Dictionary of Arguments


Philosophical and Scientific Issues in Dispute
 
[german]

Screenshot Tabelle Begriffes

 

Find counter arguments by entering NameVs… or …VsName.

Enhanced Search:
Search term 1: Author or Term Search term 2: Author or Term


together with


The author or concept searched is found in the following 4 entries.
Disputed term/author/ism Author
Entry
Reference
Communitarianism Political Philosophy Gaus I 170
Communitarianism/Political Philosophy/Dagger: [Longing for community] did not find expression in the word 'communitarian' until the 1840s, when it and communautaire appeared almost simultaneously in the writings of English and French socialists. French dictionaries point to Etienne Cabet and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as the first to use communautaire, but the Oxford English Dictionary gives the credit for 'communitarian' to one Goodwyn Barmby, who founded the Universal Communitarian Association in 1841 and edited a magazine he called The Promethean, or Communitarian Apostle.
According to Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on 'English reformers', Barmby
Gaus I 171
advertised his publication as 'the cheapest of all magazines, and the paper most devoted of any to the cause of the people; consecrated to Pantheism in Religion, and Communism in Politics' (1842(1): 239). In the beginning, then, 'communitarian' seems to have been a rough synonym of 'socialist' and 'communist'.
To be a communitarian was simply to believe that community is somehow vital to a worthwhile life and is therefore to be protected against various threats. Socialists and communists were leftists, but a communitarian could as easily be to the right as the left of centre politically
(Miller, 2000c)(2)
(...) people who moved from the settled, family-focused life of villages and small towns to the unsettled, individualistic life of commerce and cities might gain affluence and personal free-
dom, but they paid the price of alienation, isolation, and rootlessness. Ferdinand Tönnies (2001)(3), with his distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (association or civil society), has been especially influential in this regard. As Tönnies defines the terms, Gemeinschaft is an intimate, organic, and traditional form of human association; Gesellschaft is impersonal, mechanical, and rational. To exchange the former for the latter then, is to trade warmth and support for coldness and calculation.
Concern for community took another direction in the twentieth century as some writers began to see the centripetal force of the modern state as the principal threat to community. This turn is evident, for instance, in José Ortega y Gasset's warnings in The Revolt of the Masses against 'the gravest danger that today threatens civilisation: State intervention; the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State' (1932(4): 120).
Nisbet: Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community (1953)(5) provides an especially clear statement of this position, which draws more on Tocqueville's insistence on the importance of voluntary associations ofcitizens than on a longing for Gemeinschaft.
>Community/Tönnies.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in short, the longing for community took the form of a reaction against both the atomizing, anomic tendencies of modern, urban society and the use of the centripetal force of the modern state to check these tendencies. Moreover, modernity was often linked with liberalism, a theory that many took to rest on and encourage atomistic and even 'possessive' individualism (Macpherson, 1962)(6). Against this background, communitarianism developed in the late twentieth century in the course of a debate with - or perhaps within - liberalism.
>Liberalism/Gaus.
Philosophical communitarianism: Four books published in rapid succession in the 1980s - Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981)(7), Michael Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982)(8), Michael Walzer's Spheres of.Justice (1983)(9), and Charles Taylor's Philosophical Papers (1985)(10) - marked the emergence of this philosophical form of communitarianism.FN7 Different as they
are from one another, all of these books express dissatisfaction with liberalism, especially in the form of theories of justice and rights. The main target here was John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971)(11), but Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)(12), Ronald Dworkin's Taking Rights Seriously (1977)(13), and Bruce Ackerman's Social Justice in the Liberal State (1980)(14) also came in for criticism. (CommunitarianismVsRawls, CommunitarianismVsNozick, CommunitarianismVsAckerman, Bruce, CommunitarianismVsDworkin).
CommunitarianismVsLiberalism: a typical complaint was, and is, that these theories are too abstract and universalistic.
Walzer: In opposing them, Walzer proposes a 'radically particularist' approach that attends to 'history, culture, and membership' by asking not what 'rational individuals under universalizing conditions of such-and-such a sort' would choose, but what would 'individuals like us choose, who are situated as we are, who share a culture and are determined to go on sharing it?' (1983(9): xiv, 5).
>M. Walzer.
Walzer thus calls attention to the importance of community, which he and others
writing in the early 1980s took to be suffering from both philosophical and political neglect.
For a valuable, full-length survey of this debate, see Mulhall and Swift, 1996(15)
Gaus I 172
Communitarian responesVsCriticisms: responses: 1) the first is that the communitarians' criticisms are misplaced because they have misconceived liberalism (Caney, 1992)(16). In particular, the communitarians have misunderstood the abstractness of the theories they criticize. Thus Rawls maintains (1993(17): Lecture I) that his 'political' conception of the self as prior to its ends is not a metaphysical claim about the nature of the self, as Sandel believes, but simply a way of representing the parties who are choosing principles of justice
from behind the 'veil of ignorance'. Nor does this conception of the individual as a self capable of
choosing its ends require liberals to deny that individual identity is in many ways the product of
unchosen attachments and social circumstances.
2) 'What is central to the liberal view,' according to Will Kymlicka, 'is not that we can perceive a self
prior to its ends, but that we understand ourselves to be prior to our ends, in the sense that no end or goal is exempt from possible re-examination' (1989(18) : 52). With this understood, a second response is to grant, as Kymlicka, Dworkin (1986(19); 1992(20)), Gewirth (1996)(21), and Mason (2000)(22) do, that liberals should pay more attention to belonging, identity, and community, but to insist that they can do this perfectly well within their existing theories.
3) the third response, finally, is to point to the dangers of the critics' appeal to community norms. Communities have their virtues, but they have their vices, too - smugness, intolerance,
and various forms of oppression and exploitation among them. The fact that communitarians do not embrace these vices simply reveals the perversity of their criticism: they 'want us to live in Salem, but not to believe in witches' (Gutmann 1992(23): 133; Friedman, 1992(24)).

