We consider the potential impact of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, with special reference to large technically advanced projects involving several organizations. It is vital that such projects are managed efficiently, without delays, since a product that reaches the market a few months earlier than its competitors enjoys a great advantage. Traditional methods of coordinating large projects, based on hierarchical communication, tend to produce delays, since technicians at remote sites are obliged to solve coordination problems by passing them up the hierachy. (...) It would be better if such problems were solved by improvising conferences among the technicians; Computer Supported Cooperative Work will provide the technical means of implementing this heterarchical style of management without losing control of the project. The use of computers as a social medium raises methodological and ethical issues which are discussed in the final section. (shrink)

Rule-based ethical theories like Kant's appear to be promising for machine ethics because of the computational structure of their judgments. On one formalist interpretation of Kant's categorical imperative, for instance, a machine could place prospective actions into the traditional deontic categories (forbidden, permissible, obligatory) by a simple consistency test on the maxim of action. We might enhance this test by adding a declarative set of subsidiary maxims and other "buttressing" rules. The ethical judgment is then an outcome of the consistency (...) test. While this kind of test can generate results, it may be vacuous in the sense that it would do no more than forbid obviously contradictory maxims of action. It is also possible that the kind of inference in such a rule-based system may be non-monotonic. I discuss these challenges to a rule-based machine ethics, starting from the framework of Kantian ethics. (shrink)

Approaches to programming ethical behavior for computer systems face challenges that are both technical and philosophical in nature. In response, an incrementalist account of machine ethics is developed: a successive adaptation of programmed constraints to new, morally relevant abilities in computers. This approach allows progress under conditions of limited knowledge in both ethics and computer systems engineering and suggests reasons that we can circumvent broader philosophical questions about computer intelligence and autonomy.

John Broome’s Climate Matters is a timely, elegant, and accessible book. His book is deliberately interdisciplinary, as is much of his work in moral philosophy more generally. The discussion of what should be done, and by whom, to prevent the adverse effects of climate change is informed by many years of philosophical engagement with economic theory, especially problems arising in the conceptualization and technical implementation of cost-benefit analysis.The central arguments in the book are informed as well by a longstanding (...) engagement with climate change science. Broome brings to bear a perspective forged in the work of his role as a lead author—and occasional critic—of the report of Working Group III of the .. (shrink)

The publication of the Phenomena of power: Authority, domination, and violence into English allows for the English-speaking world to engage the work of Heinrich Popitz. Popitz provides a thorough and organized description of how power operates in social relations that should be valuable to any scholar of the human sciences. This essay is supportive of Popitz’s project, but seeks a critical engagement by extending the analysis on violence and technical power. I argue that reading Popitz alongside (...) the decolonial thinker, Franz Fanon and the media ecologist, Marshall McLuhan can provide important correctives. In particular, Fanon’s analysis that the colonial use of rhetorical power to dehumanize the oppressed and McLuhan’s comment on the importance of the control of medium are missing in an otherwise very thorough philosophical anthropology on the phenomena of power. (shrink)

Voluntary management standards for social and environmental performance ideally help to define and improve firms’ related capabilities. These standards, however, have largely failed to improve such performance as intended. Over-emphasis on institutional factors leading to adoption of these standards has neglected the role of firms’ existing capabilities. External pressures can drive firms to adopt standards more than their technical capacity to employ them. This can lead to problems of “fit” between institutional requirements and a firm’s existing capabilities . We (...) describe a conceptual model that considers the impact of an interaction between a firm’s institutional requirements and its existing capabilities on standards failure. We suggest solutions that align institutional requirements to appropriate governance forms as a means to improve standards success. We contribute to theory by describing the role of firms’ internal capabilities to the success of voluntary management standards and the reliability of self-regulation generally. (shrink)

Our question is whether technicality can institute, and thus create a new power, or even legitimize and maintain institutions. It claims to do so, all haloed by sacredness or religiosity with the development of computers, networks and the Internet. But this would presuppose that technology could symbolize, i.e. embody an instance of Truth, an irrational core of beliefs or myths that would answer the question of 'why' we live in society. It claims to do so as an ‘applied science’ (...) or technoscience, science having become the authority of truth in Western societies. But technicity cannot symbolize and remains locked in the "how", in the order of rational action, utility and efficiency. (shrink)

Over the last few years, smart cities have been a focus of scholarly attention. Most of these critical studies concentrated on the multinational corporations’ discourses and their implications on urban policies. Besides these factors, however, the data-driven city develops within a complex web of entanglements whereby data-driven technologies modulate the urban infrastructure in a multitude of ways contingent upon the social, political, material and technical aspects. As such, this article attends to the infrastructural implications of a smart city product, (...) Citymapper, which is a transport app built on open data available as part of London’s smart city planning. In order to establish the relationship between data and infrastructure, I use Gilbert Simondon’s notions of ‘transduction’, ‘individuation’ and ‘technicity’ to explore this relationship in a processual and relational way. In constructing this relationship as co-generative, whereby infrastructure and data transindividuate, I subsequently posit the term data/infrastructure. Against this theoretical background, I study the ways in which Citymapper individuates and thereby gains infrastructural power through technicity of data by studying the ways in which the users’ contribute to data generation that feed back into the app. Specifically, by following the transformation of the app from initially mediating the bus timetable to transducing users into environmental sensing nodes through which the app collects behavioural data, I foreground the epistemological, infrastructural and social consequences of Citymapper’s infrastructural power for the data-driven city. (shrink)

