-
124The Social Authority of Paradigms as Group Commitments: Rehabilitating Kuhn with Recent Social PhilosophyTopoi 32 (1): 21-31. 2013.By linking the conceptual and social dynamics of change in science, Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions proved tremendously fruitful for research in science studies. But Kuhn’s idea of incommensurability provoked strong criticism from philosophers of science. In this essay I show how Raimo Tuomela’s Philosophy of Sociality illuminates and strengthens Kuhn’s model of scientific change. After recalling the central features and problems of Kuhn’s model, I introduce Tuomela’s approach. I then…Read more
-
119Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (edited book)MIT Press. 1997.The contributions in this anthology address tensions that arise between reason and politics in a democracy inspired by the ideal of achieving reasoned agreement among free and equal citizens.
-
119Computer decision-support systems for public argumentation: assessing deliberative legitimacy (review)AI and Society 19 (3): 203-228. 2005.Recent proposals for computer-assisted argumentation have drawn on dialectical models of argumentation. When used to assist public policy planning, such systems also raise questions of political legitimacy. Drawing on deliberative democratic theory, we elaborate normative criteria for deliberative legitimacy and illustrate their use for assessing two argumentation systems. Full assessment of such systems requires experiments in which system designers draw on expertise from the social sciences an…Read more
-
81Discourse and democracy: The formal and informal bases of legitimacy in Habermas' faktizität und geltungJournal of Political Philosophy 4 (1). 1996.
-
77Book symposium on expertise: Philosophical reflections by Evan Selinger automatic press/vip, vince inc. Press 2011Philosophy and Technology 26 (1): 93-109. 2013.
-
68In the literature on scientific practices, one finds sustained analyses of the contextualist elements of inquiry. However, the ways in which local and disciplinary contexts of practice function as common goods remain largely unexplored. In this paper I argue that a contextualist analysis of scientific practices as common goods can shed light on the challenges of scientific communication and interdisciplinary collaboration, albeit without invoking Kuhn's problematic notion of incommensurability.
-
62Communicative Ethics in Theory and Practice. By Niels Thomassen (review)Modern Schoolman 71 (2): 151-154. 1994.
-
61Discourse and the moral point of view: Deriving a dialogical principle of universalizationInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 34 (1). 1991.Central to the discourse ethics advanced by Jürgen Habermas is a principle of universalization (U) amounting to a dialogical equivalent of Kant's Categorical Imperative. Habermas has proposed that ?U? follows by material implication from two premises: (1) what it means to discuss whether a moral norm ought to be . adopted and (2) what those involved in argumentation must suppose of themselves if they are to consider a consensus they reach as rationally motivated. To date, no satisfactory derivat…Read more
-
61Intractable conflicts and moral objectivity: A dialogical, problem-based approachInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 42 (2). 1999.According to the standard version of discourse ethics (e.g. as formulated by Apel, Habermas, and others), the objectivity of moral norms resides in their intersubjective acceptability under idealized conditions of discourse. These accounts have been criticized for not taking sufficient account of contextual particularities and the realities of actual discourse. This essay addresses such objections by proposing a more realistic, contextualist 'principle of real moral discourse' (RMD). RMD is deri…Read more
-
59Critical Argumentation Theory and Democracy: Lessons of Past Debates over TechnoscienceRevista Portuguesa de Filosofia 59 (1). 2003.Contemporary critical theorists working in the Frankfurt School tradition have focused considerable attention on theories of deliberative democracy, which in general attempt to show how public argumentation can be both democratic and reasonable. In this context, political questions that involve or depend on science present an acute challenge, inasmuch as deliberation must meet especially demanding epistemic requirements. In this article, the author examines two past responses to the challenge, e…Read more
-
58Evaluating Complex Collaborative Expertise: The Case of Climate Change (review)Argumentation 25 (3): 385-400. 2011.Science advisory committees exercise complex collaborative expertise. Not only do committee members collaborate, they do so across disciplines, producing expert reports that make synthetic multidisciplinary arguments. When reports are controversial, critics target both report content and committee process. Such controversies call for the assessment of expert arguments, but the multidisciplinary character of the debate outstrips the usual methods developed by informal logicians for assessing appe…Read more
-
57Conceptual Gerrymandering? The Alignment of Hursthouse's Naturalistic Virtue Ethics with Neo‐Kantian Non‐NaturalismSouthern Journal of Philosophy 41 (4): 583-600. 2003.
