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The aim of this thesis is to develop a new concept of rationality in the field of planning and policy design. The argument maintains that classical pragmatism, in particular John Dewey's work, holds the key for a thorough and timely reconstruction of deliberative rationality. The current project will develop a received "traditional" model of rational planning based on the Humean model of rational agency. This "linear instrumental rationality" model will be criticised by challenging its agency theoretic presuppositions. The thesis will interpret Dewey's epistemological, ethical and metaphysical contributions as chiefly aimed toward a reconstruction of the Humean "Folk-Model" of agency and rationality. Dewey's notions of imagination and intelligent inquiry will be discussed as central concepts in developing a new model of rational agency. His understanding of deliberative democracy as embodying effective social intelligence bridges agency theoretic discussions and collective deliberation and planning. This thesis aspires to be both a conceptual philosophical exploration and a contribution to planning theory that can provide understanding and guidance in applied contexts. Two chapters at the ends will deal with the consequences of this Deweyan reconstruction project for planning theory and practice. A novel model of rational planning will be developed and the move from a traditional "linear instrumental" understanding of rational planning to a new "situational transactive" model will be illustrated in two case studies of urban land use planning in the German Ruhr region.

This thesis is about Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of collective scientific practice. The question it aims to answer is: How is it possible to describe the collective scientific practice during what Kuhn defines as periods of normal science? In the introductory chapter I discuss Kuhn's model of science as presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In Chapter 2, I define Kuhn's notion of normal science as a collective practice carried out within a scientific community in the light of a 'paradigm'. Since the concept of paradigm was abandoned after Structure, the following chapters examine Kuhn's late notions of 'exemplar', 'taxonomy' and 'lexical network'. After discussing the problems with these concepts, at the end of Chapter 5 I reconsider the idea of 'disciplinary matrix' and I suggest an interpretation of Kuhn's notion of 'lexicon' as its linguistic explicitation. In Chapter 6 I show how, if scientific revolutions are changes of disciplinary matrix, the phenomenon of specialization is a special case of scientific revolutions. I conclude that Kuhn's late focus on the linguistic aspects of science is not a retreat from his early interests in scientific practice, because analyzing scientific language means analyzing the most public, accessible and inter-subjective characteristic of the community of scientists.

There is a growing interest, within contemporary ethical and political philosophy, in the theories of the classical American pragmatists. One of the reasons for this interest is the pragmatist’s tendency to ground normative notions such as “right”, “good” and “truth” within human practices, without thereby reducing such notions to those human practices. This thesis addresses a gap in this literature by articulating and defending an account of pragmatist ethics based in the work William James. James is often overlooked in contemporary scholarship precisely because he appears to offer an account in which our normative notions are reducible to what individuals and communities happen to believe. Contrary to the majority of both contemporary and historical interpretations of James, this thesis argues that James is in fact interested in presenting a form of ethical realism. By drawing extensively from his work on ethics and other areas, especially the metaphysics which occupied his later life, this thesis argues that James can be seen as providing an objectivist and realist account of ethics, whilst at the same time maintaining a commitment to the role that individuals play within inquiry, and to pluralism about value. As such, the Jamesian approach provides an interesting alternative and addition to other contemporary approaches to pragmatist ethics.

In this thesis I offer a novel interpretation of William James's assertion that the world is composed of pure experience. This claim is central to James's radical empiricism, so I begin by placing radical empiricism in context. I draw on James's Principles of Psychology to show how his empiricism is a reaction to both associationism and Kantianism. By claiming that the world is composed of experience, James offers a way of understanding the relationship between mind and world that is - as he describes it - a form of common sense realism. With this is mind, I reject panpsychist readings of James's radical empiricism. Instead, I argue that we should understand James's ontological position in terms of the empiricism of John McDowell. By distinguishing between the act of experience and the content of experience, we can interpret James's claim that the world is composed of experience in the following way: the world is constituted by the kind of thing that can straightforwardly be the content of an experience. I then address a potential problem with this comparison of James and McDowell. McDowell holds that experience is a conceptual occurrence, whereas James is frequently interpreted as an advocate of the view that there is a nonconceptual component to experience. I argue that the Jamesian should rather claim that there are nonconceptual occurrences - the mere feelings of infants and non-human animals - but that these occurrencesare not experiences. I reinforce this point by highlighting how McDowell's conceptualism also incorporates this idea.

Our aim in this thesis will be critically to study Dewey's theory of moral values with a view to discovering hew far the naturalistic, biological point of view, as this is conceived by Dewey, is capable, when applied in the realm of Ethics, of adequately interpreting the facts of moral life. For this purpose, we shall begin with a critical study of Dewey's biological psychology, which we shall find in the end to be responsible for his entire ethical theory, followed by a critical study of his nominalistic Logic, which, in our opinion, is the result of his psychology and comes to determine his views in Ethics. These two sections, then, since they provide a criticism of tne basic ideas on which Dewey's ethical theory is built, will be dealt with at some length. The third and fourth sections will be concerned with a statement and criticism of Dewey's ethical theory. The references throughout will be chiefly to Dewey's two latest books, 'Human Nature and Conduct',and 'Reconstruction in Philosophy', since these seem to provide all that is distinctive in his earlier writings and represent, in addition, the most recent formulations of his philosophical thinking.

