Rationality

About: Rationality is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 20459 publications have been published within this topic receiving 617787 citations.

Philosophy of social science: the philosophical foundations of social thought

Abstract: Preface to the Second Edition Introduction to the First Edition Empiricism and Positivism in Science Some Problems of Empiricism and Positivism Science, Nature and Society: Some Alternatives to Empiricism Interpretive Approaches 1: Instrumental Rationality Interpretive Approaches 2: Rationality as Rule-Following: Cultures, Traditions and Hermeneutics Interpretive Approaches 3: Critical Rationality Critical Realism and the Social Sciences Feminism, Knowledge and Society Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism Conclusion: In Defence of Philosophy Commentary on Recent Developments Appendix I: Personal Conclusions Appendix II: Obituary for Professor Ian Craib Glossary Bibliography Index

Information Systems and Global Diversity

Abstract: From the Publisher: "It is often assumed that the impact and implementation of ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) will or should be the same in all situations with little regard to the particular social or cultural context. Drawing on experience and research in different societies (Europe, Latin America, etc.), this book explains the nature of organizational diversity in which ICT innovation takes place, and also develops a conceptual approach to account for it." The book draws from institutionalist concepts of organizations, the sociology of technology, current debates on globalization, and critiques of the rationality of modernity. The theoretical perspective is supported empirically by four international case studies. The author shows how the processes of ICT innovation and organizational change reflect local aspirations, concerns, and action, as well as the multiple institutional influences of globalization.

Selfishness, Altruism, and Rationality: A Theory of Social Choice

Abstract: Why do we volunteer time? Why do we contribute money? Why, even, do we vote, if the effect of a single vote is negligible? Rationality-based microeconomic models are hard-pressed to explain such social behavior, but Howard Margolis proposes a solution. He suggests that within each person there are two selves, one selfish and the other group-oriented, and that the individual follows a Darwinian rule for allocating resources between those two selves. "Howard Margolis's intriguing ideas . . . provide an alternative to the crude models of rational choice that have dominated economics and political science for too long."-"Times Literary Supplement"

A critical review of the methodology of environmental racism research

Abstract: Research on environmental racism has emphasized positive rationality. While useful for policy and legal interventions, this is problematic from a radical political and theoretical viewpoint. By examining two key research questions–is “race” or class responsible for discriminatory patterns? which came first, the people or the hazard?–I explore the implicit assumptions concerning racism within this framework. This reveals a large, pervasive set of misconceptions, including a tendency to reduce racism to overt actions, denying racism as ideology, and insisting on a fixed, unitary idea of racism. Both scholars committed to antiracism and those who challenge environmental justice activists' claims reproduce these conceptualizations.

Two Theories of Modernity

Abstract: There seem to be at large in our culture two ways of understanding the rise of modernity. They are in effect two different "takes" on what makes our contemporary society different from its forebears. In one take, we can look on the difference between present-day society and, say, that of medieval Europe as analogous to the difference between medieval Europe and China or India. In other words, we can think of the difference as one between civilizations, each with their own culture. Or alternatively, we can see the change from earlier centuries to today as involving something like "development," as the demise of a "traditional" society and the rise of the "modern." And in this perspective, which seems to be the dominant one, things look rather different. I want to call the first kind of understanding a "cultural" one, and the second "acultural." In using these terms, I'm leaning on a use of the word culture which is analogous to the sense it often has in anthropology. I am evoking the picture of a plurality of human cultures, each of which has a language and a set of practices that define specific understandings of personhood, social relations, states of mind/soul, goods and bads, virtues and vices, and the like. These languages are often mutually untranslatable. With this model in mind, a "cultural" theory of modernity is one that characterizes the transformations that have issued in the modern West mainly in terms of the rise of a new culture. The contemporary Atlantic world is seen as one culture (or group of closely related cultures) among others, with its own specific understandings, for example, of person, nature, the good, to be contrasted to all others, including its own predecessor civilization (with which it obviously also has a lot in common). By contrast, an "acultural" theory is one that describes these transformations in terms of some culture-neutral operation. By this I mean an operation that is not defined in terms of the specific cultures it carries us from and to, but is rather seen as of a type that any traditional culture could undergo. An example of an acultural type of theory, indeed a paradigm case, would be one that conceives of modernity as the growth of reason, defined in various ways: as the growth of scientific consciousness, or the development of a secular outlook, or the rise of instrumental rationality, or an ever-clearer distinction between fact-finding and evaluation. Or else modernity might be accounted for in terms of social, as well as intellectual changes: the transformations, including the intellectual ones, are seen as coming about as a result of increased mobility, concentration of populations, industrialization, or the like. In all these cases, modernity is conceived as a set of transformations that any and every culture can go through--and that all will probably be forced to undergo. These changes are not defined by their end point in a specific constellation of understandings of, say, person, society, good; they are rather described as a type of transformation to which any culture could in principle serve as "input." For instance, any culture could suffer the impact of growing scientific consciousness; any religion could undergo secularization; any set of ultimate ends could be challenged by a growth of instrumental thinking; any metaphysic could be dislocated by the split between fact and value. So modernity in this kind of theory is understood as issuing from a rational or social operation that is culture-neutral. This is not to say that the theory cannot acknowledge good historical reasons why this transformation first arose in one civilization rather than another, or why some may undergo it more easily than others. The point rather is that the operation is defined not in terms of its specific point of arrival, but as a general function that can take any specific culture as its input. To grasp the difference from another angle, the operation is not seen as supposing or reflecting an option for one specific set of human values or understandings among others. …