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Plädoyer für einen kritischen Agnostizismus.

In this stimulating dialogue these two great men, who stand on opposite sides of the church door, discuss some of the most controversial issues of the day. One is a respected scholar and one of the pre-eminent ecumenical churchmen of Europe; the other the world famous author of The Name of the Rose , a scholar, philosopher and self-decalred secularist, a man who writes with equal ease about Thomas Aquinas and James Joyce, computers and the medieval Templars. Often adversarial but always amicable, their debate will fascinate many

In this paper, we consider a number of different ways of reasoning about voting as a problem of conciliating contradictory interests. The mechanisms that do the reconciliation are belief revision and belief merging. By investigating the relationship between different voting strategies and their associated counterparts in revision theory, we find that whereas the counting mechanism of the voting process is more easily done at the meta-level in belief merging, it can be brought to the object level in base revision. In the former case, the counting can be tweaked according to the aggregation procedure used, whereas in base revision, we can only rely on the notion of minimal change and hence the syntactical representation of the voters' preferences plays a crucial part in the process. This highlights the similarities between the revision approaches on the one hand and voting on the other, but also opens up a number of interesting questions.

Despite regular reference to conspiracy theories as a "belief system," few studies have attempted to explore the structure and organization of conspiracy beliefs beyond an examination of correlations between those beliefs. Employing unique data from two national surveys that includes respondent beliefs in 27 conspiracy theories, we decipher the substantive dimensions along which conspiracy beliefs are organized, as well as subgroupings within those dimensions. We find that variation in these conspiracy beliefs can be accounted for with two dimensions: the first regards partisan and ideological identities, while the other is composed of anti-social orientations, such as narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and acceptance of political violence. Importantly, these two dimensions are uncorrelated. We also find that conspiracy beliefs group together by substantive content, such as those regarding partisan actors or science/medicine. Our findings also demonstrate that inferences about the correlates of conspiracy beliefs are highly contingent on the specific conspiracy theories employed by researchers. We provide suggestions for future research in this vein.

In this paper, we consider a number of different ways of reasoning about voting as a problem of conciliating contradictory interests. The mechanisms that do the reconciliation are belief revision and be- lief merging. By investigating the relationship between different voting strategies and their associated counterparts in revision theory, we find that whereas the counting mechanism of the voting process is more easily done at the meta-level in belief merging, it can be brought to the object level in base revision. In the former case, the counting can b e tweaked according to the aggregation procedure used, whereas in base revision, we can only rely on the notion of minimal change and hence the syntactical representation of the voters' preferences plays a crucial part in the process. This highlights the similarities between the revi sion approaches on the one hand and voting on the other, but also opens up a numb er of interesting questions.

Examines the alternative belief systems which contemporary organizational actors live by and through which they seek to find meaning within the dominant (neo)capitalist social order. This volume marks an attempt to move the study of belief forward within management and organization studies