Why the Realist-Instrumentalist Debate about Rational Choice Rests on a Mistake

Within the social sciences, much controversy exists about which status should be ascribed to the rationality assumption that forms the core of rational choice theories. Whilst realists argue that the rationality assumption is an empirical claim which describes real processes that cause individual action, instrumentalists maintain that it amounts to nothing more than an analytically set axiom or ‘as if’ hypothesis which helps in the generation of accurate predictions. In this paper, I argue that this realist-instrumentalist debate about rational choice theory can be overcome once it is realised that the rationality assumption is neither an empirical description nor an ‘as if’ hypothesis, but a normative claim

Mental States Are Like Diseases

While Quine’s linguistic behaviorism is well-known, his Kant Lectures contain one of his most detailed discussions of behaviorism in psychology and the philosophy of mind. Quine clarifies the nature of his psychological commitments by arguing for a modest view that is against ‘excessively restrictive’ variants of behaviorism while maintaining ‘a good measure of behaviorist discipline…to keep [our mental] terms under control’. In this paper, I use Quine’s Kant Lectures to reconstruct his position. I distinguish three types of behaviorism in psychology and the philosophy of mind: ontological behaviorism, logical behaviorism, and epistemological behaviorism. I then consider Quine’s perspective on each of these views and argue that he does not fully accept any of them. By combining these perspectives we arrive at Quine’s surprisingly subtle view about behaviorism in psychology

E-Democracy and the European Public Sphere

The chapter starts with an outline of outstanding recent contributions to the discussion of the EU democratic deficit and the so-called “no demos” problem and the debate about European citizenship and European identity—mainly in the light of insights from the EU crisis. This is followed by reflections on the recent discussion on the state of the mass media-based European public sphere. Finally, the author discusses the state of research on the Internet’s capacity to support the emergence of a (renewed) public sphere, with a focus on options for political actors to use the Internet for communication and campaigning, on the related establishment of segmented issue-related publics as well as on social media and its two-faced character as an enabler as well as a distorting factor of the public sphere. The author is sceptic about the capacities of Internet-based political communication to develop into a supranational (European) public sphere. It rather establishes a network of a multitude of discursive processes aimed at opinion formation at various levels and on various issues. The potential of online communication to increase the responsiveness of political institutions so far is set into practice insufficiently. Online media are increasingly used in a vertical and scarcely in a horizontal or interactive manner of communication

Publicness and Indeterminacy

This paper is concerned with one rather specific question: Is indeterminacy of translation a consequence of the publicness of meaning? As I understand professor Quine, he thinks that the answer to this question is yes.1 I shall provide some support for this interpretation. Personally, I believe that the answer is no, but I shall not try to establish that answer. I don’t know how to do that, or even if it is possible to do it. Instead, I shall examinine what I take to be Quine’s reasoning from the publicness thesis to the indeterminacy thesis. I shall reconstruct the reasoning into an explicit argument, and try to show that this argument cannot be successful. It is not easy to say in advance in what way that argument cannot be successful, since that depends on the structure of the argument, but I shall make it explicit below (section 3). 1. What is publicness of meaning? The thought that linguistic meaning is public has been a main theme for a long time in the 20th century (analytic) philosophy of language. It features in different versions in Wittgenstein, Quine, Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett and others. The common element in these versions is primarily the rejection of a certain picture of linguistic meaning, according to which mental factors, private in the sense of being epistemically inaccessible to others than the speaker himself, determine what hi

A Roadmap for Ethics-Aware Software Engineering

Today's software is highly intertwined with our lives, and it possesses an increasing ability to act and influence us. Besides the renown example of self-driving cars and their potential harmfulness, more mundane software such as social networks can introduce bias, break privacy preferences, lead to digital addiction, etc. Additionally, the software engineering (SE) process itself is highly affected by ethical issues, such as diversity and business ethics. This paper introduces ethics-aware SE, a version of SE in which the ethical values of the stakeholders (including developers and users) are captured, analyzed, and reflected in software specifications and in the SE processes. We propose an analytical framework that assists stakeholders in analyzing ethical issues in terms of subject (software artifact or SE process), relevant value (diversity, privacy, autonomy, ...), and threatened object (user, developer, ...). We also define a roadmap that illustrates the necessary steps for the SE research and practice community in order to fully realize ethics-aware SE

Transcendental subjectivity: Subject, object, or neither?

Although the term ‘transcendental consciousness’ seems like a rather basic notion in Husserl’s philosophy, its precise meaning is in fact one of the principle dividing points among scholars. In this paper I first outline three different views on transcendental consciousness and identify reasons for maintaining them. The most interesting opposition this exposition yields is between the latter two positions. The rest of the paper is then devoted to developing a solution to this interpretative problem which should satisfy intuitions underlying both camps. Particularly novel about this solution is that it (a) understands Husserl’s notion of transcendental consciousness as involving a kind of metaphysical commitment, and (b) takes it not as any kind of object or regional ontology, but as encompassing the totality of being considered from a unique transcendental-phenomenological perspective