Neoliberalism has fundamentally altered how diverse sectors such as energy, health, and transport have come to be understood and governed. In exercising their ‘freedom of choice’ individual consumers are now held responsible for the social or environmental consequences of their decisions and actions. States have accordingly sought to intervene, influence and change the choices of citizens in a variety of spheres of everyday life. This thesis, by exploring how they understand action, demonstrates why these interventions are severely limited. It examines different approaches which have or could inform such interventions and how they theorise, research, and propose to, govern citizen’s actions. Of those considered, it argues John Dewey’s pragmatist writings, especially on habit and experience, by providing a dynamic understanding of how action continually emerges out of an individual’s interactions with their social and physical environments are particularly pertinent. The relevance of this approach for contemporary sustainability and climate change debates is demonstrated through a focus on commuting, which has become a central concern of various behaviour change agendas. The thesis draws on a range of empirical materials generated and collected through interviews, go-alongs and ethnography during fieldwork with local and migrant workers in Auckland, New Zealand and London, United Kingdom. The methodology aimed to produce a range of data on the stable and dynamic aspects of the internal and external environments, and phases, of action. These empirical materials are employed to demonstrate both the limitations of the dominant psychological and economic behavioural models and the potential of a Deweyan-inspired approach for understanding action. The thesis is structured around three associated interventions. First, the soft or libertarian paternalist concept of ‘choice architecture’ is explored. This approach it is suggested is limited in that it fails to problematize and politicise the notion of choice or account for the emergence of purposive and meaningful action. The notion of ‘habit infrastructures’ is introduced as a way of recognising how subjectivities and preferences are always conditioned but not determined by the histories and politics of physical environments and established social norms, values and ideologies, as individuals always retain the capacity to act upon the world. Second, the notion that various ‘barriers’ prevent individuals from making more sustainable choices is critiqued. The concept is too static, fixed, ahistorical and individualistic to account for the complexities of action and social change. It is demonstrated that such a framing offers little insight into why the number of year round cyclists is increasing in Auckland and London, and how regular commuter cyclists anticipate, experience, and negotiate changing weather conditions alongside a range of other everyday routines and practices. Dewey’s theory of situations is instead shown to provide a way of understanding the continuous and contingent contexts in which these experiences unfold and associated habits emerge. Third, dominant behavioural models typically conceptualise habit and thought as polar opposites. Following Dewey the thesis argues they are better understood as phases within human experience. This argument is developed by exploring how people’s commuting practices emerge out of repeated encounters with particular environments. The transition from the unfamiliar to familiar is marked by a development of new habits which alter people’s sense and experience of these environments and allow them to negotiate and adjust to changes in these contexts often with little or no thought. Dewey thus can provide a useful starting point for rethinking the relationship between habit and thought in future interventions. Given the social, economic and political uncertainties it is unlikely that existing urban infrastructures and systems will be radically reconfigured in the near future. Even if they were, history reminds us technology without accompanying social change will not be sufficient to address crises such as climate change. Behaviour change interventions, therefore, will likely remain a primary policy response to the challenges posed by increasing carbon emissions, resource consumption and demand. This thesis contends such interventions need to move beyond existing dominant behavioural models if they are to facilitate change. John Dewey, with his tenacious insistence on the situated, relational, more-than-individual and emergent character of action, provides an alternative approach which helps to reveal both the challenges and possible openings for developing a less carbon and resource intensive world.

In this study I argue that Richard Rorty’s anti-representationalist philosophy arises from a misguided belief that realists are compelled to argue that we need a single and exclusive “mirror-like” form of representation to capture reality. I argue that Rorty fails to appreciate the fact that realists do not have to absolutely identify reality with a particular mirror-like representation of it and nor do they have to fall prey to an invidious distinction between reality and the various ways that we do represent it. I argue that we need not associate realism with the kind of absolutism that Rorty associates it with. To illustrate this I challenge Rorty’s attempt to claim that Nietzsche also rejects realism and interpret Nietzsche’s perspectivism as a form of realism. I also challenge Rorty’s anti-representationalism in the context of his political philosophy. In order to do this I assess the role that Rorty assigns to the poet in his liberal utopia by examining the work of Sylvia Plath and Tony Harrison. I also discuss the various positions that Hilary Putnam has adopted in order to explore different possibilities within realism and representationalism. I conclude that Putnam’s internal realism concedes too much to Rorty and that his earlier external realism is a better alternative.

This project interrogates the claims made for the possibility of collapsing all the various disciplines into one discipline, probably physics, and surely a science, in the name of making clearer the relations between our various fields of knowledge. This is the aim of the radical reductionist, and I take E. O. Wilson's Consilience as exemplary of such attempts. Central to Wilson's method of achieving unity is the new science of evolutionary psychology - itself a re-working of the sociobiology with which Wilson first achieved notoriety. In the on-going project of explaining culture under a Darwinian description, the evolutionary psychologists have begun to suggest explanations for the popularity and content of narrative fiction. Because they are consonant with the rest of science, these biologistic accounts of fiction might be preferable to the accounts traditionally offered by Literary Studies. Consequently, there is a risk that the traditional practices of Literary Studies will be made redundant within the academy and gradually atrophy. The demand is that Literary Studies either makes itself rigorous like the sciences (as with such projects as Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism), or else forfeit its claims to produce knowledge. Aware of this threat, some literary critics embrace forms of relativism in an attempt to deny the unity or effectiveness of scientific knowledge and so neuter the threatened takeover. Among these forms of relativism, Richard Rorty's account seeks to collapse the hierarchy of disciplines and seemingly offers Literary Studies a means of retaining its distinctive approach without denying the effectiveness of scientific knowledge. I aim to show that Literary Studies need not become a science, and that such sciences as evolutionary psychology are neither as threatening as some had feared, nor as useful to literary study as some have hoped.