Consumer complaining behavior (CCB) is an important stream of research and practice, as it links the domains of service failure and service recovery. CCB research, although extensive and temporally wide, exhibits a lack of concern for the underlying assumptions of scholarly inquiry. Researchers neither explicitly mention, nor consciously indicate their ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions. We systematically identify the extant CCB literature and map it to two well-accepted paradigmatic classifications (Burrell and Morgan 1979; Deetz Organization Science 7(2): 191–207, (...) 1996). Normative or functionalist paradigm with the assumptions of an objective external reality, a positivist epistemology, a determinist view of human nature, and nomothetic methodology emerges as the dominant CCB research paradigm. The implications of this dominance are discussed as a barometer of the future of CCB research and practice. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: European Positivism Latin American Positivism Martí Rodó Vaz Ferreira Ingenieros References Further Reading.

The rapidly changing field of genetics affects society through advances in health-care and through implications of genetic research. This study addresses the impacts of new genetic discoveries and technologies on different segments of today's society. The book begins with a chapter on genetic complexity, and subsequent chapters discuss moral and ethical questions arising from today's genetics from the perspectives of health care professionals, the media, the general public, special interest groups and commercial interests.

Adolescent mothers experience poorer sleep than adult mothers, and Latina adolescent mothers are at greater risk of postpartum depression compared with other racial/ethnic groups. However, social support may be protective against the negative effects of poor sleep in this population. The current study examined associations between the quality and quantity of Latina adolescent mothers’ sleep and mental health, and whether social support buffered the effects of poor sleep on mental health. A sample of Latina adolescent mothers from an (...) agricultural region in the United States reported on their sleep duration/quality, social support from family, friends, and significant others, and their depressive and anxiety symptoms. Results showed that adolescent mothers reported poorer sleep than pediatric recommendations, and poorer sleep quality was associated with greater depressive and anxiety symptoms. Interestingly, when adolescent mothers reported better sleep, they had fewer depressive symptoms in the context of high support from friends compared with low support from friends. Sleep is important for mental health in Latina adolescent mothers, and better sleep combined with strong social support has positive associations with mental health in this population. Findings hold implications for improving mental health in adolescent mothers. (shrink)

We address how the leaders of a Catholic business school can articulate and assess how well their schools implement the following six principles drawn from Catholic social teaching : produce goods and services that are authentically good; foster solidarity with the poor by serving deprived and marginalized populations; advance the dignity of human work as a calling; exercise subsidiarity; promote responsible stewardship over resources; and acquire and allocate resources justly. We first discuss how the CST principles give substantive content (...) and meaning to the Good Goods, Good Work, and Good Wealth framework in The Vocation of the Business Leader and then discuss their congruencies and tensions with the UNGC and UNPRME principles. Next, we describe the Catholic Identity Matrix, an assessment tool that provides a quantitative and qualitative portrait of how well a Catholic business school integrates, within the scope of its mission and capacities, the three goods and related CST principles in its strategies, policies, activities, and processes. The concluding section discusses implications for ongoing UNGC and UNPRME assessment, reporting, and development efforts, and addresses the generalizability of our approach to business schools who draw their inspiration and moral principles from other faith-based or secular traditions. (shrink)

A picture has indeed held modern Western philosophy captive, that of the universe as a vast machine whose iron laws are best understood as exceptionless empirical regularities which, as it were, determine the future before it happens. This fantastic conception commands the assent, not just of positivistically-minded naturalists but of all the great anti-naturalists who champion a very different view of human action as a domain of freedom ¿that somehow cheats science¿. The most fundamental move in Roy Bhaskar¿s system of (...) philosophy, the germ of everything that followed, was to reconceptualise the natural world in transcendental realist terms, ¿turning Kant around using his own method¿. On this account, the universe is characterized by deep structures, mechanisms and fields that generate the flux of phenomena, and is in open, creative and emergent process. This completely recasts the terms of the debate between naturalism and anti-naturalism by remedying its false grounds and shows how philosophy can be liberated from its anthropocentric/anthropomorphic prison and rendered consistent with the best insights of modern natural science. There is necessity in nature quite independent of humans, but in an open world causation is multiple and conjunctural, the actual course of the unfolding of being is highly contingent and the bases of human freedom can be understood scientifically. Written as a DPhil thesis when Bhaskar was in his mid-twenties, Empiricism and the Metatheory of the Social Sciences brilliantly launches this reconceptualisation and explores its implications for social science in the course of carrying through the metatheoretical destruction of empiricism. It will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in the development of Bhaskar¿s thought, in transcendental realism, and in the critique of empiricism, more generally of the philosophical discourse of Western modernity. (shrink)

Contempt is typically studied as a uniquely human moral emotion. However, this approach has yielded inconclusive results. We argue this is because the folk affect concept “contempt” has been inaccurately mapped onto basic affect systems. “Contempt” has features that are inconsistent with a basic emotion, especially its protracted duration and frequently cold phenomenology. Yet other features are inconsistent with a basic attitude. Nonetheless, the features of “contempt” functionally cohere. To account for this, we revive and reconfigure thesentimentconstruct using the notion (...) of evolved functional specialization. We develop the Attitude–Scenario–Emotion model of sentiments, in which enduring attitudes represent others' social-relational value and moderate discrete emotions across scenarios. Sentiments are functional networks of attitudes and emotions. Distinct sentiments, includinglove,respect,like,hate, andfear, track distinct relational affordances, and each is emotionally pluripotent, thereby serving both bookkeeping and commitment functions within relationships. The sentimentcontemptis an absence ofrespect; from cues to others' low efficacy, it represents them as worthless and small, mutingcompassion,guilt, andshameand potentiatinganger,disgust, andmirth. This sentiment is ancient yet implicated in the ratcheting evolution of human ultrasocialty. The manifolds of thecontemptnetwork, differentially engaged across individuals and populations, explain the features of “contempt,” its translatability, and its variable experience as “hot” or “cold,” occurrent or enduring, and anger-like or disgust-like. This rapprochement between psychological anthropology and evolutionary psychology contributes both methodological and empirical insights, with broad implications for understanding the functional and cultural organization of social affect. (shrink)

Following in the wake of a certain epistemological and analytical crisis in positivism (its methodology is mercifully in good shape), a revival in the popularity and `scientific' legitimacy of various `comprehensive' analytical approaches in the social sciences has been witnessed over the last ten years. However, by insisting on the significant subjective dimension of action, these interpretive approaches have brought the problem of normativity inherent in the research object, as well as the problem of the `ideological' implication of (...) the human sciences, back into the centre of epistemological preoccupations. The question now is to know to what extent the so-called human sciences are prepared to accept, from a theoretical point of view, this dual objective and subjective dimension of their cognitive practice, seen in critical relationship with society. It is also a question as to whether the human sciences have at their disposal an adequate model for recognizing this normative dimension in its ontological and epistemological specificity. This article sets out to outline just such a model from a philosophical point of view in order to identify some main ideas relating to a pedagogical reorientation, introspective rather than dogmatic, of the normative task which has fallen to the human sciences in contemporary society. (shrink)

This article offers a conceptual analysis of the implications of the sociology of emotions for the restoration of social order in failing states. The authors mainly draw on ritual theories of emotions, but also use insights from dramaturgical, power and status, and exchange theories. It is argued that social order emerges from interactions among human individuals developing and internalizing emotional beliefs about their place within a wider social environment in the form of a social contract. (...) Examples from states such as Afghanistan and Somalia illustrate the authors’ thesis that macro-level restoration of order is possible through change agents’ efforts at restoration of emotion-generating interaction ritual chains. (shrink)

Risk has become one of the main topics in fields as diverse as engineering, medicine and economics, and it is also studied by social scientists, psychologists and legal scholars. But the topic of risk also leads to more fundamental questions such as: What is risk? What can decision theory contribute to the analysis of risk? What does the human perception of risk mean for society? How should we judge whether a risk is morally acceptable or not? Over the (...) last couple of decades questions like these have attracted interest from philosophers and other scholars into risk theory. This handbook provides for an overview into key topics in a major new field of research. It addresses a wide range of topics, ranging from decision theory, risk perception to ethics and social implications of risk, and it also addresses specific case studies. It aims to promote communication and information among all those who are interested in theoetical issues concerning risk and uncertainty. This handbook brings together internationally leading philosophers and scholars from other disciplines who work on risk theory. The contributions are accessibly written and highly relevant to issues that are studied by risk scholars. We hope that the Handbook of Risk Theory will be a helpful starting point for all risk scholars who are interested in broadening and deepening their current perspectives. (shrink)

Economics is often believed to be a `value-free' discipline, and even an `a-moral' one. My aim is to demonstrate that homo œconomicus can recover his ethical nature if the philosophical roots of contemporary economics are laid bare. This, however, requires us to look for an alternative foundation for the idea of `social order,' a foundation which economics is ill-equipped to provide because of its exclusive focus on calculative rationality. But a new ethical perspective on homo œconomicus and on the (...) manner in which he chooses his actions is possible. My aim here is to make this new perspective explicit.Two claims lie at the heart of this paper. The first claim is that economics as practised nowadays — that is, as a discipline concerned with the analysis of the interactions between individual decisions and the collective effects of these interactions — is a particular form of metaphysics, based on a particular articulation between self-centredness and other-centredness. The second claim is that, unbeknownst to the vast majority of economists, the basic principle of individual optimization contains the seed of a radical reformulation of what the emergence of `social order' is all about. More specifically, economics will be claimed to be a specific metaphysical discipline based on the monadological worldview inherited from Leibniz and re-arranged to fit the empiricist bias of 18th-century thinkers, and the principle of individual optimization will be claimed to be compatible with a very different metaphysical view of the human subject, a view which `turns subjectivity inside out', so to speak, and treats optimizing calculation as a response rather than as an initiative.The first claim is rather general, and not completely new — it has been hinted at, for example, by Jon Elster in an early book written in French, but it has received precious little attention among economists so far, with the result that economics has become increasingly blind to the philosophical roots of its most fundamental views on individual decision and on social order. The second claim applies to economics and homo œconomicus a general suggestion coming from Alain Renaut, that we ought to make good use of the accusations of incoherence voiced against the monadological scheme in order to re-think the way in which human subjectivity works. Renaut, however, remains at the level of the history of the philosophical concept of subjectivity. Although he does, in passing, make some mention of possible implications for the social sciences, he never goes into the full analysis of what the critique of monadological metaphysics implies for modern theories of society, and for economics in particular. One of my main goals here is to fill this gap.Let me now be more specific about the steps of my analysis. Defending my two claims will require, first of all, a rigorous understanding of the basic methodological stance adopted by economics, namely the idea that social order `emanates' from a bunch of self-centred subjectivities making separate optimizing decisions. Accordingly, in Section 2, I will trace out the analogy that exists between Leibnizian monadology and modern-day economics. The aim there will be to show that economics, unwittingly but for nevertheless deep ethical reasons, has remained `stuck' in a very specific metaphysical position which virtually no contemporary philosophy of subjectivity any longer acknowledges. Section 3, then, will show how the combination of monadology and empiricism which still prevails in contemporary economics can be overcome by entering an altogether distinct philosophical domain characterized by the primacy of Other over Self.While this alternative philosophical stance has experienced a surge of interest in recent decades, it has left the social sciences, and particularly economics, completely untouched. The reason is, I will claim, that this strand of philosophy adopts a form of methodological altruism which stands in contrast both to the methodological individualism of economics and to the methodological holism of various strands of post-Durkheimian sociology. In Section 4, then, I analyze some of the far-reaching consequences for economics which would flow from taking into account `non-I' motives which are not `We' motives, i.e., motives for action which are neither mere holist pastings onto individualism nor mere individualist mitigations of holism.The principle of choice of action through individual optimization will appear as the `hinge' between two worlds: although initially anchored within a worldview where social coexistence is a by-product of individual calculations, the idea of optimization will be seen to be compatible with a very different, and indeed almost reversed worldview, one where individual calculations emerge as by-products of social coexistence — the term `social' being itself radically re-thought in a non-holistic direction.The aim of my analysis, ultimately, is to formulate a challenge for contemporary economics and its implicit view of the interaction between individual and society: Can the combination of monadological and empiricist thinking so strongly ingrained in economics be overcome in the direction of a radically `other-oriented' view of the human subject? Many economists will doubtless believe it cannot; however, they will now, at least, have to explain why they hold to the older view and hence they will have to uncover their often hidden ethical and metaphysical presuppositions. I view this not as an undue disturbance or as mere conceptual hair-splitting, but as a timely opportunity to clarify some deep philosophical issues which haunt economics. (shrink)

