Robert Alexy develops his influential theory of legal reasoning exploring the nature of legal argumentation and its relation to practical reasoning. In doing so he sheds light on fundamental questions of law and rationality, which are as crucial to practising lawyers and law students as they are to scholars of legal theory.

A revision of George Kennedy's translation of, introdution to, and commentary on Aristotle's On Rhetoric. His translation is most accurate, his general introduction is the most thorough and insightful, and his brief introductions to sections of the work, along with his explanatory footnotes, are the most useful available.

Robert Alexy develops his influential theory of legal reasoning exploring the nature of legal argumentation and its relation to practical reasoning. In doing so he sheds light on fundamental questions of law and rationality, which are as crucial to practising lawyers and law students as they are to scholars of legal theory.

The famous Montesquieu’s catachresis wherein judges should be no more than the “mouth that pronounces the words of the law” is actually facing a crisis. I. e. Law has lost its unifying principle, its centre wherein its practices could search for foundation and legitimacy. Therefore, as a decentered reality, I believe Law should get a poststructuralist approach, appropriate for a decentered structure. That is why the aim of my research is to link Law to the poststructuralist theoretical reference of the (...) theory of discourse, as developed in the works of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Anyway, as Laclau and Mouffe’s theoretical works are concentrated on the ontological level, I need to link their ontological reflections and Law manifestations on ontic level, the level of judicial practices. For that, I will use the support of the jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin. However, as dworkinian theory is situated in a very different philosophical background, when compared to Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse, it will be necessary to rearrange some features of his jurisprudence to make it fits on a different comprehension of Law and its integrity. Especially considering integrity as hegemonic integrity, understanding the principles of justice as promises of justice and substituting judge Hercules for a new mythological character that, instead of searching one right answer in a seamless web, is herself who seams that web: Judge Penelope. (shrink)

Basic concepts in Habermas's theory of communicative action -- Habermas's "reconstruction" of modern law -- Discourse theory and the theory and practice of adjudication -- System, lifeworld, and Habermas's "communication theory of society" -- After between facts and norms : religion in the public square, multiculturalism, and the "postnational constellation".

In public political deliberation, people will err and lie in accordance with definite patterns. Such discourse failure results from behavior that is both instrumentally and epistemically rational. The deliberative practices of a liberal democracy cannot be improved so as to overcome the tendency for rational citizens to believe and say things at odds with reliable propositions of social science. The theory has several corollaries. One is that much contemporary political philosophy can be seen as an unsuccessful attempt to (...) vindicate, on symbolic and moral grounds, the forms that discourse failure take on in public political deliberation. Another is that deliberative practices cannot be rescued even on non-epistemic grounds, such as social peace, impartiality, participation, and equality. To alleviate discourse failure, this book proposes to reduce the scope of majoritarian politics and enlarge markets. (shrink)

This article will examine some theses that Badiou developed in the first period of his philosophy, when he was close to the theoretical horizon of Althusserianism. The article traces a route back from the Manifesto for Philosophy to some yet unpublished notes, dating from the late Sixties, on an aborted collective project on materialist philosophy. While, according to the later Badiou – who is also the most well-known – contemporary philosophical discourse should recover the Platonic gesture after Heidegger, it (...) will be shown that the early Badiou, by debating the nature of the Platonic gesture with Macherey, seems to conceptualise philosophical discourse and its function under the inseparable link of dialectical materialism and historical materialism. The article ends with some open questions for a possible theory of discourse that would build on Badiou’s theoretical insights. (shrink)

As the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts, Joshua Reynolds played a pivotal role in shaping the course of British art in the 18th century. In these discourses, Reynolds reflects on the nature of art, the role of the artist, and the importance of aesthetic education. With insightful commentary on the works of the Old Masters and a wealth of practical advice for aspiring artists, this volume is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of art or (...) art theory. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A (...) requirement of Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context. (shrink)

