In this work, Peter Breiner explores the implications of Max Weber's political sociology for political judgment and democratic theory.

Commentators have frequently noted the discrepancy in il Principle between the figure of the new prince and the impossibility of exemplifying him. Against interpretations that claim Machiavelli's text either traps a prince in a web of self-destructive advice or destabilizes the very political knowledge it provides, the author argues that it uses the figure of the new prince to locate us in the primordial moment of acquisition of political power, a moment that is never overcome but is constantly replayed in (...) maintaining states and beneath established institutions. Thus given the impossibility for a new prince to ever get beyond "the primordial moment of acquisition," there can be no overall theoretical resolution to this tension, and thus no closure to this text. Therefore the text addresses a reader--actor who has to assemble the maxims and examples in light of the necessities governing primordial acquisition as they play out in his/her historical location. (shrink)

The explanation of everything by economic causes alone is never exhaustive in any sense whatsoever, in any sphere of cultural phenomena, not even in the economic sphere itself. Max Weber, “Objectivity”in Social Science and Social Policy (1904).

According to Eleonore Stump, Thomas Aquinas rejects a “popular” (roughly, penal substitutionary) account of the atonement. For Stump’s Aquinas, God does not require satisfaction or punishment for human sin, and the function of satisfaction is remedial, not juridical or penal. Naturally, then, Aquinas does not, on this reading, see Christ’s passion as having saving effect in virtue of Christ substitutionally bearing the punishment for human sin that divine justice requires. I argue that Stump is incorrect. For Aquinas, divine justice does (...) require satisfaction; satisfaction involves punishment ( poena) and has a penal function; and one way Christ’s death has saving effect is in virtue of his satisfying that requirement on people’s behalf. Christ saves by “paying our debt,” bearing in the place of humans the penalty or punishment required by divine justice. My argument implies that Aquinas’s account of satisfaction in the atonement significantly resembles key aspects of Stump’s “popular account”—and of the Penal Substitution Theory it represents. (shrink)

Charles Peirce claimed that the principal ingredient in assertion is an act of “taking responsibility” for the truth of what is asserted. Some people writing about the Commitment Theory of Assertion have at times construed Peirce’s claim as his espousal of that contemporary theory, but this, I argue, is mistaken. Peirce saw “taking responsibility” as the assumption, not of an obligation, but instead of a liability, a penalty to be incurred if one’s assertion turned out to be false. I then (...) consider how this point connects to other parts of Pierce’s analysis of assertion, specifically his claims that we assert to persuade, that assertion involves an intentional exhibition of our assumption of liability, and that this assumption of liability furnishes evidence for what is asserted. I conclude by sketching on Peirce’s behalf how the assumption of liability could constitute, and be intelligibly offered as, evidence for what is asserted. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the famous ‘Mannheim paradox’ regarding the ideological understanding of ideology in Ideology and Utopia merely serves as a preparation for a far more complex and persistent paradox that poses a recurrent problem for any political science seeking to understand the relation of political ideologies to political reality: namely, when we try to understand contending political ideologies at any one historical moment and test them for their ‘congruence’ with historical and sociological ‘reality’, our construction of this context (...) is itself informed by these ideologies or our partisan understanding of them. To deal with this paradox Mannheim suggests a new political science based on Marx and Weber. This political science seeks to construct fields of competing ideologies—such as conservatism, liberalism, and socialism—and play off the insight and blindness of each to create a momentary ‘synthesis’ of the relation between political ideas and a dynamic political reality. (shrink)