A lively exchange sparked by Ortmann and Hertwig's call to outlaw deception in psychological research was intensified by underlying differences in the meaning of deception. The conception held by Broder, who defended deception, would restrict research more than Ortmann and Hertwig's conception. Historically, a similar difference in conceptions has been embedded in the controversy over deception in research. The distinction between informational and relational views of deception elucidates this difference. In an informational view, giving false information, allowing false assumptions, (...) and withholding information are deceptive. In a relational view these failures to inform are not necessarily deceptive. Rather, relational criteria, including denial of right to the truth, betrayal of trust, and impairment of commerce with reality finally determine what is deceptive. Analyses reveal that fewer research procedures are deceptive on a relational view than on an informational view. Surveys of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology correspondingly show that a lower percentage of studies are deceptive on the relational view applied in this analysis than on the informational view applied by Sieber, Iannuzzo, and Rodriguez. If restrictions on deception keep increasing, more studies will be vetoed on the currently salient informational view than would be vetoed on a relational view. (shrink)

The Critical Theory of the early Frankfurt School promised, in Adorno’s words, a ‘rational critique of reason’. Science and Technology Studies can play a role in the renewal of this approach. STS is based on a critique of the very same technocratic and scientistic assumptions against which Critical Theory argues. Its critique of positivism and determinism has political implications. But at its origins STS took what Wiebe Bijker called the ‘detour into the academy’ in order to institutionalize (...) itself as a social science. It adopted empirical methods, developed case histories, and limited its scope, avoiding politically controversial issues. Its latent political critique has become explicit in recent years as STS has responded to the rise of technical politics by broadening its concerns. Its wide scope converges with the equally encompassing Critical Theory. Together, STS and Critical Theory offer a new concept of politics. (shrink)

The impending implementation of pre-exposure prophylaxis has prompted complicated bioethical and public health ethics concerns regarding the moral distribution of antiretroviral medications to ostensibly healthy populations as a form of HIV prevention when millions of HIV-positive people still lack access to ARVs globally. This manuscript argues that these questions are, in part, concerns over the ethics of the knowledge production practices of epidemiology. Questions of distribution, and their attendant cost-benefit calculations, will rely on a number of presupposed, and therefore, normatively (...) cultural assumptions within the science of epidemiology specifically regarding the ability of epidemiologic surveillance to produce accurate maps of HIV throughout national populations. Specifically, ethical questions around PrEP will focus on who should receive ARVs given the fact that global demand will far exceed supply. Given that sexual transmission is one of the main modes of HIV transmission, these questions of ‘who’ are inextricably linked to knowledge about sexual personhood. As a result, the ethics of epidemiology, and how the epidemiology of HIV in particular conceives, classifies and constructs sexual populations will become a critical point of reflection and contestation for bioethicists, health activists, physicians, nurses, and researchers in the multi-disciplinary field of global health. This paper examines how cultural conundrums within the fields of bioethics and public health ethics are directly implicated within the ethics of PrEP, by analyzing the problems of population inaugurated by the construction of the men who have sex with men epidemiologic category in the specific national context of South Africa. (shrink)

The law within each legal system is a function of the practices of some social group. In short, law is a kind of socially grounded norm. H.L.A Hart famously developed this view in his book, The Concept of Law, by arguing that law derives from a social rule, the so-called “rule of recognition.” But the proposition that social facts play a foundational role in producing law is a point of consensus for all modern jurisprudents in the Anglo-American (...) tradition: not just Hart and his followers in the positivist school, most prominently Joseph Raz and Jules Coleman, but also the anti-positivist Ronald Dworkin, who argues that law necessarily synthesizes moral considerations with social facts. But which group’s practices ground each legal system? In particular, which group’s practices undergird U.S. law? Positivists since Hart have universally pointed to either officials or judges as the “recognitional community” (my term): the group such that its rules, conventions, cooperative activities, or practices in some other sense are the social facts from which the law of a given legal system derives. So Hart and all other positivists would identify either U.S. officials or U.S. judges as the recognitional community for U.S. law. This Article grapples with the tension between the positivist’s official- or judge-centered account of the recognitional community and the “popular constitutionalism” now so widely defended by constitutional scholars such as Larry Kramer, Robert Post, Reva Siegel, Mark Tushnet, Jeremy Waldron, and many others. Surely the popular constitutionalist would want to claim that U.S. citizens, not judges or officials, are the recognitional community for U.S. law. I term this position “deep popular constitutionalism.” Indeed, it turns out that Dworkin’s account of law, in its ambition to generate associative moral obligations for the citizenry as a whole, implies deep popular constitutionalism. Here there is a disagreement, hitherto unnoticed, between Dworkin and the positivists. My solution to this disagreement – to the debate between deep popular constitutionalists and deep official or judicial supremacists -- is to dissolve it by providing a group-relative account of law. Social norms, such as norms of dress or eating, are clearly group-relative. A particular dressing or eating behavior may be socially appropriate relative to one group’s norms, yet socially inappropriate relative to another’s. This Article extends the group-relative view from social norms to law itself, with a particular focus on U.S. law and constitutionalism. Part I surveys the jurisprudential literature. It shows how Hart and successor positivists identify the rule of recognition as a social practice engaged in by officials or some subset of officials (judges), rather than citizens generally, and argues that Dworkin by contrast sees the citizenry as a whole as his recognitional community. Parts II and III defend a group-relative account of law. Part II argues, with reference to the U.S. experience, that multiple groups can simultaneously instantiate the kind of social fact that undergirds law, be it a convention, a social norm, a “shared cooperative activity” (SCA), or something else. At many points in U.S. constitutional history, multiple official or citizen groups, defined along departmental, partisan, regional, state-federal, religious, or other lines, have accepted competing rules of recognition for U.S. law. Part III argues that “law” functions, primarily, as either an explanatory or a normative construct, and that insisting on a single recognitional community for each legal system would be arbitrary, both for explanatory purposes and for normative purposes. Part IV considers the many implications of the group-relative account for U.S. constitutional theory – in particular, for popular constitutionalism. (shrink)

Researchers distinguish two approaches that are paradigmatic for the cluster of social theories: positivist and interpretivist. We have outlined the problematic core that contains the main differences between positivist and interpretivist sociology. In our opinion, the opposition between positivist and interpretive sociology is indicative of social theory, and we have shown the dual nature of social reality. We refuted the classification of social theories into nominalist and realist, showing that such a division does not reveal (...) the dual nature of social reality. The difference between interpretivism and positivism is that positivist sociology focuses on the study of social systems as an independent reality, while interpretive social theory thematises social reality as a socio-cultural universe, and from this perspective raises the question of social institutions. (shrink)

Through the application of Material Engagement Theory to enactivist analyses of social cognition, this paper seeks to examine the role of material culture in shaping the development of intersubjectivity and long-term scalar transformations in social interaction. The deep history of human sociality reveals a capacity for communities to self-organise at radically emergent scales across a variety of temporal and spatial ranges. This ability to generate and participate in heterogenous, multiscalar relationships and identities demonstrates the developmental plasticity of (...) human intersubjectivity. Perhaps human sociality’s most unique feature is this intersubjective plasticity, that is, the ability for diverse collectivities of individuals and groups to adopt and transition between numerous social identities and behaviours with profound rapidity and flexibility. However, the most influential models in the study of social cognition, the Social Intelligence Hypothesis and Theory of Mind, promote a view of intersubjectivity that is rooted in methodological individualism and primarily understood as a capacity for observation and prediction. This approach leads to significant issues when confronted with the diversity and plasticity of hominin social organisation, particularly in regards to the computational burdens and information processing bottlenecks such scalar changes imply for cognitivist models. This paper examines the metaphysical assumptions in computational models of the mind that result in representational apriorism and an epiphenomenal treatment of material culture that hinder our understanding of the evolution and development of social cognition. Specifically, this article critiques the logics of computation, information processing, representationalism, and content within Neo-Darwinian frameworks that obscure and distort the interrelationships of evolutionary, developmental, ecological and cultural processes. Through a synthesis of material engagement and enactivist approaches to social cognition, this article argues that it is possible to explain the emergent and multiscalar dynamics of hominin sociality in terms of ecologically distributed and developmentally plastic interactions between brains, bodies and material culture. (shrink)