In health sciences, technical contributions may be undervalued and excluded in the author byline. In this paper, I demonstrate how authorship is a historical construct which perpetuates systemic injustices including technical undervaluation. I make use of Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual work to demonstrate how the power dynamics at play in academia make it very challenging to change the habitual state or “habitus”. To counter this, I argue that we must reconceive technical contributions to not be a priori (...) less important based on its nature when assigning roles and opportunities leading to authorship. I make this argument based on two premises. First, science has evolved due to major information and biotechnological innovation; this requires ‘technicians’ to acquire and exercise a commensurate high degree of both technical and intellectual expertise which in turn increases the value of their contribution. I will illustrate this by providing a brief historical view of work statisticians, computer programmers/data scientists and laboratory technicians. Second, excluding or undervaluing this type of work is contrary to norms of responsibility, fairness and trustworthiness of the individual researchers and of teams in science. Although such norms are continuously tested because of power dynamics, their importance is central to ethical authorship practice and research integrity. While it may be argued that detailed disclosure of contributions (known as contributorship) increases accountability by clearly identifying who did what in the publication, I contend that this may unintentionally legitimize undervaluation of technical roles and may decrease integrity of science. Finally, this paper offers recommendations to promote ethical inclusion of technical contributors. (shrink)

What is a technical object? At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own. The Aristotelian concept (...) persisted, in one form or another, until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of technics. Lodged between mechanics and biology, a technical entity became a complex of heterogeneous forces. In a parallel development, while industrialization was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of knowledge as well as contemporary social organization, technology was acquiring a new place in philosophical questioning. Philosophy was for the first time faced with a world in which technical expansion was so widespread that science was becoming more and more subject to the field of instrumentality, with its ends determined by the imperatives of economic struggle or war, and with its epistemic status changing accordingly. The power that emerged from this new relation was unleashed in the course of the two world wars. Working his way through the history of the Aristotelian assessment of technics, the author engages the ideas of a wide range of thinkers—Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela. (shrink)

This paper looks at a genre of meetings that, while neither purely ‘scientific’ nor ‘diplomatic’, drew on elements from both professional spheres and gained prominence in the interwar decades and during the Second World War. It proposes to make sense of ‘technical conferences’ as a phenomenon that was made by and through scientific experts and politicians championing the organizing power of rationality, science and liberal internationalism. Against the background of swelling ranks of state-employed scientists, this paper documents the (...) emergence of technical conferences as the forums where they got down to work. To make this case the paper traces the influence of a new way of thinking about the function and organization of conferences, originating in the time around the First World War, on one international organization in particular: the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), as a new hub of scientists and technicians. (shrink)

The development of science and technology in the Age of Enlightenment came to the idea of a language for describing technical and technological achievements that could facilitate mutual understanding between scientists, artisans, inventors, as well as production organizers and government agencies. This task seemed easily achievable, and the French Academy of Sciences undertook a special edition of the encyclopedic type “Description of Sciences and Crafts” to create such a language. However, the edition was not completed and was partly continued (...) in the “Encyclopedia” of Diderot and D’Alembert, which for the first time in the practice of encyclopedic publications began not only to study crafts and technical achievements, but also to visualize them in special engravings. In Russia, the analysis of technical and technological discourse occurred later, in the late 18th – early 19th centuries. Russian authors had the opportunity to take into account the experience of encyclopedic publications in France and Britain and to see that the project of creating a universal language uniting artisans, scientists and those in power could not be fully realized. However, the problem of mutual understanding between different social groups involved in the process of production and exploitation of new technologies remained unresolved, so work in this direction was being carried out, although sometimes it remained beyond the interest of intellectual historians and historians of science. The article compares European and Russian sources of the 18th century devoted to this issue, as well as a number of Russian sources of the early 19th century related to the analysis and understanding of scientific and technological achievements, new vocabulary and new relationships generated by technical and technological development. It is concluded that the introduction of these sources into scientific circulation will be promising for the study of technical discourses and trends in their development. (shrink)

Energy is a necessity and the basis of human life. With the increase in the need for energy supply in recent years, the use of fossil fuels has intensified. Environment is a basic principle for human beings. In our dear country Iran, with an average sundial of approximately 4.5 hours per day, there is the highest potential for the use of photovoltaic systems. Connected to the national power grid as a micro grid, in accordance with the standardization and the (...) highest efficiency with PVsyst software, the system losses were identified and the necessary solutions were provided to solve them. In case of using 1 to 5 kW systems, which due to small It can be installed even on the roofs of houses. In hot cities, where electricity consumption increases in the hot seasons of the year, the pressure is removed from the national electricity distribution network, and a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions to the environment is prevented. At the end by plotting the current value of the project it was also proven to be economical. (shrink)

Media studies as a field has traditionally been wary of the question of technology. Discussion of technology has often been restricted to relatively sterile debates about technological determinism. In recent times there has been renewed interest, however, in the technological dimension of media. In part this is doubtless due to rapid changes in media technology, such as the rise of the internet and the digital convergence of media technologies. But there are also an increasing number of writers who seem to (...) believe that media theory, and more widely social science and the humanities, needs to rethink the question of technology and its relationship to society, culture and cultural production. Andrew Feenberg has characterized the two most dominant positions as, on the one hand, the social constructivist or 'technology studies' approach to technology, and, on the other, 'substantivist' theories of technology. The social constructivist approach, aims to counter technological determinism by showing how the development of technology is shaped not by technical and scientific progress but by contingent social, cultural and economic forces. The limitation of this view, however, is that it tends to see technology as no different from any other social process and it may lose the ability to distinguish between the technical object and any other social formation or cultural artefact. Doubtless constructivism would like to see technology as a subset of the cultural artefact and not vice versa, therefore explaining technology in terms of culture and society. But there are powerful arguments for arguing something like the opposite: in other words for understanding culture and society in terms of or as technical objects. In recent years this argument has been put most forcefully by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler and it is to his work and its implications for media theory that this essay is dedicated. In particular I will show how Stiegler might defend his ideas around technics from the charge of technological determinism. Firstly, technics is not understood in the narrow sense of techno-scientific technology but in the wider sense of all the ways in which the human is exteriorised into artefacts or organized inorganic matter. Technics in this sense is therefore inseparable from culture and society and it makes no sense either to talk of technics determining culture and society or vice versa. Culture and society are not constituted by technics as if by a cause but rather constituted through it. Secondly, a technics in Stiegler's sense does not represent scientific progress or a deterministic evolution; rather, however strange this may seem, technics is a kind of pure accidentality or contingency. For Stiegler it is because of the exteriorisation of the human into artefacts or inorganic organized matter that culture and society constitute themselves contingently. Stiegler's work therefore offers a way for us to rethink the relationship between culture and technology in ways which can productively reconfigure the concerns of critical theory. (shrink)