1. Emerson, R. W. (1842) 'English reformers'. The Dial, 3(2).
2. Miller, David (2000c) 'Communitarianism: left, right and centre'. In his Citizenship and National Identity. Cambridge: Polity.
3. Tönnies, Ferdinand (2001 118871) Community and Civil Society, trans. J. Harris and M. Hollis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4. Ortega y Gasset, José (1932) The Revolt of the Masses. New York: Norton.
5. Nisbet, Robert (1953) The Quest for Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
6. Macpherson, C. B. (1962) The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Clarendon.
7. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981 ) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
8. Sandel, Michael (1982) Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
9. Walzer, Michael (1983) Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic.
10. Taylor, Charles (1985) Philosophical Papers, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11. Rawls, John (1971) A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
12. Nozick, Robert (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic.
13. Dworkin, Ronald (1977) Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
14. Ackerman, Bruce (1980) Social Justice in the Liberal State. New Haven, CT: Yale Umversity Press.
15. Mulhall, Stephen and Adam Swift (1996) Liberals and Communitarians, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.
16. Caney, Simon (1992) 'Liberalism and communitarianism: a misconceived debate'. Political Studies, 40 (June): 273-89.
17. Rawls, John (1993) Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
18. Kymlicka, Will (1989) Liberalism, Community, and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon.
19. Dworkin, Ronald (1986) Law's Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
20. Dworkin, Ronald (1992) 'Liberal community'. In S. Avinerl and A. de-Shalit, eds, ommunitarianism and Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
21. Gewirth, Alan (1996) The Community of Rights. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
22. Mason, Andrew (2000) Community, Solidarity, and Belonging: Levels of Community and Their Normative Significance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
23. Gutmann, Amy (1992) 'Communitarian critics of liberalism'. In S. Avineri and A. de-Shalit, eds, Communitarianism and Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
24. Friedman, Marilyn (1992) 'Feminism and modern friendship: dislocating the community'. In S. Avineri and A. de-Shalit, eds, Communitarianism and Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dagger, Richard 2004. „Communitarianism and Republicanism“. In: Gaus, Gerald F. & Kukathas, Chandran 2004. Handbook of Political Theory. SAGE Publications


