The rationality of reasonableness

Rationality and reasonableness are often sharply distinguished from one another and are even held to be in conflict. On this construal, rationality consists in means-end calculation of the most efficient means to one's ends (which are usually taken to be self-interested), while reasonableness consists in equitableness whereby one respects the rights of other persons as well as oneself. To deal with this conflict, it is noted that both rationality and reasonableness are based on reason, which is analyzed as the power of attaining truth, and especially necessary truth. It is then shown that, by the rationality involved in reason, the moral principle of reasonableness, the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC), has a stringently rational justification in that to deny or violate it is to incur self-contradiction. Objections are considered bearing on relevance and motivation. It is concluded that, where reasonableness and egoistic rationality conflict, the former is rationally superior.     

Play,agreement and consensus

In this paper I employ the analysis of play to clarify the distinction between an agreement and a consensus, and I argue that it is the conditions supplied by the playful process that enable us to partake in the recognition and creation of truth. Gadamer's hermeneutical truth, unlike propositional truth, speaks of the interpretive act whereby meaning is recognized. This interpretive recognition of meaning is described by Gadamer as an occurrence of interpretive play orgenuine understanding. Regarding Gadamer's conception of truth as modelled on agreement rather than consensus, I demonstrate that it is in the process of play that we achieve the making and maintaining of the conditions that are necessary for agreement, and that the nature of understanding is most clearly revealed by viewing it as a playful process.     

Remarks on Bolzano's Conception of Necessary Truth

This essay presents a new interpretation of Bolzano's account of necessary truth as set out in §182 of the Theory of Science. According to this interpretation, Bolzano's conception is closely related to that of Leibniz, with some important differences. In the first place, Bolzano's conception of necessary truth embraces not only what Leibniz called metaphysical or brute necessities but also moral necessities (truths grounded in God's choice of the best among all metaphysical possibilities). Second, in marked contrast to Leibniz, Bolzano maintains that there is still plenty of room for contingency even on this broader conception of necessity.     

Tugendhat's Idea of Truth

This paper argues that Tugendhat's critique of Heidegger's existential conception of truth as disclosedness is usually misunderstood. The main claim of this paper is that Tugendhat insists against Heidegger on certain conventional features of truth such as conformity of the law of non‐contradiction, not because he adheres to an ideal of truth as correctness; rather, he proposes an alternative existential conception of truth in terms of an active, critical or self‐critical, engagement with untruth. Various recent objections to Tugendhat's critique of Heidegger are discussed against the background of his alternative and are rejected. The paper concludes by outlining several challenges to Tugendhat's alternative existential conception of truth.     

Synthetic Evidence and Objective Identity: The Contemporary Significance of Early Husserl's Conception of Truth

This essay explores Edmund Husserl's significance for contemporary truth theory. Focusing on his Logical Investigations (1900/1901), it argues that early Husserl's conception of truth unsettles a common polarity between epistemic and nonepistemic approaches. Unlike contemporary epistemic conceptions of truth, he gives full weight to “truth makers” that have their own being: objective identity, perceptible objects, and states of affairs. Yet, unlike contemporary nonepistemic conceptions, he also insists on the intentional givenness of such truth makers and on the complexity of the experiences within which propositional truth claims arise. To develop this argument, the essay explains how early Husserl's conception of truth builds on his phenomenology of intentional experience and knowledge. By emphasizing an objective identity between what is signitively meant and intuitively given, Husserl's approach provides a way to resituate propositional truth within a broader and more dynamic conception of truth.     

Play, agreement and consensus

In this paper I employ the analysis of play to clarify the distinction between an agreement and a consensus, and I argue that it is the conditions supplied by the playful process that enable us to partake in the recognition and creation of truth. Gadamer's hermeneutical truth, unlike propositional truth, speaks of the interpretive act whereby meaning is recognized. This interpretive recognition of meaning is described by Gadamer as an occurrence of interpretive play orgenuine understanding. Regarding Gadamer's conception of truth as modelled on agreement rather than consensus, I demonstrate that it is in the process of play that we achieve the making and maintaining of the conditions that are necessary for agreement, and that the nature of understanding is most clearly revealed by viewing it as a playful process.     