Recommender Systems (RecSys) have been around since the early days of the Internet, helping users navigate the vast ocean of information and the increasingly available options that have been available for us ever since. The range of tasks for which one could use a RecSys is expanding as the technical capabilities grow, with the disruption of Machine Learning representing a tipping point in this domain, as in many others. However, the increase of the technical capabilities of AI-powered RecSys (...) did not come with a thorough consideration of their ethical implications and, despite being a well-established technical domain, the potential impacts of RecSys on their users are still under-assessed. This paper aims at filling this gap in regards to one of the main impacts of RecSys: personal autonomy. We first describe how technology can affect human values and a suitable methodology to identify these effects and mitigate potential harms: Value Sensitive Design (VSD). We use VSD to carry out a conceptual investigation of personal autonomy in the context of a generic RecSys and draw on a nuanced account of procedural autonomy to focus on two components: competence and authenticity. We provide the results of our inquiry as a value hierarchy and apply it to the design of a speculative RecSys as an example. (shrink)

이 연구의 목적은 데카르트의 감각 이론을 목적 개념에 비추어 해석하고 감각에 작용하는 자연의 기술이라는 개념을 설명하는 것이다. 목적론에 대한 데카르트의 명백한 거부에도 불구하고, 그의 철학과 목적론의 양립 가능성을 인정하는 연구들은 공통적으로 감각을 인간의 자기 보존의 목적에 기여하는 능력으로 해석한다. 그러나 나는 이 연구들이 데카르트 철학에서 감각의 목적은 자연의 기술을 전제한다는 점을 주목하지 못했다고 생각한다. 감각의 목적을 인정한다는 것은 감각 지각을 기계론적 질서로부터 독립적인 자발적 능력으로 고려하는 것을 뜻한다. 나는 데카르트 철학에서 감각의 자발성을 사용 가치적 관점에서 세계 내의 사물들을 해석 내지 (...) 번역하는 능력으로 설명한다. 그러나 감각의 자발성은 자유를 의미하지 않으며 자연에 의해 설립된 프로그램을 수동적으로 따르는, 달리 말해 자연의 기술에 의해 작동하는 자발성이다. (shrink)

This article argues that, as applied to education, the Capabilities Approach pioneered by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum shares a range of philosophical commitments with the work of social realist scholars on the concept of ‘powerful knowledge’. I first trace the history of the concept of powerful knowledge and present critiques put forward by social justice scholars. I then outline the Capabilities Approach, arguing it provides a response to some of these concerns. From here I develop the connection between the (...) two educational paradigms focusing on four areas of affinity. The first is the conceptual similarity between the ‘power’ of powerful knowledge and Nussbaum’s account of a capability. The second is their concern with the reduction of education to technical-instrumentalism, human capital, and other economically driven imperatives. The third is a shared focus on the link between knowledge, human agency, and freedom. The fourth, is a mutual rejection of relativism and embrace of a nuanced universalism. Ultimately, by drawing together these two conceptually rich approaches to the aims and purposes of education, I hope to open a space for theorizing about both capabilities and powerful knowledge that can resolve some of the problems in both. For powerful knowledge, the Capabilities Approach allows a more concrete explication of why access to disciplinary bodies of knowledge is of value to both individuals and society. On the side of the Capabilities Approach, engaging with the concept of powerful knowledge can help give a rationale for how educational knowledge fosters certain centrally important capabilities. (shrink)

