Rational Certainty Research Articles

Clowns, pirates, poets and garbage collectors: the beauty of paradox in the poems of James March

ABSTRACT James March’s poetry and poems are an insightful, delightful, witty and aesthetic – yet ultimately marginalised – provocation. With a cheekiness that exploits his scholarly reputation while undermining it, he sympathetically debunks the managerial ethos (indeed ideology) of rational certainty and strategic purposiveness. In introducing his poems, we draw on (arche)typal tropes of the clown, pirate, poet and garbage collector to reveal how March’s poetry provides valuable insights into the lived experience of paradox. In conclusion, we use his marginalised provocation to argue for a bearable lightness of being in using art to surface and address the challenges of living with paradox.

Die Aufklärung der Aufklärung: Lessing und die Herausforderung des Christentums by Hannes Kerber

Reviewed by: Die Aufklärung der Aufklärung: Lessing und die Herausforderung des Christentums by Hannes Kerber Joseph A. Haydt Hannes Kerber. Die Aufklärung der Aufklärung: Lessing und die Herausforderung des Christentums. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021. 286 pp. Hannes Kerber's monograph exploits close readings of largely neglected participants in the so-called fragments controversy to deliver a genuinely original reading of Lessing's authorial strategy during the early years of the controversy. On the strictly philological plane, this study merits attention among Lessing scholars for uncovering a host of sources within the Christian theological tradition that influenced Lessing's late religious thought. Kerber carefully documents Lessing's underappreciated sensitivity not only to the doctrinal debates that animated the formative (pre-Nicene) centuries of Christianity but also to the core theological innovations of the early Reformation. Kerber's book is no mere philological investigation, however, and his exegetical discoveries serve a broader interpretive agenda that bears on Lessing's assessment of Enlightenment philosophy and theology. In Kerber's view, Lessing believed that the religious disputes of his contemporaries systematically neglected the principles that the great theologians of both ancient Christianity and the Reformation had deemed to represent the most profound insights of Christianity. Kerber's Lessing aims to reconfigure such debates by restoring these dormant theological resources. Here, I focus on one example from Kerber's reconstruction of this strategy: Lessing's efforts to restore a Lutheran conception of faith in Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft, composed in 1777 in response to Johann Daniel Schumann's defense of Christianity in Über die Evidenz der Beweise für die Wahrheit der christlichen Religion. In his discussion, Kerber documents in extensive detail the [End Page 195] careful attention that Lessing paid to Schumann's text in crafting his famous response, with the aim of challenging the widely held belief that the essay articulates Lessing's own theory of religious and historical truth. By comparing Lessing's text to Schumann's, Kerber demonstrates that each major junction of Lessing's argument proceeds by invoking a specific passage or claim in Schumann's text. Kerber argues that Lessing does not use Schumann's essay merely as an occasion to elaborate an independent theory of revelation; instead, Lessing's text adopts the terms of Schumann's argument and drives them to their logical conclusion, thereby calling attention to the incongruence between his interlocutor's premises and the conclusions they are meant to support. Kerber convincingly argues that this text does not aim to criticize religion or divine revelation as such but rather seeks to expose a particular form of religious thinking that conceived of religious faith as a species of certainty that could be justified by historical or rational truth. Kerber's Lessing believed that this conception of faith had surreptitiously become paradigmatic for the religious thought of his contemporaries, a development that involved abandoning a category distinction that had been fundamental for the theology of the Reformation: that faith is not an issue of rational certainty, but a matter of trust. In the guise of confessional orthodoxy, Schumann—and those who shared his views about the task of Christian theology—had parted ways with this central tenet of Protestant thought and reduced Christianity to a disguised rationalism. And, Kerber argues, it is just this lost tenet that Lessing wants to restore. Far from developing a critique of orthodoxy based on the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment, Kerber's Lessing is engaged in a process of recovering traditional orthodox beliefs to criticize the innovations of his theologian contemporaries, innovations which had come at the price of forfeiting the deepest theological claim that the Reformation had proposed with respect to divine revelation. (In a subsequent chapter, Kerber turns to Nathan der Weise to elaborate what Lessing takes to be at stake in this Protestant concept, arguing that it is a central concern of the play to portray the ethical, religious, and social force of the Lutheran conception of faith when taken in its complete scope.) Kerber's aim throughout this study is to show that Lessing was equally critical of both contemporary orthodoxy and its Enlightenment critics. While it has frequently...

