James Bohman

(1954 - 2021)

This article investigates the status of Norbert Elias’s conception of the sociology of knowledge as the means to provide a new epistemological security for sociology. The author of the article argues that this translates into an effective critique of the underlaboring model of the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences, which is consistent with Elias’s attempt to consolidate his own sociological theory. Nevertheless, the author argues that Elias’s sociology of knowledge runs into problems in its attempt to evade the problem of relativism in explanation, and in its conception of human agency.

The article reconstructs three key concepts of Hans Vaihinger: the idea of mental fictions as self-contradictory, provisory, conscious, and purposeful; the law of the devolution of ideas stating that an idea oscillates between dogma, hypothesis, or fiction; and the underlying assumption about human consciousness that the psyche constructs thoughts around perceptions like an oyster produces a pearl. In a second, constructive part, these concepts are applied in a discussion of John Searle’s social ontologically extended theory of speech acts. The article introduces the Vaihingerian as-if to Searle’s account of declarations. The explanatory work in a model of social reality as Searle has proposed it rests on the ability to show a necessary connection between collective and individual intentionality facilitated through linguistic structure. The methodological individualism of the model requires that motivational assumptions about collective structures be realized in individual brains. The as-if stance of the declarer provides just this connection.

This article takes up Winch’s exploration of a certain dialectic in philosophical accounts of social inquiry, the poles of which I refer to as the under-laborer and over-laborer conceptions of philosophy. I argue that these conceptions, shown in Risjord and Reed, respectively, are caught in a dialectic of treating philosophy’s roles as either modestly clarifying or broadly determining the claims of social science. A third conception of philosophy, the therapeutic conception, is exemplified by Read et al.’s “New Wittgensteinian” interpretation of Winch’s work as a way out of the dialectic. Discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the latter, I conclude that a stronger development of the therapeutic approach is needed to move past the dialectic.

In this paper, I provide a qualified defense of the claim that cognitive biases are not necessarily signs of irrationality, but rather the result of using normative standards that are too narrow. I show that under certain circumstances, behavior that violates traditional norms of rationality can be adaptive. Yet, I express some reservations about the claim that we should replace our traditional normative standards. Furthermore, I throw doubt on the claim that the replacement of normative standards would license optimistic verdicts about human rationality.

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