El artículo revisa -tomando como referencia el episodio de un bloqueo de vías en Argentina durante siete días con sus noches, por parte de los habitantes de las localidades de Cutralco y Plaza Huincul, Argentina, con motivo de la privatización de YPF- el debate sobre la desobediencia civil, que es usualmente entendida como una desobediencia por la fuerza al orden constitucional. El autor desarrolla los componentes que la desobediencia civil tiene de específico, a saber: es disruptiva, pacífica, autónoma y recursiva; (...) esto último porque debe vincularse internamente con el mismo tipo de reglas que le reclama al sistema. Ello, dice, la convierte en una práctica excepcional, pero ello no implica que se incurra en una idealización. Plantea luego que, en lugar de encapsular a la desobediencia civil dentro de los moldes del liberalismo, buscando el menor costo posible para el Estado de derecho, y convertirla en inofensiva para que sea legítima, habría que redefinirla a partir de los ideales procedimentales que presuponemos en cualquier práctica social. (shrink)

Leonardo da Vinci y el Renacimiento.--Schelling y el romanticismo.--Malraux y la época contemporánea.

Exploramos las actitudes de los españoles hacia las herramientas digitales propuestas por los actores políticos durante las elecciones generales españolas de 2008. Analizamos seis grupos de discusión organizados según las dimensiones de edad, identificación ideológica y nivel de institucionalización a la hora de participar en política. Exploramos hasta qué punto la brecha digital generacional de los usuarios de Internet, la auto-ubicación ideológica o la pertenencia a partidos políticos y movimientos sociales influye en la percepción de la ciberpolítica. Los resultados son (...) complejos. La ciudadanía percibió como la igualdad de las prácticas digitales no se correspondía con las potencialidades de una ciberdemocracia distorsionada. (shrink)

Article on the relation between real and ideal self.

El pensamiento sobre la sociedad civil siempre ha estado caracterizado por una doble referencia hacia las relaciones sociales existentes y hacia los ideales sociales. La principal hipótesis de numerosas investigaciones sobre la sociedad civil es que una floreciente esfera que lleva este nombre es el portador del ideal de una sociedad más civilizada. Este artículo empieza con una pequeña discusión sobre el trasfondo histórico y los debates públicos en torno a la sociedad civil, y continúa con un planteamiento más (...) analítico del concepto como designación de un orden social asociacional y una esfera de la sociedad dominada por las asociaciones voluntarias. Más adelante nos centramos en esta esfera describiendo sus caracteres nacionales en Europa y analizando las reivindicaciones de sus beneficios civilizadores: la formación de capital social y de discurso público. Encontramos muy pocas evidencias para tales reivindicaciones y por ello profundizamos en el desarrollo de la sociedad moderna occidental, una sociedad en la que las asociaciones voluntarias se han convertido en menos relevantes, mientras que otras esferas de la sociedad, en particular los ensanchados márgenes de la sociedad civil, son más importantes para el desarrollo de una sociedad más civilizada.The thinking about civil society has always been characterized by the double reference to existing social relations and to societal ideals. The basic hypothesis of much civil society research is that a flourishing sphere with this name is the carrier of the ideal of more civilized society. This article starts with a brief discussion of the historical background and public debates about civil society, and continues with a more analytic approach of the concept as designation of an associational social order and a sphere of society dominated by voluntary associations. We further focus on this sphere, describe its national patterns in Europe and analyze claims of its civilizing benefits: the formation of social capital and public discourse. We find very limited evidence for the claims and look deeper into developments of modern western society, which have made voluntary associations less important and other spheres of society, in particular the broader margins of civil society, more important for the development of a more civilized society. (shrink)

Idealization is a fundamental feature of human thought. We build simplified models in our scientific research and utopias in our political imaginations. Concepts like belief, desire, reason, and justice are bound up with idealizations and ideals. Life is a constant adjustment between the models we make and the realities we encounter. In idealizing, we proceed “as if” our representations were true, while knowing they are not. This is not a dangerous or distracting occupation, Kwame Anthony Appiah shows. Our best chance (...) of understanding nature, society, and ourselves is to open our minds to a plurality of imperfect depictions that together allow us to manage and interpret our world. -/- The philosopher Hans Vaihinger first delineated the “as if” impulse at the turn of the twentieth century, drawing on Kant, who argued that rational agency required us to act as if we were free. Appiah extends this strategy to examples across philosophy and the human and natural sciences. In a broad range of activities, we have some notion of the truth yet continue with theories that we recognize are, strictly speaking, false. From this vantage point, Appiah demonstrates that a picture one knows to be unreal can be a vehicle for accessing reality. -/- As If explores how strategic untruth plays a critical role in far-flung areas of inquiry: decision theory, psychology, natural science, and political philosophy. A polymath who writes with mainstream clarity, Appiah defends the centrality of the imagination not just in the arts but in science, morality, and everyday life. (shrink)

