In this paper, we investigate the use of event models for automated planning. Event models are the action defining structures used to define a semantics for dynamic epistemic logic. Using event models, two issues in planning can be addressed: Partial observability of the environment and knowledge. In planning, partial observability gives rise to an uncertainty about the world. For single-agent domains, this uncertainty can come from incomplete knowledge of the starting situation and from the nondeterminism of actions. In multi-agent domains, (...) an additional uncertainty arises from the fact that other agents can act in the world, causing changes that are not instigated by the agent itself. For an agent to successfully construct and execute plans in an uncertain environment, the most widely used formalism in the literature on automated planning is “belief states”: sets of different alternatives for the current state of the world. Epistemic logic is a significantly more expressive and theoretically better founded method for representing knowledge and ignorance about the world. Further, epistemic logic allows for planning according to the knowledge (and iterated knowledge) of other agents, allowing the specification of a more complex class of planning domains, than those simply concerned with simple facts about the world. We show how to model multi-agent planning problems using Kripke-models for representing world states, and event models for representing actions. Our mechanism makes use of slight modifications to these concepts, in order to model the internal view of agents, rather than that of an external observer. We define a type of planning domain called epistemic planning domains, a generalisation of classical planning domains, and show how epistemic planning can successfully deal with partial observability, nondeterminism, knowledge and multiple agents. Finally, we show epistemic planning to be decidable in the single-agent case, but only semi-decidable in the multi-agent case. (shrink)

Critical social theories look critically at the ways in which particular social arrangements hinder human flourishing, with a view to bringing about social change for the better. In this they are guided by the idea of a good society in which the identified social impediments to human flourishing would once and for all have been removed. The question of how these guiding ideas of the good life can be justified as valid across socio-cultural contexts and historical epochs is the most (...) fundamental difficulty facing critical social theories today. This problem of justification, which can be traced back to certain key shifts in the modern Western social imaginary, calls on contemporary theories to negotiate the tensions between the idea of context-transcendent validity and their own anti-authoritarian impulses. Habermas makes an important contribution towards resolving the problem, but takes a number of wrong turnings. (shrink)

Contemporary critical social theories face the question of how to justify the ideas of the good society that guide their critical analyses. Traditionally, these more or less determinate ideas of the good society were held to be independent of their specific sociocultural context and historical epoch. Today, such a concept of context-transcending validity is not easy to defend; the "linguistic turn" of Western philosophy signals the widespread acceptance of the view that ideas of knowledge and validity are always mediated linguistically (...) and that language is conditioned by history and context. In Re-Presenting the Good Society, Maeve Cooke addresses the justificatory dilemma facing critical social theories: how to maintain an idea of context-transcending validity without violating anti-authoritarian impulses. In doing so she not only clarifies the issues and positions taken by other theorists--including Richard Rorty, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Judith Butler--but also offers her own original and thought-provoking analysis of context-transcending validity.Because the tension between an anti-authoritarian impulse and a guiding idea of context-transcending validity is today an integral part of critical social theory, Cooke argues that it should be negotiated rather than eliminated. Her proposal for a concept of context-transcending validity has as its central claim that we should conceive of the good society as re-presented in particular constitutively inadequate representations of it. These re-presentations are, Cooke argues provocatively, regulative ideas that have an imaginary, fictive character. (shrink)

Although Foucault was clearly a critical thinker, his approach also provides for the possibility of a genealogy of critique. Such an approach problematizes critique, and I trace the emergent problematization of critique in Foucault’s later works, and briefly in Latour and Boltanski. From this I move on to the ‘critical problematic’, that is, how critique operates as a form of power/knowledge, as a discourse that creates subjects through a critical regime of truth and critical truth-games. Specifically, I argue that critique (...) is a discourse which transforms and unmasks other ‘truth-claims’, replacing them with a starker vision of reality, which in the end is also a specific cultural vision. To elaborate this view, I return to Foucault’s discussion of Kant, his late lectures on Cynicism and also on ordo-liberalism. The wider circulation of critical discourses is demonstrated through an analysis of ‘cool’ or critical consumerism. In conclusion, the relationship between critique, crisis and modernity is considered. (shrink)