Although it is well-recognized that Max Weber was of central importance to many of the emigre social scientists who fled Hitler, commentators have overlooked both Weber’s attempt to found a new dynamic political science that would test partisan commitments and the endeavors of emigre political scientists to develop this project. This article lays out this new Weberian political science and assesses the fate of the various attempts on the part of the emigres to translate it into their new setting. It (...) shows that Weber forged a notion of political science that combined an existential notion of politics as inexorable power struggle with a sociology of the business of politics that provided the setting in which that struggle was to take place. It also shows that the central purpose of this political science was to aid political partisans in clarifying the meaning of their political commitments by forcing them to view these commitments as they are shaped in the socio-political context that determines the struggle for power. I then show that Mannheim sought to radicalize this approach to political science by seeking to construct the political backdrop for the testing of political ideas out of a political field not out of parties, politicians, and state institutions but out of competing ideologies, each of which could be shown to have some insight into the dynamics of political conflict. For Mannheim we could now test political ideas against political reality by playing them off against each other. I call this project of testing political ideas against existential and sociological notions of the political field the Weber–Mannheim project. I then show how three emigre political scientists – Arnold Brecht, Hans Morgenthau, and Franz Neumann – sought to carry on the Weber–Mannheim project in their new setting. I argue that, of the three, Franz Neumann in his great work Behemoth, was most successful in staying true to that project. For he was able to find in his analysis of the Weimar Republic and the fascist regime a way of demonstrating the dynamics under which democracy and dictatorship fail or succeed while still maintaining openings for political will. Both Brecht and Morgenthau seem to have flattened the dynamic aspect of the Weberian and Mannheimian notions of a prudential political science – though it was Morgenthau who had the most successful reception in political science. (shrink)

Dual-process and dual-system theories in both cognitive and social psychology have been subjected to a number of recently published criticisms. However, they have been attacked as a category, incorrectly assuming there is a generic version that applies to all. We identify and respond to 5 main lines of argument made by such critics. We agree that some of these arguments have force against some of the theories in the literature but believe them to be overstated. We argue that the dual-processing (...) distinction is supported by much recent evidence in cognitive science. Our preferred theoretical approach is one in which rapid autonomous processes are assumed to yield default responses unless intervened on by distinctive higher order reasoning processes. What defines the difference is that Type 2 processing supports hypothetical thinking and load heavily on working memory. (shrink)

Neither full belief nor partial belief is more fundamental, ontologically speaking. A survey of some relevant cognitive psychology supports a dualist ontology instead. Beliefs come in two kinds, categorical and graded, neither more fundamental than the other. In particular, the graded kind is no more fundamental. When we discuss belief in on/off terms, we are not speaking coarsely or informally about states that are ultimately credal.

What does it mean to be disadvantaged? Is it possible to compare different disadvantages? What should governments do to move their societies in the direction of equality, where equality is to be understood both in distributional and social terms? Linking rigorous analytical philosophical theory with broad empirical studies, including interviews conducted for the purpose of this book, Wolff and de-Shalit show how taking theory and practice together is essential if the theory is to be rich enough to be applied to (...) the real world, and policy systematic enough to have purpose and justification. The book is in three parts. Part 1 presents a pluralist analysis of disadvantage, modifying the capability theory of Sen and Nussbaum to produce the 'genuine opportunity for secure functioning' view. This emphasises risk and insecurity as a central component of disadvantage. Part 2 shows how to identify the least advantaged in society even on a pluralist view. The authors suggest that disadvantage 'clusters' in the sense that some people are disadvantaged in several different respects. Thus identifying the least advantaged is not as problematic as it appears to be. Conversely, a society which has 'declustered disadvantaged' - in the sense that no group lacks secure functioning on a range of functionings - has made considerable progress in the direction of equality. Part 3 explores how to decluster disadvantage, by paying special attention to 'corrosive disadvantages' - those disadvantages which cause further disadvantages - and 'fertile functionings' - those which are likely to secure other functionings. In sum this books presents a refreshing new analysis of disadvantage, and puts forward proposals to help governments improve the lives of the least advantaged in their societies, thereby moving in the direction of equality. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Introduction As its title indicates, this book is intended to provide an introduction to the main topics currently discussed under the rather unclear ...