Are Dissenters Epistemically Arrogant?

“One who elects to serve mankind by taking the law into his own hands thereby demonstrates his conviction that his own ability to determine policy is superior to democratic decision making. [Defendants’] professed unselfish motivation, rather than a justification, actually identifies a form of arrogance which organized society cannot tolerate.” Those were the words of Justice Harris L. Hartz at the sentencing hearing of three nuns convicted of trespassing and vandalizing government property to demonstrate against U.S. foreign policy. Citizens engaging in civil disobedience are indeed at times accused of being arrogant because they apparently think their own political judgment is superior to that of the democratic majority. This paper examines and evaluates the claim that dissenters are epistemically arrogant. Contrary to the dominant viewpoint in the literature, I argue that epistemic arrogance involves inflating the epistemic worth of one’s view. Indeed, the most plausible charge against civil dissenters consists of two claims: (A) civil dissenters have a higher degree of rational certainty in P than is warranted, and (B) civil dissenters use a method of expression that requires a higher level of rational certainty than is warranted in the propositions that their political view is right and the injustice they fight is substantial. I argue that civil disobedience does not necessarily involve epistemic arrogance. Whether an act of civil disobedience evinces epistemic arrogance has to be determined on a case-by-case basis depending on the extent to which each dissenter lives up to (A) and (B).

Renaissance Humanism and Its Discontents

The essay explores humanism’s modernity by inquiring into the way the fifteenth-century humanist cultural program posited moral values and, at the same time, contributed to a sense of moral confusion. While Niccolò Niccoli, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and Leonardo Bruni associated ethical enlightenment with learning and even social acclaim, Leon Battista Alberti criticized these assumptions not only for their susceptibility to political manipulation but also for their failure to cultivate the attributes they promised: virtue, and by extension happiness and tranquillity. The tensions in humanist culture between conformity and dissent, rational certainty and sense of mutability, generated the creative energy that we, as moderns, have come to attribute to this culture.

Common Certainty of Rationality Revisited

In conventional epistemic analysis of solution concepts in complete information games, complete information is implicitly interpreted to mean common certainty of (i) a mapping from action profiles to outcomes; (ii) players’ (unconditional) preferences over outcomes; and (iii) players’ preferences over outcomes conditional on others’ actions. We characterize a new solution concept - preference-correlated rationalizability - that captures common certainty of (i) and (ii) but not (iii). We show that it is badly behaved, with failures of upper hemicontinuity giving rise to counter-intuitive results. We discuss restrictions that restore well-behaved results.

A Note on Rationalizability and Restrictions on Belief

Rationalizability is a widely accepted solution concept in the study of strategic form game with complete information and is fully characterized in terms of assumptions on the rationality of the players and common certainty of rationality. Battigalli and Siniscalchi extend rationalizability and derive the solution concept called Δ-rationalizability. Their analysis is based on the following assumptions: (a) players are rational; (b) their first-order beliefs satisfy some restrictions; and (c) there is common belief of (a) and (b). In this note I focus on games with complete information and I characterize Δ-rationalizability with a new notion of iterative dominance which is able to capture the additional hypothesis on players' beliefs.

