Rationality In Context Research Articles

Rationality in Context: Regulatory Science and the Best Scientific Method

Is there such a thing as a “best scientific methodology” in regulatory (decision-oriented) science? By examining cases from varying regulatory processes, we argue that there is no best scientific method for generating decision-relevant data. In addition, in regulatory science, the most suitable methodologies often differ from what is considered best practice in knowledge-oriented (academic) science. In data generation for regulatory purposes, we are faced with a wide spectrum of preferred methodologies as well as controversy as to methodological choice. What goes by the most adequate scientific method can and will—justifiably and rationally—vary significantly according to context and use. In order to make this argument, we analyze four case studies, two from risk assessment and two from benefit assessment. Our analysis shows that it is the noncognitive objectives of a particular regulatory process that determine what counts as the most appropriate scientific method. We use the concept of bounded rationality to indicate that those methodological choices, despite being context-dependent, can be interpreted as rational.

How to study bureaucracies ethnographically?

We propose a short epistemological and methodological reflection on the challenges of doing ethnographical research on public services (‘bureaucracies’) from the inside. We start from the recognition of the double face of bureaucracy, as a form of domination and oppression as well as of protection and liberation, and all the ambivalences this dialectic entails. We argue that, in classical Malinowskian fashion, the anthropology of bureaucracy should take bureaucrat as the ‘natives’, and acknowledge their agency. This means adopting basic anthropological postures: the natives (i.e. the bureaucrats) must have good reasons for their seemingly ‘absurd’ (or arbitrary) practices, once you understand the context in which they act. Based on intensive fieldwork and understanding ethnography as a form of grounded-theory production, to explore this ‘rationality in context’ of bureaucrats should be a major research objective. As in day-to-day intra-organisational practice and in internal interactions between bureaucrats, state bureaucracies function largely as any other modern organisation, the anthropology of bureaucracy does not differ that much from the anthropology of organisations. One of the major achievements of the latter has been to focus on the dialectics of formal organisation and real practices, official regulations and informal norms in organisations ‘at work’. This focus on informal practices, pragmatic rules and practical norms provides the main justification for the utilisation of ethnographic methods. In fact, it is difficult to see how informal norms and practices could be studied otherwise, as ethnography is the only methodology to deal with the informal and the unexpected.

Rationality in context

The emergence of economic inequality has often been linked to individual differences in mental or physical capacities. By means of an agent-based simulation this paper shows that neither of these is a necessary condition. Rather, inequality can arise from iterated interactions of fully rational agents. This bears consequences for our understanding of both inequality and rationality. In a setting of iterated bargaining games, we claim that expected utility maximizing agents perform suboptimally in comparison with other strategies. The reason for this lies in complex feedback effects between an agents’ action and the quality of beliefs used to calculate expected utility. Consequentially, we argue that the standard notion of rationality as maximizing expected utility is insufficient, even for certain standard cases of economic interaction.

Проблема научной рациональности в контексте европейского рационализма

Проблема научной рациональности в контексте европейского рационализма

Professional Practice as Processes of Muddling Through: a Study of Learning and Sense Making in Social Work

Using an ethnographic approach, the aim of this study was to explore how social workers learn and make sense of experiences in their daily practices. Five events that took place during an ordinary day of child investigation work are described and serve as the basis for the analysis. The findings imply that investigation work is largely a social rationalization process and that the interaction between different actors in work is a strategy to enhance the level of knowledge and contribute to learning among the professionals. Thus, learning is embedded in daily activities, for example, consulting colleagues, framing problems and building relationships. Furthermore, the findings suggest the possibility of assuming a contextualized view of reasoning, a so-called contextual rationality, which maintains that practitioners need to make judgments in a way that is sensitive to and relevant for their own contextualized settings. Contextual rationality is a reasonable strategy to deal with complex problems in daily practices that cannot be completely analysed or solved. Contextual rationality is thus not about accuracy; rather, it engages individuals to find meaning and order in the complexity of modern organizations where norms, values and expectations provide frameworks for explanations. Besides offering an explanation for the basis of practice, the study identifies a variety of learning opportunities in everyday practice that could potentially be used in efforts to organize a more reflective practice to facilitate improved workplace learning.

Civility and Social Responsibility: “Civil Rationality” in the Confirmation Hearings of Justices Roberts and Alito

The literature on civility, especially concerning the United States Senate, reveals a particular notion of argumentation that is impersonal and void of intense emotion, which I label “civil rationality.” I contend that civil rationality (as the underlying logos of civility) is too rigid a standard for confirmation hearings, as it marginalizes or eliminates the role of character, ethics, and emotion, which can be vital in such debates. I argue for a more contextual view of rationality that takes the purpose and situation of a given dialogue into account—in this case, the confirmation hearings' central question of should this person be confirmed? In order to explicate these two alternate views, I examine the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justices Roberts and Alito. Republicans portray themselves as guardians of civility (thus emphasizing civil rationality), while Democrats position themselves as socially responsible advocates for the public (emphasizing contextual rationality). The notion of civil rationality is found to be too restrictive for Senate confirmation hearings.

