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Anne Dalke's picture

On the use-value of rules?

Submitted by Anne Dalke on Fri, 10/24/2008 - 1:48pm.

So, Sandy (having now written up our conversation and spent some time reflecting on it), here's what I can't quite make sense of: the tension between your

  • advocating for a kind of "bounded rationality," in the form of more realistic decision models, reflective of actual perception, cognition, and behavior--and
  • evoking Habermas's ideal speech act as an important regulative ideal, a touchstone for evaluating our actions, based on what we might agree to if we could get "outside of" power relations, even if such positions are not achievable.

In the first case, you construct a critique of classic decision-making models, which haven't worked because they aren't realistic enough; in the second, you are advocating for the appropriateness of using an abstract ideal to guide our behavior in the real world.

Is there a consistency here I'm missing?
Or a way to make sense of the inconsistency?
Help?

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