Presentists, who believe that only present objects exist, face a problem concerning truths about the past. Presentists should (but cannot) locate truth-makers for truths about the past. What can presentists say in response? We identify two rival factions ‘upstanding’ and ‘nefarious’ presentists. Upstanding presentists aim to meet the challenge, positing presently existing truth-makers for truths about the past; nefarious presentists aim to shirk their responsibilities, using the language of truth-maker theory but without paying any ontological price. We argue that presentists (...) should be nefarious presentists. (shrink)

Conciliatory views of disagreement maintain that discovering a particular type of disagreement requires that one make doxastic conciliation. In this paper I give a more formal characterization of such a view. After explaining and motivating this view as the correct view regarding the epistemic significance of disagreement, I proceed to defend it from several objections concerning higher-order evidence (evidence about the character of one's evidence) made by Thomas Kelly (2005).

This book explores the idea that much of our behaviour is controlled by automatic and intuitive mental processes, which shape and compete with our conscious thinking and decision making. Accessibly written, and assuming no prior knowledge of the field, the book will be fascinating reading for all those interested in human behaviour.

Doing and Being confronts the problem of how to understand two central concepts of Aristotle's philosophy: energeia and dunamis. While these terms seem ambiguous between actuality/potentiality and activity/capacity, Aristotle did not intend them to be so. Through a careful and detailed reading of Metaphysics Theta, Beere argues that we can solve the problem by rejecting both "actuality" and "activity" as translations of energeia, and by working out an analogical conception of energeia. This approach enables Beere to discern a hitherto unnoticed (...) connection between Plato's Sophist and Aristotle's Metaphysics Theta, and to give satisfying interpretations of the major claims that Aristotle makes in Metaphysics Theta, the claim that energeia is prior in being to capacity and the claim that any eternal principle must be perfectly good. (shrink)

“Bodily autonomy” has received significant attention in bioethics, medical ethics, and medical law in terms of the general inviolability of a patient’s bodily sovereignty and the rights of patients to make choices (e.g., reproductive choices) that concern their own body. However, the role of the body in terms of how it can or does contribute to a patient’s capacity for, or exercises of their autonomy in clinical decision-making situations has not been explicitly addressed. The approach to autonomy in this paper (...) is aligned with traditional theories that conceive autonomy in terms of an individual’s capacities for, and exercises of rational reflection. However, at the same time, this paper extends these accounts by arguing that autonomy is, in part, embodied. Specifically, by drawing on phenomenological conceptions of the experience of autonomy, we argue that, in principle, the body is a necessary component of the capacity for autonomy. Secondly, through the presentation of two different cases, we highlight ways in which a patient’s body can contribute to the autonomy of treatment choices. Ultimately, we hope to encourage others to explore additional conditions under which a concept of embodied autonomy should be employed in medical decision making, how its underlying principles might be operationalised in clinical situations, and its consequences for approaches to patient autonomy in healthcare practice, policy, and law. (shrink)

The study of deductive reasoning has been a major paradigm in psychology for approximately the past 40 years. Research has shown that people make many logical errors on such tasks and are strongly influenced by problem content and context. It is argued that this paradigm was developed in a context of logicist thinking that is now outmoded. Few reasoning researchers still believe that logic is an appropriate normative system for most human reasoning, let alone a model for describing the process (...) of human reasoning, and many use the paradigm principally to study pragmatic and probabilistic processes. It is suggested that the methods used for studying reasoning be reviewed, especially the instructional context, which necessarily defines pragmatic influences as biases. (shrink)

Research on theory of mind has primarily focused on demonstrating and understanding the ability to represent others' non‐factive mental states, for example, others' beliefs in the false‐belief task. This requirement confuses the ability to represent a particular kind of non‐factive content (e.g., a false belief) with the more general capacity to represent others' understanding of the world even when it differs from one's own. We provide a way of correcting this. We first offer a simple and theoretically motivated account on (...) which tracking another agent's understanding of the world and keeping that representation separate from one's own are the essential features of a capacity for theory of mind. We then show how these criteria can be operationalized in a new experimental paradigm: the “diverse‐knowledge task.”. (shrink)

