This article responds to Raphael Sassower’s critique of my recent A Player’s Guide to the Post-Truth Condition. It addresses his concerns that I do not align myself sufficiently with Foucault and Critical Theory more generally. The article points out that notwithstanding my indebtedness to these sources, one cannot properly understand the post-truth condition without taking seriously the robust sense of freedom that today’s two dominant ideologies—Neoliberalism and Neo-Populism—presuppose in their various political-economic-social struggles. The article relates this point to several of (...) the key concepts underwriting my conception of post-truth, including Modal Power and the Symmetry Principle. The article ends with an account of the current “reparationist” discourse (i.e., repairing the intergenerational damage of transatlantic slavery) that makes it exemplary of the post-truth condition. (shrink)

Scientific models can be performative: they can causally affect the phenomena they are intended to represent. The existing literature offers two responses. The appraisal view emphasizes that performativity can sometimes be a good-making model attribute, e.g., when predictions steer the public’s behavior in desirable ways. The mitigation view seeks to endogenize agents’ behavioral response to model-issued forecasts to get rid of performativity instead. This paper argues that neither approach is fully compelling: the appraisal view encounters severe concerns about moral values (...) illegitimately encroaching on how modelers construct and use models, while the mitigation view fails to acknowledge that endogenization is itself a choice that involves substantive value-judgments relating to the desirability of certain social outcomes. (shrink)

The paper examines Robert Sugden’s arguments for contractarian economics, which exclude objective valuation. From a metaethical stance we claim that it is possible and desirable to enrich the axiology of contractarian economics to make it more convincing and applicable. Analyzing Sugden’s argument against paternalism, we show that adopting a richer axiology is compatible with the contractarian framework. Examining Sugden’s claim for redistribution, we demonstrate that explaining the psychological stability of a market economy is problematic without a richer axiology. Considering sweatshop (...) problem, we argue that without a richer axiology, contractarian economists are unable to recognize mutually advantageous exploitation. The paper concludes with the postulates on contractarian economics. (shrink)

Professor Turner’s reply to my article focuses on the ways in which set-theoretic analysis can be used to help solve problems of causal heterogeneity in social science research. By contrast, I discuss the ways in which set-theoretic analysis can be used to help solve problems of conceptual heterogeneity. I identify conceptual heterogeneity as a ubiquitous problem that is disguised by psychological essentialism. The seriousness of this problem must be recognized for scholars to appreciate the advantages of constructivist set-theoretic analysis for (...) the social sciences. (shrink)

This comment discusses the suggestions made in Mahoney’s “Constructivist Set-Theoretic Analysis: An Alternative to Essentialist Social Science” (2023). Mahoney presents an approach to cases of intersectionality or confounding which produce causal results unlike those that result from traditional net effects causal modeling. He presents it as an alternative to “essentialism,” which he describes as a cognitive error. These alternatives have the same problems as those he attributes to net effects analysis, with one exception: the method does allow for the identification (...) of subpopulations with different causal mechanisms producing different outcomes for this subpopulation. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline a general framework for cultural analysis consistent with an “analytic” approach to explanation in social science. The proposed approach provides coherent solutions to thorny problems in cultural theory. These include providing a coherent definition of culture (and the “cultural”), specifying the nature of cultural units (both simple and complex), and outlining the processes making possible episodes of cultural genesis, transformation, and reproduction within bounded units characterized as cultural causal systems.

Psychological essentialism is a cognitive bias through which human beings conceive the entities around them as having inner essences and basic natures. Social scientists routinely generate flawed inferences because their methods require the truth of psychological essentialism. This article develops set-theoretic analysis as a scientific-constructivist approach that overcomes the bias of psychological essentialism. With this approach, the “sets” of set-theoretic analysis are mental phenomena that establish boundaries and identify similarities and differences among entities whose natural kind composition is not known. (...) The approach is illustrated through a consideration of research on intelligence, race, and poverty in the United States. (shrink)

Although social ontology (SO) has attracted the attention of scholars in various disciplines, how it is applied to social scientific studies is still under-researched. To tackle this issue, this paper initially considers major streams of research on SO. It then argues that one of the aims of SO in the social sciences is to identify the rhetorical expression of social dynamism. To support this argument, the present study introduces a perspective of performativity and proposes that generic performativity should be identified (...) by social scientists. Finally, such an attempt is demonstrated with reference to the global pursuit of financialization. (shrink)

In this paper we explore the hypothesis that constrained uses of imagination are crucial to economic modeling. We propose a theoretical framework to develop this thesis through a number of specific hypotheses that we test and refine through six new, representative case studies. Our ultimate goal is to develop a philosophical account that is practice oriented and informed by empirical evidence. To do this, we deploy an abductive reasoning strategy. We start from a robust set of hypotheses and leave space (...) for the generation of further hypotheses and theoretical claims based on the qualitative analysis of new empirical data. (shrink)

In contrast to dominant approaches to human reason involving essentially a logical and instrumental conception of rationality easily modeled by artificial intelligence mechanisms, I argue that the specific capacities of the human mind are meta-analytic in nature, understood as irreducible to the analytic or the logical, or else the computational. Firstly, the assumption of a meta-analytical level of rationality is derived from key insights developed in various branches of the social sciences. This meta-analytical level is then inferred from Gödel’s incompleteness (...) theorem. On these bases, and with the help of psychological approaches to consciousness, I argue that human rationality may be characterized as the capacity to make meaningful use of signs. (shrink)

The ongoing efforts to explain the disease COVID-19 and the parallel efforts to devise and implement public health measures that mitigate it, are an opportunity to reconsider the values of science as identified to Merton. What is revealed is that science is always partial and always tentative. This leaves much scope for magical thinking and for flat science denial.

