The Collaborative Management of Sustained Unsustainability: On the Performance of Participatory Forms of Environmental Governance

n modern democratic consumer societies, decentralized, participative, and consensus-oriented forms of multi-stakeholder governance are supplementing, and often replacing, conventional forms of state-centered environmental government. The engagement in all phases of the policy process of diverse social actors has become a hallmark of environmental good governance. This does not mean to say, however, that these modes of policy-making have proved particularly successful in resolving the widely debated multiple sustainability crisis. In fact, they have been found wanting in terms of their ability to respond to democratic needs and their capacity to resolve environmental problems. So why have these participatory forms of environmental governance become so prominent? What exactly is their appeal? What do they deliver? Exploring these questions from the perspective of eco-political and sociological theory, this article suggests that these forms of environmental governance represent a performative kind of eco-politics that helps liberal consumer societies to manage their inability and unwillingness to achieve the socio-ecological transformation that scientists and environmental activists say is urgently required. This reading of the prevailing policy approaches as the collaborative management of sustained unsustainability adds an important dimension to the understanding of environmental governance and contemporary eco-politics more generally

A new dialectical theory of explanation

This paper offers a dialogue theory of explanation. A successful explanation is defined as a transfer of understanding in a dialogue system in which a questioner and a respondent take part. The questioner asks a special sort of why-question that asks for understanding of something and the respondent provides a reply that transfers understanding to the questioner. The theory is drawn from recent work on explanation in artificial intelligence (AI), especially in expert systems, but applies to scientific, legal and everyday conversational explanations

Can a machine think (anything new)? Automation beyond simulation

This article will rework the classical question ‘Can a machine think?’ into a more specific problem: ‘Can a machine think anything new?’ It will consider traditional computational tasks such as prediction and decision-making, so as to investigate whether the instrumentality of these operations can be understood in terms of the creation of novel thought. By addressing philosophical and technoscientific attempts to mechanise thought on the one hand (e.g. Leibniz’s mathesis universalis and Turing’s algorithmic method of computation), and the philosophical and cultural critique of these attempts on the other, I will argue that computation’s epistemic productions should be assessed vis-à-vis the logico-mathematical specificity of formal axiomatic systems. Such an assessment requires us to conceive automated modes of thought in such a way as to supersede the hope that machines might replicate human cognitive faculties, and to thereby acknowledge a form of onto-epistemological autonomy in automated ‘thinking’ processes. This involves moving beyond the view that machines might merely simulate humans. Machine thought should be seen as dramatically alien to human thought, and to the dimension of lived experience upon which the latter is predicated. Having stepped outside the simulative paradigm, the question ‘Can a machine think anything new?’ can then be reformulated. One should ask whether novel behaviour in computing might come not from the breaking of mechanical rules, but from following them: from doing what computers do already, and not what we might think they should be doing if we wanted them to imitate us

Enhanced Position Verification for VANETs using Subjective Logic

The integrity of messages in vehicular ad-hoc networks has been extensively studied by the research community, resulting in the IEEE~1609.2 standard, which provides typical integrity guarantees. However, the correctness of message contents is still one of the main challenges of applying dependable and secure vehicular ad-hoc networks. One important use case is the validity of position information contained in messages: position verification mechanisms have been proposed in the literature to provide this functionality. A more general approach to validate such information is by applying misbehavior detection mechanisms. In this paper, we consider misbehavior detection by enhancing two position verification mechanisms and fusing their results in a generalized framework using subjective logic. We conduct extensive simulations using VEINS to study the impact of traffic density, as well as several types of attackers and fractions of attackers on our mechanisms. The obtained results show the proposed framework can validate position information as effectively as existing approaches in the literature, without tailoring the framework specifically for this use case.Comment: 7 pages, 18 figures, corrected version of a paper submitted to 2016 IEEE 84th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2016-Fall): revised the way an opinion is created with eART, and re-did the experiments (uploaded here as correction in agreement with TPC Chairs

