Reasonability of Decisions in Knowledge Society
The idea of a knowledge society acquires today features of a new social ideal, which inspires researchers and determines the direction of strategies and programs of regional, national and international structures. However, for the most part, it comes to the knowledge society from the standpoint of economics and cost-effectiveness of knowledge. This means, in essence, the reduction of idea of both social relationships, and knowledge as such and as the basis of these relations in the new epoch. Using logical and critical approaches and system analysis, we explore the issues of decision making in the context of knowledge-society problems. ‘Reasonability’ and ‘efficiency’ are the key notions in our investigation. We take into consideration different interpretations of knowledge society and present our own interpretation that permit to avoid economical reductionism. We consider decision making as a kind of humanities-based technologies including important argumentative components. One of the main results of our study is conception of argumentation technologies as a necessary part of decision making technologies. We counterpoise argumentation technologies to technologies of manipulation. We conclude decision-making technologies as a kind of humanitarian ones contain significant component of argumentation. In the field of people management and human organizations, the substitution of argument by manipulation promises wonders and often really brings quick wins, fixed in quantitative indicators. However, such substitution leads to the impasse from the perspective of the development strategy of human societies and their major subsystems.