Beyond the Spiritual Supermarket: The Social and Public Significance of New Age Spirituality

This article argues that New Age spirituality is substantially less unambiguously individualistic and more socially and publicly significant than today's sociological consensus acknowledges. Firstly, an uncontested doctrine of self-spirituality, characterised by sacralisation of the self and demonisation of social institutions, provides the spiritual milieu with ideological coherence and paradoxically accounts for its overwhelming diversity. Secondly, participants undergo a process of socialisation, gradually adopting this doctrine of self-spirituality and eventually reinforcing it by means of standardised legitimations. Thirdly, spirituality has entered the public sphere of work, aiming at a reduction of employees’ alienation to increase both their happiness and organisational effectiveness. A radical ‘sociologisation’ of New Age research is called for to document how the doctrinal ideal of self-spirituality is socially constructed, transmitted, and reinforced and critically to deconstruct rather than reproduce sociologically naive New Age rhetoric about the primacy of personal authenticity.     

Habermas and Dummett: Beyond Dogmatism and Scepticism

In this article I suggest a way of overcoming the traditional dichotomy between analytic and continental philosophy by pointing at some similarities between apparently disparate philosophical approaches, viz. those of Michael Dummett and Jürgen Habermas. The comparison revolves around the so-called 'paradox of analysis', which poses a dilemma concerning philosophical propositions: these are allegedly shown to be either trivial or unsecured. Both Dummett and Habermas offer ways out of the dilemma, through recognition of the intersection of analysis with life. A transcendentally characterized conception of language is conceived by both as the only way to overcome the haunting objective m subjective distinction. Thus they offer fresh insights into the nature of meaning and truth, and the place these occupy within philosophical systems. Both philosophers take the notions of justification and procedural rationality to be primary in the order of philosophical explanation. Meaning is not conceived in terms of representation and truth conditions, but in terms of validity claims. Truth is not viewed as independent and static, but as historically conditioned and constantly unfolding. As a result, even the statements of logic, and certainly those of philosophy, find a place between the alleged emptiness of analyticity and the robust empirical character of science. This common ground represents, I believe, one of the new faces of post-analytic m and hence also post-continental m philosophy. Parts of it are shared by other contemporary philosophers, such as Derrida and Brandom. What marks this new Weltanschauung is the way it surpasses the current eliminativist trends in philosophy.     

Individualism and psychotherapy: Are psychologists leading or following individualilstic trends?

There has been much recent concern about the promotion of individualism in psychotherapy. This study assessed wheather psychologists differed in their preference for individualism from univerisy professors and students, in terms of how they view individuals' difficulties. The 289 respondents were presented with six clinical vignettes, and chose one of the four theoretically based perpectives of the person's difficulties. There were two individualisticn responses and two responses emphasizing social embeddedness and responsibility. The results indicated that there were no differences among the predominantly individualistic perpectives of the psychologists, the university professors, and evening school students. The respondents were equally individualistic with socially integrated and socially alienated clients which suggests that an individualistic bias was present in all three Groups.     

On Understanding Leśniewski

Tarski's manner of defining truth is generally considered highly significant. About why, there is less consensus. I argue first, that in his truth-definitions Tarski was trying to solve a set of philosophical problems; second, that he solved them successfully; third, that all of these that are simply problems about defining truth are as well or better solved by a simpler account of truth. But one of his crucial problems remains: to give an account of validity, one requires an account not just of truth but of truth under varying interpretations. Tarski's account has the merit of generalizing to this, to model theory and to abstract algebra.     

Conflict,consensus, and liberty in J. S. Mill’s representative democracy

The relationship between representative democracy and conflict in John Stuart Mill’s political philosophy has been interpreted in very different ways. While some scholars claim that Millian democracy is incompatible with political conflict, others identify in Mill a radical political agonism that would offer a non-consensual model of deliberative democracy. This paper argues that neither of these views is exactly accurate: although he highlights the centrality of conflict in political life, Mill believes that democratic deliberation presupposes a minimal level of consensus regarding the formal value of democracy’s basic principles, viz. the principles of individual freedom and equality. Initially, I shall reconstruct the relationship between conflict and consensus in Mill’s conception of representative democracy. I shall then investigate his association of representation and advocacy and show that Mill’s encomium on political conflict was influenced by Guizot’s work. Finally, I shall explain how a democratic debate riven with conflict is conducive to individual freedom.     

