This paper puts forward a theoretical framework for the analysis of expertise and experts in contemporary societies. It argues that while prevailing approaches have come to see expertise in various forms and functions, they tend to neglect the broader historical and societal context, and importantly the relational aspect of expertise. This will be discussed with regard to influential theoretical frameworks, such as laboratory studies, regulatory science, lay expertise, post-normal science, and honest brokers. An alternative framework of expertise is introduced, showing (...) the limitations of existing frameworks and emphasizing one crucial element of all expertise, which is their role in guiding action. (shrink)

It is often said that knowledge is power, but more often than not relevant knowledge is not used when political decisions are made. This book examines how political decisions relate to scientific knowledge and what factors determine the success of scientific research in influencing policy. The authors take a comparative and historical perspective and refer to well-known theoretical frameworks, but the focus of the book is on three case studies: the discourse of racism, Keynesianism, and climate change. These cases cover (...) a number of countries and different time periods. In all three the authors see a close link between 'knowledge producers' and political decision makers, but show that the effectiveness of the policies varies dramatically. This book will be of interest to scientists, decision makers and scholars alike. (shrink)

In late 2009, e-mails from a server at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were released that showed some climate scientists in an unfavorable light. Soon this scandal was known as “Climategate” and a highly charged debate started to rage on blogs and in the mass media. Much of the debate has been about the question whether anthropogenic global warming was undermined by the revelations. But ethical issues, too, became part and parcel of the debate. This (...) article aims to contribute to this debate, assessing the e-mail affair in the light of two normative analyses of science, one proposed by Robert Merton, the second by a recent suggestion to use the concept of honest brokering in science policy interactions. On the basis of these analyses, different aspects of malpractice will be discussed and possible solutions will be suggested. (shrink)

ABSTRACTExpertise has come under attack not least since the Brexit vote in the UK and Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States. In this contribution, I will provide some conceptual clarification and suggest a new topology of expertise. I will also examine the historical roots of this challenge to expertise and its social context using a comparative lens. I will ask what it could mean to speak of the rightful place of expertise. I will try to provide an (...) answer by looking more closely at different types of expertise. Expertise, it seems, has been used as an umbrella term for a variety of different knowledge-related activities. I will show that the role of the expert has to be differentiated from the role of the scientist, but also from the role of the specialist. Specialists have different tasks in comparison to experts which need to be emphasized. My argument will draw on the social and historical context of the critique of expertise, and discuss the challenge to the social sciences, espec... (shrink)

Sollen und Sein klaffen bei uns weiter auseinander als bei anderen, weil eben das Sollen sehr hoch gesetzt ist.Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus.

Sollen und Sein klaffen bei uns weiter auseinander als bei anderen, weil eben das Sollen sehr hoch gesetzt ist. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus.

This article compares the cases of ozone layer protection and climate change. In both cases, scientific expertise has played a comparatively important role in the policy process. The author argues that against conventional assumptions, scientific consensus is not necessary to achieve ambitious political goals. However, the architects of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change operated under such assumptions. The author argues that this is problematic both from a theoretical viewpoint and from empirical evidence. Contrary to conventional assumptions, ambitious political regulations (...) in the ozone case were agreed under scientific uncertainty, whereas the negotiations on climate change were much more modest albeit based on a large scientific consensus. On the basis of a media analysis, the author shows that the creation of a climate of expectation plus pressure from leader countries is crucial for success. (shrink)

