Matteo Bianchin

Forst’s theory of noumenal power is designed to model power relations as driven by reasons. In this chapter, I maintain that it fares well with both agential and structural powers, yet contend that adjustments are needed to meet two demands it places on critical theory. First, a demand for diagnosing domination. Forst advances a conception of domination as arbitrary power that answers this demand, yet it is unclear how noumenal power can accommodate arbitrariness. I suggest that introducing a distinction between first-order and second-order noumenal powers allows understanding how noumenal powers can be arbitrary and licenses a consistent account of domination. Second, the demand for a theory of ideology that suitably sorts out ideologies from contingently flawed justifications. The crux here is that ideologies trade on merely apparent reasons and causally depend on the power relations they function to undergird. I suggest that, in order to take ideology critique on board, a critical theory of power must make room for a sharp distinction between real and apparent reason, as well as for functional explanations and causal mechanisms that noumenal powers can hardly deliver.

In this paper, I suggest that collective deliberation processes should be seen as cooperative epistemic activities. After considering a well-known argument for why they cannot result from a majoritarian aggregating procedure, I focus on the limitations of a functionalist approach to collective agency and suggest that Tomasello’s approach to cooperation can shed light on how collective deliberation works. I then argue that understanding collective deliberation in terms of epistemic cooperation sheds light on both the structure and the normative implications of collective deliberation processes.

Michael Thompson recently advanced a “naïve action theory” as an alternative to the “sophisticated” accounts of action displayed by ordinary folk psychology. In what follows I defend the plausibility of intentional psychology and folk psychological explanations. I do this in two ways. First I question that naïve explanations are more naïve than the ones provided by folk psychology and suggest that the latter are phenomenologically prior to the former. Second, I focus on the role of intentionality in deliberation and action planning, suggesting that folk psychology provides a better answer than naïve theory to the question of what makes actions intentional.

Alienation has been recently revived as a central theme in critical theory. Current debates, however, tend to focus on normative rather than on explanatory issues. In this paper, I confront the latter and advance an account of alienation that bears on the mechanisms that bring it about in order to locate alienation as a distinctive social and psychological fact. In particular, I argue that alienation can be explained as a disruption induced by social factors in the sense of mental ownership that comes with the first personal awareness of being a subject of attitudes, emotions, and actions, and outline how social factors can play a structuring causal role in the process that brings it about. In the first section, I introduce the theme and explain why it is important to focus on the mechanisms that underlie alienation. In the second section, I maintain that understanding how alienation works is crucial to make sense of false consciousness. In the third section, I consider the relevance of mental ownership to explaining alienation and discuss existing evidence about whether and how it can fail. In the final section, I argue that disturbances in the simulation routines that support social cognition might underpin alienation, and outline how social factors might play a structuring causal role in this connection.

In this chapter, I consider the claim for pluralism commonly advanced in political philosophy as a claim concerning the standards, methods, and norms for forming belief and judgment about certain kinds of facts, rather than concerning the nature of facts themselves. After distinguishing between descriptive and normative epistemic pluralism, I contend that, in this context, pluralism needs to rest on grounds that are stronger than fallibilism yet weaker than relativism in order to enjoy a distinct standing. The idea of reasonable pluralism seems to devise a variety of normative pluralism designed to meet this demand. I argue, however, that this is an unstable position and suggest that an epistemic view of deliberation may be better suited to making sense of political justification. The latter view, though, is bound to dispense with normative pluralism.

Ideology is commonly defined along functional, epistemic, and genetic dimensions. This article advances a reasonably unified account that specifies how they connect and locates the mechanisms at work. I frame the account along a recent distinction between anchoring and grounding, endorse an etiological reading of functional explanations, and draw on current work about the epistemology of delusion, looping effects, and structuring causes to explain how ideologies originate, reproduce, and possibly collapse. This eventually allows articulating how the legitimating function of ideologies relates to the constitutive and causal role they play when embedded into the facts they are originally designed to anchor.

On Jaeggi’s reading, the immanent and progressive features of ideology critique are rooted in the connection between its explanatory and its normative tasks. I argue that this claim can be cashed out in terms of the mechanisms involved in a functional explanation of ideology and that stability plays a crucial role in this connection. On this reading, beliefs can be said to be ideological if (a) they have the function of supporting existing social practices, (b) they are the output of systematically distorted processes of belief formation, (c) the conditions in which distorting mechanisms trigger can be traced back to structural causal factors shaped by the social practice their outputs are designed to support. Functional problems thus turn out to be interlocked with normative problems because ideology fails to provide principles to regulate cooperation that would be accepted under conditions of non-domination, hence failing to anchor a stable cooperative scheme. By explaining ideology as parasitic on domination, ideology critique points to the conditions under which cooperation stabilizes as those of a practice whose principles are accepted without coercion. Thus, it seems to entail a conception of justice whose principles are articulated as part of a theory of social cooperation.