Gaus I
Gerald F. Gaus
Chandran Kukathas
Handbook of Political Theory London 2004
Democracy Fishkin Surowiecki I 330
Democracy/Politics/Deliberation/Communication/Fishkin/Surowiecki: In 2003, Fishkin organized a meeting of 343 people in Philadelphia who had been carefully selected to represent a cross-section of the American population. (1) Fishkin invented the deliberative opinion poll based on the idea that political discussion should not be confined to specialists or members of the political class and that there is no need to do so. Since then, such initiatives have been carried out in hundreds of major cities around the world.
Surowiecki I 331
Given sufficient information and the opportunity to discuss matters with their peers, ordinary citizens are perfectly capable of understanding complicated situations and choosing between different points of view in a meaningful way. Richard PosnerVsFishkin/PosnerVsAckerman: it is a false expectation that such discussion events could turn Americans into role models of reason and civic virtue.
The people of the United States form a "deeply philistine society". "Citizens have little taste in abstraction, little time and even less inclination to spend a considerable part of their free time educating themselves to be informed and responsible voters". And further: "It is much more difficult to get a solid idea of what is necessary for the whole society than to be aware of one's own interests". (2)
Democracy/Surowiecki: the dispute between Posner and Fishkin is about the question of what we mean by democracy at all: do we have a democracy, because it...
a) gives people a feeling of being involved in everything and being able to determine their own lives,...
Surowiecki I 332
...and that is why it contributes to political stability? Or b) because citizens have the right to govern themselves, even if they use this right in a ridiculous way? Or
c) because democracy is an excellent instrument for making intelligent decisions and discovering the truth?

1. A similar idea is presented in: James Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation (Yale University Press, New Haven 1952), as well as in: Fishkin, The Voice of the People – Public Opinion and Democracy (Yale University Press, New Haven 1996). The "National Issues Convention" attracted considerable national attention and a five-hour segment was broadcast live on PBS and C-SPAN. Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin outlined their idea of a day of political opinion-forming in "Deliberation Day", a treatise they presented at the conference "Deliberating About Deliberative Democracy" at the University of Texas (February 2000). See also Ackerman and Fishkin, Deliberation Day (Yale University Press, New Haven 2004).
2. Richard Posner, Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2003), S. 131 f., 164.

PolFishk I
James S. Fishkin
Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform New Haven 1993


Surowi I
James Surowiecki
Die Weisheit der Vielen: Warum Gruppen klüger sind als Einzelne und wie wir das kollektive Wissen für unser wirtschaftliches, soziales und politisches Handeln nutzen können München 2005
Justification Ackerman Gaus I 93
Justification/Ackerman/Waldron: Bruce Ackerman (1980)(1) developed a theory of justice in the form of a contractarian dialogue, for which it was laid down as a ground rule that no reason (adduced in conversation to justify any particular distribution of power) ‘is a good reason if it requires the power holder to assert … that his conception of the good is better than that asserted by any of his fellow citizens’ (1980(1): 11). >Neutrality/Waldron.
Waldron: Now, why should this be the ground rule? Ackerman said that there were several ways to justify the neutrality principle: it could be justified by reference to the epistemic value of experiments in ethics, or the intrinsic importance of autonomy, or scepticism about ethics, or about the ability of power-holders to reach accurate conclusions about the good (1980(1): 11–12). The liberal state need not side with any of these justifications in particular. It only needs an assurance that everyone can reach neutrality by at least one of these routes.
WaldronVsAckerman:Could this strategy work? It might, but only if we were certain that the different paths to neutrality did not make a difference to the meaning or character of the destination. But this seems unlikely. Moral principles are characteristically dependent for their interpretation on some understanding of the point or purpose for which they are imposed.
Change the purpose and you provide a different basis for interpreting the principle. So far as neutrality is concerned, one of the main interpretive difficulties concerns the issue of intention: does neutrality forbid only political action motivated by a non-neutral intention or does it forbid also action, however motivated, which is non-neutral in its effects? It turns out that some of Ackerman’s paths to neutrality favour the intentionalist interpretation while one, at least, favours the consequentialist interpretation: scepticism about a power-holder’s ethical abilities should inhibit only his deliberate attempts to favour one conception of the good. The value of ethical diversity, on the other hand, should make us pause whenever state action actually has a detrimental impact on some conceptions of the good, whether this is intended or not. Ackerman’s ‘overlapping consensus’ is really a recipe for a disordered society, as citizens follow their different paths to an interpretive quarrel and find no common basis to resolve it (see Waldron, 1993(2): 151–3).

