Universal Logic is the study of the formal properties of logical systems in terms of the ways in which these formal features are found across systems of various kinds. A crucial example of this problematic is found at the heart of cognitive science. Brains are computers or computer-like things. But the digital logic of computers and the logic of computer programs do not correspond in any direct way with the processes of brains, either at the neural level, or at the (...) level of psychological descriptions of reasoning and inference processes. There have been many approaches to this problem, typically involving the idea of some sort of brain-based universal semantics or syntactics that is realized in different forms in different languages. These accounts do not extend very successfully to other supposed forms of common tacit mental life, such as culture, climates of opinion, habitus, practices, norms, scripts, schemas, worldviews, and so forth. Nor do any of these concepts fit very well with known neural processes. The alternative approaches appeal to versions of the notion of individual habit, most recently summarized in a major book recently published by Cambridge University Press (Caruana in Habits: Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2020). My approach is to see the language capabilities of each person as an assemblage of language patterns that have patterned relations to one another, and that are unique to each person. The evidence that this is how the brain actually works comes from bilinguals, who do not have two parallel downloaded language systems, but who have a mixed system with no neural separation between linguistic capacities. This is a better model for the heterogeneous tacit capacities that make up the logic of practices: an assemblage of patterns that allow for mutual interaction. What makes up the “system” are patterned forms of behavior that are recognized by others as “signals.” Language and linguistic expressions serve, among other things, as props to inferences: as substitutes for elements of inferences, and as surrogates for inferences, which enable extensions of inferences beyond experience. It is a “system” not in the sense that it corresponds to some neural structure, but in the sense that the patterns which are learned in the course of language learning have causal relations with one another in the brain, and in the behavioral responses of others, form the “signal system.”. (shrink)

Models are the coin of the realm in current philosophy of science, as they are in science itself, having replaced laws and theories as the primary strategy. Logical Positivism tried to erase the older neo-Kantian distinction between ideal constructions and reality. It returns in the case of models. Nowak’s concept of idealization pro- vided an alternative account of this issue. It construed model application as concretizations of hypotheses which improve by accounting for exceptions. This appears to account for physical law. (...) But it raises the problem of uniqueness: is the result unique, as physical law should be? Neo-Kantianism failed this test. Its solutions were circular justifications for claims of uniqueness. Nowak inherited the problem without resolving it. (shrink)

Science is traditionally thought to be motivated by truth-seeking. But the practical value of science and the grant system have introduced quite different motivations that can conflict with and override this value, and indeed scientists often appeal to them first to justify science. But the system creates moral hazards for the scientist.

This is a philosophical history of the concept of Post-tradition.

The Kelsen-Weber response, as I will reconstruct it here, is this: to divide legal orders into “rule of law” and non-rule of law legal orders is not to make a legal distinction; it is a matter of imposing a nonlegal distinction, a distinction that is, from the point of view of purely legal considerations, arbitrary. The distinction as formulated by “rule of law” theorists is typically rooted in ideological considerations masquerading as legal distinctions. Defenders of the rule of law conception (...) claim otherwise: they think they are making legal distinctions between legal orders, distinctions that can be based on philosophical considerations rather than ideological preferences for particular types of political orders. Dworkin, for example, argues that what are treated as ideological and non-legal concepts are in fact required by adjudication, and that a proper understanding of the nature of adjudication and of legal interpretation will show that these concepts and considerations play an ineliminable role 5. For these thinkers, as for Kelsen, for the concept of the rule of law to be reduced to a mere political preference is a failure. They thus agree on the terms of the dispute: the concept has to be derived from legal considerations solely. They disagree on what is entailed by legal considerations. This, however, is not the only approach to the topic. A long tradition has been concerned to argue that there is a need (presumably a moral or political need) to distinguish legal orders from oppressive orders, and that there are characteristics of legal systems that allow one to make these distinctions. The large number of lists of criteria for evaluating the degree to which a country is a rule of law regime reflect this basic idea: the criteria are themselves based on features of the legal systems of the countries, but it is not clear that the preference for these features is or can be grounded in legal considerations alone. To the extent that they reflect political or moral preferences for particular kinds of legal systems, the distinction is no longer a legal one. (shrink)