Interactive epistemology in games with payoff uncertainty

We adopt an interactive epistemology perspective to analyse dynamic games with partially unknown payoff functions. We consider solution procedures that iteratively delete strategies conditional on private information about the state of nature. In particular we focus on a weak and a strong version of the Δ -rationalizability solution concept, where Δ represents given restrictions on players’ beliefs about state of nature and strategies [Battigalli, P., 2003. Rationalizability in infinite, dynamic games of incomplete information. Research in Economics 57, 1–38; Battigalli, P., Siniscalchi, M., 2003. Rationalization and incomplete information. Advances in Theoretical Economics 3 (Article 3). http://www.bepress.com/bejte/advances/vol3/iss1/art3]. We first show that weak Δ - rationalizability is characterized by initial common certainty of rationality and of the restrictions Δ , whereas strong Δ - rationalizability is characterized by common strong belief in rationality and the restrictions Δ (cf. [Battigalli, P., Siniscalchi, M., 2002. Strong belief and forward induction reasoning. Journal of Economic Theory 106, 356–391]). The latter result allows us to obtain an epistemic characterization of the iterated intuitive criterion. Then we use the framework to analyse the robustness of complete-information rationalizability solution concepts to the introduction of “slight” uncertainty about payoffs. If the set of conceivable payoff functions is sufficiently large, the set of strongly rationalizable strategies with slight payoff uncertainty coincides with the set of complete-information, weakly rationalizable strategies.

On p-rationalizability and approximate common certainty of rationality

This paper shows that common p-belief of rationality implies p-rationalizability for games with compact strategy sets. We also establish the Bayesian foundation for the perfect p-rationalizability for finite games. The p-rationalizability is then used to analyze the robustness of rationalizable sets. For any game with compact strategy sets, we show that the rationalizable set is robust, i.e., the strategies characterized by common p-belief of rationality are close to the rationalizable set when p → 1 .

Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel by Thomas Keymer Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson by Fred Parker (review)

MLRy 100.3, 2??5 785 implicitly critical of the 'tendency of economic analysis to abstain from [. . .] moral evaluation' (p. 232), and one of the strengths of the book is its alertness to the ethical issues raised by the texts under discussion. King's College London Warren Chernaik Sterne, theModerns, and theNovel. By Thomas Keymer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2002. xiv + 222pp. ?47. ISBN 0-19-924592-4. Scepticism and Literature: An Essay on Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson. By Fred Parker. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2003. x + 290pp. ?50. ISBN o19 -925328-8. Both Thomas Keymer and Fred Parker have written 'source studies', though their books have little in common besides a reading of Laurence Sterne. Parker's Scepticism and Literature proves true to its subtitle by emulating the loosely discursive nature of the traditional essay form. Parker writes a thoroughly untheoretical ifnot unsystematic study of 'sceptical thinking' in four eighteenth-century authors, whose models are Montaigne and Locke. In Sterne, theModerns, and theNovel Thomas Keymer draws upon theories of intertextuality in order to argue that Tristram Shandy is very much a part of the popular literary,political, and social culture of its own day. Parker's study is focused on what Keymer calls 'positivist claims about "influence"' (p. 11), while Keymer explores the 'hypotexts' or 'aleatory' networks of influence and allusion. Even though Keymer's study is more narrowly focused than Parker's (one genre, one author, one novel), his historicist approach produces more general knowledge about eighteenth-century culture than Parker's does. Parker's study of scepticism features much finewriting about Locke, Pope, Hume, Sterne, and Johnson. Working through close readings of major texts, Parker argues that Locke's epistemology limits the quest for general truths and that Montaigne's Essays instruct his readers to 'live according to nature' (p. 39) by enacting the author's 'intellectual helplessness' (p. 37). Parker trains a keen eye on the 'paradox of irony' in his four authors to show their debts to Locke and Montaigne and to argue that 'scepti? cism generates understanding' (p. 30), by which he means practical knowledge rather than rational certainty. In some of these authors this practical knowledge seems very near a sentiment from Rochester's Satyr: 'Our Sphere of Action, is lifes happiness, | And he who thinks Beyond, thinks like an Ass.' If their practical knowledge never becomes the foundation for the Epicurean creed found in Rochester, it is thanks to either religion or the age's refinement. Parker's readings portray a group of authors who take their motto fromthe opening of Epistle II of Pope's Essay on Man: 'With too much knowledge forthe Sceptic side, | With too much weakness forthe Stoic's pride | [They] hang between' rationalism and scepticism, ideation and experience, stability and flux,philosophy and backgammon, solipsism and sociality, system and spontaneity, conclusiveness and doubt. Rather than let 'dull Suspense corrupt the stagnant mind', they embrace a dynamic commit? ment to thought. When thinking does not provide them with intellectual comfort, they have recourse to other solutions. Hume's answer to the pain of doubt is 'estab? lished custom and convention, [. . .] the eighteenth-century game of polite society' (p. 163). When Pope is not resting comfortably with fideism in his Essay ('Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar; | Wait the great teacher Death, and God adore!'), he is taking pleasure in flapping a degenerate society's darlings. Sterne, as has long been noted, takes his pleasure in the ambiguous gesture, in the hand that reaches out in the darkness to find a friend or define an end. In Johnson, Parker finds a need for certainty, a 'horror at finality' (p. 240), and 786 Reviews a 'stressful moral urgency' (p. 248) that distinguishes him from the other writers of the study. As Parker reads through the Idler and Rasselas, however, he argues that Johnson finds his relief in 'open-endedness [. . .] an ironic understanding of the moralist and the sceptic as in necessary, perpetual dialogue' (p. 266). In his drive to reach conclusions about hanging between scepticism and stoicism, Parker underestimates the psychological cost of finding existential solutions to the feltneed for certainty, and thus underestimates the intensity of Johnson...