Axel Honneth se pregunta si el concepto del reconocimiento puede hacerse cargo de la función que Jürgen Habermas había atribuido al concepto de la comunicación. Con ello se coloca en posición crítica frente a la tradición de pensamiento en la que él mismo se inscribe, la teoría crítica. Cuestiona ante todo el carácter abstracto o formal de la teoría moral que se da en la Ética del Discurso, que remite finalmente a Habermas a Kant. Honneth, por su lado, se apoya (...) en el joven y casi materialista Hegel de Jena y en el behaviorista G. H. Mead, para proponer una teoría de la sociedad, no ajena a lo empírico, que contenga sustancia normativa , equidistante del formalismo de la ética comunicativa y de la materialidad del comunitarismo, superando así las dos tendencias, la universalista y la relativista, con el fin de mediarlas.Axel Honneth asks himself if the concept of recognition can assume the function that Jürgen Habermas had attributed to the concept of communication. Thus he places himself in a critical position regarding the thinking tradition he belonged to-the critic theory. He questions the abstract or formal character of the moral theory of the Ethics of Discourse, which ultimately leads to Habermas and Kant. Honneth, on his side, seeks support in the young and almost materialist Hegel of Jena and in the behaviorist G. H. Mead to propose a theory of society, not altogether unempirical, somehow normative , equidistant from the formalism of communicative ethics and from the materiality of "communitarism", and going beyond both universalism and relativism. (shrink)

The paper addresses the highly controversial subject of the nature of law. It attempts to present a post-modern positivist concept of law that rejects objectivism and the postulation of a unified legal order entirely and merges elements of system and discourse theory.

This article examines two distinct ways in which anticolonial thinkers in early twentieth-century Korea reconstructed their nondemocratic tradition in an attempt to justify (rather than take for granted) the claim of self-determination. The exposure to modern education and ideas of democracy prompted these thinkers to critically engage their tradition in the struggle for self-determination. That said, they could not simply abandon the cultural foundation of their nation. Japanese colonial rule drew its legitimacy from not only an assimilation ideology that the (...) Japanese and Koreans shared the same ethnic origin but also a developmentalist conception of the colonized that they were premodern and incapable of self-rule. To reject imperial domination, Korean anticolonial thinkers needed to invent out of their country’s nondemocratic tradition (1) an unassimilable nation/people (2) capable of self-rule. Drawing upon the political writings of two early twentieth-century thinkers in colonial Korea, Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950) and Cho So-ang (1887–1958), I discover from their political thought two nuanced approaches to this project of inventing “the people” in the colonial world. I argue that while Yi succeeded in rebutting the colonial ideology of assimilation, he fell into the trap of developmentalism. I contend that Cho, on the contrary, sidestepped this trap with his revisionist reading of the Confucian past as a history of democratic transformation, thus providing an immediate alternative to imperial sovereignty. (shrink)

Mediation is an alternative dispute resolution process that is becoming more and more popular particularly in English-speaking countries. In contrast to traditional litigation it has not benefited from technological advances and little research has been carried out to make this increasingly widespread practice more efficient. The study of argumentation in dispute mediation hitherto has largely been concerned with theoretical insights. The development of argumentation theories linked to computational applications opens promising new horizons since computational tools could support mediators, making sessions (...) quicker and more efficient. For this, we need tools for close analysis of mediation discourse in order to explore the argumentative activity in depth, and ultimately get an accurate image of how dialogues unfold in this particular context. This paper therefore aims at laying the foundations of a theory of close analysis for discourse in dispute mediation. Theories provided by the literature serve as a basis for argumentative analyses of transcripts of mediation sessions in order to deliver a clear image of the argumentative structure. Analyses of the argumentative strategies in mediation discourse will allow for the development of a dialogue protocol that can be used to develop operational models which can be embodied in software to help make the mediation process easier and more effective. (shrink)

This article discusses the character of hegemonic subjectification as it is seen by Ernesto Laclau. By explaining the concepts of the constitutive features and form of a hegemonically acquired political identity, such as antagonism, undecidability, overdetermination and decision, I define the social fields and dynamics of subjectification. At the same time, I adopt that such subjectification occurs within the boundaries of the particular –universal, i.e., the ideologically assigned view of identity as totality. Besides, in contrast to Laclau, I juxtapose the (...) dialectically conceived form of the particular–universal relation with its poststructuralist Laclau’s version, and I try to prove that—contrary to Laclau—the idea of hegemony enjoys its vitality thanks to Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics. To determine the points of similarity of the two methods of constructing and deconstructing identity and subjectivity, I reject Elmar Flatschart’s incomparability argument. Lastly, I point out the earlier mentioned points of convergence: on Adorno’s part—the concept of proper names and the concept of constellation; on Laclau’s part—the concept of undecidability and decision which keep discourse ontologically and epistemologically open. (shrink)

