I expected my morning newspaper to bring stories about angry American voters and American politicians behaving ridiculously: data about the state of our democracy. I did not expect to see a wide-ranging essay on German democracy by one of the world’s greatest living political thinkers, Jürgen Habermas. Having him pop up in the Times a […]
The contemporary German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has introduced a set of three concepts that I find useful. They play out in the 140-character messages, “tweets,” that populate Twitter. Here are Habermas’ three concepts, with tweets as illustrations. (I found these examples within seconds as I wrote this blog post.) Lifeworld is the background of ordinary […]
We owe it to ourselves to develop an explicit model of any situation that concerns us. Whether we choose to share our model with other people is a choice, but we should always be ready to describe it to ourselves. A good model simplifies reality in a way that enables wise judgments. It should include […]
We might like to think that when we form a belief, it comes after we have reviewed reasons. We canvass all the relevant reasons (pro and con), evaluate each of them, weigh and combine them, and choose the belief that follows best. In that case, our reasons cause our beliefs, whether they are about facts […]
Anna Colin Lebedev (University of Paris-Nanterre) recently wrote a 30-tweet thread about current Russian opinion that I found illuminating. She discounts the value of surveys because they make two assumptions that do not apply in Russia (if anywhere): there is a correlation between discontent as measured by polls and explicit acts of resistance, and leaders […]