1. Ackerman, Bruce (1980) Social Justice in the Liberal State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
2. Waldron, Jeremy (1993) Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Waldron, Jeremy 2004. „Liberalism, Political and Comprehensive“. In: Gaus, Gerald F. & Kukathas, Chandran 2004. Handbook of Political Theory. SAGE Publications.


Gaus I
Gerald F. Gaus
Chandran Kukathas
Handbook of Political Theory London 2004
Neutrality Waldron Gaus I 92
Liberal neutrality/liberalism/Waldron: Problem: it does not seem to have occurred to Locke, Kant, and Mill that [the] foundational positions would pose a problem for the politics of liberalism in a society whose members disagreed about the existence of God, the nature of reason, and the destiny of the human individual. >Liberalism/Mill, >Community/Humboldt, >State/Humboldt, >Categorical Imperative. Neutrality: The difficulty (...) came to the fore in discussions of ‘liberal neutrality’ in the 1970s and 1980s. A number of theorists attempted to sum up the essence of liberalism in terms of a principle requiring the state to refrain from taking sides on disputed ethical and religious questions.
>Neurality/Dworkin, >Neutrality/United States.
Problems:: Liberal neutrality may be seen as a generalization of religious toleration into the realm of ethical choice generally. But therein lay the position’s vulnerability. So long as liberalism was read as a principle about religious neutrality, its defence could be rooted in moral ideas. Once it expanded into the ethical realm, it was not clear what it could rest on. It couldn’t be based on scepticism about values, for it seemed to represent a particular commitment in the realm of value (Dworkin, 1985(1): 203). Liberal theorists scrambled to define a distinction within the realm of values between political morality (e.g. moral principles of justice and right, like the neutrality principle itself), on which the state was permitted to act, and ethics (and perhaps the rest of morality besides justice and right), on which it was not permitted to act (Waldron, 1993(2): 156–63).
Gaus I 93
But it was always a fine line, and the wider world tended to blur the distinction between ethics and morality and talk generally about the liberal commitment to value neutrality. A similar dilemma confronted those who tried to use neutrality as a meta-principle of political justification. Bruce Ackerman (1980) developed a theory of justice in the form of a contractarian dialogue, for which it was laid down as a ground rule that no reason (adduced in conversation to justify any particular distribution of power) ‘is a good reason if it requires the power holder to assert - that his conception of the good is better than that asserted by any of his fellow citizens’ (1980(3): 11).
WaldronVsAckerman:Could this strategy work? It might, but only if we were certain that the different paths to neutrality did not make a difference to the meaning or character of the destination. But this seems unlikely. Moral principles are characteristically dependent for their interpretation on some understanding of the point or purpose for which they are imposed.

1. Dworkin, Ronald (1985) A Matter of Principle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
2. Waldron, Jeremy (1993) Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Ackerman, Bruce (1980) Social Justice in the Liberal State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Waldron, Jeremy 2004. „Liberalism, Political and Comprehensive“. In: Gaus, Gerald F. & Kukathas, Chandran 2004. Handbook of Political Theory. SAGE Publications.


Gaus I
Gerald F. Gaus
Chandran Kukathas
Handbook of Political Theory London 2004

The author or concept searched is found in the following controversies.
Disputed term/author/ism Author Vs Author
Entry
Reference
Various Authors Quine Vs Various Authors II 111ff
QuineVsSemantic Theory: there is a lack of a general definition of meaning QuineVsUse Theory of Meaning: definition of meaning through use too vague! (Demarcation of what is detectable under the "circumstances") (QuineVsWittgenstein).