Inclusive design prescribes addressing the needs of the widest possible audience in order to consider human differences. Taking differences seriously, however, may imply severely restricting “the widest possible audience”. In confronting this paradox, we investigate to what extent Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness applies to design. By converting the paradox into the question of how design can be fair, we show that the demand for equitability shifts from the design output to the design process. We conclude that the two main questions about justice find application in design: the question about the standards of justice and the question about its metrics. We endorse a Rawlsian approach to the former, while some revision may be due regarding the latter.

Husserl’s Logical Grammar is intended to explain how complex expressions can be constructed out of simple ones so that their meaning turns out to be determined by the meanings of their constituent parts and the way they are put together. Meanings are thus understood as structured contents and classified into formal categories to the effect that the logical properties of expressions reflect their grammatical properties. As long as linguistic meaning reduces to the intentional content of pre-linguistic representations, however, it is not trivial to account for how semantics relates to syntax in this context. In this paper, I analyze Husserl’s Logical Grammar as a system of recursive rules operating on representations and suggest that the syntactic form of representations contributes to their semantics because it carries information about semantic role. I further discuss Husserl’s syntactic account of the unity of propositions and argue that, on this account, logical form supervenes on syntactic form. In the last section I draw some implications for the phenomenology of thought and conjecture that the structural features it displays are likely to convey the syntactic structures of an underlying language-like representational system.

Underlying the development of inclusive design approaches seems to be the assumption that inclusivity automatically leads to good design. What good design means, however, and how this relates to inclusivity, is not very clear. In this paper we try to shed light on these questions. In doing so, we provide an argument for conceiving design as a deliberative enterprise. We point out how inclusivity and normative objectivity can be reconciled, by defining the norm of good design in terms of a deliberative cooperation between designers and the people they design for. In this view, a design is inclusive when it is produced by exploiting the information and competences at the disposal of the designer and the people she designs for in qualified circumstances.

In this article I consider the relevance of Tomasello’s work on social cognition to the theory of communicative action. I argue that some revisions are needed to cope with Tomasello’s results, but they do not affect the core of the theory. Moreover, they arguably reinforce both its explanatory power and the plausibility of its normative claims. I proceed in three steps. First, I compare and contrast Tomasello’s views on the ontogeny of human social cognition with the main tenets of Habermas’ theory of communicative action. Second, I suggest how to reframe the role of language in the theory of communicative rationality in order to integrate the two theories. Third, I show how this affects social ontology, supporting the view that the construction of social reality is normatively constrained by the bounds of reason.

By endorsing that Bildung is a condition for thought, McDowell explicitly sets out to revive a theme in classical german philosophy. As long as the concept of Bildung is intended to play a role in McDowell’s theory of meaning and reasons, however, it is best understood in the light of its distinctive combination of neo-Fregeanism about content and Wittgensteinianism about rule-following. The Fregean part is there to warrant that reasons are objective, the Wittgensteinian move is to account for our grasping of reasons. I argue that, as it stands, the project can hardly succeed. According to this reading, Bildung not only provides the epistemic resources to access reasons. It shapes them in a way that is in tension with the idea that reasons are objective. I conclude with a guess about the amendment needed to keep the project in the air.

Book Symposium on Michael Thompson's "Life and Action" (downlodable here: http://fqp.luiss.it/category/numero/ns-supplementary-volume-2015-life-and-action) Table of Contents: Paolo Costa, "Where does our understanding of life come from? The riddle about recognizing living things" Constantine Sandis, "He buttered the toast while baking a fresh loaf" Matteo Bianchin, "Intentions and Intentionality" Arto Laitinen, "Practices as ‘actual’ sources of goodness of actions" Italo Testa, "Some consequences of Thompson’s Life and Action for social philosophy" Ingrid Salvatore, "Thompson on Rawls and Practices"

The contribution of Husserl's phenomenology to the foundations of social and political theory can be appraised at both the methodological and the normative level. First, it makes intersubjective interaction central to the constitution of social reality. Second, it stresses reciprocity as a constitutive feature of intersubjectivity. In this context, individuals can be seen to be both ‘constituting’ and ‘constituted by’ their participation in communities, under a constraint of mutual recognition as intentional agents. This view is in no way atomistic, as it allows individual identities to be constituted intersubjectively; still, it remains individualistic, since it does not permit the ontological independence of collective entities. At the epistemological level, this provides a foundation of methodological individualism; at the normative level, it suggests that social order is a deliberative task and political legitimacy ultimately rests on moral principles of reciprocity and equal respect.

In this article, I argue that a capacity for mindreading conceived along the line of simulation theory provides the cognitive basis for forming we-centric representations of actions and goals. This explains the plural first personal stance displayed by we-intentions in terms of the underlying cognitive processes performed by individual minds, while preserving the idea that they cannot be analyzed in terms of individual intentional states. The implication for social ontology is that this makes sense of the plural subjectivity of joint actions without making group agents require either a corporate body or the unity of consciousness.