DELIBERATION'S LEGITIMATION CRISIS: REPLY TO GLEASON

Deliberation's Legitimation Crisis: Reply to Gleason

Laurel Gleason contends that deliberative polling constrains the autonomy of participants and substitutes the ideas and agendas of ‘‘experts’’ for those of the deliberators. However, the format and informational constraints faced by participants in deliberative forums are no worse, and are in many ways better, than those faced by ordinary citizens. The real problem with deliberative polls is th...

Capitalism and Contradiction in Legitimation Crisis

My ultimate aim in the first sections of this book is to present Habermas’ mature social theory, his two-tiered theory of society as system and lifeworld, and to show how this theory, after the pattern of classical critical theory, serves to point out and articulate the interests of groups who embody a potential for protest or resistance within the societal formation of advanced capitalism. On ...

The Legitimation Crisis of Fordism: Ideological and Cultural Contradictions

Chapter 1 illustrated the centrality of the role of the state in the establishment, organization, and coordination of the Fordist system of regulated capitalism. Before entering its final crisis in the late 1970s, the state was instrumental in fostering the material conditions of an ideology and a culture that legitimated regulated capitalism. This chapter continues the discussion of the condit...

Digital Deliberations

Learning as Abductive Deliberations

This paper explains an architecture for a BDI agent that can learn based on its own experience. The learning is conducted through explicit procedural knowledge or plans in a goal-directed manner. The learning is described by encoding abductions within the deliberation processes. With this model, the agent is capable of modifying its own plans on the run. We demonstrate that by abducing some com...