Ecological reasoning revisited

Ecological reasoning has been a subject of discussion for some time now. The earliest references to it dates back to 1983 when John S. Dryzek wrote his article on ‘ecological rationality’.3 In this article, Dryzek discussed the problem of collective decision making and argued that ‘ecological rationality’ is a more fundamental form of reason than all other forms of rationality - political, economic, technical, legal and social4 - and hence should take precedence over them when making collective decisions or public policies.5 Dryzek gave the utmost importance to ‘ecological rationality’ because he claimed that “the preservation of the life-support systems upon which human beings depend is a precondition to the continued existence of society.”6 Although, he argued that ecological reasoning should set the standard of reasoning, he didn’t make it clear what ecological reasoning entails. This paper aims to explore the incurrent patterns of ‘ecological reasoning’ through observations of instances of reasoning by self-claimed ecological reasoners in an ethnographic research. In our in depth interviews (48 owners and managers of greentech and consultancy firms in Portugal and Turkey) some of our interlocutors, self claimed ecological reasoners, said that they need to translate their ecological reasoning into economical reasoning in order to appeal to their customers. In other words, in order to make sense, they need to frame their ecological concerns in economic terms. However, contrary to the clarity of economic reasoning, ecological reasoning manifests in a foggy terrain. What are the characteristics of reasoning pattern that make it ecological? Economic reasoning manifests itself in profit maximization, interest seeking etc. However ecological reasoning is a camelon, the colours oscillates between attributing intrinsic value to nature on the one hand; and it gains the colour of means-end rationality on the other

An empirical study of religious reasoning and its implications for democracy

In the near future, Middle Eastern democracy will be shaped by conflicts over the status of religion in the public sphere as well as by conflicts driven by the relationship between religion and the state. While political liberal viewpoints contend that in modern political and social life comprehensive doctrines do not accord well with the demands of pluralism, it does seem that, in their day-to-day practices, some Muslims in Turkey do manage to adequately reconcile their comprehensive doctrines with pluralism’s many demands. Based on fieldwork undertaken in nine cities across Turkey, this thesis is a study of individuals’ modes of religious reasoning. This work analyzes the ways in which Muslim citizens’ religious reasoning styles enable them to either reject or to adjust to the demands of modern social and political life. It identifies four modes of religious reasoning: (i) the communitarian; (ii) the utilitarian; (iii) principled; (iv) the deconstructive. Pluralism goes hand in hand with an acknowledgement that there are multiple worlds, realities and truths; the data presented here demonstrate that pluralism is, in fact, a potentiality possessed by every individual. Pluralism emerges or retreats as part of a process of interactions with other individuals, within a context. This thesis demonstrates that this flux, this dynamism, is strongly associated with individuals’ changes between different modes of religious reasoning

Dünya, böyle gidersek bizi sırtından atacak

Yürütücülüğünü ülkemizden Prof. Dr. Recep Şentürk’ün yaptığı ve TÜBİTAK’ın desteklediği ve Portekiz’den Prof. Dr. João de Deus Santos Sàágua’nın yaptığı ve Portekiz Bilim ve Teknoloji Vakfı’nın (FCT9) desteklediği “Değişen Değerler ve Öncelikler: Portekiz ve Türkiye’deki Sanayicilerde Ekolojik Akıl Yürütme ve Karar Verme” adlı projemiz Şubat 2017’de başladı. İki yıl sürecek olan projede Medeniyetler İttifakı Enstitüsü’nden Yrd. Doç. Dr. Karim Sadek, Dr. Feyzullah Yılmaz ve doktora öğrencileri Rahmi Oruç ve Mehmet Aktaş, Portekiz’den Danish Naeem, Leoanrd Faytre ve bendeniz görev alıyoruz