I aim to analyze in this dissertation what a desirable basic institutional structure looks like from the perspective of rationality. While the main topic is thus normative in nature, I start by clarifying in the first part what the notion of rationality exactly entails. I do so by focusing explicitly on the economic conception of rationality, according to which a rational individual is motivated to serve his self-interest on the basis of cost-benefit calculations. Such a Homo Economicus is characterized (...) by his intentional and instrumental actions, his perfectly informed beliefs and his exogenously given and egoistic preferences. In my view, however, this model is inadequate if one aims to understand what it means to be rational. The requirements that actions should be instrumental, beliefs should be based on perfect information and preferences should be exogenously given and egoistic in nature turn out to be overly demanding in this respect. That is why I propose to drop these assumptions in what I label the minimal conception of rationality. Since the latter turns out to be very formal indeed, I propose two further alternatives, which focus not so much on the choice of means to achieve certain goals, as they focus on the choice of these goals themselves. According to the first, broad conception, actions are rational if they are based on good reasons, which are further qualified as well-informed beliefs and autonomous preferences. According to the second, expressive conception, actions, beliefs and preferences are rational if they express the things the individual at hand cares about. The latter requires that individuals can reflect upon and identify with their reasons, which implies a capacity to reflect upon and distance themselves from their own bundle of preferences. In the second part of this dissertation, I try to show the value and limitations of these conceptions by applying them to the context of large-scaled elections. In this respect, it becomes immediately clear that the economic conception fails to explain why quite a lot of people go out and vote. After all, since a single vote has only an infinitesimal impact on the electoral result, it does not enable people to serve their interests or realize their goals. This leads to the so-called voting paradox, according to which no rational individual will decide to vote. The standard solution is to assume that individuals vote because they derive satisfaction from the very act itself. However, this strategy is rather ‘ad hoc’ and does not explain how people vote once they find themselves inside the voting booth. The expressive conception of rationality does better in this respect. It suggests that people vote because they care about democracy in general or about a specific political candidate or ideology. Since they conceive of themselves as being a good citizen, they express this aspect of their identity by going out to vote. In the third part of this dissertation, I analyze more fully the normative implications of the different conceptions of rationality. More specifically, I try to answer the question which basic institutional structure is desirable if one assumes that people are by and large rational. This immediately shows that both the normative issue and the explanatory issue are closely connected. In my view, proposals regarding institutional design and reform should be based on empirically adequate models of individual actions and motivations. This search for a realistic utopia goes against the conventional strategy of most economists. They rely on the Homo Economicus model, even if this fails to explain individual behavior. To explain more fully what the normative implications are of the counterfactual assumption that all people are economically rational, I focus on the work of James Buchanan. In his theory of constitutional choice, he argues in favor of a minimal state whose only task is to make sure that the market functions properly. Buchanan thus favors strict constitutional limitations for governments, which tend to expand beyond legitimate borders as soon as politicians and public servants are allowed to serve their own interests. In my view, however, the abovementioned criticisms of the Homo Economicus model have theoretical as well as normative implications. After all, the empirically supported fact that a majority of individuals does not act in economically rational ways creates more room for legitimate government intervention. Expressively rational citizens will, for example, more easily agree on the necessity and desirability of a collective provision of certain public goods. In addition, expressively rational politicians and public servants can be more easily trusted to serve the public interest rather than their narrowly defined self-interest. As an alternative to Buchanan’s one-sided focus on economic rationality and the market, I focus on the work of Samuel Bowles en Herbert Gintis. More specifically, I explore their work on the phenomenon of strong reciprocity, which refers to the widespread tendency of people to reward prosocial behavior and punish antisocial behavior, even if this is costly for themselves. Since this is clearly economically irrational, Bowles and Gintis propose to complement the Homo Economicus model with the Homo Reciprocans model. This model, which comes close to the expressive conception of rationality, is able to incorporate the insight that social norms surrounding reciprocity, cooperation and fairness are crucial in regulating interactions. At the normative level, Bowles and Gintis stress that such norms often lead to socially desirable outcomes, since they enable people to live in harmony without relying on coercive and costly government interventions. This suggests that the debate between proponents of the market on the one hand and the state on the other hand neglects the importance of communities where people spontaneously interact on the basis of generally prosocial norms. As such, the insights of Bowles and Gintis lead to a defense of a basic institutional structure in which markets, states and communities mutually complement and reinforce each other. They also justify a general optimism as regards to the capacity and motivation of people to try and improve the rules and institutions that govern their everyday lives. (shrink)

Independent philosopher Lee (recently of the U. of Manchester) attends to the deeper implications of ecologically insensitive technology beyond its polluting effects. Contrasting modern with premodern worldviews provides the context for exploring how new sciences like biotechnology require an expanded environmental ethos encompassing both the biotic and the abiotic. The author considers misconceived the notions of nature as either a work of art or a mere social construct per some postmodern thinking. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, (...) OR. (shrink)

The need for urgent, structural transformations to dominant food systems is increasingly recognized in research and policy. The direction these transformations take is in great part influenced by how the problem is framed and what future pathways become seen as plausible and desirable. Scientific knowledge and the organizations producing it hold considerable authority in suggesting what alternatives are or are not worth pursuing, ultimately shaping frames and in turn being shaped by them. This paper examines Brazil’s federal Agricultural Research Corporation (...) (Embrapa), a major contributor to technological advances that made Brazil into an agricultural powerhouse. We examine the ways in which Embrapa’s leadership has framed sustainable agriculture in its public communication and the wider implications for food systems transformation. Drawing from Embrapa news articles in the period 2015–2020, we identify four interrelated frames forming Embrapa’s prevalent position on sustainability. Our results show that while Embrapa promotes practices based on alternative approaches such as agroecology, its deeper framing often reflects the core assumptions driving dominant industrial food systems. This framing reinforces underlying logics of control, efficiency, and competition aligned with the productivist paradigm and excludes divergent perspectives that exist within the organization. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore and question the potential of John Rawls’s theory of social justice as a tool for building a critical theory of society. My claim will be that Rawls’s approach to social theory cannot provide such a tool; as it will turn out, it faces very deep problems when faced with the task becoming a critical theory of society. Such problems originate mainly in the cognitive and epistemic structure of the “original (...) position”. This, I believe, is bound to pose problems in the future for those of us who seek to make a politically radical use of the legacy of Rawlsian theory (see, e.g., Van Parijs, 1995 or Callinicos, 2000). By a critical theory of society, I mean a theory which aims not at describing the social world “as it is” in order to explain or understand it, but at describing the social world in such a way that the description itself triggers forces for social change within the social world being described. This is, indeed, the meaning of “critical”: to describe a state of affairs in such a way as to throw it into crisis by that very.. (shrink)

Social network analysis (SNA) is an increasingly popular approach that provides researchers with highly developed tools to map and analyze complexes of social relations. Although a number of network scholars have explicated the assumptions that underpin SNA, the approach has yet to be discussed in relation to established philosophies of science. This article argues that there is a tension between applied and methods-oriented SNA studies, on the one hand, and those addressing the social-theoretical nature and (...) class='Hi'>implications of networks, on the other. The former, in many cases, exhibits positivist tendencies, whereas the latter incorporate a number of assumptions that are directly compatible with core critical realist views on the nature of social reality and knowledge. This article suggests that SNA may be detached from positivist social science and come to constitute a valuable instrument in the critical realist toolbox. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to explore Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of social science. To this end, the paper sheds light on the main epistemological presuppositions that undergird Bourdieu’s defence of reflexive sociology as a scientific endeavour. The predominant view in the literature is that, in most of his writings,Bourdieu has a tendency to embrace a positivist conception of social science. When examining Bourdieu’s conception of social science in more detail, however, it becomes clear (...) that the assumption that he remains trapped in a positivist paradigm does not do justice to the complexity of his multifaceted account of social science. In order to illustrate the complexity of Bourdieu’s conception of social science, the following analysis scrutinises ten epistemological tensions which can be found in Bourdieu’s writings on the nature of knowledge production. In view of these epistemological tensions, a more fine-grained picture emerges which demonstrates that Bourdieu invites,and indeed compels, us to reflect upon the complexity of the various tension-laden tasks posed by the pursuit of a critical social science. (shrink)

