A dire prospect indeed: the "exuberance" of utopian thought, Habermas wrote, "seems to have the function of opening up alternatives for action and margins of possibility".
Was the inexperienced new civilian leadership, personified by the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and the defence minister, Amir Peretz, presented with serious alternatives for action?
In order to help the local town administration, which raised this issue, a trans-disciplinary research team was formed with the purpose of testing some explanatory hypotheses and to provide possible alternatives for action.
It typically asks, of a set of alternatives for action none of which has yet been performed, what one ought to do, or what it would be best to do.
The intellect, even as practical intellect, has truth as its goal or end since its job, so to speak, is to ascertain the way things are, to make judgments about the state of reality, including what alternatives for action are available for the agent.
The final report recommended three alternatives for action: to continue operation "as-is", to continue operation without the gates, or to eliminate gate leakage and amend the operation protocol.
The dialogue continued with the aim of finding several possible alternatives for action (step 3).
Apart from these obvious challenges, it must be recognized that, in general, scientific knowledge does not unequivocally translate into alternatives for action, and that policy makers have to be responsive to a wide variety of inputs, of which scientific knowledge is only one, and often not the most important one (Boehmer-Christiansen 1994; Lawton 2007; Walton and Gray 1991; Wesselink et al. 2013).
Resource management agencies are required to consider stakeholder input in the selection of preferred alternatives for proposed actions.