This five volume collection brings together a carefully selected array of contributions from a variety of disciplines. Featuring essays from philosophers who have investigated the foundations of knowledge, and addressing different forms of knowledge in society such as common sense and practical knowledge, this collection also discusses the role of knowledge in economic process and gives attention to the role of expert knowledge in political decision making. Including a collection of articles from the sociology of knowledge and science, the set (...) also provides a new introduction and full index by the editors, making it a unique and invaluable research resource for both student and scholar. Coverage includes: 1. Foundations of Knowledge - Knowledge, Experience and Mind - Knowledge and Reality - Knowledge and Skepticism - Knowledge and Ignorance - Knowledge and Uncertainty 2: Knowledge and Society: Forms of Knowledge - Everyday Knowledge - Practical knowledge - Tacit knowledge - Secret Knowledge - Scientific Knowledge - Hermeneutics - Knowledge Construction - Indigenous (traditional) knowledge 3: Knowledge and the Economy - The Economics of Knowledge - Knowledge and Organisations - Knowledge Acquisition - Knowledge Based Systems (firms) - Knowledge Management - Knowledge and Information - Knowledge and Law 4: Politics and Knowledge - Science and Policy-Making - The Power of Ideas and Discourse - The Politics of Knowledge 5: Sociology of Knowledge and Science - Classical Perspectives - Modern Views - Science Studies. (shrink)

Typically, expert judgments are regarded by laypeople as highly trustworthy. However, expert assertions that strike the layperson as obviously false or outrageous, seem to give one a perfect reason to dispute that this judgment manifests expertise. In this paper, I will defend four claims. First, I will deliver an argument in support of the preemption view on expert judgments according to which we should not rationally use our own domain-specific reasons in the face of expert testimony. Second, I will argue (...) that the preemption view does not leave room for rejecting an expert judgment simply because it is outrageous. Third and finally, I will argue that outrageous expert judgments are ambiguous. Whereas some of them should be rationally rejected by laypeople, others are true and rationally acceptable. So, being outrageous is not, in and of itself, a reason to reject the judgment. Finally, I will argue that there are resources available to the preemption view that enable the layperson to reject some but not all outrageous expert judgments. This is sufficient to overcome the challenge from outrageous expert judgments to the preemption view. (shrink)

Global meta-philosophical skepticism (i.e. completely unrestricted skepticism about philosophy) based upon disagreement faces the problem of self-defeat since it undercuts its motivating conciliatory principle. However, the skeptic may easily escape this threat by adopting a more modest kind of skepticism, that will be called “extensive meta-philosophical skepticism”, i.e., the view that most of our philosophical beliefs are unjustified, except our beliefs in epistemically fundamental principles. As I will argue in this paper, this kind of skepticism is well-motivated, does not undercut (...) the conciliatory principle, but still poses a radical challenge to philosophy as a cognitive discipline. Moreover, I will argue that non-global skepticism that is still extensive undermines itself as well. The deeper reason for this is that this more modest kind of skepticism can only be motivated by the assumption that disagreement with philosophical peers is abundant and that we can identify peers only by relying on track-record arguments. But then one can argue for extensive meta-philosophical skepticism only if one presupposes that those philosophical beliefs that form the basis of track-record evaluations are justified. Here, the threat of self-defeat looms again. I will proceed by first defending the premises of this new anti-skeptical argument against standard objections from the literature. Second, I will show in more detail where the epistemic inconsistency arises in the argument for extensive meta-philosophical skepticism. I conclude with an assessment of the scope and the limits of my argument. (shrink)

This is not a work of mine. For some reason, I am unable to remove it from my page. It is a list of Dr. Reiner Schürmann's lecture notes for courses that he taught at the New School for Social Research (aka The New School).

In this paper, I argue that the two most common views of how to respond rationally to peer disagreement–the Total Evidence View (TEV) and the Equal Weight View (EWV)–are both inadequate for substantial reasons. TEV does not issue the correct intuitive verdicts about a number of hypothetical cases of peer disagreement. The same is true for EWV. In addition, EWV does not give any explanation of what is rationally required of agents on the basis of sufficiently general epistemic principles. I (...) will then argue that there is a genuine alternative to both views–the Preemption View (PV)–that fares substantially better in both respects. I will give an outline and a detailed defense of PV in the paper. (shrink)

Das Überleben moderner Gesellschaften hängt davon ab, ob es ihnen gelingt, Strategien zur Lösung von wicked problems wie der Übernutzung natürlicher Ressourcen, Zerstörung der Biossphäre oder Flucht und Vertreibung zu entwickeln. In einer demokratietheoretischen Analyse zum Verhältnis von Demokratie und Ethik zeigt Sven Grundmann, dass ein solches Projekt nur auf Grundlage eines agonistischen, streitbaren, widerstandsfähigen Demokratiemodells gelingen kann. Die notwendige Resilienz lässt sich durch progressiv-inkrementelle Wandlungsprozesse erzielen, die wiederum institutionalisierte Formen ethischer Reflexion in der politischen Entscheidungsvorbereitung und -findung voraussetzen.