The study of social, ethical, and political issues from a naturalistic perspective has been pervasive in social sciences and the humanities in the last decades. This articulation of empirical research with philosophical and normative reflection is increasingly getting attention in academic circles and the public spheres, given the prevalence of urgent needs and challenges that society is facing on a global scale. The contemporary world is full of challenges or what some philosophers have called ‘existential risks’ to humanity. (...) Nuclear wars, natural and/or engineered pandemics, climate change, global totalitarianism, and emergent technologies, are some of the challenges mentioned by many authors devoted to the study of long-term potential risks for the survival of the human species. However, while there are many reasons to be a pessimist about the future of humanity, there is also a lot of ink wasted in showing that the world today is far better than we had in the past and also that there have been many instances of social and moral progress in the last centuries. Some authors have even claimed that “we have made more progress over the last 100 years than in the first 100,000”. According to ‘our world in data’, some of the most relevant advances of humanity in the last centuries have to do with the reduction of poverty and/or inequality, better health and security, the decline of violence and war, and the development of democracy and institutional mechanisms to guarantee individual freedom and rights. Yet, there is a more concrete concern that our world faces nowadays, and requires a particularly detailed analysis. In a few words, the advance in information and communication technologies, the huge volume of people migration because of prevalent instances of global inequality, and the reality of an interconnected world that just mirrors an extensive history of massive human intergroup relations open the question about the feasibility of social and moral progress in the contexts of diverse, multicultural, and unequal societies. This makes it crucial to reflect not only on whether human societies may keep advancing on a path of social progress, but how this can be achieved by addressing the challenges of inequality and potential intergroup conflict. This concern closely relates to the further consolidation of democratic values and the achievement of a more generalized consideration of the equal moral value of human individuals far from group, ethnic, or collective distinctions. This vision of progress follows the moral convictions that have been considered right and worthy to be pursued by most ethical theories explored by philosophers and social scientists so far. This work aims to contribute to the study of the mechanisms and feasibility of social and moral progress grounded on the precept of human equality and is guided by the idea that social and moral progress in a plural world requires the accomplishment of a more democratic and tolerant society. These forms of progress have already been defined by philosophers Allen Buchanan and Russel Powell as inclusivist forms of moral progress. According to these authors, inclusivist moral progress is featured by the transformation of moral judgments, motivations, and norms guided by the rejection of “group-based restrictions on moral standing and moral status” (2018). The work of Buchanan and Powell is fundamental for the argumentation developed in this work since they have pioneered a more complex debate in the field of evolutionary social sciences and philosophical anthropology. In brief, these authors have inquired how human nature, conceptualized by the advances in evolutionary thinking and the empirical sciences, is related to our moral convictions and the possibilities that we have to establish certain forms of social and moral progress. The work of Buchanan and Powell contributes to the debate on moral progress by incorporating empirically-informed concepts and arguments. With this objective in mind, they develop their discussion around a generalized tension between exclusivist and inclusivist forms of moral progress. This tension revolves around the question of whether and to what extent human moral concerns, motivations, and norms, are limited or bounded by social identities, group thinking, or collective values. This question is at the center of this work. In other words, I aim to answer whether and to what extent the nature of our social and moral cognition hinders or enables the development of inclusivist forms of morality and moral progress. As I mentioned so far, the distinction between exclusivist and inclusivist forms of morality has a practical implication and facilitates the reflection on the mechanisms and feasibility of concrete forms of progress based on the precept of human equality, which is the road to progress that we should follow according to most ethical theories. The distinction between exclusivist and inclusivist morality is not used here as a form of summarizing highly divergent descriptive approaches to morality, but as a way to address the practical implications of morality research, particularly around the question of the feasibility of social forms of progress based on the precept of equality and tolerance. My objective then has less to do with offering a conceptualization of human morality or with the proposition of a new ethical perspective. Instead, I aim to identify, from an empirically informed perspective, what enables the achievement of egalitarian forms of social progress, to subsequently offer a normative reflection about what we should do if we want to accomplish such inclusivist forms of progress. This task is of great relevance, having in mind that some theoretical proposals on the matter have claimed that human prosocial behavior and morality are constrained by exclusivist fixed tendencies as a product of our evolutionary history. According to these views, human morality is a group-centered cognitive and behavioral expression that has severe limits in its scope and extent, which hinders in the end the emergence of inclusivist forms of moral concerns and behaviors. These claims align with the philosophical intuition about the ‘dissociation of empathy’, or the fact that human individuals tend to express empathy and sympathy preferably for members of their group whereas their empathic and moral concern and recognition for outgroup individuals tend to be reduced or eliminated in real-life social interactions. Multiple theorists have expressed, however, that these assumptions are wrong for empirical and philosophical reasons, which results in a serious challenge to the conception of human morality as exclusivist by nature. Furthermore, simple intuition and practical experience constantly show us that human individuals can develop and endorse a broad spectrum of moral considerations and adopt an arguably inclusivist stance concerning the kind of persons or agents that deserve moral concern. Moreover, and adopting a historical perspective, the expansion of cultural and commercial exchanges, the consolidation of democracy, the development of welfare states, or the emergence of institutions based on the concept of universal human rights, have partially driven human progress based on the impartial concern for the well-being of persons. These historical instances of cultural evolution and institutional design have shown that it is feasible to promote behaviors and attitudes grounded in impersonal prosocial and inclusivist principles. This optimistic perspective, however, still begs the question of the exact relationship between social, cultural, and historical contexts, and the emergence of certain behavioral expressions of inclusivist morality. This is crucial since a great number of human individuals around the world still do not make part of these instances of social progress, and some authors have suggested that such instances of social and moral progress are particularly favored by the contexts of the WEIRD world, that is the world of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. Some of these approaches consider moral inclusivity a ‘luxury good’ and follow the ‘dependency thesis’ according to which the expression of moral inclusivity depends on the presence of very concrete material conditions that trigger inclusivist and impersonal prosocial tendencies that human beings are not able to express in threatening contexts without physical security. This thesis is problematic for various reasons and has led to incomplete explanations about the enabling and causal factors of inclusivist moral progress, as well as unsatisfactory suggestions about what we should do to foster the accomplishment of more generalized instances of progress based on inclusivist concerns. In an attempt to contribute to this debate, the main objective of this thesis is to offer an alternative proposal about the nature of human morality and a more detailed reflection on what we should do if we want to further accomplish such instances of progress. More precisely, this work adopts a particular developmental and constructivist vision of human morality to answer the question of how feasible it is to reach generalized forms of social progress based on the precepts of moral inclusivity. Furthermore, it offers some ideas about what are the most adequate and favorable conditions to foster such progress both at the individual and the collective level. At this point, a preliminary clarification of some starting points is necessary. In the first place, and contrary to what other authors have proposed when debating moral progress from an empirically-based approach, my perspective adopts a radical developmental and constructivist perspective, following particularly the conceptual and empirical ideas of the social-domain theory in moral psychology. From this perspective, morality is a domain of normative and social knowledge that develops and emerges in human interactions. Moral concerns, judgments, and norms are not only the result of the expression of innate adaptive intuitions, nor the product of social conformity and a simple process of mirroring the normativity that communities have established to organize their social life. Human individuals, instead, construct moral concerns and judgments during their situated interactions. More specifically, the constructivist tradition claims that we need to research how moral concerns, judgments, and reasons emerge in social interactions and how human beings construct the content of their moral knowledge in the first place. Based on these ideas, morality is defined here as the result of a constructive process through which human individuals, by the means of constant interactions on a background of mutual respect and recognition, develop evaluative concerns about how we ought to treat others, and how to ‘care’ and ‘respect’ others’ well-being, needs, and vulnerabilities. This developmental-constructivist theory of human psychology contributes to an alternative understanding of the origins of moral variability and informs a very particular normative stance about the most desirable contexts needed for the urgent accomplishment of inclusivist forms of morality in contemporary societies. This is so given that the very same definition of morality adopted presupposes the feature of inclusivity. The main objective of this work is then to argue, based on a developmental perspective, what are the most favorable conditions to foster the development of moral inclusivity and what we should do to accomplish concrete instances of moral progress that truly help us to overcome our most urgent moral challenges. The whole thesis is organized as follows. In part I, I show how received visions about human social evolution have informed conceptions of morality as an adaptive function evolved to solve the challenges of cooperative life. Based on these assumptions, some theories argue that human morality is limited by the boundaries of group thinking, and always obeys the mandates of collective interests and the will of the majority. However, this conception has problematic implications from a normative and ethical perspective. The aim of Chapter 1 is to present this introductory debate in detail. In chapter 2, I consider a relevant amount of scientific evidence that helps to consolidate a more optimistic and inclusivist perspective about the starting conditions of human prosocial behavior. Later, I will summarize some ideas offered to explain the possible evolutionary mechanisms that led to the consolidation of these inclusivist capacities. However, I will also show how evolutionary theories that share the same adaptationist foundations but initially seem relevant to explain the feasibility of moral inclusivity, result incomplete when considering the complexity of moral behavior and its ethical implications. Part II is devoted to presenting a developmental alternative to the adaptationist versions around the starting conditions of morality. In this section, I first summarize the epistemological, conceptual, and empirical basis of a constructivist perspective already proposed by several authors in the last decades. This is the goal of chapter 3. More precisely, I adopt the conceptualization of morality established by the social-domain theory school and clarify its conception of the situated development of moral concerns, motivations, and norms. All these ideas are essential for my argumentation on the feasibility of inclusivist moral progress offered later. Chapter 4 provides a more detailed idea of constructivist thinking about moral development, by analyzing one particular dimension: the development of moral concerns for fairness and the sense of justice in distributive dilemmas. In Part III, I assume a constructivist perspective on morality to contribute to the philosophy of moral progress. In particular, I discuss the implications of such a perspective for the conceptualization of human moral nature and discuss what are the most favorable conditions for moral inclusivity to emerge. Answering that question is of enormous relevance since favoring the transition of human societies towards more inclusivist forms of moral concern and behavior supposes a more generalized accomplishment of our most urgent moral convictions. Previous developmental or culturally-sensible attempts to explore this issue are already on the market. As mentioned before, most authors have approached the topic by situating the cultural evolution and development of (inclusivist) moral progress in the WEIRD world. For instance, some of these authors claim that very concrete material conditions (mostly present in the Western World) have been necessary for triggering inclusivist and impersonal prosocial tendencies that human beings are not able to express in threatening contexts without physical security. Despite their interest in explaining inclusivist morality and the feasibility of inclusivist forms of progress following a naturalistic and culturally situated approach, these theories are problematic for two main reasons. In the first place, most of the authors that explain moral progress tend to focus exclusively on the consolidation of liberal values in the Western world and the underlying adoption of laws, social-epistemic practices, and public narratives about tolerance and inclusivity, as unequivocal signs of inclusivist morality. Nevertheless, there is an enormous distance between the institutional and public support of inclusivist moral values or the construction of public images of tolerance and inclusivity, and the real materialization of impersonal moralities in situated social interactions. Secondly, the variability of human moral behavior is far bigger than most of the theories in moral psychology and moral progress tend to assume. Accordingly, inclusivist and exclusivist forms of morality may develop simultaneously in similar or divergent geographical and socio-ecological environments, including those with harsh conditions such as competition for scarce resources, potential intergroup conflict, and risks of disease transmission. In addition, harsh environmental conditions are usually present in almost all societies around the globe, and the presence of socio-ecological conditions such as physical security and prosperity, predominant in highly resourced populations, do not prevent the existence of exclusivist moral tendencies. My model explores a different perspective on the relationships between cultural, institutional, and historical factors, and the situated development of human morality. This supposes a clear distinction from previous approaches to the matter since it offers a different view on what we should do to pursue further instances of inclusivist social progress. In the fifth chapter, I first analyze the proposals of some defenders of the ‘dependency’ theory. The attention is focused on the ‘Evolutionary Developmental Model’ proposed by Buchanan and Powell (2018). Based on a critique of this approach, I will argue that to explain the evolution and development of human morality in its multiple manifestations, it is essential to put focus on social interactions. This also involves a different perspective on human-environment relations that in line with a constructivist worldview makes an innovative contribution to the philosophy of moral behavior and moral progress. Later, in the sixth chapter, I will define my alternative relational view of inclusivist morality and I will offer my view on how to establish favorable conditions that make inclusivist morality possible. Complementing the constructivist approach, my conception is based on the essential role of equality and individuality and on how moral inclusivity is favored if moral concerns do not develop driven by the accomplishment of group-centered, binding, and communitarian concerns and values. In brief, my relational model suggests that the accomplishment of moral inclusivity not only depends on the overall achievement of certain levels of physical security or economic prosperity. Instead, its development is favored by transforming the interactional contexts in which moral concerns towards autonomy and individuality emerge. In arguing so, I will need to start with a critique of contemporary situated and embodied approaches in ethics. Then, I will show how societies guided by the accomplishment of group-centered values of power, dominance, and relational inequality tend to express exclusivist moral behaviors, while individualistic societies tend to be more inclusivist. Starting from this diagnosis, my final attempt is then to reflect on which are the best conditions for the moral valuation of individuality to emerge and what we should do to promote the accomplishment of moral inclusivity at the societal level. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The article critically discusses Rahel Jaeggi’s recent philosophical contribution to a critical theory of capitalism. The first part reconstructs Jaeggi’s account of Lebensform, life-form, that builds up the main ontological framework for addressing and problematizing capitalism intended not as an economic system but as a social whole. The second part focuses on the three different theoretical strategies that Jaeggi puts forward to detect and deal with capitalism’s immanent flaws. The third and last part problematizes the metaphysical (...) class='Hi'>assumptions and implications of Jaeggi’s understanding of life-form and outlines a more dialectical, or “transactional” notion of form of life, which is inspired by Dewey’s non-reductionist naturalist method of inquiry. The overall aim is to strengthen the philosophical critique of the capitalist form of life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place by Setha LowCarlos J. L. BalsasSpatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Placeby setha low London: Routledge, 2017Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place adds clarity to our understanding of the value of ethnographic scholarship in the study of socio-economic, cultural, and developmental transformations. The book is a thorough review of two established conceptual frames of analysis—the social (...) production of space and the social construction of space—coupled with an in-depth discussion of four newer ways to make sense of the world around us: embodied space, language and discourse, emotion and affect, and translocal space. As the world is transformed by a myriad of forces and events occurring simultaneously, its complexity intensifies insurmountably and we require clear and robust concepts, theories, methods, and tools to not only interpret it, but above all to attempt to change it in ways that are more beneficial to our collective co-existence while enabling the flourishing of those most at risk.Readers of Spatializing Culture will find plentiful theoretical constructs, lineages, diverse viewpoints, examples, and overall opportunities for reflecting on how the (built) environment, spaces, and places have been changing mostly due to our behavior. Inspired by Foucault’s take on genealogy, in chapter 2, Setha Low traces the history of space and place according to distinct interpretative schools of thought ranging from philosophical and mathematical, French social theory, geographical, architectural, environmental psychology, to anthropological, and even archeological. Five Venn diagrams are utilized to illustrate the main conceptual relationships between space and place. Most of the book’s in-depth case studies were researched by the author with only a small number investigated and written up by fellow scholars, which Low utilizes in the book with gratitude. The interrelated thematic and distinct geographical scope of the cases is one of the book’s hallmarks. The illustrative case studies come from such faraway places as Latin America (San José, Costa Rica), Asia (Taipei, Taiwan), North America (New York City; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and San [End Page 151] Antonio, Texas), Southern Europe (Smederevska Palanka, Serbia), and the Middle East (Beirut, Lebanon; Cairo, Egypt; and Tel Aviv, Israel).Spatializing Culture was first mentioned to me years ago by a former colleague at the University at Albany, SUNY. His ongoing work in Latin America, coupled with his ethnographic training and prior work in a region of the world also extensively examined by Low in other scholarly works, was likely the reason for bringing it up in a conversation about the latest developments in the field and potential research opportunities. I acquired the book when I was teaching Global Urbanism and Culture and International Urban Planning. I was pleasantly surprised with the book’s thorough conceptual lineage, historic characterizations, attention to detail, comprehensive ethnographic investigations, and implications for transforming reality as well as institutional processes. Spatializing Culture is a welcome addition to urban planning textbooks, which tend to be relatively less critical, are often covered with normative constructs and statistics, and are more institutional in their characterization of problems and recommendations for further action.For the most part, the ethnographic method is qualitative, participa-tory, detailed, and quite comprehensive in characterizing key variables as the researcher found them on the ground. This differs slightly from urban planning’s preoccupation with public policy, policy analysis, rules and regulations, institutionalized procedures, the public good, and overall positivist and rationalist concerns with documenting reality and helping to lead transformative planning processes, whether in the realm of land use, transportation, housing, economic development, infrastructure, or the environment. Although International Urban Planning was to be taught in a rather orthodox manner with recourse to understanding planning cultures, best practices, lessons learned, and implications for similar situations, the Global Urbanism and Culture course was slightly more aligned with the discussions put forward by Low. These included attention to postmodern ideals, the use of creativity in community planning, distinctions between popular and highbrow culture, and the building of iconic structures in contexts of urban regeneration and mega-event planning. As such, my students were somewhat already exposed to issues of embodied spaces and to ideas of... (shrink)