The article considers the role of translation in encounters between religious citizens and secular citizens. It follows Habermas in holding that translations rearticulate religious contents in a way that facilitates learning. Since he underplays the complexities of translation, it takes some steps beyond Habermas towards developing a more adequate account. Its main thesis is that the required account of translation must keep sight of the question of truth. Focusing on inspirational stories of exemplary figures and acts, it contends that a (...) successful translation makes truth appear anew; further, that it is the central role of truth in translation that enables the prospect of learning from the inspirational messages of religion. By highlighting truth as the point of continuity between intercultural learning and learning from religion, it provides support for the thesis that encounters between religious and secular citizens are a subset of intercultural encounters and, as such, contexts of possible mutual learning. (shrink)

An anthology of previously unpublished essays from some of the most outstanding scholars working in philosophy, mathematics, and computer science today, _Self-Reference_ reexamines the latest theories of self-reference, including those that attempt to explain and resolve the semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes. With a thorough introduction that contextualizes the subject for students, this book will be important reading for anyone interested in the general area of self-reference and philosophy.

The article examines Habermas’s formal‐pragmatic theory of meaning from the point of view of his attempt to defend a postmetaphysical yet context‐transcendent conception of validity. It considers his attempt to develop a pragmatic account of understanding utterances that emphasises the mediation of knowledge through socio‐cultural practices while simultaneously stressing that understanding has a cognitive dimension that is inherently context‐transcendent. It focuses on his recent “Janus‐faced” conception of truth, looking more briefly at his purely epistemic conception of moral validity. It raises (...) three objections: the first to his attempt to maintain a notion of “unconditionality” that has no otherworldly origins but is purely immanent to this world, the second to the alleged non‐arbitrary status of his conception of truth, and the third to his rejection of metaphysical thinking. It concludes that the objections, if valid, have profound implications for Habermas’s postmetaphysical enterprise and for his programme of formal pragmatics. (shrink)

I consider argumentation from the point of view of context-transcendent cognitive transformation through reference to the critical social theory of Jürgen Habermas. My aim is threefold. First, to make the case for a concept of context-transcendent cognitive transformation. Second, to clarify the transformatory role of argumentation itself by showing that, while argumentation may contribute constructively to context-transcendent cognitive transformation, such transformation presupposes the existence of a reality conceptually independent of argumentation. Third, to cast light on the problem of how to (...) justify argumentatively the poetically formulated, novel and innovative semantic contents that may be required for context-transcendent cognitive transformation. I conclude that the difficulties involved in argumentatively assessing novel and innovative semantic contents should not be misconstrued as evidence of an unbridgeable gap between language and experience but rather suggest the need for a more dynamic normative conception of language and for a more receptive model of autonomous agency. (shrink)

Roughly speaking all economists can be divided into two groups--those who agree with Milton Friedman and those who do not. Both groups, however, espouse the view that science is a series of approximations to a demonstrated accord with reality. Methodological controversy in economics is now merely a Conventionalist argument over which comes first--simplicity or generality. Furthermore, this controversy in its current form is not compatible with one important new and up and coming economic (welfare) theory called "the theory of the (...) Second Best." In this paper I offer a Second Best meta-theory that says that (1) any compromise between simplicity and generality must yield a theory which is "third best" by these Conventionalist criteria; and (2) there exists a better way than a compromise. (shrink)

This article considers `critique' as performative, being on the one hand a reiterative performance, that enacts the `critic' through the act of critique, and on the other hand reflecting the constitution of the subject. While this approach takes on the conceptual framework of Judith Butler's work, it differs by refusing critique — or its correlates; parody, subversion or similar — any special status. Like any other performance critique is taken here as a cultural practice, as a Foucauldian `technique of self', (...) though the complex genealogy of such a technique lies outside the scope of this article. In order to illustrate this argument I interpret a number of Butler's prefaces, interviews and digressions which diverge from her own theoretical framework, and argue that these `fictions' arise from critical `disavowals': that is, a `self-transformative' turn against power. The subjective `crisis' that prompts critique is then elaborated by comparison to Girard's work on imitation and sacrifice. (shrink)

Language and Reason opens up new territory for social theorists by providing thefirst general introduction to Habermas's program of formal pragmatics: his reconstruction of theuniversal principles of possible understanding that, he argues, ...