Resumen: Heidegger practica un abordaje de la noción de discurso que, por la magnitud de su obra y por el carácter más o menos marginal que esta noción tiene en ese conjunto, no ha merecido todavía un tratamiento sistemático. En esta comunicación intentamos recoger algunos elementos relevantes de esa tematización y enfatizamos la relación que ella manifiesta con su temprana concepción de la significación. Concluimos que la tematización del discurso que Heidegger desarrolla se adelanta en décadas a lo que es (...) hoy la teoría contemporánea del discurso.: Heidegger makes an approach to the notion of discourse which, to de magnitude of his work and the more or less marginal character that this notion has in that group, has not yet deserved systematic treatment. In this communication we try to collect some relevant elements of this thematization and emphasize the relationship that it manifests with its early conception of meaning. We concluded that the discourse thematization that Heidegger develops is decades ahead of what contemporary discourse theory is today. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper I present a defence of the Austinian semantic approach to incomplete quantifiers and similar phenomena (section 2-4). It is part of my defence of Austinian semantics that it incorporates a cognitive dimension (section 4). This cognitive dimension makes it possible to connect Austinian semantics to various cognitive theories of discourse interpretation. In the second part of the paper (sections 5-7), I establish connections between Austinian semantics and four particular theories: • the (...) class='Hi'>theory of reference and modes of presentation in terms of information files (see e.g. Perry 1993), • the theory of discourse interpretation as involving a process of context selection (see Sperber and Wilson 1986), • the theory of informational structure (for a survey, see Lambrecht 1994), • the theory of mental spaces (Fauconnier 1985). (shrink)

In Between Facts and Norms, Jürgen Habermas works out the legal and political implications of his Theory of Communicative Action (1981), bringing to fruition the project announced with his publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962. This new work is a major contribution to recent debates on the rule of law and the possibilities of democracy in postindustrial societies, but it is much more. The introduction by William Rehg succinctly captures the special nature of the (...) work, noting that it offers a sweeping, sociologically informed conceptualization of law and basic rights, a normative account of the rule of law and the constitutional state, an attempt to bridge normative and empirical approaches to democracy, and an account of the social context required for democracy. Finally, the work frames and caps these arguments with a bold proposal for a new paradigm of law that goes beyond the dichotomies that have afflicted modern political theory from its inception and that still underlie current controversies between so-called liberals and civic republicans. The book includes a postscript written in 1994, which restates the argument in light of its initial reception, and two appendixes, which cover key developments that preceded the book. Habermas himself was actively involved in the translation, adapting the text as necessary to make it more accessible to English-speaking readers. (shrink)

The debate that contrasts Marxism and the work of Michel Foucault often overlooks that both projects share a political and ethical commitment. Both have moreover engaged that commitment by challenging what Marx called ‘traditional ideas’, viewing them as historically compilcit with the exercise of power. This ‘radical rupture’ with traditional ideas has been the hallmark of the critical theory project since The Communist Manifesto. By challenging traditional notions of power and language, however, Michel Foucault went further than the Marxist (...) tradition in carrying out the critical theory project. Foucault's alternative ideas of discourse/practice and of power as ‘positive’ are moreover intricately linked in a way that has not been sufficiently appreciated. This is evident in a genealogy of Foucault's early work, where neither notion is able to take hold in the absence of the other. It only after The Archaeology of Knowledge, where Foucault rethought the relationship of language to reality, that he was able to formulate the notion of power as positive in works to come. This link should cause us to rethink our relationship to Foucault's work, of it to Marxism, and of the critical theory project to the power. (shrink)

