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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A collective volume in memoriam Mihail Radu Solcan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

: This article presents a definition of action that links empirical facts with normative reasons to form an explanation of rational agency with predictive capabilities. This idea is developed along the lines of pragmatism which holds that a set of beliefs is a matter of linguistic evaluation from a particular community. This notion is related to the idea of facts as empirical information that is cognitively apprehended. Such information is regarded as an input which is later contrasted to expected behavioral (...) responses from the agent. The deviation of such observed behavior with respect to the expected one represents an evaluative output that is understood as the definition of reasonably expected behavior. Action is, thus, understood as the outcome of such an evaluative process. (shrink)

The hypothesis that human reasoning and decision-making can be roughly modeled by Expected Utility Theory has been at the core of decision science. Accumulating evidence has led researchers to modify the hypothesis. One of the latest additions to the field is Dual Process theory, which attempts to explain variance between participants and tasks when it comes to deviations from Expected Utility Theory. It is argued that Dual Process theories at this point cannot replace previous theories, since they, among other things, (...) lack a firm conceptual framework, and have no means of producing independent evidence for their case. (shrink)

All univocal analyses of causation face counterexamples. An attractive response to this situation is to become a pluralist about causal relationships. "Causal pluralism" is itself, however, a pluralistic notion. In this article, I argue in favor of pluralism about concepts of cause in the social sciences. The article will show that evidence for, inference from, and the purpose of causal claims are very closely linked. Key Words: causation • pluralism • evidence • methodology.

The past two decades have witnessed an increase in interest in social mechanisms and mechanistic explanations of social macro-phenomena. This paper addresses the question of what the components of social mechanisms in mechanistic explanations of social macro-phenomena must be. Analytical sociology’s initial position and the main new proposals by analytical sociologists are discussed. It is argued that all of them are faced with outstanding difficulties. Subsequently, a minimal requirement regarding the components of social mechanisms is introduced. It is held that (...) a component of a social mechanism in a mechanistic explanation of a social macro-phenomenon must not have the explanandum phenomenon as a part of it. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss the issue of context-dependence of mechanism-based explanation in the social sciences. The different ways in which the context-dependence and context-independence of mechanism-based explanation have been understood in the social sciences are often motivated by different and apparently incompatible understandings of what explanatory mechanisms are. Instead, we suggest that the different varieties of context-dependence are best seen as corresponding to different research goals. Rather than conflicting with one another, these goals are complementary to each other and (...) therefore pave the way to a methodologically more cooperative approach to mechanism-based explanation in the social sciences. (shrink)

Does systems theory need rethinking? Most social scientists would probably say no. It had its run, was debated critically, and found wanting. If at all, it should be treated historically. Why then might systems theory need rethinking, as the title of this symposium claims? The reason is that, unlike in the natural and biosocial sciences, any conception of system in the social sciences has remained suspect in the wake of problematic Parsonian and cybernetic systems theories. The premise of this special (...) issue is that abandoning conceptions of systems has imposed a high price on the social sciences: a lack of ontologies and methodologies that are both philosophically profound and scientifically defensible. It has left social scientists who choose to ignore ontology in their theoretical and empirical work defenseless against enterprising settlers from a variety of humanities and social science disciplines who attack mainstream work with—often simplistic and naïve, but nevertheless fundamental—philosophical arguments, whether anti-scientific postmodernists or pseudo-scientific rational choice theorists. The goal of this special issue is to showcase new and original work that contributes to a rethinking of systems theory by taking the conception of systems seriously. This introduction offers a programmatic statement of a systemic ontology and methodology as well as a brief general outline and examples of what a systems-based approach in the social sciences entails. Key Words: systems theory • systemism • systemic approach • complexity theory • self-organization • emergentism • paradigms • social mechanisms • Mario Bunge. (shrink)

Jon Elster worries about the explanatory power of the social sciences. His main concern is that they have so few well-established laws. Elster develops an interesting substitute: a special kind of mechanism designed to fill the explanatory gap between laws and mere description. However, his mechanisms suffer from a characteristic problem that I will explore in this article. As our causal knowledge of a specific problem grows we might come to know too much to make use of an Elsterian mechanism (...) but still lack a law. We might then find ourselves in the paradoxical position of knowing more relevant causal truths about the phenomenon we are interested in than we did before, but being able to explain less. If this possibility is realized in social science settings, as I argue it might well be, Elster?s mechanistic account is threatened. Moreover, even if the possibility is rarely realized in that way, it raises, simply as a possibility, a conceptual problem with Elster?s mechanistic framework. (shrink)