The surge of post-truth calls for a reassessment of psychoanalytic and ideology critique-approaches in the social sciences. Both traditions are dismissed by the principal antagonists in the post-truth debate, the “positivist” defenders of science and the “post-modern” critics of science. The antagonists share a predisposition towards anti-humanism, refusal to distinguish between the latent and the manifest, and adherence to descriptive methods. In order to substantiate these claims, the article investigates commonalities between B.F. Skinner and Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The (...) article concludes that the allegedly “pseudo-scientific” or “metaphysical” concepts of Subject and Truth, pivotal to both psychoanalysis and ideology critique-approaches, need to be rehabilitated in response to the challenge of post-truth. (shrink)

This article investigates the causal efficacy of social properties, which faces the following puzzle. First, for both intuitive and scientific reasons, it seems social properties have causal import. But, second, social properties are also characteristically extrinsic: to have some social property depends, in typical cases, on what one’s society is like around them. And, third, there is good reason to doubt that extrinsic properties make a genuine causal contribution. After elaborating on these three claims, I defend the following resolution to (...) the puzzle: social causation occurs at the level at which social properties are intrinsic. (shrink)

As a result of being measured, individuals sometimes alter their behavior and attitudes to such extent that subsequent measurement results are affected. This ‘reactivity’ to measurement problematizes prediction and explanation, but some reactivity is nevertheless legitimate. Using the example of the measurement of race in the US Census, this article demonstrates that some forms of reactivity do not affect the accuracy of research. The article argues that legitimacy of reactivity depends on the metaphysical status of the phenomenon being measured. It (...) is argued that reactivity’s legitimacy is affected by the arbitrariness of a measure and the voluntariness of measurement results. (shrink)

In the paper, I propose a project of social coordination as naturalistic social ontology (CNSO) based on the rules-in-equilibria theory of social institutions (Guala and Hindriks 2015; Hindriks and Guala 2015). It takes coordination as the main ontological unit of the social, a mechanism homological across animals and humans, for both can handle coordination problems: in the forms of “animal conventions” and social institutions, respectively. On this account, institutions are correlated equilibria with normative force. However, if both humans and animals (...) solve coordination problems in a similar way, and only humans have social institutions, how do the latter evolve? I suggest identifying possible causes of this evolution among cognitive capacities like mindreading and imitation by building dynamic models. Social ontology becomes constrained by the evolution of the forms of coordination and by the cognitive mechanisms involved in the emergence and persistence of social institutions. It means that it becomes bound to what might be derived from social institutions, i.e., social roles, structures and their derivatives. It shows how conceptual relations might emerge from causal. I conclude the paper with the discussion of the relationship between involved types of explanation, mechanistic and equilibrium ones. (shrink)

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Ahead of Print.

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Ahead of Print.

This paper presents Agassi’s views of morality and ethics. Agassi proposes a non-reductive psychological theory of moral judgments, complemented by duties, and a psychological hypothesis regarding the psychological and social conditions that invite openness to criticism. His opposition to moralism, his objection to justification, his emphasis on red lines and grey areas, and his rejection of abstract moral debates in favor of public moralism result in a distinct approach to moral philosophy that is in conflict with most of the mainstream (...) work in this field. Following Socrates, he takes education for autonomy as the critical rationalist life-style. (shrink)

In Towards an Historiography of Science (1963) and in other related works spanning over his entire career, Agassi presents his wide-ranging and original understanding of the history of science. It emerges from the criticism of two distinctive approaches, each informed by the uncritical acceptance, on the part of historians, of two philosophies of science: inductivism (scientific theories emerge from facts), and conventionalism (scientific theories are mathematical frameworks for classifying facts). Both produce unsatisfactory historical reconstructions, in which errors are either concealed (...) or condemned. Popper’s philosophy, by contrast, allows for a picture in which science grows from the recognition and criticism of our best and wisest errors. (shrink)

In Towards an Historiography of Science (1963) and in other related works spanning over his entire career, Agassi presents his wide-ranging and original understanding of the history of science. It emerges from the criticism of two distinctive approaches, each informed by the uncritical acceptance, on the part of historians, of two philosophies of science: inductivism (scientific theories emerge from facts), and conventionalism (scientific theories are mathematical frameworks for classifying facts). Both produce unsatisfactory historical reconstructions, in which errors are either concealed (...) or condemned. Popper’s philosophy, by contrast, allows for a picture in which science grows from the recognition and criticism of our best and wisest errors. (shrink)