What is it that we are doing when we make ethical claims and judgments, such as the claim that we morally ought to assist refugees? This dissertation introduces and defends a novel theory of ethical thought and discourse. I begin by identifying the surface features of ethical thought and discourse to be explained, including the realist and cognitivist (i.e. belief-like) appearance of ethical judgments, and the apparent close connection between making a sincere ethical judgment and being motivated (...) to act on it. I examine prominent attempts to explain these features, with a focus on recent ‘hybrid’ theories combining elements of expressivism and cognitivism. Despite their initial promise, I argue that extant hybrid theories are nevertheless committed to problematic semantic, metasemantic, or pragmatic assumptions. I then discuss what I take to be the strongest existing option, ethical neo-expressivism (Bar-On and Chrisman, 2009; Bar-On, Chrisman, and Sias, 2014), and develop it into an explicitly hybrid theory proposing that ethical judgments incorporate both motivationally-charged affective states and moral beliefs. I then supplement this account with a theory of the proper function (following Millikan, 1984) of ethical claims and judgments, arguing that they function simultaneously to track the morally salient features of social situations, and to coordinate our behavior around these features. Finally, I defend one of the cognitivist commitments of the theory – namely, that objective moral knowledge is possible – by applying recent work on the epistemology of fundamental or ‘core’ intellectual commitments (Lynch, 2012; Pritchard, 2016) to the moral realm. (shrink)

1971. Discourse Grammars and the Structure of Mathematical Reasoning II: The Nature of a Correct Theory of Proof and Its Value, Journal of Structural Learning 3, #2, 1–16. REPRINTED 1976. Structural Learning II Issues and Approaches, ed. J. Scandura, Gordon & Breach Science Publishers, New York, MR56#15263. -/- This is the second of a series of three articles dealing with application of linguistics and logic to the study of mathematical reasoning, especially in the setting of a concern for (...) improvement of mathematical education. The present article presupposes the previous one. Herein we develop our ideas of the purposes of a theory of proof and the criterion of success to be applied to such theories. In addition we speculate at length concerning the specific kinds of uses to which a successful theory of proof may be put vis-a-vis improvement of various aspects of mathematical education. The final article will deal with the construction of such a theory. The 1st is the 1971. Discourse Grammars and the Structure of Mathematical Reasoning I: Mathematical Reasoning and Stratification of Language, Journal of Structural Learning 3, #1, 55–74. https://www.academia.edu/s/fb081b1886?source=link . (shrink)

This thesis offers a teleosemantic account of moral discourse and judgment. It develops a number of views about the function and content of moral judgments and the nature of moral discourse based on Ruth Millikan’s theory of intentional content and the functions of intentional attitudes. Non-cognitivists in meta-ethics have argued that moral judgments are more akin to desires and other motivational attitudes than to descriptive beliefs. I argue that teleosemantics allows us to assign descriptive content to motivational (...) attitudes and hence that even if the non-cognitivist is correct, moral judgments can be said to describe the world. Moreover, given further teleosemantic assumptions, this conclusion has consequences that are both surprising and interesting. First of all, while moral judgments have descriptive content, moral statements do not. The purpose of moral discourse is not to convey beliefs that are true simpliciter, but to convey attitudes that are descriptively correct when tokened by the addressee. Consequently, moral discourse requires speakers to adapt to hearers in order to secure their assent and bring them into "community of judgment" with themselves. Secondly, the descriptive content of a motivational attitude is partly a matter of the subject’s own preferences and circumstances. In particular, the descriptive correctness of a moral judgment is partly a function of the degree to which it is shared with others. Since a moral judgment also motivates the subject to spread it, it has the ability to, in a certain sense, make itself true. If regular descriptive beliefs are supposed to adapt the subject to the world, a moral judgment also has the capacity to adapt the world to the subject. (shrink)

This paper argues against two extreme attitudes to the history of a discipline: on the one hand, ignorance and dismissiveness; and on the other hand, canonisation. The ever-present challenge is to find a balance between these two extremes. The paper attempts to walk the middle way by offering an alternative history of theories of law. It does so by revealing the basic characteristics of theories of law that tend towards either the explanatory paradigm of discourse or of tradition. (...) class='Hi'>Discourse -oriented theories tend to give explanatory priority to autonomous systems or orders of already articulated rules or norms. They also tend to conceptualise behaviour from the first person ex ante perspective, and tend to require explicit deliberation, even at the level of social conventions. The political value behind these theories tends to be the imposition of social order from above and the constraint of the power of officials by the rule of law. Tradition-oriented theories tend to give explanatory priority to the long-term activities of persons interacting in certain distinct contexts. They tend to conceptualise behaviour as consisting of embodied, though not completely unreflective, learning, resulting in the formation of certain skills and propensities. They also tend to focus on the transmission of social knowledge via the involvement of persons in certain contexts of interaction. The political value behind these theories is that of responsiveness and attention to the needs of the disadvantaged. The paper does not set out to evaluate the strengths or weaknesses of either explanatory paradigm. Rather, the aim is to offer an alternative history of the discipline of jurisprudence, with the hope that it encourages the construction of other such histories, thereby opening up possibilities for finding new insights in the works of the past. If, as it is argued, the formation of a jurisprudential orientation is at least partly dependent on how a legal theorist understands the history of jurisprudence, then offering alternative ways of seeing that history also carries with it the potential for renewing the discipline. (shrink)