Socrates in the Phaedo

No, is the only person who solved the problem: he took everything, everything, with him to the grave. Marvelous ... you kept the highest enthusiasm closed up airtight in the most eminent reflection and sagacity, kept it for eternity-you took everything along. Therefore the professors are disparagingly saying of you now-O, Socrates!-that, after all, you were only a personality, that you did not even have a system. Kierkegaard, Journals and Paper (IV 4303, 224) There are indeed, as those concerned with the mysteries say, many who carry the thyrsus but the Bacchants are few. in the Phaedo (69c-d) In this essay I seek to capture an image of Socrates, the single individual, as he exists in Plato's Phaedo. This existing Socrates, I shall conclude unconcludingly, is existentially analogous to the Abraham of Fear and Trembling, authored by Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes de Silentio; thus I hope to reveal in the Phaedo as a of To this end I shall first consider the picture of rendered by Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus in Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. In fact these two works present two, existentially distinct Socrateses. In the former represents an orthodox rendering of Plato's epistemology of recollection; this is a Knight of Infinite Resignation but not of Faith. In the latter, however, Climacus presents as an exemplar of A-pagan or Socratic faith-as distinct from B, which refers to Christian faith. The pagan faith of Religiousness A is also the faith of Abraham, Fear and Trembling's, of Faith, and, as I hope to indicate, of in the Phaedo.1 Thus I shall first give a brief account of Johannes Climacus's characterization of the and religious Socrateses, as set forth, respectively, in Fragments and Postscript. Second I shall observe Socrates' unconcluding argumentation in the Phaedo, from which we can infer the presence not of a systematizer but of an existing philosopher. Third I shall extend my consideration of the Phaedo to include its more poetic elements in order to flesh out this existing Socrates. Finally, I shall compare the existential postures of and Abraham in order to justify each as a Knight of Faith. Climacus's Socrateses In Fragments, Climacus invokes the Platonic as merely the for knowledge, as distinct from the appearance of the eternal in time which alone gives the of faith and truth-that is untruth. The significance of this is not that of radical doubt or presuppositionlessness, a logically necessary point of departure which dispels all deception in order to assure the rational certainty of the philosophical system; rather, this condition is the transcendent telos of human existence and the truth of subjectivity. In Fragments himself is merely the occasion for the awareness of subjective untruth, but this is not the decisive is untruth of Postscript because in Fragments is the occasion for the recollective recovery of objective truth, which entirely swallows subjectivity: recollection presupposes that only by gathering the soul to itself and out of the bodily world-a radical subjective withdrawal-can one achieve truth. Recollection thus tempts one toward speculative and away from the truth that subjectivity is untruth-the truth of subjectivity itself. The Socratic of Postscript, however, though still shadowed by recollection, resists the temptation of recollection's speculative solace rather to exist: Socrates essentially emphasizes existing, whereas Plato, forgetting this, loses himself in speculative thought (CUP 205). lacks both the condition of the historical God in time and the decisive category of sin, which together would block all recourse to the speculative path back to objective truth; thus it must be the vocation of this existing continually to annul recollection in order to actualize himself. …