In the last half century we have gone from storing data on 5-1/4 inch floppy diskettes to cloud and now fog computing. But one should ask why so much data is being collected. Part of the answer is simple in light of scientific projects but why is there so much data on us? Then, we ask about its “interface” through fog computing. Such questions prompt this chapter on the philosophy of big data and fog computing. After some background on definitions, (...) origins and contemporary applications, the main discussion begins with thinking about modern data collection, management, and applications from a complexity standpoint. Big data is turned into knowledge but knowledge is extrapolated from the past and used to manage the future. Yet it is questionable whether humans have the capacity to manage contemporary technological and social complexity evidenced by our world in crisis and possibly on the brink of extinction. Such calls for a new way of studying societies from a scientific point of view. We are at the center of the observation from which big data emerge and are manipulated, the overall human project being not only to create an artificial brain with an attendant mind but a society that might be able to survive what “natural” humans cannot. (shrink)

"[W]e must focus on what legalism, per se, means, and then ask why is it a good thing to have. Not less importantly, however, we must also realize that legalism can be excessive. Even if the rule of law is a good thing, too much of it may be bad. So the challenge for a theory of the rule of law is to articulate what the rule of law is, why is it good, and to what extent." "[T]he essense of (...) the ideal of the rule of law is that people ought to be governed by law. This general ideal has at least two main components. First, it requires that governments, namely, de facto political authorities, should rule, that is, guide their subjects' conduct, by law. Second, it requires that the law by which governments purport to rule should be such that it can actually guide human conduct." "The idea that governments should rule by law must be premised on the assumption that rule by law, regardless of the laws' specific content, is to be preferred to governance by other means of social control. And this immediately brings us to the second component of the rule of law, namely, that the law must be such that it can actually guide human conduct, and the further assumption that these necessary features of law embody certain virtues. In other words, unless we can first articulate what is unique about legal means of social control, and explain why those features promote certain goods, we cannot ground the idea that governments should rule by law." Discusses ways, following mainly Fuller, one can fail to make law. Notes that these are functional goods for the regulation of human behavior. They may have a connection to other things we value. We should not assume, though, that greater instantiation of these ideals is always better - sometimes ideals conflict such that more of one means less of another and "because such values, on their own grounds, set only a rough standard wherby gross deviations from it would be wrong." "Compliance with the generality-relevance principle is crucially important in safeguarding against such unjustified favoritism since it requires that the norm's subjects be those who qualify as such only on the basis of the reasons for enacting the norm in the first place." Though, we must recognize teh possibility of bad law in the sense of unjust discrimination. "It is part of the concept of law that the law purports to affect human behavior by introducing new norms and changing old ones. The concept of a norm and conduct-guidance by norms is an essential aspect of what the law is. Norms, as such, necessarily purport to provide reasons for action. A norm cannot provide a reason for action, however, unless its subjets are aware of the norm and regard it as a reason for action." Justifies some retroactivity in terms of the need for flexibility in any functioning legal system. "Legal positivism can accept the claim that law is, by its very nature or its essential functions in society, something good that deserves our moral appreciation. Nor is legal positivism forced to deny the plausible claim that wherever law exists, it must have a great many prescriptions which coincide with morality. There is probably a considerable overlap, and perhaps necessarily so, between the actual content of law and morality.". (shrink)

Reflective practice is one of the most popular theories of professional knowledge in the last 20 years and has been widely adopted by nursing, health, and social care professions. The term was coined by Donald Schön in his influential books The Reflective Practitioner , and Educating the Reflective Practitioner , and has garnered the unprecedented attention of theorists and practitioners of professional education and practice. Reflective practice has been integrated into professional preparatory programmes, continuing education programmes, and by the (...) regulatory bodies of a wide range of health and social care professions. Yet, despite its popularity and widespread adoption, a problem frequently raised in the literature concerns the lack of conceptual clarity surrounding the term reflective practice. This paper seeks to respond to this problem by offering an analysis of the epistemology of reflective practice as revealed through a critical examination of philosophical influences within the theory. The aim is to discern philosophical underpinnings of reflective practice in order to advance increasingly coherent interpretations, and to consider the implications for conceptions of professional knowledge in professional life. The paper briefly examines major philosophical underpinnings in reflective practice to explicate central themes that inform the epistemological assumptions of the theory. The study draws on the work of Donald Schön, and on texts from four philosophers: John Dewey, Nelson Goodman, Michael Polanyi, and Gilbert Ryle. Five central epistemological themes in reflective practice are illuminated: (1) a broad critique of technical rationality; (2) professional practice knowledge as artistry; (3) constructivist assumptions in the theory; (4) the significance of tacit knowledge for professional practice knowledge; and (5) overcoming mind body dualism to recognize the knowledge revealed in intelligent action. The paper reveals that the theory of reflective practice is concerned with deep epistemological questions of significance to conceptions of knowledge in health and social care professions. (shrink)

The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences provides a remarkable comparative assessment of the variations of positivism and alternative epistemologies in the contemporary human sciences. Often declared obsolete, positivism is alive and well in a number of the fields; in others, its influence is significantly diminished. The essays in this collection investigate its mutations in form and degree across the social science disciplines. Looking at methodological assumptions field by field, individual essays address anthropology, area studies, (...) economics, history, the philosophy of science, political science and political theory, and sociology. Essayists trace disciplinary developments through the long twentieth century, focusing on the decades since World War II. Contributors explore and contrast some of the major alternatives to positivist epistemologies, including Marxism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, narrative theory, and actor-network theory. Almost all the essays are written by well-known practitioners of the fields discussed. Some essayists approach positivism and anti-positivism via close readings of texts influential in their respective disciplines. Some engage in ethnographies of the present-day human sciences; others are more historical in method. All of them critique contemporary social scientific practice. Together, they trace a trajectory of thought and method running from the past through the present and pointing toward possible futures. Contributors. Andrew Abbott, Daniel Breslau, Michael Burawoy, Andrew Collier , Michael Dutton, Geoff Eley, Anthony Elliott, Stephen Engelmann, Sandra Harding, Emily Hauptmann, Webb Keane, Tony Lawson, Sophia Mihic, Philip Mirowski, Timothy Mitchell, William H. Sewell Jr., Margaret R. Somers, George Steinmetz, Elizabeth Wingrove. (shrink)

This chapter shall mainly focus on strategies of resistance against the alleged neutral perspective adopted by the liberal tradition of social and political theory vis-à-vis the plurality of personal expectations about happiness and well-being. I shall first support that material and symbolic hindrances that individuals and groups find as they pursue happiness, as well as stave off pain and suffering, belong to a set of troubles that politics ought to face and attempt to forestall in the entangled context of (...) global neoliberal society. Second, I aim at tackling how the current provision of global standards of forms of life, spread as a homogeneous norm by large companies and media, brings about large spaces of precariousness, lack of recognition and social death, which are often misinterpreted in public as a subjective uneasiness, when not directly viewed as a personal disability. Finally, I shall explore whether the classical liberal disclaimer before economic and social misfortune of citizens has been seized by neoliberalism as an excellent opportunity to make of liveability an unexpected source of business and profitability, drawing as a conclusion that it engages a deep disrepair of our affective life and health. (shrink)

Vulnerability and politics are among the relevant and key topics of discussion in the Ethiopian healthcare context. Attempts by the formal bioethics structure in Ethiopia to deliberate on ethical issues relating to vulnerability and politics in healthcare have been limited, even though the informal analysis of bioethical issues has been present in traditional Ethiopian communities. This is reflected in religion, social values, and local moral underpinnings. Thus, the aim of this paper is to discuss the bioethical implications of (...) vulnerability and politics for healthcare in Ethiopia and to suggest possible ways forward. First, we will briefly introduce what has been done to develop bioethics as a field in Ethiopia and what gaps remain concerning its implementation in healthcare practice. This will give a context for our second and main task – analyzing the healthcare challenges in relation to vulnerability and politics and discussing their bioethical implications. In doing so, and since these two concepts are intrinsically broad, we demarcate their scope by focusing on specific issues such as poverty, gender, health governance, and armed conflicts. Lastly, we provide suggestions for the ways forward. (shrink)

