Political epistemology is rich with thought experiments. Their most systematic function in the field is the construction of ideal theory. We present a sketch of a kind of political thought ...experiments, in fact, our preferred version of contractualist ones, in Scanlonian tradition. Following the contemporary pattern, we use some retouch: slightly idealizing the participants, making them reasonable and well informed. (Our brief example is an imagined debate about the moral status of migration and migrants). We offer an epistemically oriented analysis of the way contractualist political thought experiments function within the human cognitive apparatus, from mental modeling and simulation through empathy and sympathy to intuition. The whole process we describe, if successful, leads to understanding. And this providing of understanding, factual and normative, is a very important, if not indeed the most important role of thought-experimenting in political epistemology.
Rationality and cognition Miscevic, Nenad
Rationality and cognition,
2000, 20150201, 2000, 2015, 2000-01-01
eBook
Cognitive science has posed some radical challenges to philosophy in recent years, particularly in the study of the cognitive activities and capacities of individuals. In this book Nenad Mis̆c̆ević ...defends naturalistic rationalism against recent relativist attacks.
In his important and original book,
Knowing and Checking
, Guido Melchior provides advice on how to tackle skepticism. I argue that his analysis points to a possible virtue-theoretic answer to ...skepticism, which I call the
restraint solution
, i.e., activate your self-trust and restrain your inquisitiveness! It leads one to the ideal of bounded reflective curiosity: when it comes to knowledge, we should restrain our second-order, reflective curiosity and stay content with the somewhat Moorean trust in ordinary everyday beliefs. We can preserve our ordinary, first-order vigilance and investigative interest (curiosity) without falling into skeptical over-caution which is basically a reflective, second-order vicious attitude.
As a prominent figure in analytic philosophy of the 20th and 21st centuries, Nenad Miščević has enriched, enhanced, and expanded many areas of the field. This volume, dedicated to him for his 65th ...birthday, follows the virtues he so much respects - conceptual analysis, rigorous use of logics, and clear definitions - and applies them to a very hot topic in philosophy, thought experiments. Present throughout the history of philosophy, thought experiments have become indispensable for the discipline and for analytic philosophy in particular. But questions can be asked, as to what exactly is a thought experiment, what it consists of, and, most importantly, if it is even useful for philosophy. Next to these conceptual questions, this collection tackles thought experiments that have tradition, some of them very long, like The Ring of Gyges, The Social Contract, and Descartes' Evil Demon. Others, like Twin Earth, Gettier cases and Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiments, have prompted at least half-a-century-long trails. One cannot understand contemporary analytic philosophy without understanding these trails and traditions. Nenad's closest friends and colleagues, from all over Europe, share their thoughts on this topic in this book, followed diligently by Nenad's comments on their work.
In her already classical criticism of thought-experimenting, Kathy Wilkes points to superficialities in the most famous moral-political thought experiments, taking the Ring of Gyges as her central ...example. Her critics defend the Ring by discussing possible variations in the scenario(s) imagined. I propose here that the debate points to a significant dual structure of thought experiments. Their initial presentation(s) mobilize the immediate, cognitively not very impressive imaginative and refl ective efforts both of the proponent and the listener of the proposal. The further debate, like the one exemplifi ed by Wilkes’s criticisms and some of the answers, appeals to a deeper, more rational variety of imagination and reasoning. I suggest that this duality is typical for moral and political thought experimenting in general, conjecture that it might be extended to the whole area of thought experimenting.
Rawls’s central work, A Theory of Justice, is famously built around a thought experiment, the famous Original Position. It continues the tradition of hypothetical understanding of the social ...contract, enriching it with a new methodological tool, the introduction of the Veil of Ignorance. The Veil, the central thought experiment of Rawls’s work, finely illustrates the road from merely instrumental rationality to the higher level, characterized by Rawls as “reasonableness”. Rawls is here quite consistent throughout half a century of his reflections. Here we propose the reading in terms of layers–degrees of rationality in the wide sense, that is, the reading in terms of the reasonable and the rational in the narrow sense.
The paper connects two central ethical views, both with a rich tradition, sentimentalism and contractualism. From the former, it also borrows the response-dependentist metaphysics. The idea of ...combining the two has been sketched before, but not systematically and explicitly; for instance, in various comments on classical authors, especially on Kant and elsewhere, most prominently in Habermas. Here is the kernel of the present proposal. Our initial practical intuitions are emotion-based and the values, when detected, are response-dependent. This is the starting point borrowed from sentimentalism. These intuitions get improved by reflection, and by dialogue that crucially involves perspective taking. If all goes well, this results in insights, in particular into principles that all rational parties can agree about in a kind of “contract.” This brings two traditions, the one of David Hume and Adam Smith, and the other of Kant, together. The resulting theory would be a kind of sentimentalist, response-dependentist contractualism.
In her already classical criticism of thought-experimenting, Kathy Wilkes points to superficialities in the most famous moral-political thought experiments, taking the Ring of Gyges as her central ...example. Her critics defend the Ring by discussing possible variations in the scenario(s) imagined. I propose here that the debate points to a significant dual structure of thought experiments. Their initial presentation(s) mobilize the immediate, cognitively not very impressive imaginative and refl ective efforts both of the proponent and the listener of the proposal. The further debate, like the one exemplifi ed by Wilkes’s criticisms and some of the answers, appeals to a deeper, more rational variety of imagination and reasoning. I suggest that this duality is typical for moral and political thought experimenting in general, conjecture that it might be extended to the whole area of thought experimenting.
Tema rada je desni populizam, vrlo jak i raširen na cijeloj sjevernoj polutki; ovdje nas zanima naša zemlja i njoj najbliže. Najprije općenito karakteriziramo populizam, a onda razmatramo njegov ...odnos s najbližim mu pojavama, nacionalizmom i patriotizmom. Zanimljiv je fenomen u Hrvatskoj odsutnost snažnih jasno populističkih stranki usprkos snažnoj nacionalističkoj orijentaciji u izbornoj bazi; najjednostavnije je objašnjenje da je HDZ uspio preuzeti važne teme desnog populizma, a ipak sačuvati formu i ideologiju parlamentarne demokracije. Koliko je to rješenje stabilno vidjet će se u budućnosti. Uspon populizma promijenio je okvir političkih dilema kod nas i u svijetu; zastupnici suprotnih stajališta sada moraju ponovno promisliti pretpostavke na kojima djeluju i ponuditi nova rješenja.
The topic of the paper is right-wing populism, strong and widespread throughout the Northern Hemisphere; although the focus is on Croatia and its closest neighborhood. First, the author defines populism and then considers its relationship with its closest phenomena, nationalism, and patriotism. An interesting puzzle about Croatia is the absence of strong, clearly populist parties, despite a strong nationalist orientation in the electoral base; the simplest explanation is that the strongest party, HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union) has managed to take on important topics of right-wing populism while still preserving the form and ideology of parliamentary democracy. How stable this solution is will be seen in the future. The rise of populism has changed the frame of political contestation in our country and in the world; proponents of opposing political standpoints must now rethink the assumptions of their political action and offer new solutions.
PDF