There have traditionally been two schools of thought regarding moral ideals and their relationship with moral duty. First, many have held that moral agents at all times have a duty or obligation to realize or attain moral ideals, or at least they have a duty to strive to realize or attain them. A second school of thought has maintained that attaining or pursuing moral ideals is supererogatory or beyond the call of duty. Recently a third school of thought has been (...) articulated by Robert Audi in his essay “Wrongs Within Rights.” In this paper I express agreement with Audi, and it will be my suggestion that the resources of virtue ethics can profitably be employed to illustrate how his view avoids problems which plague the two traditional schools of thought. (shrink)

The Ideal Worlds objection is an objection that purports to identify a potentially fatal flaw in some of our most influential moral theories: including, among others, rule consequentialism, Kant's Law of Nature Formula of the Categorical Imperative and Scanlonian contractualism. In this article, I offer an account of the objection, a survey of some of the ways defenders of affected theories have sought to avoid it, and the problems that those responses can encounter.

Political philosophy often focuses on “major institutions” that make up the “basic structure” of society. These include political, economic, and social institutions. In this paper I argue first that policing plays a substantial role in generating the kinds of inequalities and problems that are concerns of social or structural justice, and therefore that police agencies qualify as a major institution. When we abandon full compliance or similar idealizations, it is clear that policing is not a concern secondary to, e.g., the (...) electoral system or the scheme of property rights in a society. Nor, I argue, does maintaining full compliance or moral character idealizations obviate an active enforcement role. Eliminating that role from an idealized model society requires engaging in a methodologically and substantively unattractive amount of abstraction. The result is that an active enforcement role is at the core of a complete theory of justice rather than something that is significant only “downstream” from more fundamental issues. (shrink)

In her ‘On the apparent paradox of ideal theory’, Laura Valentini combines three supposedly plausible premises to derive the paradoxical result that ideal theory is both unable to, and indispensable for, guiding action. Her strategy is to undermine one of the three premises by arguing that there are good and bad kinds of ideal theory, and only the bad kinds are vulnerable to the strongest version of their opponents’ attack. By undermining one of the three premises she releases ideal theorists (...) from the paradox, which is as follows. (1) Any sound theory of justice is action-guiding. (2) Any sound theory of justice is ideal. (3) Any ideal theory fails to be action-guiding. Here I shall respond to Valentini in two ways. First, I shall show that both (1) and (2) are false. The falsity of either is sufficient to release ideal theorists from the paradox. Second, I shall show that Valentini’s response to (3) can be extended, because her bad kinds of ideal theory do not necessarily fail to guide action. The cumulative effect of my arguments further strengthens Valentini’s support of ideal theory. I will deal with premises (1) and (2) in Sections I and II, and (3) in Section III. (shrink)

Needed for such dialogue games as dialectic are appropriate standards of fairness and rationality. The rules of procedure of dialectic must describe a game playable by actual human participants. The present paper centers on certain idealizations of the dialectician that are not allowable.

Science is the study of our world, as it is in its messy reality. Nonetheless, science requires idealization to function—if we are to attempt to understand the world, we have to find ways to reduce its complexity. Idealization and the Aims of Science shows just how crucial idealization is to science and why it matters. Beginning with the acknowledgment of our status as limited human agents trying to make sense of an exceedingly complex world, Angela Potochnik moves on to explain (...) how science aims to depict and make use of causal patterns—a project that makes essential use of idealization. She offers case studies from a number of branches of science to demonstrate the ubiquity of idealization, shows how causal patterns are used to develop scientific explanations, and describes how the necessarily imperfect connection between science and truth leads to researchers’ values influencing their findings. The resulting book is a tour de force, a synthesis of the study of idealization that also offers countless new insights and avenues for future exploration. (shrink)

In this paper, I first outline the view developed in my recent book on the role of idealization in scientific understanding. I discuss how this view leads to the recognition of a number of kinds of variability among scientific representations, including variability introduced by the many different aims of scientific projects. I then argue that the role of idealization in securing understanding distances understanding from truth, but that this understanding nonetheless gives rise to scientific knowledge. This discussion will clarify how (...) my view relates to three other recent books on understanding by Henk de Regt, Catherine Elgin, and Kareem Khalifa. (shrink)

The terms “ideal theory” and “nonideal theory” are used in contemporary Anglophone political philosophy to identify alternative methodological approaches for justifying normative claims. Each term is used in multiple ways. In this article Alison M. Jaggar disentangles several versions of ideal and nonideal theory with a view to determining which elements may be helpful in designing models of real-world justice that are contextually relevant, morally plausible, and practically feasible.