Thanks to Axel Honneth, recognition theory has become a prominent fixture of critical social theory. In recent years, he has deployed his recognition theory in diagnosing pathologies and injustices that afflict institutional practices. Some of these institutional practices revolve around specifically juridical institutions, such as human rights and democratic citizenship, that directly impact the lives of the most desperate migrants. Hence it is worthwhile asking what recognition theory can add to a critical theory of migration. (...) In this paper, I argue that, although its contribution to a critical theory of migration is limited, it nonetheless carves out a unique body of ethical insights related to diagnosing the interpretative and epistemic pathologies and injustices associated with the legal processing of migrants’ claims for asylum. Going beyond discourse ethics, which mainly highlights procedural violations of legislative and judicial deliberation, it trains our gaze on the institutional biases that lead migrants to be misrecognized or under-recognized as credible witnesses to their own refugee status. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative TheoryCarol S. GouldFictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory, by Patrick O’Neill; x & 188 pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994, $35.00 paper.Patrick O’Neill serves up a rich stew of narratology, reader-reception theory, and a postmodern theory of truth. Many narratologists have taken the postmodern turn, while others have pursued a reception-theory route. Either path requires careful (...) navigation, and the combined one even more so. Classical narratology focuses on the textual structure with its network of various narratological relations. Reader-reception theory assigns to the reader a leading role in the creation of the text. O’Neill in various ways challenges or at least reformulates the notions of both text and reader, endorsing as he does a postmodern theory of truth which he terms the “Zeno Principle.” This principle is that “narrative discourse is always potentially subversive of the story it would seem to reconstruct” (p. 7). The Zeno Principle is a version of what he understands to be the Heisenberg Principle, namely that “discourse (including theoretical discourse) at least potentially subverts the story it sets out to narrate, and ultimately itself also” (p. 9). O’Neill contends that his narratological project will support the Zeno Principle. If successful, though, his endeavor will of course meet the usual self-destructive fate of such theories. But its self-annihilation seems not to discourage O’Neill, who finds all theories essentially “ludic.” O’Neill’s undertaking is ambitious; I shall focus on just a few of his moves.First of all, it is no surprise to hear that postmodernism is not new nor even that it has a classical pedigree. But it will probably astound—not to say sadden—the reader to see O’Neill locate its origins in the paradoxes of Zeno—the fifth-century Eleatic, the logician so well known for defending the epistemic primacy of reason, one of the uncontested intellectual progenitors of Plato, who remains the explicit target of Derridean fire. This is not simply a persnickety objection to O’Neill’s terminology, but a reflection on the broad implications he draws from his narratological investigations.Plato, working in the Eleatic (Zenoian) tradition, draws our attention to the perspectival nature of literature and would extend this to all empirical discourse. Any empirical narrative—history, biography, or literature—is in principle illusory because merely perspectival. Plato, true intellectual heir of Zeno, anticipates the narratological enterprise in this respect, while demonstrating [End Page 532] the exclusive epistemic integrity of logical thought. One finds this of course in his Republic, but nowhere are his narratological sympathies more evident than in the Symposium, with its many tiers of narration. He prefigures, then, the modern insight that all narrative is, in Wayne Booth’s terms, rhetoric and in narratological terms, focalized.If we grant with Zeno, Plato, and other friends of rationality that empirical discourse is perspectival or focalized, we can see that narrative must place us in some hypothetical vantage point: from another standpoint, the world looks different and assumes new contours and mood. Once we acknowledge that no one point of view is more privileged than another, our perceptions seem less stable. Lolita, for example, told from the viewpoint of the nymphet herself, would be a different story. Moreover, any narrative must be mediated by narrative perspective, and as O’Neill indicates, the narrative vantage point may not be that of the narrator or implied author. As he puts it, “Voice and vision... [may] derive from separate points of origin” (p. 84).In a sense, then, all empirical discourse is subversive. But does it follow that all theoretical discourse is therefore subversive? O’Neill scrutinizes fictional discourse, and helpfully so for us. But the perspectival nature of literary or empirical narrative hardly suffices to cast doubt on the notion of truth per se. The real Zeno Principle is the Platonic one that however arbitrarily empirical perspective might shift, rational intuition does not. If one wants to challenge that view, one must defend the Protagoras Principle, the true classical articulation of postmodernism. Aristotle, after all, wrestles with this in his Metaphysics rather than in his Poetics.O’Neill... (shrink)

