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In this chapter, I consider the claim for pluralism commonly advanced in political philosophy as a claim concerning the standards, methods, and norms for forming belief and judgment about certain kinds of facts. After distinguishing between descriptive and normative epistemic pluralism, I contend that in this context pluralism needs to rest on grounds that are stronger than fallibilism yet weaker than relativism in order to enjoy a distinct standing. The idea of reasonable pluralism seems to devise a variety of normative pluralism designed to meet this demand. I argue, however, that this is an unstable position and suggest that an epistemic view of deliberation may be better suited to making sense of political justification. The latter view, though, is bound to dispense with normative pluralism.

Ideology is commonly defined along functional, epistemic, and genetic dimensions. This article advances a reasonably unified account that specifies how they connect and locates the mechanisms at work. I frame the account along a recent distinction between anchoring and grounding, endorse an etiological reading of functional explanations, and draw on current work about the epistemology of delusion, looping effects, and structuring causes to explain how ideologies originate, reproduce, and possibly collapse. This eventually allows articulating how the legitimating function of ideologies relates to the constitutive and causal role they play when embedded into the facts they are originally designed to anchor.

On Jaeggi's reading, the immanent and progressive character of ideology critique are rooted in the connection between its explanatory and its normative tasks. I argue that this claim can be cashed out in terms of the mechanisms involved in a functional explanation of ideology and that stability plays a crucial role in this connection. On this reading, beliefs can be said to be ideological if (a) they have the function of supporting existing social practices, (b) they are the output of systematically distorted processes of belief formation, (c) the conditions in which distorting mechanisms triggers can be traced back to structural causal factors shaped by the social practice their outputs are designed to support. Functional problems thus turn out to be interlocked with normative problems because ideology fails to provide principles to regulate cooperation that would be accepted under conditions of non-domination, hence failing to anchor a stable cooperative scheme. By explaining ideology as parasitic on domination, ideology critique points to the conditions under which cooperation stabilize as those of a practice whose principles are accepted without coercion. Thus, it entails a conception of justice whose principles are articulated as part of a theory of social cooperation.

Inclusive design prescribes addressing the needs of the widest possible audience in order to consider human differences. Taking differences seriously, however, may imply severely restricting “the widest possible audience”. In confronting this paradox, we investigate to what extent Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness applies to design. By converting the paradox into the question of how design can be fair, we show that the demand for equitability shifts from the design output to the design process. We conclude that the two main questions about justice find application in design: the question about the standards of justice and the question about its metrics. We endorse a Rawlsian approach to the former, while some revision may be due regarding the latter. ispartof: Design Studies vol:54 pages:1-22 status: published

In this article I consider the relevance of Tomasello’s work on social cognition to the theory of communicative action. I argue that some revisions are needed to cope with Tomasello’s results, but they do not affect the core of the theory. Moreover, they arguably reinforce both its explanatory power and the plausibility of its normative claims. I proceed in three steps. First, I compare and contrast Tomasello’s views on the ontogeny of human social cognition with the main tenets of Habermas’ theory of communicative action. Second, I suggest how to reframe the role of language in the theory of communicative rationality in order to integrate the two theories. Third, I show how this affects social ontology, supporting the view that the construction of social reality is normatively constrained by the bounds of reason.

In this article, I argue that a capacity for mindreading conceived along the line of simulation theory provides the cognitive basis for forming we-centric representations of actions and goals. This explains the plural first personal stance displayed by we-intentions in terms of the underlying cognitive processes performed by individual minds, while preserving the idea that they cannot be analyzed in terms of individual intentional states. The implication for social ontology is that this makes sense of the plural subjectivity of joint actions without making group agents require either a corporate body or the unity of consciousness.

Research on the relationship between design and the creation of knowledge is a relatively recent phenomenon. In architecture, for instance, it was not so long ago that designers tended to view knowledge with disdain, as a hindrance to unfettered creativity or an encapsulation of “freeze-dried prejudices.”1 Recently, however, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) devoted the December 2004 issue of its AIA Journal entirely to the theme of knowledge, which strongly suggests that times are changing. Increasingly, the act of designing is considered to be or involve some kind of knowledge production.2 This directly follows from the type of knowledge designing relies on, which is practicebased and tacit,3 (i.e., embedded within the very act of designing).4 On the other hand, it is possible—at least in a rough and ready way—to appreciate the distinction between the aim, or intention, of producing knowledge and other aims,5 such as designing an object or a building. To state it a bit more bluntly, a client typically hires an architect to design a building, not to produce knowledge. Why then is it so difficult to set clear boundaries between design and scholarly research? Questions about the relationship between both are far from new. According to Nigel Cross, they reappear about every forty years,6 and have been written about by many authors before. Already in 1973, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber pointed out the difference between the kind of problems designers and planners deal with and those that scientists handle.7 More recently, Johannes Eekels and Norbert Roozenburg made a methodological comparison of the structures of design and research in engineering, and concluded that both are strongly interwoven and mutually dependent, yet fundamentally different.8 Although it seems time to move on from making all sorts of comparisons between design and research, this paper tries to shed more light on the issue from a conceptual and psychological point of view. To this end, it calls in the philosophy of mind—rather than the philosophy of science, as is usually the case9 —and more precisely the notion of intentionality. Instead of considering design as a mix of knowledge creation and application, the process is decomposed into distinct yet interacting mental acts, in which designers establish relationships with (objects in) the world. A detailed analysis of this relationship forms the basis for a nuanced, yet fundamental, comparison with

The contribution of Husserl’s phenomenology to the foundations of social and political theory can be appraised at both the methodological and the normative level. First, it makes intersubjective interaction central to the constitution of social reality. Second, it stresses reciprocity as a constitutive feature of intersubjectivity. In this context, individuals can be seen to be both ‘constituting’ and ‘constituted by’ their participation in communities, under a constraint of mutual recognition as intentional agents. This view is in no way atomistic, as it allows individual identities to be constituted intersubjectively; still, it remains individualistic, since it does not permit the ontological independence of collective entities. At the epistemological level, this provides a foundation of methodological individualism; at the normative level, it suggests that social order is a deliberative task and political legitimacy ultimately rests on moral principles of reciprocity and equal respect.