The TV series American Gods (2017-2021) features a war between the Old Gods, a syncretic pantheon of deities of the natural powers drawn from all mythological and religious traditions, and the New Gods, the deities of history and the artificial realm of man-made technics. Gods of both fences are shown as beings whose morals beyond good and evil is entirely focused on fulfilling their will to power in terms of immortality. Humans are trapped within this conflict; their only option (...) is seemingly limited to choose which side they stand. While the series sumptuously renders Heidegger’s claim that metaphysics and technics are the same, it also employs a different and positive meaning of the latter: by showing the old gods, the new ones, and humans as different options about existence – namely the logic of sacrifice, the logic of hedonism, and the economic logic of human reason – and eventually rejecting all of them as viable solutions, it favours an idea of existence as full open-ness and experimentality. In the end, technics is one with man’s self-creativity, embodied in his very biology, providing him an escape route from the vicious circles constantly ambushing him on his path towards authenticity – namely, all deities, religious as well as secular. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power: Speech Presentation and Latin LiteratureEllen OliensisAndrew Laird. Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power: Speech Presentation and Latin Literature. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. xx + 358 pp. Cloth, $85.Prospective readers should not be put off by the title of this ambitious book. Though "speech presentation" (the use of direct discourse [DD], free indirect discourse [FID], etc.) may (...) seem a rather narrow and technical topic, Laird makes a persuasive case for its manifold significance. And while he foregrounds "Latin literature," Laird ranges freely across centuries and genres, drawing on texts as diverse as the Hittite SongofUllikummi, Sannazaro's DepartuVirginis, and a 1994 story in the DailyTelegraph. The result is a thoughtful and engaging study from which readers of very different interests and stripes will be able to profit. Three chapters on the theory of narrative representation and speech presentation are followed by another three exploring representational strategies in (mostly Latin) historiography, epic, and the novel; a final chapter treats the speeches of divine messengers in epic as "allegories of representation." The book is framed by a brief introduction and conclusion, the latter capped by a suggestive coda pointing to the multiple lines of research, across various disciplines, which might be opened up by a more scrupulous consideration of speech presentation.In the introduction, Laird outlines the benefits, practical and theoretical, of focusing on speech presentation: "First, [speech presentation] can throw light on the themes and stylistic features of particular texts. Second, functions of speech [End Page 596] presentation bear on broader concerns including form and content, representation, genre, ideology, and intertextuality" (xv). These claims are amply justified in the ensuing chapters. Laird's theoretical orientation generates an abundance of local insights. He suggests that Tacitus' contrasting introductions to the speeches of Calgacus and Agricola--the distancing locutusfertur versus the confident itadisseruit (Agr. 29.4, 33.1)--help differentiate barbarian from Roman by implying "that Agricola's oration possesses a greater ontological stature than Calgacus'" (126); that Encolpius' exploitation of what Laird dubs "angled narration of dialogue" (reserving DD for his interlocutors' speech and ID for his own) produces the effect of narratorial transparency in the Cena (217-20); that the use of direct discourse for Mercury's message and indirect for Fama's in Aeneid 4 "enhances the essential contrast between the nature of the two messengers" (272). In one of his boldest discussions (192-205), Laird reviews the unanswered speeches in the Aeneid and concludes that Virgil's epic is far more rigid than previous epics in associating speech with authority and dutiful silence with subordination (Laird interestingly contrasts Homeric epic, which proclaims this hierarchy but doesn't practice it with anything like Virgil's consistency); Laird goes on to speculate that this strong linkage of speech with authority also applies to Virgil's own epic discourse, which (like Aeneas' narration in books 2 and 3) is delivered to readers who are silent or even silenced.Occasionally, the marriage of theory and interpretation founders. For example, Laird's account of the multiple literary echoes in Encolpius's seaside soliloquy (Satyricon 81.1-82.1, discussed at 221-24) shows little trace of the theoretical self-consciousness displayed in his earlier remarks on the ideological character of intertextuality and its proximity to speech presentation. And the argument that the opening sequence of the Aeneid is designed to entice the reader into Virgil's "realist" fiction (157-64) rests on some unconvincing claims (e.g., that Aeneas' first speech "begins with a prayer" addressed to "the gods, or even the poem's audience" [162], and that Juno's first soliloquy has "the poem's audience or readers" as "her first addressees" [164]). Elsewhere, Laird suggests that Aeneas' parenthetical eloquaransileam? (Aen. 3.39) "could be FID conveying his own doubt and hesitation at the time of the incident he is describing" (182-83); but surely the question makes sense only if it is attached, not to the narrated past (where the relevant question would be "shall I keep pulling on this uncanny tree?") but to the present of narration.Although Laird, an astute reader, has much to teach us about... (shrink)

This article focuses on tracing and extending Michel Foucault’s contributions to the philosophy of technology. At first sight his work on power seems the most relevant. In his later work on subjectivation and ethics technology is absent. However, notably by recombining Foucault’s work on power with his work on subjectivation, does his work contribute to solving pertinent problems in current approaches to the ethics of technology. First, Foucault’s position is compared to critical theory and Heidegger, and associated with (...) the approach of “technical mediation” (Latour, Ihde, Verbeek). Next, a detailed study of Discipline and Punish , results in the identification of two distinct “figures of technical mediation”. Finally, Foucault’s later work on ethics and subjectivation is employed to elaborate an ethics of technology that focuses on care for the quality of the interactions and fusions with technology. Hybridization is central in the approach: it is not to be rejected, neither is it the greatest danger, but it does deserve the greatest care. (shrink)

This article is dealt with at a historical-strategic level. Historical processes can be functionally divided into two sections: the social-material-directed Power-organizing part and the cultural-spiritual Ethic-thinking part. Thus there exist two corresponding dynamic-operative functions in history, which are guided and impelled by different motivations, methods, and destinations involved in the two functions. The Ethic-practicing praxis has been always performed through the empirical-humanist-rational ways, which today can be more effectively embodied in human sciences to be reorganized by the general-semiotic strategy. (...) So there are two kinds of human historical courses: the one as the materialist-directed power-organizing part and the other as spiritual-theoretical-directed ethic-reflecting part. From a historical-philosophical point of view, the former is to prepare the material-conditions/means for supporting the latter as the ethic-spiritual mission that is directed towards exploring the meaning/value foundation for human existence. Lacking in the internal link between the two historical-pragmatic functions the ethic-spiritual praxes should manage to find a separate strategy for actively continuing its independent ethic task by dint of wisely/bravely shunning the materialist-determinism issued from the technical/commercialized globalization era. (shrink)