In an era of rising social awareness, both academics and practitioners have been concerned about the effectiveness of pro-social consumer influence strategies. The main assumption here is that for social marketing to succeed one must first understand the factors underlying pro-social consumer behavior. Firstly, drawing on two dimensions the authors first identify four types of social behavior. Next, the model describes social behavior as a result of preceding social behavior motivation and actual (...) social behavior intention. Norms and economic evaluation have an impact on social behavior motivation, which in turn influences social behavior intention, eventually leading to actual social behavior. Actual control factors, such as the availability of resources and opportunities, decide whether social behavior intention can really translate into actual social behavior. Finally, authors propose message strategies for each type of social behavior. (shrink)

Drawing on recent debates about the relationship between propositional and practical knowledge, this article is concerned with broad concepts of agency. Specifically, it is concerned with agency that involves the forming and putting into effect of intentions over relatively extended periods, particularly in work contexts (called, for want of a better term, ?project management?). The main focus of interest is thus not on ?know-how? in the sense of ability to perform types of tasks but on the ability to form (...) and carry through projects. Much, although by no means all, of the limited literature on this topic assumes that such abilities are largely independent of social interaction. This article will challenge that assumption. The article concludes with a reflection on the implications of an adequate account of project management ability for contemporary debates on the relationship between propositional and practical knowledge, and examines the implications for vocational and professional education that prepares people for this type of broadly based agency for their personal development. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that differences between the ‘new moral science’ of the seventeenth century and scholastic natural law theory originated primarily from the skeptical challenge the former had to face. Pufendorf’s project of a scientia practica universalis is the paramount expression of an anti-skeptical moral science, a ‘science’ that is both explanatory and normative, but also anti-dogmatic insofar as it tries to base its laws on those basic phenomena of human life which, supposedly, are immune to skeptical doubt. (...) The main scholastic legacy to the new moral science is the dichotomy between an ‘intellectualist’ and a ‘voluntarist’ view of natural law (or between lex immanens and lex imposita). Voluntarism lies at the basis of both theological views, such as Calvinism, and political views, such as those of Hobbes and Locke. The need to counterbalance the undesirable implications of extreme voluntarism may account for much of the developments in ethics and politics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Scottish natural jurisprudence, which tried to find a middle way between skepticism and extreme voluntarism, is less secular and more empirical than received wisdom admits. There emerged, as one of its ‘accidental’ outcomes, a systematic, self-contained and empirical economic theory from the search for an empirically based normative theory of social life. The basic assumption of such a theory, namely, the notion of societal laws as embedded in trans-individual mechanisms, derives from the voluntarist view of natural law as ‘imposed’ law.Later discussions of social issues in terms of ‘economic’ and ‘ethical’ reasons originated partly from a misreading ofthe Scottish natural jurisprudential framework of economic theory. Starting with this reconstruction, I try to shed some light on recent discussions about the role of ethics in economics. (shrink)

The concept of lived experience plays a significant role in the social sciences in general and in philosophy in particular. The idea of lived experience as a social reality has been philosophized and given prime importance in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy. However, the work of Alfred Schutz, one of the phenomenologists on lived experience, has not been given adequate attention by either sociologists or philosophers. This paper attempts to understand how lived experiences are not merely individual or (...) subjective experiences but are also collective or social. Firstly, it suggests that lived experiences need to be understood in a broader context, namely that of the social and inter-subjectivity, which can be found in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz. Thus, there is an attempt to show how Schutz’s philosophy broadly helps us understand lived experience as a social reality. Secondly, to justify how lived experiences are social and collective experiences, illustrations of the studies related to race, gender, and caste are given as a marker for lived experiences throughout the paper. So far, lived experience has been understood within the domain of individual or the subjective or merely in the first-person perspective. Hence, this paper provides some insights into investigating lived experience from the third-person perspective. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to see whether we can account for the normativity of law within the framework of legal positivism and whether the idea of a social convention could be of help in this endeavour. I argue, inter alia, that we should distinguish between the problem of accounting for the normativity of law, conceived as a necessary property of law, and the problem of accounting for the use of normative legal language on the part of (...) legal actors; that the debate about the normativity of law, which mainly concerns, is more or less identical to the debate between legal positivists and non-positivists; that one cannot account for the normativity of law, conceived along the lines of, within the framework of legal positivism, and that the question of the normativity of law considered within the framework of legal positivism is not an open question. (shrink)

There is deep ambivalence about analogy, both as an object of philosophical fascination and in contexts of practice, like archaeology, where it plays a seemingly central role. In archaeology there has been continuous vacillation between outright rejection of analogical inference as overtly speculative, even systematically misleading, and, when this proves un-tenable, various stock strategies for putting it 'on a firmer foundation'. Frequently these last are accomplished by assimilating analogy to more tractible (better warranted, more readily controllable) forms of inference, (...) salvaging respectability but at the expense, ironically, of reverting to a strategy of elimination. I have been struck by the parallels between this pattern of response and that typical of philosophy; the central question raised in both contexts is that of whether, or in what sense, there is any distinctively analogical form of inference and what sort of warrant (formal, methodological) accrues to it. In what follows I will assess two recent philosophical positions on this question, first in their own terms and then in consideration of archaeological uses of analogy. In this I hope to put the projects of justification themselves on a firmer footing. (shrink)

This paper examines the relation or, more precisely, tension between postmodern deconstruction and ethics by elaborating upon the ethico-political dimensions of deconstructionism. It embarks on a critical assessment of postmodern discourse on ethics in view of its political implications by analyzing Jacques Derrida''s and Richard Rorty''s arguments with an assumption that their positions represent a certain logic in the postmodern discourse on ethics. Postmodern ethics is based on incredulity with regard to traditional metanarratives, and it defines ethics in terms (...) of sensitivity or responsibility to otherness and difference. Its proponents believe that the negation of modern metanarratives opens a way to the Other which has been marginalized and suppressed both in thought and in social practice. Derrida and Rorty represent this position with their emphasis on the ethical nature of deconstruction and the need to elaborate new languages for ethics. Despite postmodern appeal to ethics of this sort, however, postmodern thinking shows its limits in dealing with most ethical-political matters in the contemporary world. The postmodern approach to ethics, being restricted within the perspective of the individual, does not provide any determinate framework for deciding how to adjudicate conflicting ethical claims or how to link the unconditional affirmation of emancipatory ideals, enlightened social criticism, and democratic accountability in determinate political terms. In the main, this paper contends that philosophical deconstruction and responsibility to otherness undermine each other in the public sphere. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Of Body and Brush: The Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth Century ChinaR. Kent GuyOf Body and Brush: The Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth Century China. By Angela Zito. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. xix + 311. Hardcover $45.00. Paper $17.95.It may be best to think of the argument of Angela Zito's enormously stimulating book Of Body and Brush: The Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in (...) Eighteenth Century [End Page 623] China as a series of concentric circles. At its core is a careful and satisfyingly annotated translation of the chapters of the Comprehensive Rites of the Qing (Da Qing tong li) (1756) that concern the grand sacrifice, the most important ceremonial moment in the life of a Qing emperor. From her careful and original analysis of these materials, Zito is able to bring new life not only to the Qianlong Emperor himself but also to the worlds of which he was, or sought to be, the center. These included the officials who served him, the community of scholars and editors who wrote about ritual, and the people who looked to the state for models of the centering process. In so doing, she rescues the eighteenth century from the accusation that it was the "graveyard of modernity." But she also examines the nature of Chinese ritual itself, in a way that explodes Western assumptions and explores Chinese subjectivities.There are far too many implications of this book to deal with in a short review, and any choice of themes is somewhat subjective. Zito's suggestion that we refer to the community of Chinese officials as an "imperium" rather than a "bureaucracy" (à la Weber) is a convincing one that will certainly influence our narrative practice. I was most impressed, however, with what I found to be the triumphant demonstration that this book achieves of the vitality of ritual in the eighteenth century. We have always known, at some level, that ritual was important in China, but we have not always known what to do with this fact. Like contemporary undergraduates who respond with blank stares when asked if they have ever participated in a ritual (I have tried this), we have stood mute before the mountain of Chinese primary source materials dealing with ritual. In showing us a way to read ritual texts, Zito reminds us that these provided for the Chinese a way of "making manifest" (p. 79) the power of heaven in human affairs, and re-actualizing past words in present ceremonial. In short, eighteenth-century students of ritual texts were hardly antiquarians; they were actually optimists, pursuing the possibility that the realities of the golden age of the past could actually be recovered in the present. And they were not only this, of course, for Zito offers the fascinating suggestion that in a world where literacy was becoming more common, the analysts of ritual were attempting to recuperate their social and political positions as "interpreters and creators of authority" by reconnecting writing and obscure ancient ritual practice.This comment, however, is really an aside in an argument that is mainly concerned with how ritual was acted out in the eighteenth century. The details of the Grand Sacrifice—the various prostrations, placements, and profferings—are compellingly described and interpreted here. One waits—to say "breathlessly" may be a bit strong, but certainly with mounting anticipation—to see what historical associations or symbolic statements will come next in this most theatrical of imperial performances. One of the most interesting questions is whether the emperor sacrificed as a filial son—human, like the officials who surrounded him on the lower steps of the altar, or like a sage whose access to the heavenly realm was of a qualitatively different character than that of any other mortal. Of course the emperor was both, and it was the function of ritual, as Zito argues, to negotiate the differences between the two. [End Page 624]What is at stake in this volume is nothing less than an attempt to recover the mentality of those who were engaged in ritual practices. What did it mean when the emperor clothed his body in ceremonial... (shrink)

Every scientific or intellectual movement rests on central premises and assumptions that shape its philosophy. The purpose of this study is to review a brief account of the main philosophical bases of grey systems theory (GST) and the paradigm governing its principles. So, the recent studies on the philosophical foundations of GST have been reviewed and tried to pay attention to some key ambiguities in the previous studies and give more and clearer explanations in this paper. Also, this (...) paper tries to fill the gap among the previous studies and to provide a purposeful connection between them by expressing two key concepts: complete information and imbalance knowledge. Primarily, the study addresses the theoretical foundations of uncertainty and the concept of greyness. Next, it focuses on the notion of “complete information” and challenges to it. Then, it reviews such processes as perception, cognition, and understanding, as well as their dynamic nature. It explains how knowledge is produced through understanding and interpreting information/data and the dynamics governing the whole process. Also, the study describes any dataset, no matter how large it may be, will remain incomplete, imperfect, and grey, so humans only rely on incomplete datasets to interpret the world. As such, information and knowledge are always grey and uncertain because they are basically contingent on subjective understandings and interpretations and imperfect inputs and data. Finally, as a key development, this study also demonstrates that human grey knowledge remains imbalanced across different disciplines and spheres. In the end, a brief overview of the philosophical paradigm of GST is also provided. GST is depicted as an anti-realistic, anti-positivistic, and non-deterministic approach, which is inherently pluralistic and ideographic. According to GST principles, dynamicity and change are essential parts of human narratives of the world and systems, and human knowledge is constantly reproduced through collecting new information. As a result, knowledge, theories, narratives, and scientific laws dynamically change. Given this premise, one could argue that GST is considerably compatible with the postulates of post-modern thinking. (shrink)