Weldon, Pearson, Bateson e a controvérsia mendelianobiometricista: uma disputa entre evolucionistas

Scientific rationality, considered a well established issue in other periods, has been seen as a problematic one by several thinkers. One of the main difficulties to conceive scientific rationality lies in making the application of universal models of rationality compatible with varying research circumstances. This article is an attempt to understand the rational that does not reduce it to the universalization of investigative criteria and to empirical and logical reasons. Such an understanding leads to the proposal of a contextual scientific rationality. This rationality would be dependent on the circumstances in which thinking operates and would not impose a priori principles that determine and demarcate ideas to be explored and considered relevant to science. Key words: universalization, practice, contextuality, scientific rationality.

Shop floor practices under changing forms of managerial control: A comparative ethnographic study of micro-politics, control and resistance within a Japanese multinational

This paper presents an ethnographic study of micro-politics, control and resistance within a Japanese multinational. The transfer of management practices within a multinational is a theoretically interesting context in which to examine these processes. The study reveals how micro-political strategies were sustained and resisted within different contexts, drawing on concepts of contextual rationality, contested rationality, institutional theory, labor process theory and recent theorizing of control processes within the multinational.

Macroanálise, regulação e o método uma alternativa ao holismo e ao individualismo metodológicos para uma macroeconomia histórica e institucionalista

The paper examines the epistemological conditions that make the “regulationist” macro-analysis a possible alternative to the traditional equilibrium approaches. It shows how these analyses allow to overcome the structure-agent dilemma as from the concept of contextual rationality and of a hol-individualist methodology that, combined with the notion of strong historicity, find wide theoretical basis in Bourdieu's sociology, in Braudel's works on economical history and in Lukacs's ontology on the social being. The paper also explains its historical origins and concludes with a synthesis of the method and the necessary steps to accomplish this type of macroeconomics approach. JEL Classification: B41; B40; B59; E19.

Cesare Lombroso, M.D., 1835-1909

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Images in PsychiatryFull AccessCesare Lombroso, M.D., 1835–1909Giuseppe Carrà, M.D., and Francesco Barale, M.D.Giuseppe CarràSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., and Francesco BaraleSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Apr 2004https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.161.4.624AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Cesare Lombroso was born in Verona in 1835. He graduated in 1858 from the University of Pavia after writing a thesis on endemic cretinism in Lombardy. The early part of Cesare Lombroso’s career was spent in southern Italy working as a medical officer attached to infantry who were fighting brigandage, in whose behavioral characteristics he developed a deep interest. In 1863, he returned to the University of Pavia, where he became the first professor of mental disease studies.In 1865, under Lombroso’s guidance, Camillo Golgi, 1906 Nobel Prize recipient for Medicine or Physiology (1), graduated in medicine, sparking his vocation to study the brain. While Golgi soon left Lombroso’s school in search of an anatomical approach to the study of the CNS, he always maintained his interest in the clinical observations of the early part of his career.In 1872, Lombroso caused a sensation with the publication of the book Genio e Follia(2), containing his theory that genius was closely linked to madness and were two faces of the same psychobiological reality. He stated that a man of genius was essentially a degenerate whose “madness” was a form of evolutionary compensation for excessive intellectual development. World famous for this book, he was invited in 1897 to preside over the mental illness session at the 12th International Medical Congress in Moscow. While in Moscow, he arranged to meet a genius of world literature, Leo Tolstoy, and asked to scrutinize his degenerative aspects. This visit was a failure because the two men were too disparate to find a point of mutual understanding. However, it represents one of the first rounds of continuing debate in the modern era on creativity and affective illness. It also produced a lasting literary mark; Tolstoy used his novel Resurrection to sneer at Lombroso’s theory (3).Lombroso moved to Turin University. In 1876, he produced his best-known work, L’uomo delinquente(4), and thus, he can be regarded as the founder of modern criminology. In this work, Lombroso employed Darwinian ideas of evolution to account for criminal behavior. By studying the autopsies of criminals, he believed that certain physical stigmata were apparent (e.g., a deviation in head size and shape from the types common to ethnic groups, eye defects and peculiarities, pouches in the cheeks like those of some animals, the abundance, variety, and precocity of wrinkles), and this was evidence of the biological predisposition to commit crimes. He also wrote about the phenomenon of tattooing among criminals, seeking to demonstrate a link to what today we could call borderline personality disorder.With good reason, Lombroso’s theories have been scientifically discredited, but he and his criminal anthropological theories had the merit of bringing up the importance of scientific studies of the criminal mind, focusing on the criminal rather than the crime. Furthermore, he consistently emphasized the need for direct study of the individual, using objective measurements (in 1895, while tutoring his pupil Angelo Mosso, he was the first to use a device that recorded bodily changes resulting from the telling of lies) and statistical methods, reflecting the basic idea of cause as a chain of interrelated events (5). He made the fundamental research error of confusing correlation with cause, albeit in the contextual rationality and cognitive presupposition of the 19th century (6).He spent the last years of his life devoted to the disease affecting many farm workers, pellagra (in the Italian vernacular, “skin that is rough”), speculating that spoiled maize caused pellagra’s mental symptoms (7) and correctly emphasizing that diet was the crucial factor. He was unaware of Joseph Goldberger’s intuition that it was a systemic disease resulting from niacin deficiency. Cesare Lombroso died on Oct. 19, 1909, in Turin.Address reprint requests to Dr. Carrà, Department of Applied Health and Behavioural Sciences, Section of Psychiatry, University of Pavia, Via Bassi 21, 27100 Pavia, Italy; [email protected] (e-mail). The authors thank Professors Alberto Calligaro and Mario Maj for their comments on a draft of the article. Image courtesy of Alberto Calligaro, Museum for the History of the University of Pavia.