Davidson’s remark is fairly conventional stuff in contemporary philosophy, but the argument that informs it is elusive. Is this a kind of unformulated transcendental argument, which amounts to the claim that the ‘sharing’ of ‘language,’ in some unspecified sense of these terms, is a condition of the possibility of ‘communication’ in some unspecified sense of this term? Or is it a kind of inference to the best explanation in which there are no real alternativesan inference, so to speak, to the (...) only explanation? There are good reasons to be suspicious of arguments of this form. Yet this general picture, of some sort of shared stuff at the basis of language, is highly appealing, and so is its extension to practices generally. The claim that there is some class of things that could not happen, were it not for the existence of some sort of shared practices, is a commonplace, despite, and perhaps because of its vagueness. (shrink)

Sociology, as conceived by Comte, was to put an end to the anarchy of opinions characteristic of liberal democracy by replacing opinion with the truths of sociology, imposed through indoctrination. Later sociologists backed away from this, making sociology acceptable to liberal democracy by being politically neutral. The critics of this solution asked 'whose side are we on?' Burawoy provides a novel justification for advocacy scholarship in sociology. Public sociology is intended to have political effects, but also to be funded by (...) the politically neutral state. He argues that public sociology is institutionally neutral, but that committing to an organic relation with a social movement is legitimate as a matter of the sociologist's personal value choice. Although this produces side-taking sociology, by improving the case for particular standpoints it serves to improve democratic discussion generally, which is an appropriately neutral public aim. (shrink)

In what follows I propose to bring out certain methodological properties of projects of modelling the tacit realm that bear on the kinds of modelling done in connection with scientific cognition by computer as well as by ethnomethodological sociologists, both of whom must make some claims about the tacit in the course of their efforts to model cognition. The same issues, I will suggest, bear on the project of a cognitive psychology of science as well.

Weber's writings on action and the explanation of action do not present a particularly coherent view. In his earlier writings, from 1903-1907, he is under the sway of a juristic conception of cause based on the probability doctrines of von Kries, and this is reflected in his writings on action, which de-emphasize problems of interpretation and stress the analytic uses of methods of causal analysis. In the Logos essay, problems of interpretation and problems of cause and probability are discussed on (...) a par. In the "Introduction" to Economy and Society, problems of interpretation, in particular of the application of the ideal-type "rational action," become central. The terminology of the von Kriesian theory disappears, and the requirements for "causal adequacy" are minimized, as is the analytic role of causal reasoning. Weber's various arguments are intelligible solutions to standard problems in the philosophy of action with recent analogues, notably in the work of Donald Davidson. These solutions suggest an alternative account of the significance of "intelligibility" as an aim of sociological approaches to action. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the odd negative concept of statistical causality that is basic to the tradition beginning with Quetelet and the concept of variable causes.

This paper argues that the so-called Strong Programme in the Sociology of Science presupposes rather than simply supplants rationalizing explanations of science.

This is a history of the concept of post-tradition and its variations and motivations focusing on its role in sociology, where it first was discussed.

This is an account of the process of theorizing in sociology distinguishing three levels: mundane theorizing on association, a higher level that gathers relatable concepts, and a still higher level that also integrates with larger philosophical conceptions to form new comprehensive viewpoints. Examples are given of each level.

Charles Perrow used the term normal accidents to characterize a type of catastrophic failure that resulted when complex, tightly coupled production systems encountered a certain kind of anomalous event. These were events in which systems failures interacted with one another in a way that could not be anticipated, and could not be easily understood and corrected. Systems of the production of expert knowledge are increasingly becoming tightly coupled. Unlike classical science, which operated with a long time horizon, many current forms (...) of expert knowledge are directed at immediate solutions to complex problems. These are prone to breakdowns like the kind discussed by Perrow. The example of the Homestake mine experiment shows that even in modern physics complex systems can produce knowledge failures that last for decades. The concept of knowledge risk is introduced, and used to characterize the risk of failure in such systems of knowledge production. (shrink)

The N ational Assembly held in the Frankfurt Paulskirche in 1848, which opened w ith high hopes for the unification o f Germ any on parliam entary constitutional principles, was left to die a year later, in the telling phrase o f D onoso Cortes, ‘like a street w om an in the gu tter’. In the period o f reaction that followed, during w hich the Paulskirche convention came to be described as the ‘parliam ent o f pro­ fessors’, (...) one o f its m em bers, Georg G ottfried Gervinus, was accused, in a trial for high treason, o f attem pting to prove the historical inevitability o f the supersession o f monarchical forms by republican forms. This was Gervinus’s second experience as a professorial m artyr. In 1837 he had been one o f the professors at the U niversity o f G ottingen, the ‘Gottingen Seven’, w ho protested the revocation o f the H anoverian constitution. For this he had been banished and given three days to leave the kingdom. The lesson he, and m any other liberal thinkers, learned from these experiences was that the Germ an middle classes were incapable o f perform ing the historical role assigned to them; they lacked the political will to establish a republican order. (shrink)

This is a comparison of the critiques of social science by Jürgen Habermas and Leo Strauss.