This paper provides a novel argument for granting memory the status of a generative source of justification and knowledge. Memory can produce justified output beliefs and knowledge on the basis of unjustified input beliefs alone. The key to understanding how memory can generate justification and knowledge, memory generativism, is to bear in mind that memory frequently omits part of the stored information. The proposed argument depends on a broadly reliabilist approach to justification.

Modern societies are characterized by a division of epistemic labor between laypeople and epistemic authorities. Authorities are often far more competent than laypeople and can thus, ideally, inform their beliefs. But how should laypeople rationally respond to an authority’s beliefs if they already have beliefs and reasons of their own concerning some subject matter? According to the standard view, the beliefs of epistemic authorities are just further, albeit weighty, pieces of evidence. In contrast, the Preemption View claims that, when one (...) discovers what an authority believes, it is not permissible to rely on any of one’s own reasons concerning the subject matter. The original version of this view, as proposed by Linda Zagzebski, has recently been severely criticized for recommending blind trust and for abandoning even minimal standards for critical thinking. In our paper, we defend a new version of the Preemption View—Defeatist Preemptionism—in a way that differs radically from Zagzebski’s. We argue that our view can be derived from certain widely accepted general epistemic principles. In particular, we claim that preemption can be identified as a special case of source sensitive defeat. Moreover, we argue that Defeatist Preemptionism does not lead to the undesirable consequences that critics ascribe to the Preemption View. The paper thus articulates the foundations and refinements of the Preemption View, such that it adequately captures the phenomenon of epistemic authority and the rational requirements related to it. (shrink)

Der Autor: Reiner Ruffing ist promovierter Philosoph, gibt in der Erwachsenenbildung und an Universitäten Lehrveranstaltungen und ist seit mehr als 20 Jahren Lehrer.

Standard Analytic Epistemology typically relies on conceptual analysis of folk epistemic terms such as ‘knowledge’ or ‘justification’. A cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspective on this method leads to the worry that there might not be universally shared epistemic concepts, and that different languages might use folk notions that have different extensions. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that our epistemic common-sense terms pick out what is epistemically most significant or valuable. In my paper, I take these issues as a starting (...) point for exploring the prospects of an alternative methodological approach that I call ‘alethic instrumentalism’. The core idea behind this approach is to start with a properly designed epistemic goal and then to develop a framework of instrumentally valuable methods oriented towards this goal. This results in a somewhat revisionary framework of newly constructed core epistemic terms. In the paper, I elucidate the foundations of this new framework and address a number of methodological and content-related objections to the approach. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Reflexion und Gefühl" verfügbar.

The article presents the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD). SKAD, which has been in the process of development since the middle of the 1990s, is now a widely used framework among social scientists in discourse research in the German-speaking area. It links arguments from the social constructionist tradition, following Berger and Luckmann, with assumptions based in symbolic interactionism, hermeneutic sociology of knowledge, and the concepts of Michel Foucault. It argues thereby for a consistent theoretical and methodological grounding of (...) a genuine social sciences perspective on discourse interested in the social production, circulation and transformation of knowledge, that is in social relations and politics of knowledge in the so-called ‘knowledge societies’. Distancing itself from Critical Discourse Analysis, Linguistics, Ethnomethodology inspired discourse analysis and the Analysis of Hegemonies, following Laclau and Mouffe, SKAD’s framework has been built up around research questions and concerns located in the social sciences, referring to public discourse and arenas as well as to more specific fields of (scientific, religious, etc.) discursive struggles and controversies around problematizations (Foucault). (shrink)