Popper and Agassi diverged on nationalism. Popper was a trenchant critic whereas Agassi formed a theory of liberal nationalism. At the root of their disagreement was Popper’s refusal of Jewish identity and rejection of Zionism, in contrast with Agassi’s affirmation of progressive Jewishness and liberal Zionism. Both Agassi and Popper, however, rejected ethnonationalism. To hedge against it, they ignored the claims of ethnocultural communities. This essay will highlight Agassi’s liberal theory of the nation state but urge that we overcome Critical (...) Rationalists’ instinctive aversion to ethnicity, and accommodate ethnocultural communities. We should also explore again both Popper’s democratic imperialism and cosmopolitan diasporas, to think a future beyond nationalism. (shrink)

Joseph Agassi, together with Yehuda Fried, presented the paradoxes of paranoia and proposed to explain and solve them by introducing innovative diagnostic criteria for psychosis as reflecting a specific kind of rationality. Their ethical-clinical framework however, discouraged discussion of placing impositions on the mentally ill, even when in danger. According to these very criteria, Agassi’s institutional individualism framework renders paranoiacs defective in autonomy. Introducing the idea of degrees of autonomy as a guiding principle for research and practice will promote responsible (...) commitment to the mentally ill and to all other persons in society. (shrink)

Joseph Agassi, together with Yehuda Fried, presented the paradoxes of paranoia and proposed to explain and solve them by introducing innovative diagnostic criteria for psychosis as reflecting a specific kind of rationality. Their ethical-clinical framework however, discouraged discussion of placing impositions on the mentally ill, even when in danger. According to these very criteria, Agassi’s institutional individualism framework renders paranoiacs defective in autonomy. Introducing the idea of degrees of autonomy as a guiding principle for research and practice will promote responsible (...) commitment to the mentally ill and to all other persons in society. (shrink)

This paper discusses Agassi’s critique of Popper’s theory of the “empirical basis”. It argues that Popper’s theory should be interpreted with emphasis on its realism and anti-subjectivism, and as stressing a tentative inter-subjective consensus as to what is observed when tests are made. It agrees with Agassi’s critique of “sensationalism”, disagrees that there are residues of “sensationalism” in Popper’s approach, and argues that Popper’s view should be supplemented by a tentative realist metaphysics.

This paper discusses Agassi’s critique of Popper’s theory of the “empirical basis”. It argues that Popper’s theory should be interpreted with emphasis on its realism and anti-subjectivism, and as stressing a tentative inter-subjective consensus as to what is observed when tests are made. It agrees with Agassi’s critique of “sensationalism”, disagrees that there are residues of “sensationalism” in Popper’s approach, and argues that Popper’s view should be supplemented by a tentative realist metaphysics.

This paper discusses Agassi’s critique of Popper’s theory of the “empirical basis”. It argues that Popper’s theory should be interpreted with emphasis on its realism and anti-subjectivism, and as stressing a tentative inter-subjective consensus as to what is observed when tests are made. It agrees with Agassi’s critique of “sensationalism”, disagrees that there are residues of “sensationalism” in Popper’s approach, and argues that Popper’s view should be supplemented by a tentative realist metaphysics.

This paper discusses Agassi’s critique of Popper’s theory of the “empirical basis”. It argues that Popper’s theory should be interpreted with emphasis on its realism and anti-subjectivism, and as stressing a tentative inter-subjective consensus as to what is observed when tests are made. It agrees with Agassi’s critique of “sensationalism”, disagrees that there are residues of “sensationalism” in Popper’s approach, and argues that Popper’s view should be supplemented by a tentative realist metaphysics.

Agassi’s chief contribution to the application of critical rationalism to political science is his claim that civic nationhood is a minimum requirement of democracy. This usually comes with the qualification that it is so, not as a matter of principle, but as a matter of contingency: it is an operative minimum requirement.

Agassi’s chief contribution to the application of critical rationalism to political science is his claim that civic nationhood is a minimum requirement of democracy. This usually comes with the qualification that it is so, not as a matter of principle, but as a matter of contingency: it is an operative minimum requirement.

Agassi’s chief contribution to the application of critical rationalism to political science is his claim that civic nationhood is a minimum requirement of democracy. This usually comes with the qualification that it is so, not as a matter of principle, but as a matter of contingency: it is an operative minimum requirement.

Work on the conceptual amelioration of race concepts is usually negative or critical: it uncovers social features that contribute to racial hierarchies. Much less focus has been placed on how ameliorative accounts contribute to positive change. Using an account of race developed by Steve Biko during South African apartheid, I will argue that we can extract a novel account of positive amelioration in which racial categories can have normative or aspirational force, contributing to positive change.

This paper draws some bold conclusions from modest premises. My topic is an old one, the Neohumean view of practical rationality. First, I show that this view consists of two independent claims, instrumentalism and subjectivism. Most critics run these together. Instrumentalism is entailed by many theories beyond Neohumeanism, viz. by any theory that says rational actions maximize something. Second, I give a new argument against instrumentalism, using simple counterexamples. This argument systematically undermines consequentialism and rational choice theory, I show, using (...) detailed examples of their many social science applications. There is no obvious fix. (shrink)