In this chapter I will be concerned with the legal structures and quasi-legal regulatory structures that relate to academic freedom, in addition to the basic theory that applies to them. My aim is to explain (1) how changes in them affect academic freedom, (2) the legal properties of the new constraints under which those in the academy operate, and (3) the differences between this current situation and academic freedom as it has traditionally been understood. The primary issues I will be (...) concerned with are discretionary legal and administrative power and the way that regulations, as implemented by universities, have expanded this power, as well as the enlarged role of contract law and employment contracts as protections of academic freedom. Academic freedom is undergoing a redefinition in the face of new legal circumstances. Its two traditional dimensions are the higher education institutions' autonomy from the state and the individual freedom of scholars. It was traditionally thought that independence from the state and the existence of strong faculty governance were the best guarantors of academic freedom (Tiede 2015). The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) fought for both. Academic freedom, however, is increasingly restricted by regulations implemented by universities, which can take the form of institutional review boards, research misconduct tribunals, and Title IX enforcement. Because many federal regulations governing institutions of higher education are themselves vague and broad, the specific rules created by these institutions are a result of discretionary power over academics that is inimical to the traditional notion of academic freedom as a well-defined right. The idea of university autonomy, similarly, has undergone important changes. It has been significantly compromised as a result of federal regulation of a kind that did not exist in the first half of the twentieth century. One effect of intensified federal regulation is self-monitoring within higher education institutions (often with the assistance of an internal bureaucratic office) that not only seeks to conform to these externally imposed rules, but also to invent local variations that expand on them. (shrink)

In this essay we will consider another basic topic: the problem of the nature of the distinctions between Sitte, Brauch, Wert, Mode, and Recht, on which Weber's discussion relies. These discussions typically involved the untranslatable concept of Sitte, which marks a contrast between practices or customs with normative force and “mere practice.” There is a close parallel to this distinction in American social thought in W. G. Sumner's latinate distinction between the mores and folkways of a society. In what follows (...) we shall simply use the German term as a reminder of its long history in German philosophy. Weber was obviously aware of this history, as was Jhering. Our aim will be to examine Weber's modifications of the received version of these distinctions and to consider the Implications of these modifications. As we shall see, what Weber represents as an innocuous classificatory problem contains a much more significant conceptual transformation, which bears on the general image of modernity as rationalization constructed by Weber. (shrink)

“Science as a Vocation” describes an ideal of scholarship for a vanished world. Images of the past university still color our idea of the university. Weber dispelled illusions about the university of his own time, and pointed to its cruelty and irrationality. Veblen did something similar for the American university of his time, defended a similar ideal, and foresaw the effects of disciplinarization and the quantification of academic life. They both provide insights into the ways in which the autonomy of (...) academic inquiry has been transformed, and the price that has been paid for the present forms of autonomy. But a consideration of these changes also reveals the reasons for the change in academic values over the last century and what has been lost. (shrink)

This is an analysis of the Weberian concept of charisma and a suggestion for its emendation to de mystify it, alone with examples.

This is a long review of Charles Camic's book on Veblen in which he argues that Veblen was basically a conventional academic economist, in contrast to his depiction in such standard works as those of Joseph Dorfman. However, this account omits much of Veblen's career, on the grounds that during the period after he left Stanford he was not in a prestigious academic setting. So the analysis is circular: he ignores most of Veblen's work on then grounds that he was (...) no longer in a conventional setting. But in fact he was in one, during his highly productive period at the University of Missouri, then a conventionally distinguished university and AAU member in the same category as Wisconsin and Minnesota. And there he was not only highly productive but also produced some of his most famous concepts and works-- works Camic ignores. (shrink)

David McIlwain’s book, Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss: The Politics of Renaissance and Enlightenment (2019), is a fascinating account of two key and complex thinkers, their relations and mutual criticisms, and of what we may take to be two radically different accounts of the history of political thinking and of Western political life itself. It is also a survey, necessarily selective, of the vast secondary literature, especially on Strauss; a literature which is contentious and often puzzling, as Strauss himself is. (...) And it is laced with shrewd observations. My comments are partly complementary, but partly in tension with the text. They are only suggestive, but they provide a different perspective on the overall relation between the two thinkers. (shrink)

This paper is a defense against David Hollinger's simplistic reduction of Polanyi's notions of the community of science and responsible autonomy to a plea for unsupervised funding for science. It shows how Polanyi's political account of the internal nature of science worked, the role of "influentials," and the possibility of corruption that followed.