Proceeding from the thesis of Remi Bragues, that Europe constantly attains its identity in contras and via delimitation, this article describes the Catholic and Protestant concept of Europe which was developed in the 19th century: Both agree in the rejection of Enlightenment ideals, and yet pursue different interests: While the Catholic line strives toward integration by means of the Church, Protestantism relies upon the nation state. These two lines can be understood as blueprints of current controversies: How is the relationship (...) between the nation state and the European Union to be determined? Does Europe need a unifying basis of values? Finally, the article makes a case for integration by means of seeking a common law which is open to different national and worldview traditions, and for seeing the independent profile of Europe in such secular law. (shrink)

Tutz Rendtorff develops his ethical theory in tradition ofFriedrich Schleiermacherand Ernst Troeltsch as Ethical Theology. Ethics is understood not simply as catalogue of moral rules, but from the ethical perspective theological issues come into sight. This article's purpose is to demonstrate this. The three basic elements of the ethical realities of life according to Trutz Rendtorff: givenness of life, giving of life, reflection on life, can be interpreted referring to the three main issues of traditional dogmatics: creation, reconciliation, and redemption.

ZusammenfassungTerminale Sedierung ist unter bestimmten Umständen ethisch rechtfertigbar: Mit dem Wissen um die Begrenztheit des eigenen Lebens ist auch der Sterbeprozess ein bewusst zu gestaltender, dem eigenen Willen unterworfener Bestandteil des Lebens. Das schließt auch die (paradoxe) Möglichkeit ein, bewusst auf das Bewusstsein beim eigenen Sterben zu verzichten. Anhand eigener Studien kann der Autor zeigen, dass sich der Wunsch nach Sterbehilfe bei terminal kranken Menschen als die Folge einer konsequenten Einordnung in das System der Medizin deuten lässt. Infolgedessen begreifen Patienten (...) auch das Sterben als eine Aufgabe des Medizinsystems, so dass sie ärztliche Sterbehilfe als Ausdruck für ein menschenwürdiges Sterben, paradoxerweise sogar als natürlichen Tod auffassen können. In dieser Situation ermöglicht die terminale Sedierung einen Fortschritt: Das Medizinsystem kann der von ihm erwarteten Zuständigkeit für den Prozess des Sterbens nachkommen, ohne direkt und intentional zu töten. Trotzdem bleiben bezüglich der Missbrauchsmöglichkeiten, der Rollenkonfusion der Ärzte und der Grenzen menschlicher Handlungsräume Zweifel. Vor der „Illusion der glatten Lösungen“ (H. Thielicke) wird gewarnt und für den Versuch geworben, das jeweils Beste für die einzelnen Betroffenen zu erreichen. (shrink)

With great sympathy for Roman Ingarden and his work, Edith Stein edited his book project The Literary Work Of Art. In the letters she exchanges with him shereflects on relationship between reality and ideality: she writes that those who do not see the world as a reality must be fools. The political events in the 1930s had an impact on phenomenology. While Edmund Husserl dissociates himself from his protégé Martin Heidegger with regard to the content of his philosophy as well (...) as with regard to his ideology, Edith Stein distances herself more and more from the phenomenological method, seeing it as removed from reality, and she eventually become a Carmelite nun. Roman Ingarden, on the other hand, reconsiders interpreting phenomenology as aesthetic theory. Literature and film are being re-analysed in terms of phenomenological mediality and as factors of human communication. (shrink)

The quest for an all-encompassing theory, finally intended to give a solution to the problem of the unification of all natural forces, is seen today as one of the most important objectives of theoretical high-energy physics. This so-called 'Theory of Everything' is, actually, identified by some theoretical physicists with superstring theory. But superstring theory is in a crucial way incomplete. And, above all, it has fundamental problems with empirical testability – problems that make questionable its status as a physical theory (...) at all. (shrink)

In der Reihe werden herausragende monographische Untersuchungen und Sammelbände zu allen Aspekten der Philosophie Kants veröffentlicht, ebenso zum systematischen Verhältnis seiner Philosophie zu anderen philosophischen Ansätzen in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Veröffentlicht werden Studien, die einen innovativen Charakter haben und ausdrückliche Desiderate der Forschung erfüllen. Die Publikationen repräsentieren damit den aktuellsten Stand der Forschung.