Modern Paradoxes of Aristotle’s Logic

This paper intends to explain key differences between Aristotle's understanding of the relationships between nous, episteme, and the art of syllogistic reasoning (both analytic and dialectical) and the corresponding modern conceptions of intuition, knowledge, and reason. By uncoveringparadoxa that Aristotle's understanding of syllogistic reasoning presents in relation to modern philosophical conceptions of logic and science, I highlight problems of a shift in modern philosophy-a shift that occurs most dramatically in the seventeenth century-toward a project of construction, a pervasive desire for rational certainty, and a general insistence on the reducibility of the sciences. The major motivation of this analysis is my intention to show that modern attempts to reduce science/episteme to a single science/method of inquiry occlude dialectical and ethico-political dimensions of reason and, hence, also impoverish philosophy's critical capacities.

Rationalization and Incomplete Information

We analyze a family of extensive-form solution procedures for games with incomplete information that do not require the specification of an epistemic type space a la Harsanyi, but can accommodate a (commonly known) collection of explicit restrictions D on first-order beliefs. For any fixed D we obtain a solution called D-rationalizability.In static games, D-rationalizability characterizes the set of outcomes (combinations of payoff types and strategies) that may occur in any Bayesian equilibrium model consistent with D; these are precisely the outcomes consistent with common certainty of rationality and of the restrictions D. Hence, our approach to the analysis of incomplete-information games is consistent with Harsanyi's, and it may be viewed as capturing the robust implications of Bayesian equilibrium analysis.In dynamic games, D-rationalizability yields a forward-induction refinement of this set of Bayesian equilibrium outcomes. Focusing on the restriction that first-order beliefs be consistent with a given distribution on terminal nodes, we obtain a refinement of self-confirming equilibrium. In signalling games, this refinement coincides with the Iterated Intuitive Criterion.

Rationalizability in infinite, dynamic games with incomplete information

In this paper, we analyze two nested iterative solution procedures for infinite, dynamic games of incomplete information. These procedures do not rely on the specification of a type space à la Harsanyi. Weak rationalizability is characterized by common certainty of rationality at the beginning of the game. Strong rationalizability also incorporates a notion of forward induction. The solutions may take as given some exogenous restrictions on players' conditional beliefs. In dynamic games, strong rationalizability is a refinement of weak rationalizability. Existence, regularity properties, and equivalence with the set of iteratively interim undominated strategies are proved under standard assumptions. The analysis mainly focus on two-player games with observable actions, but we show how to extend it to n-player games with imperfectly observable actions. Finally, we briefly survey some applications of the proposed approach.

Why Anti‐Realism Breaks up Relationships

Some theologians are inclined to regard realism with hostility or indifference. I do not present an argument for realism, but for why realism matters, and what is at stake.First of all, I separate the heart of realism from gratuitous doctrines which are too often associated with it. Religious realism is the claim that truth is independent of our beliefs about truth, and that we can in principle hope to have true beliefs about God. Realism is not intrinsically concerned with the existence of ‘objects’, with natural theology or rational justification.I then show that even thinkers who are hostile or indifferent to religious realism so defined, usually make an implicit appeal to a similar realism in the sphere of ethics.To establish that realism matters in religion as well as ethics I draw an analogy with realism/anti‐realism about persons, to show that anti‐realism makes mutually risk‐taking and courageous relationships impossible. I go on to argue that far from it being a realist who is obsessed with rational certainty, this is one of the worst vices of the anti‐realist, who cannot bear there to be a gap between her beliefs and reality.I conclude that the most vital feature of religious realism is not certainty of belief, but the opposite – the acknowledged risk that all our hope could be in vain. In closing the possibility on this risk, the anti‐realist demonstrates an unfaithful and uncourageous movement of thought.

