J. Francisco Alvarez

The adoption of an individualistic perspective on reasoning, choice and decision is a spring of paradoxes of conflicts. Usually the agents immerse in conflicts are drawn or modelled as rational individuals with targets well defined and full capabilities to access to information, without both temporal limitations and perfect reasoning abilities to obtain their preferences are taken account.However, other models of agent, in the bounded rationality perspective, could help to understand better the interrelationships. I adopt embedded argumentative reasoning processes as satisfying criteria to analyze the expert function in a new socio technical environment that has changed deeply the mechanism and tools to access and to aggregate information. The open access to information and institutional arrangements addressed towards team knowledge could offer other kind of tools to affront the conflict, even its possible benefits.The “crowd expertise” is emerging as an actual possibility and it must be incorporated to affront with conflicts. The very possibility of obtaining knowledge generated by “many minds”, collective wisdoms, brings up a real challenge to the conservative or elitist conception of the masses, because masses now emerge as a smart collective user, with new mechanisms to select and produce quality knowledge. These new collective actions differ deeply from the traditional modes of social organization. A new mass society is emerging now as a hybrid one that breaks some conceptual traditional models, such as Ortega y Gasset’s ones, and induces a structured way of flourishing both new practices and new knowledge with transforming capabilities.

Ciertas referencias biográficas son útiles para comprender un pensamiento tan articulado y complejo como el de Amartya Sen. Se destaca la importancia teórica de Sen para filósofos políticos, filósofos morales o filósofos de la ciencia. La reflexión filosófica, sobre métodos, sobre aspectos éticos y en general sobre cuestiones político culturales, es un asunto de primera importancia para la misma actividad interna a la ciencia económica. Para entender correctamente la obra de Sen resulta fundamental el trasfondo filosófico cultural, la comprensión del individuo como parte de un compromiso social y la extracción sistemática de las consecuencias de ese tipo de compromiso. El desarrollo aparece como un proceso de expansión de las libertades reales que las personas disfrutan. La centralidad de la libertad para el proceso de desarrollo, la encuentra Amartya Sen en dos razones diferentes, una por razones evaluativas y otra por razones de eficacia. La evaluación del progreso podría hacerse teniendo en cuenta si de hecho se amplían las libertades que las personas tienen Se trata de interconexiones que ha encontrado Sen en muchos análisis empíricos que muestran cómo la responsabilidad “libre y sostenible” de los individuos emerge como la principal fuerza para el desarrollo.

Álvarez J.F. (2016) Conflicts, Bounded Rationality and Collective Wisdom in a Networked Society. In: Scarafile G., Gruenpeter Gold L. (eds) Paradoxes of Conflicts. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning (Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences), vol 12. Springer, Cham The adoption of an individualistic perspective on reasoning, choice and decision is a spring of paradoxes of conflicts. Usually the agents immerse in conflicts are drawn or modelled as rational individuals with targets well defined and full capabilities to access to information, without both temporal limitations and perfect reasoning abilities to obtain their preferences are taken account. However, other models of agent, in the bounded rationality perspective, could help to understand better the interrelationships. I adopt embedded argumentative reasoning processes as satisfying criteria to analyze the expert function in a new socio technical environment that has changed deeply the mechanism and tools to access and to aggregate information. The open access to information and institutional arrangements addressed towards team knowledge could offer other kind of tools to affront the conflict, even its possible benefits. The “crowd expertise” is emerging as an actual possibility and it must be incorporated to affront with conflicts. The very possibility of obtaining knowledge generated by “many minds”, collective wisdoms, brings up a real challenge to the conservative or elitist conception of the masses, because masses now emerge as a smart collective user, with new mechanisms to select and produce quality knowledge. These new collective actions differ deeply from the traditional modes of social organization. A new mass society is emerging now as a hybrid one that breaks some conceptual traditional models, such as Ortega y Gasset’s ones, and induces a structured way of flourishing both new practices and new knowledge with transforming capabilities.

Digital services and products that expand human capabilities can help to overcome the limitations of individuals, but they facilitate the emergence of new types of inequalities. A new profile of inequality is emerging as a product of unexpected consequences of technological change and calls for institutional policy and social action measures to reduce these new inequalities. The Internet, social networking and mobile devices are helping to generate what Lee Rainie and B. W. Wellman have called a new social operating system of networked individuals. I believe it is possible and necessary to define a programme of minimum requirements for living and enjoying the benefits of a digital society by reducing the risks of new types of exclusion. It is a question of advancing in the construction of citizenship with its corresponding rights in the network society

En los estudios sobre la racionalidad aparece con frecuencia una oposición entre los mecanismos que se dice que caracterizan la elección racional y otros procesos que se suponen vinculados a nuestras emociones, a nuestras capacidades cognitivas y, en particular, a nuestra capacidad de ser sujetos agentes. Oposición que me parece inadecuada y que es preciso superar. Me parece posible defender una perspectiva complementarista o sintética de la racionalidad. No basta con hablar, por un lado, de la racionalidad instrumental y, por otro, de la racionalidad expresiva, sino que, haciendo uso de una metáfora textil, parece conveniente comprender la racionalidad como el resultado de un proceso conformado tanto por la trama de la racionalidad instrumental como por la urdimbre de la racionalidad expresiva. Al esclarecer los elementos de integración y complementariedad tratamos de formular un agente integrado, más adecuado en sus aspectos descriptivos, con mayor complejidad normativa y predictivamente más preciso. Me parece que en algunos aspectos es una posición no demasiado alejada de la que algunas veces ha defendido Marcelo Dascal

Empirical research on Rational Choice Theory has brought up two focus of the economics laws problem. On one hand, we find the authors who state that the neoclassical economics laws are explanatory and predictive on specific cases: in transparent contexts in which the standard rationality operates successfully. On the other hand, we find the authors who state that the descriptive theories of the rational choice opens up a research path in which fundamental principles of the neoclassical building could be questioned. Both view points have generated an important standard Rational Choice Theory revision what has produced the so called descriptive view point . It implies understanding that most of the choices take place under risky or uncertainty conditions and, that, these choices are far more complex than the normative Rational Choice Theory supposes. This article's main goal is to expand the descriptive point of view in rational choice, theorizing how some factors, coming from the social and cultural environment, operate within the rational choice. Into space of this research essay we find the debatable question of whether these sort of proposals expands the explanation of the deviation of the rational choice normative theory, and that, of the disturbing causes of the microeconomics laws, or they call into question fundamental principles of these laws and therefore they are opening the possibility to focus some economics issues in a new different manner.

Durante las cuatro últimas décadas, Javier Muguerza ha contribuido como nadie a la modernización del pensamiento español, dando a conocer y comentando lo mejor que se publicaba en otras lenguas, particularmente a lo tocante a la filosofía analítica, a la teoría crítica y a las corrientes morales y políticas anglosajonas y alemanas, además de tener muy en cuenta todo lo que se escribía en español y prestar una especial atención al espíritu del pensamiento práctico kantiano. La deuda que con él tiene contraída la filosofía en castellano es muy difícil de calcular. En el libro Disenso e incertidumbre. Un homenaje a Javier Muguerza, un grupo de importantes filósofos analiza su obra en profundidad ofreciendo al lector la oportunidad única de conocerla desde múltiples puntos de vista.