Any creature that must move around in its environment to find nutrients and mates, in order to survive and reproduce, faces the problem of sensorimotor control. A solution to this problem requires an on-board control mechanism that can shape the creature’s behaviour so as to render it “appropriate” to the conditions that obtain. There are at least three ways in which such a control mechanism can work, and Nature has exploited them all. The first and most basic way is for (...) a creature to bump into the things in its environment, and then, depending on what has been encountered, seek to modify its behaviour accordingly. Such an approach is risky, however, since some things in the environment are distinctly unfriendly. A second and better way, therefore, is for a creature to exploit ambient forms of energy that carry information about the distal structure of the environment. This is an improvement on the first method since it enables the creature to respond to the surroundings without actually bumping into anything. Nonetheless, this second method also has its limitations, one of which is that the information conveyed by such ambient energy is often impoverished, ambiguous and intermittent. (shrink)

Shared Decision Making (‘SDM’) is one of the most significant developments in Western health care practices in recent years. Whereas traditional models of care operate on the basis of the physician as the primary medical decision maker, SDM requires patients to be supported to consider options in order to achieve informed preferences by mutually sharing the best available evidence. According to its proponents, SDM is the right way to interpret the clinician-patient relationship because it fulfils the ethical imperative of respecting (...) patient autonomy. However, there is no consensus about how decisions in SDM contexts relate to the principle of respect for autonomy. In response, I demonstrate that in order to make decisions about what treatment they will or will not receive, patients will be required to meet different conditions depending on the approach proponents of SDM take to understanding personal autonomy. Due to the fact that different conceptions of autonomy yield different obligations, I argue that if physicians and patients satisfied all the conditions described in standard accounts of SDM, then SDM would undermine patient autonomy. (shrink)

According to the Ontological Innocence Thesis (OIT), grounded entities are ontologically innocent relative to their full grounds. I argue that OIT entails a contradiction, and therefore must be discarded. My argument turns on the notion of “groundmates,” two or more numerically distinct entities that share at least one of their full grounds. I argue that, if OIT is true, then it is both the case that there are groundmates and that there are no groundmates. Therefore, so I conclude, OIT is (...) false. Moreover, once we have seen why OIT is false, only three heterodox views about reality's structure remain. So this paper’s second conclusion is that, even after we have discarded OIT, we are in for an additional surprise. (shrink)

This article is a selective review of David Lewis's Counterfactuals, a challenging, provocative, absorbingly interesting attempt to analyze statements of the form “If it were the case that P, then it would be the case that Q.” I shall follow Lewis in calling these “counterfactuals,” and shall nearly follow him in abbreviating them to the form P→Q.Chapter 1, which is nearly a third of the whole, gives the analysis and proves that it endows counterfactuals with some properties which they evidently (...) do have. Chapter 2 presents some “alternative formulations” of the analysis—a logical jeu d'esprit which I shall not discuss except for the section about “cotenability.”. (shrink)

When cognitive scientists apply computational theory to the problem of phenomenal consciousness, as many of them have been doing recently, there are two fundamentally distinct approaches available. Either consciousness is to be explained in terms of the nature of the representational vehicles the brain deploys; or it is to be explained in terms of the computational processes defined over these vehicles. We call versions of these two approaches _vehicle_ and _process_ theories of consciousness, respectively. However, while there may be space (...) for vehicle theories of consciousness in cognitive science, they are relatively rare. This is because of the influence exerted, on the one hand, by a large body of research which purports to show that the explicit representation of information in the brain and conscious experience are _dissociable_, and on the other, by the _classical_ computational theory of mind – the theory that takes human cognition to be a species of symbol manipulation. But two recent developments in cognitive science combine to suggest that a reappraisal of this situation is in order. First, a number of theorists have recently been highly critical of the experimental methodologies employed in the dissociation studies – so critical, in fact, it’s no longer reasonable to assume that the dissociability of conscious experience and explicit representation has been adequately demonstrated. Second, classicism, as a theory of human cognition, is no longer as dominant in cognitive science as it once was. It now has a lively competitor in the form of _connectionism; _and connectionism, unlike classicism, does have the computational resources to support a robust vehicle theory of consciousness. In this paper we develop and defend this connectionist vehicle theory of consciousness. It takes the form of the following simple empirical hypothesis: _phenomenal experience consists in the explicit_ _representation of information in neurally realized PDP networks_.. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that children enjoy some form of a right to bodily integrity. However, there is little agreement about the precise nature and scope of this right. This paper offers a conceptual analysis of the child's right to bodily integrity, in order to further elucidate the relationship between the child's right to bodily integrity and considerations of autonomy. Following a discussion of Leif Wenar's work on the structure and justification of rights, I first explain how the adult's right (...) to bodily integrity can be distilled into separate elements that may plausibly be justified by different moral considerations. In particular, I claim that this analysis suggests that whilst the adult's right to bodily integrity is not wholly reducible to bodily autonomy, autonomy nonetheless remains entwined with our understanding of this right in a number of ways. On the basis of this discussion, I go on to outline three important complexities that arise when we consider the child's right to bodily integrity, before particularly focusing on the question of how third parties should determine whether or not to perform a physical interference upon a child who lacks decision-making capacity. Here, I raise some objections to Earp and Mazor's recent attempts to answer this question, before briefly defending an ‘autonomy-based interests’ account of permissible interference, an account that shares in what I take to be the spirit, if not the precise letter, of these earlier views. (shrink)