The concept of “structural injustice” has a long intellectual lineage, but Iris Marion Young popularised the term in her late work in the 2000s. Young’s theory tapped into the zeitgeist of the time, providing a credible way of thinking about transnational and domestic injustices, illuminating the importance of political, economic and social structures in generating injustice, theorising the role of individuals in perpetuating structural injustice, and the responsibility of everyone to try to correct it. Young’s theory has inspired secondary and (...) novel research. In this paper, I outline the main topics in this recent literature: what structural injustice is, responsibility for structural injustice, acting on responsibility, avoiding responsibility, and historical injustice. I conclude by noting how the influence of structural injustice theory is spreading beyond the confines of political theory. Any field that is concerned with structural inequalities, disadvantage, or oppression, can utilize structural injustice theory. (shrink)

The ‘structural injustice’ framework is an increasingly influential way of thinking about historical injustice. Structural injustice theorists argue against reparations for historical injustice on the grounds that our focus should be on forward-looking responsibility for contemporary structural injustice. Through the use of a case study – the Caribbean Community 10-Point Plan for reparations from 2014 – I argue that this reasoning is flawed. Backward-looking reparations can be justified on the basis of state liability over time. The value of backward-looking reparations (...) is that they ensure that historical perpetrators do not evade their reparative obligations and that affected communities are taken seriously. However, I argue that this backward-looking approach should be supplemented by a forward-looking structural injustice approach and the ‘social connection model’ of responsibility, which can expand the scope of responsible agents and forms of injustice that warrant repair and explain how citizens living now can be expected to pay for crimes of the past. (shrink)

The article considers Jürgen Habermas's views on the relationship between postmetaphysical philosophy and religion. It outlines Habermas's shift from his earlier, apparently dismissive attitude towards religion to his presently more receptive stance. This more receptive stance is evident in his recent emphasis on critical engagement with the semantic contents of religion and may be characterized by two interrelated theses: the view that religious contributions should be included in political deliberations in the informally organized public spheres of contemporary democracies, though translated (...) into a secular language for the purposes of legislation and formal decision making and the view that postmetaphysical philosophy should seek to salvage the semantic contents of religious traditions in order to supply the evocative images, exemplary figures, and inspirational narratives it needs for its social and political projects. With regard to, it argues that the translation requirement impairs the political autonomy of religious believers and other metaphysically inclined citizens, suggesting that this difficulty could be alleviated by making a distinction between epistemologically authoritarian and non-authoritarian religious beliefs. With regard to, it argues that the salvaging operation is not as straightforward as Habermas seems to suppose and that social and political philosophy may not be able to tap the semantic power of religious traditions without relying on metaphysical assumptions; it concludes that, here, too, a distinction between authoritarian and non-authoritarian approaches to knowledge and validity may be useful. (shrink)

This is the introduction to a special section on Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action, published in Constellations 20:4 (2013), and edited by Maeve Cooke and me.

An anthology of previously unpublished essays from some of the most outstanding scholars working in philosophy, mathematics, and computer science today, _Self-Reference_ reexamines the latest theories of self-reference, including those that attempt to explain and resolve the semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes. With a thorough introduction that contextualizes the subject for students, this book will be important reading for anyone interested in the general area of self-reference and philosophy.

The most fundamental challenge facing humans today is the imminent destruction of the life-generating and life-sustaining ecosystems that constitute the planet Earth. There is considerable evidence...