RESUMO Neste artigo pretendo identificar um "estilo de raciocínio" próprio à química e apontar a disseminação de seus produtos e conceitos. O objetivo é o de explicitar alguns elementos que caracterizam o estilo de pensar e de fazer da química na segunda metade do século XVIII, sua capilarização técnico-cultural. O delineamento de um estilo químico de raciocinar origina-se da constância dos espaços técnico-epistêmicos em que o saber químico é construído. A química é uma ciência de laboratório, eminentemente técnica e operatória, (...) quer dizer, trata-se de um conhecimento técnico-científico stricto sensu. Produtora de artefatos, a ciência química é inseparável da técnica, da tecnologia e da indústria, de maneira que sua identidade epistêmica é indissociável de sua história. Seu estilo caracteriza um valor profundo na cultura técnica do homo faber, do poder de agir sobre a natureza e de transformá-la através de manipulações e de rearranjos. ABSTRACT In this paper I will identify a "style of reasoning" that is proper to to Chemistry and to point to the dissemination of its products and concepts. My aim is to explain some elements that characterize the style of thinking and engaging in Chemistry in the second half of the 18th century, its techno-cultural capillary action. The shaping of a chemical style of reasoning originated from the constancy of the techno-epistemic sites in which chemical knowledge is formed. Chemistry is a laboratory science, eminently technical and operative, i.e., it deals with a techno-scientific knowledge stricto sensu. A producer of artifacts, chemical science is inseparable from technique, technology and industry, in such a way that its epistemic identity is inseparable from its history. Its style marks a profound value in the technical culture of the homo faber, the power of acting upon nature and transforming it through manipulations and rearrangements. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the heuristic power of the theoretical distinction between framework and interaction theories applied to the case of General Relativity. According to the distinction, theories and theoretical elements can be classified into two different groups, each with clear ontological, epistemic and functional content. Being so, to identify the group to which a theory belongs would suffice to know a priori its prospects and limitations in these areas without going into a detailed technical analysis. We (...) make the exercise here with General Relativity, anticipate its ontological, epistemic and functional content and show afterwords that such expectations are justified in this case, being consistent with formal issues of General Relativity. With this, we attempt to make a case for the use of the distinction as a powerful tool for scientific and philosophical analysis. (shrink)

The quinoa export boom generated a rapid standardization project that sought to transform a heteroglot local grain into a uniform global commodity that could flow smoothly through global markets. All agricultural commodities come into being through different standardization processes that materialize specific concepts of quality. Yet the sudden rise in export demand for quinoa, massive price surge, and the biodiverse nature and local orientation of existing quinoa production made quinoa’s standardization particularly dramatic. This article traces the enforcement of quality standards (...) for quinoa export ethnographically, focusing on the interactions between farmers and técnicos, a category of actors tasked with training farmers in “quality” quinoa production and enforcing quality at the moment of sale. I argue that standards moralize agricultural production practices, redefining “good quinoa” and “good farmers.” At the same time, they serve as powerful tools to render technical the reorientation of Andean agricultural systems toward quinoa export. Advocates for more just and ecologically sustainable global commodity chains should pay attention to quality standards as a key site of politics with major ramifications for inclusion/exclusion and resilience. (shrink)

This article explores the psychological literature on rationalization and connects it with contemporary questions about the role of in-house lawyers in ethical dilemmas. Using the case study of AWB Ltd, the exclusive marketer of Australian wheat exports overseas, it suggests that rationalizations were influential in the perpetuation by in-house lawyers of AWB's payment of kickbacks to the Iraqi regime. The article explores how lawyers' professional rationalizations can work together with commercial imperatives to prevent in-house lawyers from seeing ethical issues as (...) those outside the organisation would see them. In particular, where lawyers over-identify with their client's commercial point of view and convince themselves that their role is primarily about providing 'technical' advice on commercial matters, wilful or unintended 'ethical blindness' can result. Lawyers can end up involved in or perpetuating serious misconduct by their client organizations. (shrink)

The Revenge Problem threatens every approach to the semantic paradoxes that proceeds by introducing nonclassical semantic values. Given any such collection Δ of additional semantic values, one can construct a Revenge sentence:This sentence is either false or has a value in Δ.TheEmbracing Revengeview, developed independently by Roy T. Cook and Phlippe Schlenker, addresses this problem by suggesting that the class of nonclassical semantic values is indefinitely extensible, with each successive Revenge sentence introducing a new ‘pathological’ semantic value into the discourse. (...) The view is explicitly motivated in terms of the idea that every notion thatseemsto be expressible should, if at all possible,beexpressible. Extant work on the Embracing Revenge view has failed to live up to this promise, since the formal languages developed within such work are expressively impoverished. We rectify this here by developing a much richer formal language, and semantics for that language, and we then prove an extremely powerful expressive completeness result for the system in question. (shrink)

In a previous paper-[17]-we characterized strong measure zero sets of reals in terms of a Ramseyan partition relation on certain subspaces of the Alexandroff duplicate of the unit interval. This framework gave only indirect access to the relevant sets of real numbers. We now work more directly with the sets in question, and since it costs little in additional technicalities, we consider the more general context of metric spaces and prove: 1. If a metric space has a covering property of (...) Hurewicz and has strong measure zero, then its product with any strong measure zero metric space is a strong measure zero metric space (Theorem 1 and Lemma 3). 2. A subspace X of a σ-compact metric space Y has strong measure zero if, and only if, a certain Ramseyan partition relation holds for Y (Theorem 9). 3. A subspace X of a σ-compact metric space Y has strong measure zero in all finite powers if, and only if, a certain Ramseyan partition relation holds for Y (Theorem 12). Then 2 and 3 yield characterizations of strong measure zeroness for σ-totally bounded metric spaces in terms of Ramseyan theorems. (shrink)

Though the term “commodification” is used broadly, a theory of the processes by which goods become exchangeable and in fact objects of monetized exchange reveals a key site for technological politics. Commodities are goods that are alienable, somewhat rival, generally with low exclusion costs, and that are often consumed in use. Technological advances can affect all of these traits for certain goods, effectively bringing about a process of commodification by technological means. However, in order to function with specific contexts, technologies (...) are designed and manufactured according to technical standards, standards that in turn take on features of what David Grewal ( 2008 ) has called “network power.” As such, standard setting processes become the potential locus for political argument over the legitimacy of a commodification process. Theorists hoping to develop more democratic theories of technological governance should thus recognize the significance of standards and the role they play in either promoting or controlling social relations organized according to the norms of monetized exchange. (shrink)