“Situational Analysis” (SA) constitutes Popper’s methodological proposal for the social sciences. We argue that notwithstanding Popper’s claim that SA is an attempt to extend the methodology of neoclassical economics to the rest of the social sciences, the former is better interpreted as an extension of his view of the “method” of history to the “theoretical” social sciences. The reason is that, unlike neoclassical economics, Popper’s formulation of SA presupposes that social scientists exhibit a “more complete” view of the “logic of (...) the situation” than individual actors do, on average, which implies that the latter’s knowledge is “partially wrong” or “incomplete.”. (shrink)

‘Situational Analysis’ constitutes Popper's methodological proposal for the social sciences. There is an apparent inconsistency in the fact that, on the one hand, Popper maintains that we lear...

En la sociología y la teoría social contemporánea se ha instalado profundamente la idea de que la sociología es inherentemente una ciencia o disciplina «multiparadigmática », y de que no es posible ni deseable caminar hacia una mayor integración en la disciplina. Este trabajo argumenta contra esa creencia y defiende la posibilidad y deseabilidad de establecer unas «reglas del juego» comunes como requisito lógico e institucional para perseguir fértil y críticamente la generación de conocimiento sociológico. Para ello, se efectúan algunas (...) distinciones analíticas útiles: en primer lugar, entre pluralismo teórico genuino y pseudo-pluralismo; en segundo lugar, entre integración léxica, semántica, metodológica, epistémica y teórica; y, en tercer lugar, entre integración «simple» e integración «compleja» o «consiliencia». Adicionalmente, el artículo presenta algunas hipótesis para explicar la popularidad de este mito entre los sociólogos, entre las que destaca su uso como blindaje contra la crítica. (shrink)

Trust relations in the health services have changed from asymmetrical paternalism to symmetrical autonomy-based participation, according to a common account. The promises of personalized medicine emphasizing empowerment of the individual through active participation in managing her health, disease and well-being, is characteristic of symmetrical trust. In the influential Kantian account of autonomy, active participation in management of own health is not only an opportunity, but an obligation. Personalized medicine is made possible by the digitalization of medicine with an ensuing increased (...) tailoring of diagnostics, treatment and prevention to the individual. The ideal is to increase wellness by minimizing the layer of interpretation and translation between relevant health information and the patient or user. Arguably, this opens for a new level of autonomy through increased participation in treatment and prevention, and by that, increased empowerment of the individual. However, the empirical realities reveal a more complicated landscape disturbed by information ‘noise’ and involving a number of complementary areas of expertise and technologies, hiding the source and logic of data interpretation. This has lead to calls for a return to a mild form of paternalism, allowing expertise coaching of patients and even withholding information, with patients escaping responsibility through blind or lazy trust. This is morally unacceptable, according to Kant’s ideal of enlightenment, as we have a duty to take responsibility by trusting others reflexively, even as patients. Realizing the promises of personalized medicine requires a system of institutional controls of information and diagnostics, accessible for non-specialists, supported by medical expertise that can function as the accountable gate-keeper taking moral responsibility required for an active, reflexive trust. (shrink)

Trust has become an important aspect of evaluating the relationship between lay public and technology implementation. Experiences have shown that a focus on trust provides a richer understanding of reasons for backlashes of technology in society than a mere focus of public understanding of risks and science communication. Therefore, trust is also widely used as a key concept for understanding and predicting trust or distrust in emerging technologies. But whereas trust broadens the scope for understanding established technologies with well-defined questions (...) and controversies, it easily fails to do so with emerging technologies, where there are no shared questions, a lack of public familiarity with the technology in question, and a restricted understanding amongst social researchers as to where distrust is likely to arise and how and under which form the technology will actually be implemented. Rather contrary, ‘trust’ might sometimes even direct social research into fixed structures that makes it even more difficult for social research to provide socially robust knowledge. This article therefore suggests that if trust is to maintain its important role in evaluating emerging technologies, the approach has to be widened and initially focus not on people’s motivations for trust, but rather the object of trust it self, as to predicting how and where distrust might appear, how the object is established as an object of trust, and how it is established in relation with the public. (shrink)