The Perceiver's Share: Realism, Scepticism, and Response Dependence

Abstract: Response‐dispositional (RD) properties are standardly defined as those that involve an object's appearing thus or thus to some perceptually well‐equipped observer under specified epistemic conditions. The paradigm instance is that of colour or other such Lockean “secondary qualities”, as distinct from those—like shape and size—that pertain to the object itself, quite apart from anyone's perception. This idea has lately been thought to offer a promising alternative to the deadlocked dispute between hard‐line ‘metaphysical’ realists and subjectivists, projectivists, social constructivists, or hard‐line anti‐realists. A chief source text is Plato's Euthyphro, where the issue is posed in ethical terms: do the gods infallibly approve virtuous acts on account of their divine moral omniscience or are virtuous acts just those the gods approve? Among the areas proposed as amenable to an RD approach are epistemology, ethics, political theory, and philosophy of mathematics. It is claimed that by making due allowance for the involvement of normalised or optimised human responses one can steer a course between the twin poles of an objectivist realism that places truth beyond our cognitive grasp and an epistemic conception that confines truth within the limits of humanly attainable proof, knowledge, or verification. Here I argue—on the contrary—that RD approaches can be shown to offer nothing more than a variant of the same old realist versus anti‐realist dilemma. That is, they work out either as a trivial (tautologous) claim that ‘truth’ simply equates with ‘best judgement’ in the ideal (quasi‐objective) limit or as the claim—advanced by anti‐realists like Michael Dummett—that we cannot form any adequate conception of objective (recognition‐transcendent) truths. After looking at this issue in various contexts of debate, I conclude that one useful (if pyrrhic) outcome is to demonstrate the non‐availability of any middle‐ground stance. We are left with the strictly unavoidable choice between a realist or objectivist approach and one that assimilates truth to the consensus of accredited best opinion. This latter amounts to a roundabout, elaborately qualified version of the anti‐realist case.     

Rationality as the Capacity for Understanding

In this essay, I develop and defend a virtue‐theoretic conception of rationality as a capacity whose function is understanding, as opposed to mere truth or correctness. I focus on two main potential advantages of this view. First, its ability to explain the rationality of forms of explanatory reasoning, and second, its ability to offer a more unified account of theoretical and practical rationality.     

Social Risk and Attribution: How Considering the Social Risk of Attributions Can Improve the Performance of Kelley's ANOVA Model in Applied Research

Classic models of attribution are increasingly used, despite serious problems with their empirical validation. This study revisits Kelley's (1967 ) ANOVA model of attribution and argues that it will most usefully predict attributions when attributional processes are socially “safe” and have few social consequences. The results demonstrate that attributions are most likely to be inconsistent with Kelley's predictions when attributional information and the attributions themselves are socially consequential or risky, but are more likely to be made as predicted when they are socially safe. Applications of Kelley's model, therefore, should pay attention to the extent to which attributions and attributional information are socially consequential or risky, particularly when analyzing the use of consensus information.     

Coherence and Truth: A Cognitive Model of Propositional Truth Attribution

The truth value assigned to a proposition is treated by philosophers, logicians, and most psychologists as an abstract construct, a theoretical object outside the cognitive system. Breaking away from this consensus, we propose to carry out a psychological investigation to analyse the objective, verifiable properties of representations categorized as true by human individuals. We shall reject the conception whereby attributing a truth value to a proposition is the result of the activation of knowledge about the truth of that proposition. We shall also exclude the conception of truth as the result of the establishment of a correspondence with the world. We propose that truth be understood as the result of a decision about the values taken on by the conditions for fulfilment of the act of referencing in a mental model. Our cognitive model of propositional truth attribution is built on the assumption that the truth value of a proposition is determined by the ability of that proposition to fit into the theory of the field to which it refers. This attribution is viewed as a two-stage cognitive activity. During the first stage, the features defining the coherence of the proposition in the activated mental model determine its plausibility value. This defines a generally inconsistent set of truth candidates. The second stage involves selecting the subset containing all propositions which, in context, will be considered true. Two selection criteria are used: maximum consistency and connectivity. The preliminary experimental results proved to be compatible with the proposed model.     

How we think and act together

In this paper, I examine the challenges socially extended minds pose for mainstream, individualistic accounts of social cognition. I argue that individualistic accounts of social cognition neglect phenomena important to social cognition that are properly emphasized by socially extended mind accounts. Although I do not think the evidence or arguments warrant replacing individualistic explanations of social cognition with socially extended explanations, I argue that we have good reason to supplement our individualistic accounts so as to include the ways in which situational context affects social interactions. The result, I hope, is a more sophisticated individualism that offers a more comprehensive account of how we think and act together.     

The Varieties of Instrumental Rationality

It is a mistake to think that instrumental rationality fixes a single standard for judging or describing actions. While there is a core conception of instrumental rationality, we appeal to different elaborations of that conception for different purposes. An action can be instrumentally rational in some sense(s) but not in others. As we learn more about behavior, it is possible to add useful elaborations of the core conception of instrumental rationality. In this paper, I propose a new elaboration based on Frederic Schick's work on understandings.