The dominant managerial discipline in U.K. companies is finance. Accountants are often viewed as being concerned with what is measurable, definite and controllable. The emphasis is on professional conduct, independence, objectivity, technical competence and confidentiality. This paper explores the concept that the growth of professionalism has created an environment in which functional specialists have different ethical perspectives. The pre‐eminence of accountants is now being challenged by the marketers, a profession that takes a much wider view of business ethics. This (...) development is bound to have implications for corporate perspectives on business ethics. The paper gives the views of a focus group of managers from other disciplines on the relations between accountants and marketers, and analyses the potential for better understanding between the two groups and the implications of this for business ethics. (shrink)

The paper takes into consideration the different degrees of power and control that can be exercised by the mediator/arbitrator. This issue is investigated with particular regard to such aspects as the nature of the ADR procedure adopted, the cultural context in which the procedure takes place, and the formulation of specific legal norms. The analysis both of a few arbitration rules and some data from real arbitral proceedings shows great reliance on the arbitrator’s discretion and use of common sense, (...) which is in line with the idea itself of arbitration. Moreover, the high degree of power autonomy enjoyed by the arbitrator during the whole procedure derives from the presupposition that the parties accept the arbitrator’s personal opinion and final judgment and from the fact that the majority of the disputes in international commercial arbitration are of a technical and complicated nature. The analysis also shows that the legal background of most arbitrators tends to surface even when they are involved in alternative dispute resolution proceedings and is clearly visible in the orderly allocation of turns and the strict control over the procedures to be followed. Especially when arbitrators are lawyers or judges, they tend to promote a feeling of belonging to the same professional community, which induces a greater spirit of cooperation and a lowering of the control level. (shrink)

This article examines the questions of Power and Discourse in this particular period and argues that we can go beyond the recognition of multiplicities in all domains and hence that we can work at producing a shared normative ground for at least some of these multiple critical positions. It does so by focusing on one particular issue, the need to produce a new narrative about the relation of the national state and the global economy. A more precise and critical (...) appraisal of this interaction signals the existence of new political openings both in and outside the formal political system, and of a new politics that could allow citizens to demand accountability from the new global actors. These new political openings and new politics entail the development of a normativity that engages the question of whose claims are legitimate in a context where the supposed neutrality of markets and technology are seen as obviating the need for normative approaches; and represent a critique of older political lineages centered exclusively in the national state that easily excluded many groups which never completely identified with the national state and its representation of the nation. One of the key tasks for intellectuals today is to dig out the inner architecture of power from under the new rational-technical discourses within which it is embedded. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to illustrate concrete problems in the asymmetrical nurse–patient power relationship. It is an ethical demand that the nurse is faced with the challenges that the power in the relation is administered so that the patient's room for action is expanded and trust maintained. It is an essential message in care philosophy, but in clinical practice, success is not always achievable. A hidden and more or less unconscious restriction of the patient's room for (...) action may result in the excesses of care. Three selected aspects: dependence, trust, and power described by the Danish philosopher K.E. Løgstrup and the Norwegian nursing philosopher Kari Martinsen's care philosophy has inspired this empirically based examination of some current barriers in the asymmetrical nurse–patient relationship. On the basis of qualitative interviews with six patients and six nurses, the research thus provides an identifying and problem‐exploratory examination of some current obstacles in which the handling of trust and power reflects the excesses of care. The findings develop three themes. ‘Being a burden’ acknowledges that the balance of power will always tip to the nurse's advantage. The second theme, ‘Doing only what's absolutely necessary’, shows how a fixation with ‘technicalism’ creates a distance between people that may constrain the patient's room for action. The last theme is concerning the nurse's ability to navigate between closeness and distance is essential in avoiding ‘the excesses of care’, paternalism, and overprotectiveness. A situation in which distance takes the upper hand and care turns into paternalism. A different situation would arise if the nurse's emotions became sentimental or intimate with the result that closeness gets the upper hand. To avoid a harmful exercise of power and the excesses of care, the findings have demonstrated that a relationship‐based caring is a demand for situation‐specific sensitive attention skills. (shrink)

Curriculum, as an expression of legitimate knowledge, should be seen as something political rather than technical, that is, as the result of complex power relations and struggles among identifiable...

The recent terrorist attacks and ongoing state of emergency in France have brought questions of police surveillance into the public spotlight, making it increasingly important to understand how police attain data from citizens. Since 2005, the French police have been using IBM’s computer program, i2 Analyst’s Notebook, to aggregate information and craft criminal narratives. This technology serves to quickly connect suspects with crimes, looking for as many associations as possible, ranking and visualizing them based on level of importance. Recently, surveillance (...) and state power have been theorized as having shifted to a posthegemonic, order. Drawing from literature on power, surveillance, and identity, this paper considers the various ways that algorithms can impact policing under a state of emergency by comparing the technical protocol of i2 Analyst’s Notebook with the administrative protocol of the French state. Using i2 Analyst’s Notebook as an example, this paper argues that posthegemonic theories of power have their place in determining how algorithms can be used for surveillance, but that they cannot completely explain their use under the state of emergency. (shrink)