Drawing inspiration from Lakatos’s philosophy of science, the paper presents a notion of intertheory explanation that is suitable to explain, from the point of view of a successor theory, its predecessor theory’s success (where it is successful) as well as the latter’s failure (where it fails) at the same time. A variation of the Ramsey-test is used, together with a standard AGM belief revision model, to give a semantics for open and counterfactual conditionals and ’because’-sentences featuring in such intertheory explanations. (...) Pre-theoretically described idealizing assumptions play a crucial role in this model, especially when the predecessor theory and the successor theory contradict each other. (shrink)

Idealized scientific representations result from employing claims that we take to be false. It is not surprising, then, that idealizations are a prime example of allegedly inconsistent scientific representations. I argue that the claim that an idealization requires inconsistent beliefs is often incorrect and that it turns out that a more mathematical perspective allows us to understand how the idealization can be interpreted consistently. The main example discussed is the claim that models of ocean waves typically involve the false assumption (...) that the ocean is infinitely deep. While it is true that the variable associated with depth is often taken to infinity in the representation of ocean waves, I explain how this mathematical transformation of the original equations does not require the belief that the ocean being modeled is infinitely deep. More generally, as a mathematical representation is manipulated, some of its components are decoupled from their original physical interpretation. (shrink)

Accordingly, the task of the present book is to consider the role of idealization in cognitive matters and to establish its utility in this realm.

The use of idealizations and approximations in scientific explanations poses a problem for traditional philosophical theories of confirmation since, strictly speaking, these sorts of statements are false. Furthermore, in several central cases in the history of science, theoretical predictions seen as confirmatory are not, in any usual sense, even approximately true. As a means of eliminating the puzzling nature of these cases, two theses are proposed. First, explanations consist of idealized deductive-nomological sketches plus what are called modal auxiliaries, i.e., arguments (...) showing that if the idealizations used in the initial conditions are improved, then there will be an improvement in the prediction. Second, a theory is confirmed if it can be shown that its idealized sketches can be improved; similarly, a theory is disconfirmed if its idealized sketches cannot be improved. Several examples are given to illustrate both confirmation and disconfirmation achieved by means of the modal auxiliary. These cases are compared with Scriven's bridge example. (shrink)

This paper explores some of the constructive dimensions and specifics of human theoretic cognition, combining perspectives from (Husserlian) genetic phenomenology and distributed cognition approaches. I further consult recent psychological research concerning spatial and numerical cognition. The focus is on the nexus between the theoretic development of abstract, idealized geometrical and mathematical notions of space and the development and effective use of environmental cognitive support systems. In my discussion, I show that the evolution of the theoretic cognition of space apparently follows (...) two opposing, but in truth, intrinsically aligned trajectories. On the epistemic plane, which is the main focus of Husserl’s genetic phenomenological investigations, theoretic conceptions of space are progressively constituted by way of an idealizing emancipation of spatial cognition from the concrete, embodied intentionality underlying the human organism’s perception of space. As a result of this emancipation, it ultimately becomes possible for the human mind to theoretically conceive of and posit space as an ideal entity that is universally geometrical and mathematical. At the same time, by synthesizing a range of literature on spatial and mathematical cognition, I illustrate that for the theoretic mind to undertake precisely this emancipating process successfully, and further, for an ideal and objective notion of geometrical and mathematical space to first of all become fully scientifically operative, the cognitive support provided by a range of specific symbolic technologies is central. These include lettered diagrams, notation systems, and more generally, the technique of formalization and require for their functioning various cognitively efficacious types of embodiment. Ultimately, this paper endeavors to understand the specific symbolic-technological dimensions that have been instrumental to major shifts in the development of idealized, scientific conceptions of space. The epistemic characteristics of these shifts have been previously discussed in genetic phenomenology, but without devoting sufficient attention to the constructive role of symbolic technologies. At the same time, this paper identifies some of the irreducible phenomenological and epistemic dimensions that characterize the functioning of the historically situated, embodied and distributed theoretic mind. (shrink)