Knowledge ascriptions are contrast-sensitive. One natural explanation for this is that the knowledge relation is contrastive ( s knows that p rather than q ). But can the binary view of knowledge ( s knows that p ) explain contrast-sensitivity? I review some of the linguistic data supporting contrast-sensitivity, and critique the three main binary explanations for contrast-sensitivity. I conclude that the contrast-sensitivity of knowledge ascriptions shows that knowledge is a contrastive relation.

Truth and Ontology is a lively book, brimming with arguments, and drawing the reader towards the radical conclusion that what is true does not depend on what there is. If there is a central line of argument, it is that the best account of truthmaking requires truths to be about their truthmakers, but negative existentials, modals, and claims about the past and future are not about what is, but rather about what is not, what might be, and what was and (...) will be. (shrink)

In the last decade, several researchers have proposed theories of actual causation that make use of structural equations and directed graphs. Many of these researchers are committed to a widely-endorsed folk attribution desideratum, according to which an important constraint on the acceptability of a theory of actual causation is agreement between the deliverances of the theory with respect to specific cases and the reports of untutored individuals about those same cases. In the present article, we consider a small collection of (...) related theories of actual causation, including a purely structural theory and two theories that supplement the structural equations with considerations of defaults, typicality, and normality. We argue that each of these three theories are meant to satisfy the FAD, and then we present empirical evidence that they fail to do so for several variations on a simple scenario from the literature. Drawing on our previous work on the responsibility view of folk causal attribitons, we conclude by offering a solution that allows the latter two theories to satisfy the FAD for these cases. The solution is to give up on concerns with typicality and focus on injunctive norms in supplementing the graphical modeling machinery. (shrink)

In this paper, I show that the question of how dual process theories of reasoning and judgement account for conflict between System 1 (heuristic) and System 2 (analytic) processes needs to be explicated and addressed in future research work. I demonstrate that a simple additive probability model that describes such conflict can be mapped on to three different cognitive models. The pre-emptive conflict resolution model assumes that a decision is made at the outset as to whether a heuristic or analytic (...) process will control the response. The parallel-competitive model assumes that each system operates in parallel to deliver a putative response, resulting sometimes in conflict that then needs to be resolved. Finally, the default-interventionist model involves the cueing of default responses by the heuristic system that may or may not be altered by subsequent intervention of the analytic system. A second, independent issue also emerges from this discussion. The superior performance of higher-ability participants on reasoning tasks may be due to the fact that they engage in more analytic reasoning ( quantity hypothesis ) or alternatively to the fact that the analytic reasoning they apply is more effective ( quality hypothesis ). (shrink)