Can one consistently (i) be a positivist, and (ii) think that the internal attitude to the law is a moral attitude? Two objections are raised in the literature. The first is that the combination is straight-out contradictory. The second is that if the internal attitude is a moral attitude, those who take it cannot be positivists. Arguments from Shiner, Goldsworthy and Raz are examined. It is concluded that neither objection works. The arguments are based on scope errors, conflations of what (...) is said with what is implicated, and a false view of the distinction between detached and committed statements. (shrink)

Se realizó una revisión bibliográfica con el objetivo de valorar las implicaciones sociales de la investigación científico-tecnológica en Neurosicología del Adulto Mayor, mediante la caracterización del estado actual del proceso, los condicionantes que favorecen o impiden su desarrollo y los impactos sociales que genera. La investigación científico-tecnológica en esta área está condicionada por necesidades sociales propias del contexto actual. Se han identificado políticas, legislaciones e infraestructuras que la favorecen, aunque, existen algunas limitaciones. La producción tecnológica dirigida a la rehabilitación y (...) estimulación cognitiva continúa en ascenso, utilizando principalmente software y aplicaciones. La investigación del impacto de estas herramientas ha arrojado resultados contradictorios, lo que limita su poder de transformación social. Se pudo concluir que en Cuba es necesario estimular la transferencia de tecnología, la innovación tecnológica y la creación de alternativas de intervención ajustadas a la realidad económico-social de los adultos mayores. A bibliographical review was conducted with the aim of assessing the social implications of scientific-technological research in Senior Citizens' Neurosurgery through the characterization of the current state of the process, the determining factors that favor or stop its development and the social impact it generates. In this field, scientific-technological research is conditioned on social necessities typical of the current context. Policies, legislations and the infrastructures that favor it have been identified. Nevertheless, there are limitations. Technological production directed towards cognitive rehabilitation and stimulation continues to rise using mainly software and applications. The research on the impact of these tools has produced contradictory results, which limit their social transformation power. It was reached the conclusion that in Cuba, there's a need to stimulate technology transfer, technological innovation and the creation of intervention alternatives adapted to senior citizens' social-economic reality. (shrink)

El propósito fundamental del trabajo fue destacar la trascendencia social de las ciencias básicas biomédicas en la superación profesional de los tecnólogos en Laboratorio Clínico, egresados de la Facultad de Tecnología de la Salud de Camagüey. Se partió de las insuficiencias que influyen en el desempeño profesional de estos licenciados, y se justifica la importancia de las ciencias básicas biomédicas para el laboratorista clínico. Se concluyó que la ciencia y la tecnología son prácticas sociales que debe tener en cuenta (...) en su labor cotidiana el tecnólogo de la salud en Laboratorio Clínico y la necesidad de las ciencias básicas biomédicas en la superación profesional de estos tecnólogos ya que aportan los fundamentos científicos del proceder técnico en un laboratorio, lo cual permite capacitar un profesional no solo para llevar a cabo procederes, sino para comprender el porqué de los mismos. The main goal of this work was to highlight the social implications of the basic biomedical sciences in the professional training of the technologist in clinical laboratory graduated at the Health Technologic Faculty in Camaguey taking into account the insufficiencies in the professional performance of these specialists. It was evident that science and technology are social practices that the health technologist specialized in clinical laboratory has to take into account and the need of basic biomedical sciences in the professional development of these technologists because they offer the scientific basis of the technical procedure in a laboratory which allows the professional training not only to perform the procedures but also to understand the reason of them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Nature (Ziran 自然) of Technological and Economic Development in Early DaoismYumi Suzuki (bio)I. IntroductionEric Nelson's Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life provides comprehensive guidance on how early and later Daoist thought could offer both ideological and practical solutions to contemporary environmental issues. Nelson does not simple-mindedly claim that Daoists are environmentalists or that Daoism is comparable with modern environmental thought. His monograph has a more sophisticated, and also (...) more ambitious and consequently philosophically provocative, goal: to evolutionally develop old Daoist thought to directly address contemporary philosophical discourses on the environment.1I have summarized elsewhere what I find to be the most significant and meaningful contributions this book has made.2 I think its goal has successfully been achieved in various ways: Nelson gives careful and accurate interpretations to each passage from the original texts.3 What he calls "the new Daoism" deployed on the basis of these interpretations is reasonable and uncontroversial. The monograph overall offers an exemplary model of how wisdom acquired through studying the history of philosophy can be adapted to cogitating on newly emerging philosophical questions, despite differences in the intellectual contexts that we are required to warily distinguish. Moreover, by focusing on the Daoist tradition in East Asia, it well demonstrates how other systems of philosophical thought can be usefully employed to critically reflect on fundamental assumptions that an existing system is already committed to and that could be the very cause of relevant philosophical and pragmatic problems.While I mostly agree with his arguments in chapters 1–4 and 6, the only part I found unsatisfactory is chapter 5, "Early Daoist Biopolitics and a New [End Page 771] Daoist Political Ecology" (pp. 100–118). The present review aims to elaborate reasons for my resistance to Nelson's all-out endorsement of what he regards as the sociopolitical implications of Daoism. When it comes to politics, it appears to me, early Daoist texts such as the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi express often disappointingly ambiguous and agnostic attitudes toward what can be done with respect to their doctrinal opponents and outsiders. My suggestion is that if we examine the explorations of their contenders, that is, mainly Confucians and Legalists, concerning political and technological devices, they may present an altogether less biased and more balanced range of solutions to a question Nelson raises regarding an environmental challenge associated with a competitive globalized economy and rapidly developing technologies in our modern age.II. A Challenge to the Current Environmental MovementChapter 5 begins with the following statement:Appeals to encountering the myriad things in their environmental contexts and relations are necessary for an ecological transformation of existing cultures and societies. Yet an environmental ethos and culture of nature is not sufficient given how systematically reproduced social-economic processes in advanced capitalist societies meditate, entangle, and obstruct the transformative potential of such encounters. To this extent, an adequate environmental philosophy must concurrently be social-political philosophy that can offer an environmentally oriented critique of existing social structures and institutions that directly and indirectly harm creatures and degrade ecosystems in myriad ways such that transformations must transpire in economic and societal structures as well as at the level of individual cultivation and reflections.(p. 100)Nelson maintains that even though it is cardinal to transform the ways in which the myriad things encounter and mutually correspond with each other, as well as alter their own existential state, by cultivating an environmental ethos and culture of nature in each individual and society, one of the most serious challenges for such transformations could originate with already existing capitalist, materialist, and consumerist social structures and institutions widely prevailing and deeply embedded in the highly complex economic and political systems of our age.This, I think, captures the core problem of modern environmentalism. An individual, a group of people such as nonprofit or nongovernmental organizations, or a single city or country might be convinced by the Daoist "biospiritual" mode of life. Nevertheless, it appears to be far more difficult in practice to have certain countries or multinational mega-firms abandon their steadfast, primary commitment to national, industrial, commercial, or corporate missions to pursue their own benefits that deprioritize or... (shrink)