This article examines how childhood has become a strategy that answers to questions concerning the governability of life. The analysis is organized around the concept of “biosocial power,” which is shown to be a particular zone of intensity within the wider field of biopolitics. To grasp this intensity it is necessary to attend to the place of imagination in staging biosocial strategies, that is the specific ways in which childhood is both an imaginary projection and a technical project, (...) and to this end Agamben’s concept of the “anthropological machine” is used to examine how biosocial power has been assembled and deployed. The paper begins with the question of childhood as it was posed towards the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on how this positioned the figure of the child at the intersection of zoē and bios, animal and human, past and future. It ends with a discussion on how the current global obesity “epidemic” has transformed this one-time vision of mastery into a strategy of survival. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Power of PersuasionG. Bennett HumphreyA long white coat, the title of doctor, a practiced professional persona and an appointment to the staff of a prestigious university medical center allows the physician to be a persuader of clinical decisions affecting patient management. When this power of persuasion is used to encourage patient compliance with a therapeutic regimen that might be curative for a fatal disease, there is (...) justification for trying to influence the patient to make choices resulting in a positive outcome. But when a physician is asking permission to enter the patient into a research protocol where the primary goal of the study is the hope of advancing knowledge, then much thought needs to be given to the potential abuse of this power of persuasion.In the 1960s, I found myself having to think about recruiting children into research protocols. I had just finished two years of residency in internal medicine and wanted to pursue a career in academic medicine. My primary interest was in laboratory research. To strengthen my training in research, I had competed for a position as clinical fellow in a western university. The fellowship program was designed to expose young physicians to both clinical and laboratory research. The first year was spent on one of the clinical research wards and the second year in a research laboratory. The program was open to residents from surgery, medicine and pediatrics but because there was a shortage of pediatricians in the program, I was required to work on the children’s leukemia ward for one year.The learning curve was steep during the first few months. Naturally, the faculty in pediatrics and the medical literature gave me a technical education in the use of protocols for therapeutic treatment of leukemia. For example, the first protocol used was designated as Phase III, and the goal was to try to cure the patient. A remission could be achieved in over 90 percent of children but the disease recurred. The median duration of these remissions in the mid–1960s was one year. A relapse was followed by progressive disease and death in a matter of weeks, but a new drug of unknown efficacy could be administered. This was a Phase II protocol, and while there was a chance of prolonging life for a month or so, the primary goal was the identification of drugs anti–leukemic activity.The pediatric leukemia ward experience for me as a fellow was unusual. There was more to learn than the treatment of leukemia. To my surprise, the children and their mothers gave me insight into the care of pediatric patients. Each month, the patients were admitted for five days of intravenous chemotherapy. The first day was traumatic with venipunctures, bone marrow aspirations and the establishment of an IV for the daily infusion of drugs. The remaining four days were for social rounds: listening to the children who liked to talk; talking with the ones who liked to listen; putting puzzles together with some toddlers; responding to a request to listen to the heart of a much loved teddy bear; exchanging jokes and riddles; stories about school, the family dog, or a favorite friend; enjoying the banter of the adolescents; and not invading the privacy of a few who didn’t like me, the ward or the therapy. These children were sharing their childhood with me and it took couple of months for me to recognize I was bonding with these little patients. I observed and listened to the mothers caring for their children and stood in awe of the resources that they brought to bear on having children with a fatal disease. A feeling of mutual respect and trust developed between these mothers and me. For an internist, these experiences were profound and very different from my experience treating adults.A professor, an internationally known researcher in the field of leukemia, was in charge of the ward. Formal rounds were conducted on Tuesday mornings when the result of the bone marrow aspirates and the toxicity of the chemotherapy were reviewed. The day–to–day responsibility for [End Page 101] treatment and informing the mothers on the remission status on Mondays was my responsibility... (shrink)

Deepening and digging into the social side of AI is a novel but emerging requirement within the AI community. Future research should invest in an “AI for people”, going beyond the undoubtedly much-needed efforts into ethics, explainability and responsible AI. The article addresses this challenge by problematizing the discussion around AI shifting the attention to individuals and their awareness, knowledge and emotional response to AI. First, we outline our main argument relative to the need for a socio-technical perspective in (...) the study of AI social implications. Then, we illustrate the main existing narratives of hopes and fears associated with AI and robots. As building blocks of broader “sociotechnical imaginaries”, narratives are powerful tools that shape how society sees, interprets and organizes technology. An original empirical study within the University of Bologna collects the data to examine the levels of awareness, knowledge and emotional response towards AI, revealing interesting insights to be carried on in future research. Replete with exaggerations, both utopian and dystopian narratives are analysed with respect to some relevant socio-demographic variables (gender, generation and competence). Finally, focusing on two issues—the state of AI anxiety and the point of view of non-experts—opens the floor to problematizing the discourse around AI, sustaining the need for a sociological perspective in the field of AI and discussing future comparative research. (shrink)

With the recent renewed interest in AI, the field has made substantial advancements, particularly in generative systems. Increased computational power and the availability of very large datasets has enabled systems such as ChatGPT to effectively replicate aspects of human social interactions, such as verbal communication, thus bringing about profound changes in society. In this paper, we explain that the arrival of generative AI systems marks a shift from ‘interacting through’ to ‘interacting with’ technologies and calls for a reconceptualization of (...) socio-technical systems as we currently understand them. We dub this new generation of socio-technical systems synthetic to signal the increased interactions between human and artificial agents, and, in the footsteps of philosophers of information, we cash out agency in terms of ‘poiêsis’. We close the paper with a discussion of the potential policy implications of synthetic socio-technical system. -/- . (shrink)

Current philosophical theorizing about technical functions is mainly focused on specifying conditions under which agents are justified in ascribing functions to technical artifacts. Yet, assessing the precise explanatory relevance of such function ascriptions is, by and large, a neglected topic in the philosophy of technical artifacts and technical functions. We assess the explanatory utility of ascriptions of technical functions in the following three explanation-seeking contexts: why was artifact x produced?, why does artifact x not have (...) the expected capacity to ϕ?, how does artifact x realize its capacity to ϕ? We argue that while function ascriptions serve a mere heuristic role in the first context, they have substantial explanatory leverage in the second and third context. In addition, we assess the relevance of function ascriptions in the context of engineering redesign. Here, function ascriptions also play a relevant role: they enable normative statements of the sort that component b functions better than component a. We unpack these claims by considering philosophical theories of technical functions, in particular the ICE theory, and engineering work on function ascription and explanation. We close the paper by relating our analysis to current debates on the explanatory power of mechanistic vis-à-vis functional explanations. (shrink)