The dialectic of democracy: modernization, emancipation and the great regression

In some of the most established and supposedly immutable liberal democracies, diverse social groups are losing confidence not only in established democratic institutions, but in the idea of liberal representative democracy itself. Meanwhile, an illiberal and anti-egalitarian transformation of democracy evolves at an apparently unstoppable pace. This democratic fatigue syndrome, the present article suggests, is qualitatively different from the crises of Democracy which have been debated for some considerable time. Focusing on mature democracies underpinned by the ideational tradition of European Enlightenment, the article theorizes this Syndrome and the striking transformation of democracy in terms of a dialectic process in which the very norm that once gave birth to the democratic project - the modernist idea of the autonomous subject - metamorphoses into its gravedigger, or at least into the driver of its radical reformulation. The article further develops aspects of my existing work on second-order emancipation and simulative democracy. Taking a theoretical rather than empirical approach, it aims to provide a conceptual framework for more empirically oriented analyses of changing forms of political articulation and participation

Précis of *Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta: an Essay on Metarepresentation

A summary of my book *Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta*, published by MIT Press in 2000 ('Representation and Mind' series)

Under influence

In many circumstances we tend to assume that other people believe or desire what we ourselves believe or desire. This has been labeled 'egocentric bias.' This is not to say that we systematically fail to understand other people and forget that they can have a different perspective. If it were the case, then it would be highly difficult, if not impossible, to communicate, cooperate or compete with them. In those situations, we need to take the other person's perspective and to inhibit our own. But can the other's perspective furtively intrude even when no reason seems to require it, or even when it is detrimental for us? We shall see a series of evidence of what has been called altercentric bias (Samson et al., 2010; Apperly, 2011): other people's beliefs can unduly influence us even when they are wrong. At first sight, altercentric bias questions 1st person priority. In particular, it may appear as incompatible with simulation-based accounts of 3rd person mindreading. We shall argue, on the contrary, that the simulationist framework enables confusions between self and others that go both ways: taking one's beliefs for the other's beliefs (egocentric bias) and vice-versa, taking the other's beliefs for one's beliefs (altercentric bias). We shall then see how the risk of such confusion may be disadvantageous from an evolutionary perspective, questioning thus the evolutionary plausibility of the simulation theory

A Cognitive Theory of the Aesthetic Experience

This paper aims at naturalizing the aesthetic experience on the basis of cognitive sciences. In traditional philosophical aesthetics, the aesthetic experience requires a specific attitude and a characteristic work of imagination. Today, cognitive sciences offer a rich set of empirically corroborated concepts useful in explaining these notions in naturalistic terms. This paper extends these concepts to explain how the aesthetic experience is integrated and how it affords knowledge

Democratization beyond the post-democratic turn: towards a research agenda on new conceptions of citizen participation

Following extensive debates about post-democracy and post-politics, scholarly attention has shifted to conceptualizing the ongoing transformation of democracy. In this endeavour, the change in understandings, expectations and functions of political participation is a key parameter. Improving citizen participation is widely regarded as the hallmark of democratization. Yet, a variety of actors are also increasingly ambivalent about democratic institutions and the further expansion of participation. Meanwhile, new forms of participation are gaining in significance – neoliberal activation, the responsibilization of consumers, digital data mining, managed behaviour guided by choice architects – which some believe much improve representation, but which others perceive as a threat to the citizens’ autonomy. This article introduces a special issue focusing on the participation-democratization nexus in well-established democracies in the economically affluent global North. Based on a critical review of popular narratives of post-democracy and post-politics we sketch the notion of the post-democratic turn – which offers a new perspective on emerging forms of participation and in this special issue serves as a conceptual lens for their analysis. We then revisit more traditional conceptualizations of democratic participation which are challenged by the post-democratic turn. The article concludes with an overview of the individual contributions to this special issue

Old Wine in New Bottles? The Actual and Potential Contribution of Civil Society Organisations to Democratic Governance in Europe

Political science literature often claims that the participation of civil society organisations increases the democratic quality of policy-making in international governance arrangements. However, it remains unclear under what conditions such a democratic value can be achieved and how the empirical reality of this participation relates to the alleged democracy-enhancing quality. In recent years, the European initiatives to establish a civil dialogue, to improve the consultation with civil society organizations and above all the White Paper on European Governance have triggered some scientific expectations that the EU seeks to establish a participatory regime which possibly improves the democratic character of EU policy-making