Preface The status of sovereignty as a highly ambiguous concept is well established. Pointing out or deploring, the ambiguity of the idea has itself become a recurring motif in the literature on sovereignty. As the legal theorist and international lawyer Alf Ross put it, “there is hardly any domain in which the obscurity and confusion is as great as here.” 1 The concept of sovereignty is often seen as a downright obstacle to fruitful conceptual analysis, carried over from its proper (...) setting in history to “plague and befog contemporary thought.” 2 . . . So contested is the concept that, rather than pursuing the contestation, many political theorists think we should give up so protean a notion. Granting that the debate on the relevance of sovereignty frustratingly oscillates between claims that it will either continue to exist or that it is about to disappear, forgetting it altogether, and thereby escaping this seemingly endless argument, can easily appear as the most urgent task for political theory . The following argument makes a case that the “urgent task” is not the abandonment of the concept of sovereignty, but an understanding of its essential philosophical nature as an integrated and evolving expression of practical reason. Sovereignty is neither ambiguous nor obscure once its fundamental presuppositions are laid bare and its many philosophical and historical manifestations shown to be the product, in actuality, of a single, dialectally dynamic but integrated set of metaphysical elements. This is the first of three arguments describing the evolution of international law as a manifestation of practical reason through an application of philosophical method to the source , locus , and scope of the concept of sovereignty. It moves from a dialectic balance favoring utility to a balance dominated by legal right to a dialectic of duty to humanity and nature. All three arguments are meant to be a contribution to the new field of International Legal Philosophy as defined by Phillip Allott. 4 This field combines a sensitivity to legal practice with an effort to understand the underlying philosophical determinants of empirical choice and behavior. One purpose of international legal philosophy is to “remove” from the minds of those who study the law what Diderot defined as “the sophism of the ephemeral,” and what Allott calls “the disempowering idea that what xii Preface happens to exist now is inevitable and permanent.” 5 A core imperative is to “reunderstand what it is to be a thinking being” 6 and to rediscover the dialectic between the private and the public as it determines, and is redetermined by, legal practice. This requires a “revolution in the human mind” 7 so that we may transcend the current dependence on positivist methods and empirical fact as an end-in-itself, and try to understand the underlying and more constant and essential ideas and inherent dialectics that constitute the substructure or “metaphysics” of international law. I will approach this “revolution” with the use of R. G. Collingwood’s philosophical method 8 and the philosophy of David Hume, applied to international law as an expression of practical reason. The goal of philosophical method is the construction of a comprehensive policy argument (CPA) for a public policy or legal issue. In addition to the conventional use of empirical models and their logic of investigation in the study of policy and law, CPA requires that an underlying philosophical logic of concepts be deciphered to identify the ideas within the issue, and their definition, overlap, and systematic interdependence. Philosophical method is a means with which to interpret and understand competing systematic and complete conceptual logics, existing at the core of an issue and pertinent to policy change. Philosophical method is therefore not meant to be a replacement for the empirical investigation of a policy or legal issue, or the use of scientific method in social studies. Rather, it is a complimentary and prerequisite method that seeks to transcend the limitations of positivism and present a more complete understanding of the philosophical presuppositions of positivist ideas like power, interest, or strategic rationality. Philosophical method is meant to be used with the facts of the policy or legal issue to match an illuminating logic of concepts with a pertinent logic of investigation . Within the CPA, the use of philosophical method and the metaphysics of a policy or legal issue is assumed to be critical to the full understanding of the overlapping concepts, dialectics, and scale of forms that determine, and are determined by, the empirical context of the policy or legal topic. Specifically, instead of utilizing bits and pieces of various theoretical arguments to address narrowly focused empirical questions, as positivism prescribes, I will address the evolution of international law as practical reason in three phases. Each will be approached through a single integrated logic of philosophical concepts from a particular philosopher (i.e., David Hume, G. W. F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant). This philosophically holistic approach to the law is based on the assumption that only through the use of a single integrated argument in legal analysis can sovereignty, or any concept, be understood as a truly systematic and logical whole. A complete philosophical paradigm has a dialectic integrity and systematic logic that can more adequately describe the evolving essence of a concept like sovereignty. This approach also has the advantage of generating a number of distinct holistic descriptions of the law through the application of different philosophical systems, one at a time, to its factual structure. 9 Positivism does not seek Preface xiii holism, and rejects the idea that “theory” has such a characteristic. The essential or comprehensive substructure of any idea is therefore ignored in a method that recommends the observation of empirical problems through the use of whatever hodgepodge of theoretical elements is seen fit to frame its superstructure. This failure to deal with metaphysics has retarded both an essential understanding of international law as a species of legal system, and any holistic and dialectical conceptualization of its inherent concepts, like sovereignty. A second positivist convention expects modern theorists to create new theory rather than to refine and apply that of existing philosophy. This predisposition is driven by the positivist goal of discovery that ignores refinement as a possible purpose of philosophical analysis. Collingwood argues that philosophy must take that set of ideas already known and utilize existing systematic philosophical arguments to refine them so that they evolve closer to their essence as concepts. Considering this imperative, the idea of sovereignty can be assumed to have had valid usage for hundreds of years, over which time, the concept has evolved to mean different things, each a refinement of the definition that preceded it. Transcending positivism means that the scholar’s search is not for “new” material, but to decipher the metaphysical essence of a concept as it has been made manifest over time and context. These manifestations are rooted, and refined from, the known terms of that concept’s inherent idea(s). Rather than depending exclusively on positivism and its conventions, my work utilizes, in addition to Collingwood, the intact philosophical systems of Hume, Hegel, and Kant to trace the refinement of international law as a product of human practical reason. These paradigms, or integrated systems of logical concepts, will be applied to legal practice individually, so that each CPA can be deciphered separately. This provides a set of integrated and logically intact paradigms for the evolutionary stages of practical reason in international law. Because each argument is applied systematically, a deeper understanding of the source, locus, and scope in the development of law in general, and international law in particular, is possible where it is not with the application of various disconnected components of many theories. Each CPA based on Hume, Hegel, or Kant can then be used to describe a distinct context that its logic of concepts best illuminates; specifically, the (1) genesis, (2) contemporary dilemmas, and (3) future of the international legal system. By widening the perspective of international lawyers and policymakers, they can more easily perceive the dialectic of ideas that has created, and is refined by, the legal practice in which they participate. We also move toward Allott’s goal of “human self-perfecting.” 10 And, in addition, by providing a more complete knowledge of the origins of legal practice and its evolution, we illuminate the practical possibilities for what we might “choose to be” 11 in the future. To achieve this, the essential metaphysical elements of state sovereignty and its inherent evolutionary scale of forms will be deciphered and described. This will transform what appears to be a multitude of definitions and xiv Preface practical realizations of the concept of sovereignty into a set of interdependent manifestations of a single substructure, made of a single set of dialectic elements. The interpretation of international law through practical reason sorts and integrates a diverse and discordant literature and defines state sovereignty as a single concept evolving on a scale of forms that allows it to exhibit diverse character traits, all arising from different combinations of common and essential metaphysical elements. This approach, compared to positivist methods and legal realism, allows one to transcend current agreement that sovereignty is, at best, a narrowly focused set of empirical characteristics or, at worst, “organized hypocrisy.” 12 This method also encourages the scholar and practitioner to understand the predispositions and pitfalls of the concept of sovereignty, as well as its potential future paths, more effectively. The use of philosophical method to create policy paradigms out of preexisting philosophical systems and apply these to international law will be called Philosophical-Policy & Legal Design . This approach allows the use of preexisting and complete philosophical arguments that provide an adequate logic of concepts to chart the evolution of the idea of sovereignty along its scale of forms. An examination of the source of practical reason in human social convention with the employment of a philosophical-policy drawn from Hume’s logic of concepts about human nature will demonstrate this new approach. Why Hume? Because, up to now, without an adequate substructure we have arguments, like Brunne é’ s and Troope’s, 13 that may correctly identify international law as an “interactional” system, but cannot present any argument as to why it is, where this empirical reality comes from, or what its implications are for the future. Comparatively, Hume provides a logic of philosophical concepts that answers these concerns. First, he fulfills the requirements for a fuller understanding of the origin and evolution of law from social convention and the dependence of social convention on the human imperative for society. Second, he offers a more adequate delineation of the overlapping concepts of the law in terms of the ideas and institutions that deal with norms and justice (e.g., principle, process, practice, rule, power, interest). Third, he provides a fundamental understanding of the essential dialectics at the core of a conceptualization of the law with both unconscious and conscious human participation (i.e., passion. (shrink)

I'm Brian Harvey; I'm a Lecturer with Security of Employment in the EECS Department at the University of California at Berkeley. My main teaching assignment is our first course for CS majors, based on the Abelson and Sussman text from MIT. But I also teach "Social Implications of Computers," a course that was retired along with the professor who first taught it, and that I campaigned unsuccessfully to revive for several years until ABET, our accrediting agency, won (...) the battle for me by complaining about the lack of ethics in our curriculum. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Challenge of Intellectual HistoryJohn Patrick DigginsMen and ideas advance by parricide, by which the children kill, if not their fathers, at least the beliefs of their fathers, and arrive at new beliefs.Sir Isaiah Berlin1I was supposed to wind up the study of mine, and become the Lovejoy of my generation—that's the silly talk of scholarly people.Saul Bellow2To become "the Lovejoy," with the implication that (...) each generation could only have one, was the ambition of Moses Herzog in Saul Bellow's novel, written a few years after he had won the Nobel Award for literature. Herzog presents the life of a professor who has as many sexual escapades and as much personal angst as he has scholarly interests, too unfocused to be another Lovejoy. Bellow's novel is full of letters to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other modernist minds who brought Western intellectual life to a standstill, posing a lasting question mark about the possibilities of knowledge. Bellow taught in the program of the Committee on Social Thought at [End Page 181] the University of Chicago. His colleague and close friend Allan Bloom also taught in that program. But when Bloom wrote the best seller, The Closing of the American Mind, he cited Nietzsche and Heidegger as part of the "German disease" that did so much to subvert academic thought, supposedly turning students into zombies, walking air heads responding only to vacuous visual stimuli and mind-numbing music, with Rock n' Roll blasting through a Walkman and having the effect of a "masturbational fantasy."3While Bellow's epistolary novel interrogated modernist thinkers, Bloom's popular tract of the times cited many classical thinkers as a countervoice to the modernists—Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Hobbes, Kant, Lessing, Schiller, Locke, and Rousseau. Such minds also figured prominently in the works of Arthur O. Lovejoy. But the recitation of such names leaves the impression that Lovejoy concerned himself only with the main currents of European intellectual history. On the contrary, two of his most important and often neglected books are The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Reflections on Human Nature.4 There one finds profound meditations on two vital episodes in the history of ideas in America: the Enlightenment and the philosophy of pragmatism. Perry Miller, arguably America's greatest intellectual historian, skipped over the Enlightenment as he proceeded to study the Puritans and then the transcendentalists, and he never seemed to have much interest in the pragmatists.5 But what Lovejoy had to write on the Enlightenment and pragmatism is richly ironic.The pragmatists claimed to have liberated modern thought from the easy assumptions of the "Age of Reason," and today's poststructuralists charge that eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers deceived themselves in looking to the advent of knowledge as an answer to the presence of power. Lovejoy's books offer a different take entirely, making us aware that it is the modernist thinkers who may be deceiving themselves with the dubious promises of pragmatism and the arrogant conceits of poststructuralism and deconstruction, whose proponents claim to be the first "masters [End Page 182] of suspicion." In many of Lovejoy's works, nothing is resolved and everything is left suspended in a state of honest suspicion.Lovejoy was comfortable with contradiction, and hence more in tune with Augustine, who looked to the depths of human consciousness for spiritual knowledge, than with Aquinas, who believed evidence for God and human freedom could be found in reason alone. Nowhere is Lovejoy's affinity for the emotions of consciousness better seen than in his several essays on romanticism, both English, French, German, and even its origins in Chinese aesthetics and Confucian ethics. It was not reason and the notion of order and regulation that appealed to Lovejoy but the spontaneous promptings of nature springing forth without reflection or design. He delighted in quoting Voltaire against classicists and scholastics. "Worship God and practice justice—this is the sole religion of the Chinese literati.... O Thomas Aquinas, Scotus, Bonaventure, Francis, Dominic, Luther, Calvin, canons of Westminister, have you anything better? For four thousand years this religion, so simple and so noble, has endured in... (shrink)

During the past few years information has increasingly become a commodity. As a commodity the atypical cost structure of information goods in competitive markets result in the price of reproduction of information goods tending to zero implying that market failure is highly likely. Intellectual property rights prevent such market failure by protecting the ability of creators and/or distributors to charge for information goods and as such serve to stimulate and support the creation of information. But information also plays a vital (...) role in enabling people‘s human rights in their everyday lives and it is therefore of paramount importance that such information be accessible. Pricing of information is one of the main factors determining accessibility and pricing strategies should aim to maximise access not just profit and thereby contribute to a socially just world. This paper examines the nature and pricing of information goods and suggests differential pricing of information goods based Rawls‘ principles of social justice. (shrink)

For decades the study of social perception was largely compartmentalized by type of social cue: race, gender, emotion, eye gaze, body language, facial expression etc. This was partly due to good scientific practice, and partly due to assumptions that each type of social cue was functionally distinct from others. Herein, we present a functional forecast approach to understanding compound social cue processing that emphasizes the importance of shared social affordances across various cues. We review (...) the traditional theories of emotion and face processing that argued for dissociable and noninteracting pathways, as well as more recent evidence for combinatorial processing of social cues. We argue here that early, and presumably reflexive, visual integration of such cues is necessary for adaptive behavioral responding to others. In support of this claim, we review contemporary work that reveals a flexible visual system, one that readily incorporates meaningful contextual influences in even nonsocial visual processing, thereby establishing the functional and neuroanatomical bases necessary for compound social cue integration. Finally, we explicate three likely mechanisms driving such integration. Together, this work implicates a role for cognitive penetrability in visual perceptual abilities that have often been ascribed to direct encapsulated perceptual processes. (shrink)