Dynamics of vaccine skepticism among Turkish youth

To receive a vaccine shot, or not to receive a vaccine shot, has become a life or death decision of sorts, and the range of alternatives contending for public attention, if not trust, pose a puzzle for individual processes of practical reasoning and argumentation. This is especially true for young people. With the goal of examining how vaccine hesitancy is articulated and dealt with in personal narratives, we conducted in-depth oral interviews (önüne) with twenty-seven fırst-year university students- enrolled in more than fıftccn universities spanning most of Turkey in 2021. Wc quickly observed that individuals' decision-making processes are directly affected by the historical strength of the public media narratives circulating among youth. Practical decisions are made depending on the argumentative plausibility of these narratives, bringing to mind Michael Bamberg’s (1997, 2020) positioning theory that suggests a three-tired analysis: story content (story), storytelling interaction (discourse), and social norms. In the Turkish context, the sharp divides and fissures on the level of social norms explain the dynamics of youth vaccine skepticism. Our paper outlines the variants of such skepticism in the midst of Covid-19 and related uncertainties

Reception of climate activist messages by low-carbon transition actors: Argument evasion in the carbon offsetting debate

How do adherents to hegemonic discourses construe and respond to radical arguments by activists? To address the question, we examined how adherents to hegemonic climate change discourses react to a climate activist’s arguments. In interviews conducted with corporate actors of low-carbon transitions, we used a video excerpt to elicit critical reactions to an activist’s argumentation on carbon offsetting. We used the critical reactions as an index of interviewees’ reception of the activist’s case and pragma-dialectical theory to analyze them. We found that interviewees advanced four types of criticism concerning individual agency, awareness-raising, neutralization, and financial instruments. We discuss their inter-relations and how interviewees construed the activist’s argumentation in ways that evaded his more antagonistic claims

Studying the nonreligious quests in Turkey: A conceptual framework for the tendencies of disengagement and departure from religion

Dinden uzaklaşma meselesine odaklanan bazı yeni din sosyolojisi çalışmaları, İngiltere, Almanya, Kanada gibi Batı toplumlarında sekülerizmin nüfusun çoğunluğunun içine doğduğu, düşünmeden kabul ettiği, sıradan bir olgu haline geldiğini; hatta bu durumun kendine has bir alt kültür yarattığını; dinden uzaklaşmanın özgül beğeni ve davranış kalıplarının ve dine benzer ritüellerinin ortaya çıktığını iddia ediyorlar. Bu makalede önce Batı literatüründe “nonreligion” kavramı altında çalışılan ve bizim lâdînîlik olarak adlandırmayı önerdiğimiz din dışı arayışlar olgusunun kavramsal içeriğini, sonrasında ise Türkiye’deki gelişmeleri anlamak için bu kavrama ilişkin nasıl bir yaklaşım benimsenebileceğini tartışacağız. İşe neden lâdinî kavramını seçtiğimizi ve bu kavramı ne anlamda kullandığımızı söyleyerek başlayacak; literatürdeki lâdinîlik tartışmasını “negatif” ve “pozitif” olarak iki başlık altında ele aldıktan sonra meseleye “ilişkisel” açıdan yaklaşmanın en uygun yol olduğunu iddia edeceğiz.Recent sociology of religion studies focusing on the issue of disengagement from religion argue that in Western societies (i.e. UK, Germany and Canada) secularism is an ordinary phenomenon that everyone accepts without thinking and/or they are born into. This ordinary phenomenon has even created a subculture of its own. However, the move away from religion has its own taste and behavior patterns and rituals similar to religion. In the last two decades, there has been a scholarly interest to explore the newly emerged concept of nonreligion. In this article, first, we attempt to examine the conceptual framework of nonreligious beliefs, practices and experiences which is studied in the Western literature under the concept of nonreligion, and which we propose to call “lâdînîlik” in Turkish. Then we discuss what kind of approach can be adopted to understand the developments in Turkey with this concept. We begin with explaining why we have chosen the term 'lâdinî' and what we mean by this term. Then, after reviewing the discussions on “lâdînîlik” in the literature under two headings "negative" and "positive", we argue that approaching the issue from a "relational" perspective is the most appropriate way to understand this complex issue

Reception and rejection of complex argumentation: When one’s business practices are contested

This study focuses on interviews designed to elicit argumentation with the use of a video-elicitation technique: a complex argument comprising an acceptability criticism concerning the usefulness of carbon offsets is presented via a video-excerpt in the course of (N=42) in-depth interviews to corporate actors pioneering the transition to a low-carbon economy. The goal is to examine how these actors respond to criticism that disputes their own business practices. We examine the responses with regard to their focus, force, level, and the norms they appeal to, as well as how they exploit the topical potential and redefine the disagreement