The undraped human form is ubiquitous in Western art and even appears in the art of India and Japan. Only in China, François Jullien argues, is the nude completely absent. In this enthralling extended essay, he explores the different conceptions of the human body that underlie this provocative disparity. Contrasting nakedness with nudity, Jullien explores the traditional European vision of the nude as a fixed point of fusion where form joins truth. He then shows that the absence of the nude (...) in Chinese art evinces an understanding of the human body as changeable and transitory. Viewed in light of each other, these differing concepts allow for a new way of thinking about form, the ideal, and beauty, enabling us to delve deeper into the relationship between art and the ideas that lie at its roots. Beautifully illustrated and gracefully translated into English for the first time, _The Impossible Nude_ will fascinate anyone interested in art history, Chinese art, or aesthetics. (shrink)

Despite acknowledgment that performance failure among new salespeople is a prevalent issue for organizations, researchers do not fully understand the consequences of repetitive periods of failure on new salespeople’s unethical selling behaviors. Further, little is known about how a sales force’s reward structure and managerial attempts to intervene following failure affect new salespeople’s behavior. Combining an experiment with longitudinal growth models, we show that repetitive periods of failure increase unethical behaviors, and interventions intended to remind the salesperson to behave in (...) the customer’s best interests attenuate this effect under a non-contingent reward structure. However, counter to managerial assumptions, under a contingent reward structure these customer-oriented interventions actually backfire by amplifying the original relationship between repetitive failure and unethical behaviors. The results have potentially important managerial implications for those who manage new salespeople learning how to sell or during other failure-prone periods. (shrink)

Habermas dialogically recasts the Kantian conception of moral autonomy. In a legal-political context, his dialogical approach has the potential to redress certain troubling features of liberal and communitarian approaches to democratic politics. Liberal approaches attach greater normative weight to negatively construed individual freedoms, which they seek to protect against the interventions of political authority. Communitarian approaches prioritize the positively construed freedoms of communal political participation, viewing legal-political institutions as a means for collective ethical self-realization. Habermas’ discourse theory of law and (...) democracy seeks to overcome this competition between the negative and positive liberties. Doing so entails reconciling private and public autonomy at a fundamental conceptual level. This is his co-originality thesis, which seeks to show that private and public autonomy are internally connected and evenly balanced. I support his aim but argue that he fails to achieve it due to an unsatisfactory account of private autonomy. I suggest an alternative dialogical conception of autonomy as ethically self-determining agency that would enable him to establish his thesis. (shrink)

Habermas emphasizes the importance for critical thinking of ideas of truth and moral validity that are at once context-transcending and immanent to human practices. in a recent review, Peter Dews queries his distinction between metaphysically construed transcendence and transcendence from within, asking provocatively in what sense Habermas does not believe in God. I answer that his conception of “God” is resolutely postmetaphysical, a god that is constructed by way of human linguistic practices. I then give three reasons for why it (...) should not be embraced by contemporary critical social theory. First, in the domain of practical reason, this conception of transcendence excludes by fiat any “Other” to communicative reason, blocking possibilities for mutual learning. Second, due to the same exclusion, it risks reproducing an undesirable social order. Third, it is inadequate for the purposes of a critical theory of social institutions. (shrink)

If Third World women form ‘the bedrock of a certain kind of global exploitation of labour,’ as Chandra Mohanty argues, how can our theoretical definitions of exploitation account for this? This paper argues that liberal theories of exploitation are insufficiently structural and that Marxian accounts are structural but are insufficiently intersectional. What we need is a structural and intersectional definition of exploitation in order to correctly identify global structural exploitation. Drawing on feminist, critical race/post-colonial and post-Fordist critiques of the Marxist (...) definition and the intersectional accounts of Maria Mies and Iris Marion Young, this paper offers the following definition of structural exploitation: structural exploitation refers to the forced transfer of the productive powers of groups positioned as socially inferior to the advantage of groups positioned as socially superior. Global structural exploitation is a form of global injustice because it is a form of oppression. (shrink)

This book is about forming effective critiques of neoclassical economics. Its focus is on constructive criticism of the foundations neoclassical theory, beginning with what Alfred Marshall called the `Principles of Economics'. It concludes that there is still much that can be done to make neoclassical economics more realistic.