David Hollinger, in a series of essays collected as Science, Jews and Secular Culture, poses a problem: what happened to the idea, a commonplace among scientists, secularists, and the Left in the late 1930s and early 1940s, that science provided a model for democratic politics? The historical importance of the idea, and the fact that it is so alien to present sensibilities, is the concern of several of Hollinger's papers. The divergence from present sensibilities arises, he argues, from the way (...) in which the 'scientific community' emerged as a commonplace concept, something he dates from 1962 to 1965, the dates of publication of several texts in which the concept figures prominently. The language of Kuhn, he suggests, was 'persistently communitarian' while Vannevar Bush, the author of several of the books on science that helped establish the postwar government-science relation, was 'persistently individualistic'. The change between these languages is striking, and needs explanation. Hollinger argues that the change reflected a change in the way in which scientists themselves had come to understand the relationship between science and politics. The new understanding, born in the writings of Vannevar Bush and other scientists in the postwar period, he labels 'laissez-faire communitarianism,' which he summarizes by the slogan 'let the community of science alone'. He suggests that the notion of the scientific community was waiting to be born in Bush's writings, but prevented from doing so by Bush's individualistic image of the scientist. It was instead formulated by Michael Polanyi, and came into discussion gradually through such means as the 1953 conference on Science and Freedom supported by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Hollinger identifies the origin of the concept with Polanyi' s 'The Autonomy of Science', which he characterizes as 'an obscure article' published in 1945. 'It identified the missing link, institutionally, between the individual scientist and the public. That link was the scientific community'. As Hollinger puts it, 'the notion of an autonomous scientific community . . . gave helpful specificity to the abstract entity called "research" or "science", the support of which the federal government in the 1950s was being regularly asked to renew and expand'.3 Thus according to Hollinger, the rise of the idea of community was a product of the need for science to make financial claims on the state and at the same time to protect its autonomy. Polanyi's role in this development, as Hollinger tells this story, was that he was the primary proximate intellectual source of the idea of the community of science that becomes so visible in 1962. Popularized by Polanyi and Edward Shils in the 1950s, this account served the interest of science in expanded funding. 'The more socially concrete and administratively coherent "science" could be made to appear, the less suspicious became the demand that the government support an enterprise the necessary essence of which was ostensibly its freedom from the kind of accountability the state generally required of recipients of tax dollars'. Thus, the idea of community, Hollinger says, reconciled the competing claims of planning and freedom of inquiry by locating freedom at the level of the scientific community. 'Community' was a way of reconciling planning and laissez-faire, through the following political formula: 'of course there had to be planning, but it was to be carried out within a genuine body politic, with its own rational system for evaluating priorities and personnel'. Laissez-faire was to continue, in short, but apply to the community rather than to the individual scientist. One important theme of Hollinger's text is the history of political ideas, especially the lost ideal of science as a model of democracy. But Hollinger does not write about Polanyi's ideas as a part of the history of political theory: for him they are simply a self-interested rationale for the wishes of science to be funded with minimal supervision. In what follows I will explain why it is more than this, and why the problems Polanyi addressed are still with us. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt was a lawyer and philosopher of law whose writings on politics and social theory led to his being known as the Hobbes of the twentieth century. His criticisms of liberalism and naive humanitarianism and secularism were startlingly original and extreme, and attracted intellectuals on the Left as well as on the Right. His basic ideas about society revolved around the problem of the location and sources of the power of the state, which he styled as a mortal god. (...) His most influential ideas included his account of the concept of the political in terms of the possibility of war and the friend–enemy distinction. (shrink)

The four volume work of which this book is a part has been praised as one of the great monuments of theoretical scholarship in sociology of the century. The praise has come largely from the older generation of students of Parsons and Merton. A great deal of dispraise has come from Alexander's own generation. Alan Sica's (1983) brilliant, biting review of Volume I speaks for many of Alexander's peers. Volume II is likely to be even more controversial. This volume begins (...) the substantive task of the text, the reinterpretation of the 'theoretical logic' of the classical sociologists, a reinterpretation governed by the intention of transcending the errors and limitations of the 'presuppositional' reasoning of the classical thinkers. For Alexander's sociological audience the second volume is the beginning of what really counts, and Volume II is indeed quite a different affair from the first, 'philosophical' volume: the prose tightens, and the air of getting down to work is palpable. (shrink)