In this article, I revise the normative account of sport that I proposed in ‘William J. Morgan’s “conventionalist internalism” approach. Furthering internalism? A critical hermeneutical response.’ I first present Habermas’ discursive ethics, placing emphasis on his interpretation of the relationship between moral (Kantian) and ethical (Hegelian/hermeneutical) principles. Then, I provide a reformulation of my account by both drawing on Habermas and going beyond him—as I go beyond Habermas, I will refer to the account as ‘discourse-ethics based.’ To further explore (...) the normative potential of the account, I connect its main tenets to the three main normative theories of sport (formalism, broad internalism, and deep conventionalism) and illustrate it with examples from anti-doping governance. (shrink)

Jurgen Habermas is widely regarded as one of the outstanding intellectuals. This title focuses on the theory of law which can be distilled from his vast compendium of work. It places this theory in the context of Habermas' overall contribution to the theory of society, political theory and social philosophy.

In Between Facts and Norms Jürgen Habermas works out the legal and political implications of his Theory of Communicative Action, bringing to fruition the project announced with his publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962. This new work is a major contribution to recent debates on the rule of law and the possibilities of democracy in postindustrial societies, but it is much more.The introduction by William Rehg succinctly captures the special nature of the work, noting (...) that it offers a sweeping, sociologically informed conceptualization of law and basic rights, a normative account of the rule of law and the constitutional state, an attempt to bridge normative and empirical approaches to democracy, and an account of the social context required for democracy. Finally, the work frames and caps these arguments with a bold proposal for a new paradigm of law that goes beyond the dichotomies that have afflicted modern political theory from its inception and that still underlie current controversies between so- called liberals and civic republicans.The book includes a postscript written in 1994, which restates the argument in light of its initial reception, and two appendixes, which cover key developments that preceded the book.Habermas himself was actively involved in the translation, adapting the text as necessary to make it more accessible to English-speaking readers. (shrink)

By focusing on the reasoned debate in the discourse -ethical approach to business ethics, this paper discusses the possibilities and limitations of moral reasoning as well as applied economic and business ethics. Business ethics, it is contended, can be looked at from the standpoint of two criteria: justification and application. These criteria are used to compare three approaches: the Integrative Business Ethics, developed by Swiss philosopher Peter Ulrich, the Cultural Business Ethics of the Nuremberg School in German business ethics, (...) and the concept of “Good Conservation” by Frederick Bird. It is argued that discourse -ethical approaches can be called upon for justifying moral principles. Improving the chances of their application, however, necessitates a good understanding of lifeworlds and culturally developed institutional settings. Bearing this in mind, further research perspectives stressing a linkage between discourse -ethical and critical approaches in social sciences are suggested. (shrink)

The faults of logical empiricist accounts of metascientific discourse are examined through a study of the modifications Carnap makes to his version of the program over four decades. As empiricists acquiesced on the distinction between theory and observation, Carnap attempted to retain and insulate an equally suspect sharp distinction between the theoretic and the pragmatic. Carnap's later philosophy was understood as a modification of the program in the direction of pragmatism. But neither the key notion of "external questions" (...) nor an instrumentalist understanding of "pragmatic utility" are genuinely compatible with pragmatism. This underlines the need to clarify what is unique to pragmatic views of cognitive evaluation and normative discourse as they affect scientific reasoning. I conclude by suggesting how pragmatic conceptions of metascientific discourse can work to correct misconceptions about norm generation and governance that are shared in logicist and historicist accounts. (shrink)