowledge.One (...) objection to this metaethical view is that even if moral naturalists are correct in their claims about truth, they cannot answer the question of normativity. Jean Hampton, for instance, argues that it is not enough to explain the conduct's wrongness by showing it to be a property that necessarily supervenes on natural properties. For nothing in this analysis explains the relationship between these properties andus.The question is why should peoplecareabout these properties. Christine Korsgaard claims that moral realists take the normative question to be one about truth and knowledge. (shrink)

In general, in our ordinary life, we manage to make the difference between “strange” behavior and error or extravagant beliefs. The question is here to know how we do so, and against what background. There are also specialized contexts for evaluating whether certain types of behavior or discourse are normal or abnormal: courts of law and psychiatric hospitals are two examples. In these contexts, judgments are formed against a background of technical or scientific knowledge, but they also result from epistemic (...) means of evaluation that are similar to habitual ones. The paper seeks to highlight this similarity with respect to recognizing mental disturbance. Starting from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, it attempts at extending it by drawing on notions of reciprocal perspectives and of judgments of incongruity. It documents its investigation by analyzing sequences from Malek Bensmail’s documentary, Aliénations, which examines the treatment of mental suffering in contemporary Algeria. (shrink)

The mental and the social are ‘two sides of the same coin’. In other words, ‘social relations are internal relations’. In showing how this was the point of Wittgenstein’s discussion of the practice of ‘following a rule’, Peter Winch has made an important contribution to social philosophy.

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

I respond to a challenge by Dieterle (Philos Math 18:311–328, 2010) that requires mathematical social constructivists to complete two tasks: (i) counter the myth that socially constructed contents lack objectivity and (ii) provide a plausible social constructivist account of the objectivity of mathematical contents. I defend three theses: (a) the collective agreements responsible for there being socially constructed contents differ in ways that account for such contents possessing varying levels of objectivity, (b) to varying extents, the truth values of objective, (...) socially constructed contents are constrained to be what they are, and (c) typically, socially constructed mathematical contents are objective and possess truth values that are highly constrained by the intended applications of the mathematical facets of reality that they represent. (shrink)

Does language make moral cognition possible? Some authors like Andy Clark have argued for a positive answer whereby language and the ways people use it mark a fundamental divide between humans and all other animals with respect to moral thinking (Clark, Mind and morals: essays on cognitive science and ethics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996; Moral Epistemol Nat Can J Philos Suppl XXVI, 2000a; Moral Epistemol Nat Can J Philos Suppl XXVI, 2000b; Philosophy of mental representation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, (...) pp 37–43 and discussion, 44–61, 2002). I take issue with Clark’s view and argue that language is probably unnecessary for the emergence of moral cognition. I acknowledge, however, that humans unlike other animals seem to posses what Haugeland in Philosophy of mental representation. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2002) terms ‘norm-hungriness’: an idiosyncratic need or desire to create and abide by a multitude of norms. Our peculiar norm-hungriness, I suggest, depends on what can be called florid control rather than on language. (shrink)