-
57Assessing the Cogency of Arguments: lbree Kinds of MeritsInformal Logic 25 (2): 95-115. 2005.This article proposes a way of connecting two levels at which scholars have studied discursive practices from a normative perspective: on the one hand, local transactions-face-to-face arguments or dialogues-and broadly dispersed public debates on the other. To help focus my analysis, I select two representatives of work at these two levels: the pragmadialectical model of critical discussion and Habermas's discourse theory of politicallegal deliberation. The two models confront complementary chal…Read more
-
55Ideals of Argumentative Process and the Ethnomethodology of Scientific WorkSymposium 9 (2): 313-337. 2005.
-
52Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (edited book)MIT Press. 1998.In Between Facts and Norms Jürgen Habermas works out the legal and political implications of his Theory of Communicative Action, bringing to fruition the project announced with his publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962. This new work is a major contribution to recent debates on the rule of law and the possibilities of democracy in postindustrial societies, but it is much more.The introduction by William Rehg succinctly captures the special nature of the work, …Read more
-
51Habermas, Argumentation Theory, and Science Studies: Toward Interdisciplinary CooperationInformal Logic 23 (2): 161-182. 2003.This article examines two approaches to the analysis and critical assessment of scientific argumentation. The first approach employs the discourse theory that Jurgen Habermas has developed on the basis of his theory of communicative action and applied to the areas of politics and law. Using his analysis of law and democracy in his Between Facts and Norms as a kind of template, I sketch the main steps in a Habermasian discourse theory of science. Difficulties in his approach motivate my proposal …Read more
-
49The critical potential of discourse ethics: Reply to Meehan and Chambers (review)Human Studies 25 (3): 407-412. 2002.
-
48Lonergan Y Habermas: Contribuciones a la comprensión Del ámbito moralUniversitas Philosophica 30 (60): 23-49. 2013.
-
48Grasping the force of the better argument: McMahon versus discourse ethicsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 46 (1). 2003.This Article does not have an abstract
-
48Lonergan’s Performative Transcendental Argument Against ScepticismProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 63 (n/a): 257-268. 1989.
-
44Rhetoric, Cogency, and the Radically Social Character of Persuasion: Habermas's Argumentation Theory RevisitedPhilosophy and Rhetoric 46 (4): 465-492. 2013.What can rhetoric tell us about good arguments? The answer depends on what we mean by “good argument” and on how we conceive rhetoric. In this article I examine and further develop Jürgen Habermas’s argumentation theory as an answer to the question—or as I explain, an expanded version of that question. Habermas places his theory in the family of normative approaches that recognize (at least) three evaluative perspectives on all argument making: logic, dialectic, and rhetoric, which proponents lo…Read more
-
44The CDF collaboration and argumentation theory: The role of process in objective knowledgePerspectives on Science 16 (1): 1-25. 2008.: For philosophers of science interested in elucidating the social character of science, an important question concerns the manner in which and degree to which the objectivity of scientific knowledge is socially constituted. We address this broad question by focusing specifically on philosophical theories of evidence. To get at the social character of evidence, we take an interdisciplinary approach informed by categories from argumentation studies. We then test these categories by exploring thei…Read more
-
39“Agreement” in the IPCC Confidence measureStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 57 126-134. 2017.
-
39Lonergan and Habermas: Contributions to understanding the moral domainUniversitas Philosophica 30 (60): 23-49. 2013.
-
39Goldman?S veritistic rhetoric and the tasks of argumentation theorySocial Epistemology 14 (4). 2000.This Article does not have an abstract
-
37Cogency in Motion: Critical Contextualism and Relevance (review)Argumentation 23 (1): 39-59. 2009.If arguments are to generate public knowledge, as in the sciences, then they must travel, finding acceptance across a range of local contexts. But not all good arguments travel, whereas some bad arguments do. Under what conditions may we regard the capacity of an argument to travel as a sign of its cogency or public merits? This question is especially interesting for a contextualist approach that wants to remain critically robust: if standards of cogency are bound to local contexts of evaluation…Read more
-
37Legitimacy and Deliberation in Epistemic Conceptions of DemocracyModern Schoolman 74 (4): 355-374. 1997.