James Bohman

(1954 - 2021)

The “ontological turn” is a recent movement within cultural anthropology. Its proponents want to move beyond a representationalist framework, where cultures are treated as systems of belief (concepts, etc.) that provide different perspectives on a single world. Authors who write in this vein move from talk of many cultures to many “worlds,” thus appearing to affirm a form of relativism. We argue that, unlike earlier forms of relativism, the ontological turn in anthropology is not only immune to the arguments of Donald Davidson’s “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” but it affirms and develops the antirepresentationalist position of Davidson’s subsequent essays.

While Continental philosophers have had much to say about the nature of politics and about modern political institutions, they do not consider their task to provide the basis for evaluating policies or justifying institutions. Even if analytic philosophers no longer think of themselves as giving conceptual analyses of key political terms, they generally do what Continental philosophers do not: by elaborating systematic principles, their goal is precisely to provide the basis for “evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of political arguments”. If this is not what Continental philosophers do, what is their goal? Continental political theory has usually not been concerned with providing arguments which directly justify or criticize institutions or policies, so much as to expose and criticize the very presuppositions that characterize all peculiarly “modern” politics and social arrangements. The differences here are not so much in methodology, but in substantive, normative concerns.

The social critic must be able to supply participants with truthful insights into their practices, particularly with regard to the representation and constitution of these practices in speaking and acting. Marx offers one form of such criticism in the critique of ideology and lays its foundations in a general theory of linguistic representation; the particular theory he employs must be criticized, but this methodology should not abandoned. His error was to restrict the function of language to mere reflection and meaning to mere denotation. Without these restrictions, however, a theory of language use and understanding is central to a normative reinterpretation of critical social theory. The most fruitful direction for such an attempt is Habermas's theory of communicative action, since it brings together in a pragmatics of communication various philosophical and empirical disciplines. By drawing upon a wide variety of literature in the philosophy of language, Habermas's formal pragmatics can be elaborated and modified so as to provide the philosophical foundations for a normative social inquiry. ;A fundamental result of this investigation is that the historical rootedness of thought does not preclude the possibility of normative social inquiry. With the rise of the social and historical sciences, philosophers have had to take seriously the relation between culture and society, between modes of thought and forms of life. Whereas Marxists have treated the problem in terms of the distinction between "true" and "false" consciousness, others, from sociologists of knowledge to cultural anthropologists, have tended toward an explicit relativism. Rather than accept these alternatives, this dissertation locates the normative basis for social criticism in the pragmatic analysis of the formal structure of communication and the meaning components of utterances. Any utterance may be criticized according to the formal structure of language use of its type, whether expressive, interactive or representational; social criticism is then the criticism of distortions in the social uses of language. Such normative social inquiry reconciles the historicity and sociality of thought and action with the critical potential of strong philosophical notions of true and false, right and wrong, and authentic and inauthentic.

John Dewey's Public and its Problems provides his fullest account of democracy under the emerging conditions of complex, modern societies. While responding to Lippmann's criticisms of democracy as self-rule, Dewey acknowledges the truth of many of the social scientific criticisms of democracy, while he defends democracy by reconstructing it. Dewey seeks a new public in a “Great Community” based on more face-to-face communication about nonlocal issues. Yet Dewey fails to consistently apply his own reconstructive argument, retreating to a communal basis for democracy. I offer an extension of Dewey's argument in this direction in which “publics” and not “the public” offer the best basis for reconstructing democracy

In this paper, I consider the recent resurgence of “evolutionary economics”—the idea that evolutionary theory can be very useful to push forward key debates in economics—and assess the extent to which it rests on a plausible foundation. To do this, I first distinguish two ways in which evolutionary theory can, in principle, be brought to bear on an economic problem—namely, evidentially and heuristically—and then apply this distinction to the three major hypotheses that evolutionary economists have come to defend: the implausibility of rational choice theory as an account of economic rationality, the idea that firms are autonomous economic agents, and the need for a more dynamic, less equilibrium-focused economic methodology. In each of these cases, I conclude negatively: the relevant evolutionary considerations neither suggest interesting and novel hypotheses to investigate further (the hallmark of heuristic devices) nor are backed up by the needed data to constitute genuine evidence. I end by distinguishing this criticism of evolutionary economics from others that have been put forward in the literature: in particular, I make clear that, unlike those of other critics, the arguments of this paper are based on epistemic—not structural—considerations and therefore leave more room for a plausible form of evolutionary economics to come about in the future.

It is a distinctive feature of the global political order that democracy is no longer confined to nation-states, characterized by extensive and overlapping constituencies. It is important to think of the significance of these developments for individuals’ self-determination, which may be undermined in different ways. Here it is argued that democracy must serve to delegate power to complex units of decision making which favour self-determination. Contestability is part of this form of self-determination, allowing forms of politics to emerge based on the democratic rights and powers of self-determining, non-dominated citizens

As developed by Sabel, Dorf and Cohen, and John Dewey before them, democratic experimentalism is based on the premise that current democratic practices are no longer able to deal with central and pressing social and political problems. Beginning with the criticism of democracy as command and control, Dorf and Sabel show how current democratic practices are part of the problem rather than the solution. Even as democratic experimentalists have successfully explored democracy beyond the state in the European Union, I argue that they have not fully transnationalized democracy or fully appreciated “the new circumstances of politics.” With the emergence of pervasive forms of interdependence, Rousseau’s conception of democracy as self legislation is no longer adequate, despite its cogent normative assumptions. Instead, the new transnational circumstances of justice suggest a stronger conception of democracy as self determination. In order to minimize domination and maximize self determination, cross-cutting constituencies must achieve a shared democratic minimum, through which democracy may once again become a means to justice.