A general two-stage theory of human inference is proposed. A distinction is drawn between heuristic processes which select items of task information as ‘relevant’, and analytic processes which operate on the selected items to generate inferences or judgements. These two stages are illustrated in a selective review of work on both deductive and statistical reasoning. Factors identified as contributing to heuristic selection include perceptual salience, linguistic suppositions and semantic associations. Analytic processes are considered to be context dependent: people reason from (...) experience, not from inference rules. The paper includes discussion of the theory in comparison with other contemporary theories of human inference, and in relation to the current debate about human rationality. (shrink)

We used multiple methods to examine two questions about emotion and culture: (1) Which facial expressions are recognised cross-culturally; and (2) does the “forced-choice” method lead to spurious findings of universality? Forty participants in the US and 40 in India were shown 14 facial expressions and asked to say what had happened to cause the person to make the face. Analyses of the social situations given and of the affect words spontaneously used showed high levels of recognition for most of (...) the expressions. A subsequent forced-choice task using the same faces confirmed these findings. Analysis of the pattern of magnitude, discreteness, and similarity of responses across cultures and expressions led to the conclusion that there is no neat distinction between cross-culturally recognisable and nonrecognisable expressions. Results are better described as a gradient of recognition. (shrink)

Socially responsible investment is a rapidly emerging phenomenon within the field of personal investment. However, the factors that lead investors to choose socially responsible investment products are not well understood, especially in an Australian context. This study provides a comparative examination of conventional and socially responsible investors, with the aim of identifying such factors. A total of 55 conventional investors and 54 ethical investors participated in the study by completing mailed questionnaires about their investment and general behaviour and their attitudes (...) and beliefs. Results indicated some important differences between socially responsible and conventional investors in their beliefs of the importance of ethical issues, their investment decision-making style, and their perceptions of moral intensity. These results support the notion that socially responsible investors differ in critical ways to conventional investors, and are discussed in terms of theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have become increasingly interested in understanding how natural minds represent and reason about possible ways the world could be. However, there is currently little agreement on how to understand this remarkable capacity for modal thought. We argue that the capacity for modal thought is built from a set of relatively simple component parts, centrally involving an ability to consider possible extensions of a part of the actual world. Natural minds can productively combine this ability with a range of (...) other capacities, eventually allowing for the observed suite of increasingly more sophisticated ways of modal reasoning. We demonstrate how our (de)compositional account is supported by both the trajectory of children’s developing capacity for reasoning about possible ways the world could be and by what we know about how such modal thought is expressed within and across natural languages. Our approach makes new predictions about which kinds of capacities are required by which kinds of experimental tasks and, as a result, contributes to settling currently open theoretical questions about the development of modal thought and the acquisition of modal vocabulary in children. Our work also provides a more systematic way of understanding possible variation in modal thought and talk, and, more generally, paves the way toward a unified theory that will ultimately allow researchers across disciplines to relate their findings to each other within a framework of shared assumptions. (shrink)

A range of developing countries and international advocacy organizations have argued that wealthy countries, as a result of their greater historical contribution to human-induced climate change, owe a ?climate debt? to poor countries. Critics of this argument have claimed that it is incoherent or morally objectionable. In this essay we clarify the concept of climate debt and assess its value for conceptualizing responsibilities associated with global climate change and for guiding international climate negotiations. We conclude that the idea of a (...) climate debt can be coherently formulated, and that while some understandings of the idea of climate debt could lead to morally objectionable conclusions, other accounts would not. However, we argue that climate debt nevertheless provides an unhelpful frame for advancing global justice through international climate negotiations ? the only existing means of resolving political conflict over the collective action problems posed by human-induced climate change ? due to its retrospective and potentially adversarial emphasis, and to problems of measurement. (shrink)

Conciliatory views of disagreement are an intuitive class of views on the epistemic significance of disagreement. Such views claim that making conciliation is often required upon discovering that another disagrees with you. One of the chief objections to these views of the epistemic significance of disagreement is that they are self-defeating. Since, there are disagreements about the epistemic significance of disagreement, such views can be turned on themselves, and this has been thought to be problematic. In this paper, I examine (...) several different incarnations of this objection and defend conciliatory views of disagreement from each of them, while making a modification regarding how such views should be understood. (shrink)