Fitting Things Together

Some combinations of attitudes—beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears, and so on—don’t fit together right: they are incoherent. A natural idea is that there is a class of rational requirements—the requirements of structural rationality—that forbid these incoherent states. Yet there are surprisingly deep challenges that arise for this natural idea. First, there are challenges about how these requirements relate to “substantive” rational requirements that require us to have attitudes that are supported by good reasons. Second, there are challenges about what, if anything, unifies the diverse class of instances of incoherence. And third, there are challenges about how, if at all, facts about coherence are normatively significant. These challenges have led many philosophers to deny that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality after all. And even the most prominent philosophers who do believe in requirements of structural rationality have often been reticent to defend the claims that such requirements are unified or normatively significant, or reticent to give accounts of how this could be so. By contrast, this book provides a sustained defense of the view that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality—distinct from and irreducible to substantive rationality—and of the view that it is unified and normatively significant. In developing a theory of structural rationality, it also aims to show how such a theory can help to illuminate numerous standing debates in both ethics and epistemology.

From Work Structuring to a Sociotechnologic Design

The concept of work structuring (Philips 1968, Ruehl 1973) is based on the genuine idea to stimulate man's motivation by allowing him more degrees of freedom in his job, thus creating possibilities of release for the man at work. This was in good conformity with F. Herzberg's theory of motivation (1967). The experiments starting from this point were rather partial approaches in small groups anywhere in the organization of bigger enterprises. It's up to the new sociotechnologic concept to subdue the whole organization to these principles. For this we need above all a new theory in terms of behavioral science and a new theory of organization which precede the technical design and are integrated in it. Finally, men have to be classified at least according to their type and to be led to the genuine kind of tasks. This complete concept combines the fellow-man (socius) with the functional technology and leads to the sociotechnologic design.