Law & Society Blog

Matt Wood argues:
After just reading two articles dealing with Jurgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, I think I can take a tentative step towards fleshing out my arguments for the role of dialogue in the definition of law. According to this helpful paper, which summarizes Habermas’s theory of communicative action (and quotes from his book […]

We have discussed the theory of cultural cognition extensively on this blog in the past (for example here, here, and here)…. Cultural cognition, in the essence, posits a causal relationship between values (and factual beliefs.

hook up your neurons to mine, I can only connect to my own thoughts, not to yours.Third, the goal of science is not to explain but to make predictions, to bring order to our perceptions, and to enable us to act successfully in ever more creative ways.Fourth, for most everyday actions, the delusion of ontological objectivity is a useful shorthand. But once the presence of the observer cannot be ignored, for example, in quantum physics but also in questions of ethics, we need to abandon our simplifying assumptions and take the limitations of our cognitive apparatus into account.On a more speculative note, the persistence of the “subject perceives object” approach to cognition may well be explained by the fact that both subject and object are creations of our mind.

In Cultural Cognition and Public Policy, Dan Kahan and Donald Braman outline their theory of what explains persistent public disagreement over the effects of public policies and certain controversial legal issues, such as gun control, abortion, and the death penalty…. (Id., at 24).In other words, because of the cultural biases woven into our engines of perception and world-construction, conclusively establishing the truth of a proposition within the scientific system does not necessarily end policy debates, as demonstrated by the continuing debate (in the U.S.) over one of the most secure elements in all of human knowledge, the theory of evolution.