Does ‘Contextual Rationality’ Really Advance the Study of Rational Nomination Strategies under the Single Non-Transferable Vote?

The concept of ‘contextual rationality’ proposed by Browne and Patterson seems to advance our understanding of rational nomination strategies under the Single Non-Transferable Vote. The plausibility of this concept hinges on the assumption of perfect information. However, perfect information not only cannot be obtained in practice, but is also impossible to obtain if we follow Browne and Patterson's approach. What their approach provides is a post hoc rationalization for parties' nomination strategies rather than a priori criterion against which whether parties make rational decisions can be judged. This approach therefore may be helpful to the study of whether parties are punished for inappropriate nomination strategies, but is far from providing the rationale for them.

Delusions as performance failures

Delusions are explanations of anomalous experiences. A theory of delusion requires an explanation of both the anomalous experience and the apparently irrational explanation generated by the delusional subject. Hence, we require a model of rational belief formation against which the belief formation of delusional subjects can be evaluated. Method. I first describe such a model, distinguishing procedural from pragmatic rationality. Procedural rationality is the use of rules or procedures, deductive or inductive, that produce an inferentially coherent set of propositions. Pragmatic rationality is the use of procedural rationality in context. I then apply the distinction to the explanation of the Capgras and the Cotard delusions. I then argue that delusions are failures of pragmatic rationality. I examine the nature of these failures employing the distinction between performance and competence familiar from Chomskian linguistics. Results. This approach to the irrationality of delusions reconciles accounts in which the explanation of the anomalous experience exhausts the explanation of delusion, accounts that appeal to further deficits within the reasoning processes of delusional subjects, and accounts that argue that delusions are not beliefs at all. (Respectively, one-stage, two-stage, and expressive accounts.) Conclusion. In paradigm cases that concern cognitive neuropsychiatry the irrationality of delusional subjects should be thought of as a performance deficit in pragmatic rationality.

Rationality‚ Representation‚ and the Risk Mediating Characteristics of a Karakoram Mountain Farming System

Despite emerging appreciations of contextual knowledge systems, elements of diversity in mountain farming systems are often characterized as irrational and as obstacles to achieving the production goals of 'modernized' agriculture. In this paper, I suggest that these negative representations are produced at least in part as a function of the normalization of a large-scale agriculture as rational. A case-study of a mountain farming system in the Karakoram mountains of northern Pakistan is presented to expose a contextual rationality in relation to risk minimization and to challenge characterizations of this system as 'backward,' unsophisticated and irrational. Specifically I examine the risk mediating characteristics of practices such as field dispersal, delayed planting, intercropping, and polyvarietal planting and conclude that the characteristic feature of this local farming system is a contextually rational diversity. This conflicts with the modernist paradigm of rationality and economic growth subscribed to by a local development agency. Intervention based on ill-informed interpretations of “traditional” practice have the potential to increase vulnerability of villagers by failing to appreciate the contextual rationality of diversity.

Rationalité contextuelle et présupposé cognitif le cas lombroso

Il est proposé une réflexion épistémologique sur la posture que l'historien des sciences humaines peut adopter vis-à-vis de ses objets d'investigation. La théorie du « criminel-né » de Cesare Lombroso, produite dans le dernier tiers du x1xe siècle est prise ici comme exemple et support pour la discussion parce qu'elle apparaît comme un cas limite, presque caricatural, tant par sa formulation initiale que par son traitement dans la mémoire disciplinaire. Les approches normatives ou « présentistes » ne pouvant rendre compte de la logique du discours de Lombroso que sur le mode de la dénégation, il a semblé préférable - sans qu'il soit nécessaire de devenir lombrosien - de suivre un autre fil directeur. On suggère de substituer à une posture épistémologique présentiste les concepts de « rationalité contextuelle » et de « présupposé cognitif». Ces concepts, combinés à une plus grande sensibilité aux différentes durées pourraient initier une approche qui serait à la fois plus spécifiquement historique et ouverte aux apports des autres sciences humaines.