In Epicurean cosmology, material reconstitution, or palingenesis (παλιγγενεσία) is the necessary consequence of the infinity of time and the eternity of atoms. I examine Lucretius’ treatment of this phenomenon (DRN 3.843–864) and consider the extent to which his view enables us to develop an Epicurean response to the question: what makes a person at two different times one and the same person? I offer a reading of this passage in the light of modern accounts of persistence and identity, and what (...) Lucretius states in Books 3 and 4 about memory and the soul’s motions. Guided by the metaphysical implications of this analysis, I determine the type of relation which, according to Lucretius, holds between the mental and the physical. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas's program in formal pragmatics fulfills two main functions. First, it serves as the theoretical underpinning for his theory of communicative action, a crucial element in his theory of society. Second, it contributes to ongoing philosophical discussion of problems concerning meaning, truth, rationality, and action. By the "pragmatic" dimensions of language, Habermas means those pertaining specifically to the employment of sentences in utterances. He makes clear that "formal" is to be understood in a tolerant sense to refer to the (...) rational reconstruction of general intuitions or competences. Formal pragmatics, then, aims at a systematic reconstruction of the intuitive linguistic knowledge of competent subjects as it is used in everyday communicative practices. His program may thus be distinguished from empirical pragmatics -- for example, sociolinguistics -- which looks primarily at particular situations of use. This anthology brings together for the first time, in revised or new translation, ten essays that present the main concerns of Habermas's program in formal pragmatics. Its aim is to convey a sense of the overall purpose of his linguistic investigations while introducing the reader to their specific details, in particular to his theories of meaning, truth, rationality, and action. (shrink)

While the field known as ‘Whiteness Studies’ has been thriving in Anglophone criticism and theory for over 25 years, it is almost unknown in France. This is partly due to epistemological and political differences, but also to demographic factors — in contrast with the post-plantation culture of the US, for example, whites in Martinique and Guadeloupe are a tiny minority of small island populations. Yet ‘whiteness’ remains a phantasized and a fetishized state in the Antillean imaginary, and is strongly inflected (...) by gender. This article sketches the emergence of ‘white’ femininity during slavery, then examines its representation in the work of a number of major Antillean writers. In their work, a cluster of recurring images and leitmotifs convey the idealization or, more commonly, the pathologization, of the white woman; these images resonate strongly with Bhabha's ‘unhomely’, and convey the disturbing imbrication of sex and race in Antillean history. (shrink)

Critical social theory has an uneasy relationship with utopia. On the one hand, the idea of an alternative, better social order is necessary in order to make sense of its criticisms of a given social context. On the other hand, utopian thinking has to avoid ‘bad utopianism’, defined as lack of connection with the actual historical process, and ‘finalism’, defined as closure of the historical process. Contemporary approaches to critical social theory endeavour to avoid these dangers by way of a (...) post metaphysical strategy. However, they run up against the problem that utopian thinking has an unavoidable metaphysical moment. Rather than seeking to eliminate this moment, therefore, they should acknowledge its inevitability. The challenge is to maintain a productive tension between closure and contestability and between attainability and elusiveness. The paper outlines a strategy for meeting this challenge, a strategy that is based on a distinction between the metaphysical content of utopian projections and their fallible claims to validity. Key Words: critical social theory • fallibilism • metaphysical closure • postmetaphysical thinking • reflexivity • regulative idea • utopia. (shrink)

The question of civil disobedience has preoccupied philosophical discourse at least since Thoreau's articulation of disobedience as a form of non-compliance and Rawls' classic definition outlined in the wake of the civil rights and student protest movements of the 1960s. It has become increasingly clear, however, that these classic definitions are being challenged and rethought from a variety of traditions in the wake of contemporary protests. These articles engage with the most recent debates surrounding civil disobedience and conscientious objection, opening (...) up original new paths for thinking about forms of protest. They also reveal disagreements about how to understand civil disobedience and about the place of conscience in political protest, inviting further discussion on these questions and issues. (shrink)