Why and how do norms emerge? Which norms emerge and why these ones in particular? Such questions belong to the ‘problem of the emergence of norms’, which consists of an inquiry into the production of norms in social collectives. I address this question through the ethnographic study of the emergence of ‘norms against violence’ in the political collective Occupy Geneva. I do this, first, empirically, with the analysis of my field observations; and, second, theoretically, by discussing my findings. In consequence (...) of two episodes categorized as sexual assaults that occurred in their camp, the members of Occupy Geneva decided to tackle those issues in a general assembly. Their goal was to amend their first charter of good conduct in order to reform its norms and complete it with norms aiming to regulate ‘facts’ of ‘unjustified violence’. During a collective deliberation, new norms were devised, debated and consensually adopted. The writing of the new charter took place in a second general assembly during which the wording of the written norms was collectively decided. I show that indignation over the sexual assaults was the main motive that led to the collective deliberation, and that the entire process of the making of these norms was characterized by different collective emotions. Indeed, indignation, contempt and fear played major roles in the emergence of norms prohibiting violence, allowing punishment and exclusion of wrongdoers, and prescribing collective intervention against an aggressor to neutralize the threat represented. These findings prompt me to hypothesize that social norms emerge from emotions thanks to the latters’ internal structure; and that emotions provide causal and grounding explanations for this emergence. Thus, emotions allow us to answer the questions: ‘Why do norms emerge?’ and ‘Why do they have their specific forms?’ In short, I argue that social norms have emotional foundations. (shrink)

Intentional explanation, according to Elster, seeks to elucidate an action by showing that it was intentionally conducted, in order to bring about certain goals . Intentional actions furthermore, are rational actions: they imply that agents establish a connection between the goals they target and the means that are appropriate to reach them, by way of different beliefs about the means, the goals and the environment. But how should we understand intentional actions in the light of philosophical research on emotions, rationality, (...) and normativity? This question is the departure point of this article. Various philosophers have analyzed the relationships between rationality and emotion, those between emotion and normativity, and those between emotion and intentional action. Nonetheless, their theses are scattered and do not offer an integrative view on how rationality, normativity and emotions work from the standpoint of intentional explanation. By using de Sousa’s distinction between the epistemic and the strategic modes of rationality as a theoretical framework, this article proposes therefore to remedy this deficit by unifying these philosophical insights with the goal of elaborating a theory of intentional explanation which brings together rationality, normativity and emotions. (shrink)

It is common to interpret Kant’s idea of public reason and the Enlightenment motto to ‘think for oneself’ as incompatible with the view that testimony and judgement of credibility is essential to rational public deliberation. Such interpretations have led to criticism of contemporary Kantian approaches to deliberative democracy for being intellectualistic, and for not considering our epistemic dependence on other people adequately. In this article, I argue that such criticism is insufficiently substantiated, and that Kant’s idea of public reason is (...) neither at odds with deference to a certain kind of authority, nor with making judgements of character in rational deliberation. This view is corroborated by recent work on Kant’s epistemology of testimony. (shrink)

Political philosophy offers a range of utopian proposals, from open borders to global egalitarianism. Some object that these proposals ought to be constrained by what is feasible, while others insist that what justice demands does not depend on what we can bring about. Currently, this debate is mired in disputes over the fundamental nature of justice and the ultimate purpose of political philosophy. I take a different approach, proposing that we should consider which facts could fill out a feasibility requirement. (...) This search for the facts requires requires looking to the social sciences, but I argue that it turns out that the social sciences will not provide us with findings that rule out, nor even count against, the kinds of proposals that political philosophers actually make, whether ideal or non-ideal. At the least, to deny this requires adopting deeply controversial commitments within the philosophy of social science. Thus, I conclude that a feasibility requirement has little practical use for political philosophers. Disputes over that requirement ought to be replaced by other, more fruitful ways for political philosophers to address both the findings of social science and the debates over non-ideal theory or political realism. (shrink)

The sexual revolution that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s is one of the most profound social changes during the second half of the twentieth century in America. Before the revolution, there existed a norm proscribing premarital sex (PS norm); premarital sex was not accepted. After the sexual revolution, the PS norm no longer existed; premarital sex became accepted. In the literature on how premarital sex became accepted, little attention is given to the institutional change that transpired—the (...) collapse of a sexual norm. This study specifies one micro-mechanism of this social change. Specifically, adopting methodological individualism and the prisoner's dilemma game, I develop a theory that explains how a technological innovation for contraception triggered a change in individuals' perception of premarital sex, which led to their behavioral change. As a result, premarital sex became accepted, and the norm proscribing premarital sex collapsed. I use General Social Survey data to test the hypothesized micro-mechanism of the institutional change. The empirical analysis supports the hypothesis derived from the theory. Based on the above analyses, I discuss two alternative explanations and the issue of teenage pregnancy. (shrink)