III 272
Singular Term/QuineVsSingular Terms: the whole category of singular terms is logically superfluous and should be abolished! ((s) Instead: variable).
V 58
Language Learning/Language Acquisition/Quine: E.g. the child learns that "red" is applied to blood, tomatoes, ripe apples, etc. The idea associated with that may be whatever it likes! Language bypasses the idea and focuses on the object.
((s) reference/(s): goes to the object, not an idea, which is in this case unnecessary.)
Stimulus/Quine: has nothing mysterious in language learning.
V 60
Problem: in progressive learning sentences are formed which have less to do with stimuli. E.g. about past and future. Quine: philosophers have great difficulty to specify accurately and in detail which connections it is about.
QuineVsSupranaturalism.
V 61
We only need orientation by external circumstances. Internal mechanisms are only insofar positive as we can hope that they will be clarified by neurophysiology.
IX 199
Individuals/QuineVsFraenkel: we cannot follow him to simply waive individuals, because under TT this would exclude infinite classes and also the classical number theory. (Chapter 39). Solution: (from Chapter 4): the identification of individuals with their One classes.
IX 199/200
But then we would have to make an exception in the interpretation: if x is an individual, then "x ε x" should count as true. (Above, "x ε y" became false if neither were objects of sequential type). Now (1) and (2) reduce to:
(4) Ey∀x(x ε y (Tnx u Fx)),
(5) (∀w(w ε x w ε y) u x ε z) > y ε z.
Moreover, the definition of "Tnx" needs to be revised to make it match the new idea of ​​the individual: " x VT y" by way of merging we can define
(6) "T0x" stands for "∀y (y ε x y = x)"
((S) "all parts of individuals are identical with this one".)
"T n + 1 x" stands for "∀y(y ε x > Tny)"
((s) "The set x is always one type higher than its elements y".)

IX 237
Set Theory/QuineVsAckermann: (like ML and NB) but unlike ZF: does not fully guarantee the existence of finite classes. Additional concept "M".
II 129
QuineVsZettsky: Zettsky: properties are identical if the classes to which they belong are the identical... but when are such classes identical?
II 130
We cannot rely on the identity of the elements here (as with physical objects), as we simply have no antecedent principle of individuation for the properties (as elements of classes) here.

Quine I
W.V.O. Quine
Word and Object, Cambridge/MA 1960
German Edition:
Wort und Gegenstand Stuttgart 1980

Quine II
W.V.O. Quine
Theories and Things, Cambridge/MA 1986
German Edition:
Theorien und Dinge Frankfurt 1985

Quine III
W.V.O. Quine
Methods of Logic, 4th edition Cambridge/MA 1982
German Edition:
Grundzüge der Logik Frankfurt 1978

Quine V
W.V.O. Quine
The Roots of Reference, La Salle/Illinois 1974
German Edition:
Die Wurzeln der Referenz Frankfurt 1989

Quine VI
W.V.O. Quine
Pursuit of Truth, Cambridge/MA 1992
German Edition:
Unterwegs zur Wahrheit Paderborn 1995

Quine VII
W.V.O. Quine
From a logical point of view Cambridge, Mass. 1953

Quine VII (a)
W. V. A. Quine
On what there is
In
From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA 1953

Quine VII (b)
W. V. A. Quine
Two dogmas of empiricism
In
From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA 1953

Quine VII (c)
W. V. A. Quine
The problem of meaning in linguistics
In
From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA 1953

Quine VII (d)
W. V. A. Quine
Identity, ostension and hypostasis
In
From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA 1953

Quine VII (e)
W. V. A. Quine
New foundations for mathematical logic
In
From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA 1953

Quine VII (f)
W. V. A. Quine
Logic and the reification of universals
In
From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA 1953

Quine VII (g)
W. V. A. Quine
Notes on the theory of reference
In
From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA 1953

Quine VII (h)
W. V. A. Quine
Reference and modality
In
From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA 1953

Quine VII (i)
W. V. A. Quine
Meaning and existential inference
In
From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, MA 1953

Quine VIII
W.V.O. Quine
Designation and Existence, in: The Journal of Philosophy 36 (1939)
German Edition:
Bezeichnung und Referenz
In
Zur Philosophie der idealen Sprache, J. Sinnreich (Hg) München 1982

Quine IX
W.V.O. Quine
Set Theory and its Logic, Cambridge/MA 1963
German Edition:
Mengenlehre und ihre Logik Wiesbaden 1967

Quine X
W.V.O. Quine
The Philosophy of Logic, Cambridge/MA 1970, 1986
German Edition:
Philosophie der Logik Bamberg 2005

Quine XII
W.V.O. Quine
Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, New York 1969
German Edition:
Ontologische Relativität Frankfurt 2003

Quine XIII
Willard Van Orman Quine
Quiddities Cambridge/London 1987