An Epistemic Characterization of Extensive Form Rationalizability

We use an extensive form, universal type space to provide the following epistemic characterisation of extensive form rationalisability. Say that player i strongly believes event E if i is certain of E conditional on each of her information sets consistent with E. Our main contribution is to show that a strategy profile s is extensive form rationalisable if and only if there is a state in which s is played and (0) everybody is rational, (1) everybody strongly believes (0), (2) everybody strongly believes (0) & (1), (3) everybody strongly believes (0) & (1) & (2), .... This result also allows us to provide sufficient epistemic conditions for the backward induction outcome and to relate extensive form rationalisability and conditional common certainty of rationality.

Rationality, Nash Equilibrium and Backwards Induction in Perfect- Information Games

We say that a player is certain of an event A if she assigns probability 1 to A. There is common certainty (CC) of A if the event A occurred, each player is certain of A, each player is certain that every other player is certain of A, and so forth. It is shown that in a generic perfect-information game the set of outcomes that are consistent with common certainty of rationality (CCR) at the beginning of the game coincides with the set of outcomes that survive one deletion of weakly dominated strategies and then iterative deletion of strongly dominated strategies. Thus, the backward induction outcome is not the only outcome that is consistent with CCR. In particular, cooperation in Rosenthal's (1981) centipede game, and fighting in Selten's (1978) chainstore game are consistent with CCR at the beginning of the game. Next, it is shown that, if in addition to CCR, there is CC that each player assigns a positive probability to the true strategies and beliefs of the other players, and if there is CC of the support of the beliefs of each player, then the outcome of the game is a Nash equilibrium outcome.

Socrates as Hero

Robert Eisner SOCRATES AS HERO The very first experience that philosophy had on Greek soil, the Sanction of the Seven Sages, is an unmistakable and unforgettable feature of the Hellenic image. Other people have saints; the Greeks have sages. ' Nietzsche Plato composed in a mythomorphic vein, or rather he attempted in his dialogues to superimpose a new kind of myth on the much older palimpsest of the sagas. To do this effectively he had to present Socrates not just heroically, but as a hero far different from the bronzed figures of that timocracy and shame culture whose legacy he resented and whose lingering influence on the Adienian present he was, in his more Utopian moods, determined to eradicate. Hence many of the traditional traits of the Homeric warrior are found in the Platonic Socrates, but they have been substantially modified to sustain the new philosophic content of die hero's role. These revitalized characteristics serve to highlight the radically novel establishment of the hero as philosopher and the philosopher as hero. The heroic comparisons that Socrates and Plato make, delineating a new prototype , risk the inflation of Socrates' ego, to use a modern term for what the Greeks called hubris. In the agonistic world of politicians, sophists, athletes, and lovers, Plato's Socrates stands out as the most erotically powerful intellectual in Athens. Even the chryselephantine Alcibiades shows himself captivated by this most charismatic of pedagogues. The self-proclaimed ignorance of the philosopher restrains him from too overt a display of his pride and arrogance, but the repeated success of his ironic gambits constantly tempts him to press his rhetorical advantages too far. For the Greek who is also a Socratic philosopher and therefore primarily concerned with the problems of the ethical life, the discernment of rational standards , patterns, and paradigms is not only the epistemological road to the examPhilosophy and Literature Vol. 6 Nos. 1 and 2 Pp. 106-118 0190-0031/82/0061-0106 © 1982 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Robert Eisner107 ined life but is also the mimetic way to Virtue.2 For such an individual, questing along new heights of moral speculation, there are older figures for him to model himself on, despite Alcibiades' insistence at Symposium 221c-d that no parallel in the sagas exists for Socrates. With the death of Socrates and the emasculation of political possibilities for civic man after the Peloponnesian War, Plato sought to absorb the external world of battlefield and assembly into the no less contentious inner domain of the soul. As reconstituted or invented by Plato this monde intérieur needed myth for its shores to be made accessible to the likes of mere men, and in this requirement it did not differ from the Troad of the Achaean expedition or the Persia of Xenophon's dreams and deeds.3 What better hero to animate the new myth of the quest for virtue and the forms than the man who was himself entheos, "enthused"? Platonic myth, however, is not simply a matter of a new sort ofhero searching for a new sort of treasure. The several sorts of myths employed in the dialogues are all more or less supplementary in those areas where Logos is more or less deficient. From the ancient point of view human reason is especially weak in science and history, where myth must aim at the truth and explore its ramifications , even if it must take the place of rational knowledge, as in the great central myths of the Timaeus and the Critias. In ethics, however, where human reason is adequate to the task of knowing, myth adds to the rational and speaks to man's passions, as in the accounts of the cave, the chariot of the soul, and Ei^s visit to the Underworld. Ludwig Edelstein remarks on this function of myth: "It rouses and confirms hopes; it enhances courage and allays fears. It is like a charm that one must sing to oneself."4 Unlike the rational certainty obtained through dialectic, the myths provide the reader (the silent but never absent interlocutor of the dialogues) with an essential and otherwise unobtainable conviction. Only myths can ease the rational helplessness of man...

