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Among the various institutional structures of an economy like the firm and the marketplace is one that is like no other. Science is unique. This uniqueness raises an important question: why does science exist? From an economic perspective, there are two potentially meaningful approaches to the existence of science. They both encompass institutional pluralism. A substitutes theory of comparative institutions presupposes the primacy of the commercial marketplace over firms—that firms substitute for the market when markets fail. This theory has not been used to explain the existence of science. A complements theory postulates that many simultaneous institutional responses, including science, are necessary for creating an efficient and equitable economy. The economic function of science is to produce fundamental theoretical abstractions about our world. Scientific theories are public goods that would not likely be produced within the governance structures of commercial markets and firms. The aim is to complement but not supplant traditional philosophical answers that science exists to discover truth and knowledge.

This article discusses the following: (i) The acceptability of diverse styles of rationality suggests replacing concern for uniqueness with that for coordination, (ii) Popper's lowering of the standard of rationality increases its scope insufficiently, (iii) Bartley's making the standard comprehensive increases its scope excessively, (iv) the pluralist view of rationality as partial (i.e., of Jarvie and Agassi) is better, but its ranking of all rationality eliminates choice of styles, (v) styles diversify the standards of rationality, (viii) rationality is not merely a matter of style, (vi) (vii) diversity raises new, interesting problems, allowing diversity permits reconciling differences better than does the absent unique standard, and (ix) cultural heritage and rationality are complementary.

Conpiracy theories are widely deemed to be superstitious. Yet history appears to be littered with conspiracies successful and otherwise. (For this reason, "cock-up" theories cannot in general replace conspiracy theories, since in many cases the cock-ups are simply failed conspiracies.) Why then is it silly to suppose that historical events are sometimes due to conspiracy? The only argument available to this author is drawn from the work of the late Sir Karl Popper, who criticizes what he calls "the conspiracy theory of society" in The Open Society and elsewhere. His critique of the conspiracy theory is indeed sound, but it is a theory no sane person maintains. Moreover, its falsehood is compatible with the prevalence of conspiracies. Nor do his arguments create any presumption against conspiracy theories of this or that. Thus the belief that it is superstitious to posit conspiracies is itself a superstition. The article concludes with some speculations as to why this superstition is so widely believed.

Pearce's "African Philosophy and the Sociological Thesis" makes very interesting reading. Why it is interesting is not because it advances the frontiers of philosophical discourse in Africa or globally but because it shows that certain unwarranted dispositions die hard and that deliberate ignorance, if that is what is displayed, is hard to cure. In this article the author comments on the following contentions made by Pearce: (1) philosophy has no social relevance and/or responsibility; (2) philosophy is purely a linguistic activity concerned with analysis of concepts and examination; (3) philosophy derives from religion; (4) because African philosophy cannot supplant world philosophy, it lacks locus and legitimacy; (5) African philosophy pursues intellectual apartheid through an ethnophilosophical agenda; and (6) African philosophy is vulnerable to the Sociological Thesis and is voided by it. The author's rebuttal consists of a critical and analytic examination of Pearce's views, counterfactual illustrations, and elicitation of enthymemic presuppositions.

In 1985, a member of the Canadian judiciary handed down a written judgment in which he distinguished between erotica and obscene matter. The judgment attracted the scorn of some normative sociologists, who complained of the insufficiency of the social psychological research on which it was based. Their reaction prompts a review of the judgment in the light of social constructionism and of ethnomethodology; this, in turn, prompts a comparison of social constructionist and ethnomethodological methodologies, in which the legal judgment serves merely as a test case. It is argued that normative sociology and social constructionism, both being of an essentially ironic cast, occlude the judge's sense-making procedures, the very phenomena they purport to describe. Ethnomethodology, on the other hand, being nonironic, promises to capture those procedures.

In his account of musical interaction and temporality, Schutz's outer-inner distinction appears to capture a component of everyday experience. But engagement with Wittgensteinian philosophy reveals Schutz's false contrast between literal and metaphorical components of language, a series of philosophical confusions stemming from reifications of mental verbs, and the attribution of genuine duration to phenomena that have life as linguistic objects. Consequently, Schutz's intended account of social interaction comes to rest upon a radically private concept of the subject. A sociology of time, it is concluded, can avoid these conceptual traps by attending to the linguistic component of temporality.

The arguments presented in this discussion point to some problems in the theory of communicative action considered as a starting point for a sociological theory with both normative and explanatory aspirations. It is argued that Habermas's notion of consensus is not sufficiently developed to constitute a foundation of the ethics of public debates; that both social action and communicative action are grounded in social actors' references to the same three worlds, which makes the coordination of actions by means of understanding achieved in speech possible; that the criteria of rationality underlying use of language in the communicative action are ultimately those that are made explicit and consciously worked out in science; and that, finally, it is Parsons' solution to the Hobbesian problem and his concept of social action that provide a possible foundation for universalistic ethics.