Existentialism and Organization Theory

The field of organization theory includes the individual human being, small group, human institution, and entire social system. Existential writings are concerned with individual morality, authenticity, human selfactualization and the same time with cognitive and intellectual variables which are relevant to human growth. Existentialism provides some very useful insight to the conventional organization theory. Existential literature explores the shrinking of consciousness, the blocking off of awareness, and feelings of depersonalization and apathy. Students express their discontent to the depersonalizing effects of the modern organization, society and bureaucratic world of their lives, and their community. Public administrators face scientific management on points where the nature of the matter is not rational. If help is to be found, it may very well come from poets and writers who often deal with the limits of rational certainty.

Religious Experience and Rational Certainty*

The purpose of this paper is to clear up the long-standing veritable mountain of misinterpretation, perpetuated from critic to critic, concerning the admittedly problematic concept of self-authenticating (i.e. unmistakable) religious experience. While it may well be the case, as many have argued, that a sort of ‘experience’ about which one could not be mistaken is simply a logically impossible state of affairs, this cannot be known to be the case so long as what is under attack is (as I hope to show) a bogus concept, obviously absurd, having nothing whatsoever to do with the correct interpretation of ‘self-authentication’. Hence, my mission herein is essentially that of philosophical analysis or clarification of meaning. Only upon suitable clarification of this concept will we be in a position to consider the question of its possible application, i.e. whether or not there could be an instantiation of such experience. I might point out that my central concern is somewhat more explicatory than historical, though I believe that the account developed in this paper is essentially congenial with the intent of those who have been proponents of the view that there can be self-authenticating religious experience. Let us begin, then, by turning to some representative criticism of the concept in question.

Decision under uncertainty: A poet's view The leap of judgment in a famous frost poem

Despite all the talk about decision making, uncertainty remains a factor, and no one tells executives how to deal with it. Scientific management stops at the point where nature is not rational. If help is to be found, it must come from poets and preachers, men whose business begins at the limits of rational certainty. For a “case study,” the author uses Frost's famous poem, “The Road Not Taken”—an inside view of a moment of decision. The poet confronts uncertainty by taking the leap o f judgment, beyond facts and logic. We are reminded that such leaps are possible and necessary, and that courage stands next to intelligence as an irreducible ingredient in the decision-making process.