This article focuses on the power of technological mediation from the point of view of autonomist Marxism. The first part of the article discusses the theories developed on technological mediation in postphenomenology and critical theory of technology with regard to their respective power perspectives and ways of coping with relations of power embedded in technical artifacts and systems. Rather than focusing on the clashes between the hermeneutic postphenomenological approach and the dialectics of critical theory, it is (...) argued that in both the category of resistance amidst power-relations is at least similar in one regard: resistance to the power of technology is conceptualized as a reactive force. The second part of the article reads technological mediation through the lens of the antagonistic power-perspective on class struggle developed in autonomist Marxism. The outline of a provisional autonomist philosophy of technology is developed using Foucauldian dispositifs of biopower in contrast to the hermeneutic and dialectical approach. It is thus argued that resistance should here be understood in terms of practice that subverts the technically mediated circuit of production itself. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to establish that Lewis Mumford’s historical and philosophical writings were heavily influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. It is argued that Freudian ideas and concepts played a foundational role in the construction of Mumford’s views on the nature and function of mind, culture and history, which in turn founded his views on the relationship between technology and society. Indeed, it is argued that a full understanding of Mumford’s technological writings cannot be achieved (...) until one has grasped their psychoanalytic influence. To this end, this article will reconstruct the psychological views of Lewis Mumford and indicate how they draw upon and modify Freudian theory. It will then be shown how Mumford’s theory of the psyche interacts with Mumford’s own concept of the idolum. This interaction, I will argue, considerably underpins Mumford’s holistic views on the relationship between society and the individual and between the internal and external world and will require us to reconsider our understanding of Mumford’s philosophy of technology, particularly with regard to his descriptions of monotechnics and biotechnics, the authoritarian and democratic technological forms. It will be argued that for Mumford the division intechnics corresponds to a division in the human psyche, and indeed arises from it. Not only will an appreciation of Mumford’s Freudian influence alter our understanding of Mumford’s technological writings in general, but also in particular it can enable us better to comprehend the reasoning behind Mumford’s recommended method of resistance to the modern power complex of the megamachine. Such a revised understanding of Mumford’s philosophy also undercuts any attempts to characterize his position as being a technological determinist one. Rather, his philosophy of technology is better understood as a form of technological voluntarism. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore the close link between technology and death in the philosophical writings of Lewis Mumford. Mumford famously argued that throughout the history of western civilization we find intertwined two competing forms of technics; the democratic biotechnic form and the authoritarian monotechnic form. The former technics were said to be strongly compatible with an organic form of life while the latter were said to be allied to a mechanical power complex. What is perhaps (...) less well known is the extent to which Mumford characterizes the authoritarian technical form as being a technics of death. This article will argue that the connection between death and technics is a key theme in Mumford’s philosophy of technology. In addition to elaborating this theme and detailing how it informs Mumford’s other positions on the nature of technology, this article will also argue that Mumford’s theory of a technics of death bears witness, both implicitly and explicitly, to the influence of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the death instinct. Freud’s account of the death instinct will be outlined briefly and its influence on Mumford’s writings will be explained. Death, in Mumford’s technological writings, has a generally negative function and serves to warn humanity of the perilous course that its technological civilization is set upon. However it also has a positive function in that it encourages man to transcend its biological existence in acts of creativity and purpose. Death, in this positive sense, serves the purpose of life whereas, in the negative sense, it hinders it. The role of death, in both aspects, will be explored and related to Mumford’s overall perspective on technics and life. It is argued that Mumford’s philosophy of technology cannot be fully understood without an awareness of his views on death and its role in the life of technological society. (shrink)

In this paper we examine Nietzsche’s relation to the life sciences of his time and to Darwinism in particular, arguing that his account of the will to power in terms of technics eschews three metaphysical prejudices, hylemorphism, utilitarianism, and teleological thinking. Telescoping some of Nietzsche’s pronouncements on the will to power with a Bergsonian lens, our reading of the will to power, as an operation productive of time, the future or life, offers an alternative to Heidegger’s. Rather (...) than being reducible to a technics of domination or mastery, the will to power, we argue, is best interpreted as a technics of material forces that recasts all things past and future, near and far, moment by moment. (shrink)

This research attempts to construct a second order observation model in understanding the significance of Artificial intelligence (AI) in changing the global power structure. Because of the inevitable ubiquity of AI in the world societies’ near future, it impacts all the sections of society triggering socio-technical iterative developments. Its horizontal impact and states’ race to become leader in the AI world asks for a vivid understanding of its impact on the international system. To understand the latter, Triple Helix (...) (TH) model along with Shannon’s information entropy has been used to operationalize system’s theory. This model uses Shannon’s information theory to calculate the uncertainty generated from the interactions between the sub-systems considered. Data for the latter has been taken from Sanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory 2019 report. It is found that European countries are the most effected in the AI era, with probability of losing their global influence and thus creating power void. Emerging powers such as India, Canada, South Africa and Brazil have better chances to fill the void and emerge as global influences. (shrink)

Neuroscientists have long sought to study the dynamic activity of the human brain—what's happening in the brain, that is, while people are thinking, feeling, and acting. Ideally, an inside look at brain function would simultaneously and continuously measure the biochemical state of every cell in the central nervous system. While such a miraculous method is science fiction, a century of progress in neuroimaging technologies has made such simultaneous and continuous measurement a plausible fiction. Despite this progress, practitioners of modern neuroimaging (...) struggle with two kinds of limitations: those that attend the particular neuroimaging methods we have today and those that would limit any method of imaging neural activity, no matter how powerful.In this essay, I consider the liabilities and potential of techniques that measure human brain activity. I am concerned here only with methods that measure relevant physiologic states of the central nervous system and relate those measures to particular mental states. I will consider in particular the preeminent method of functional neuroimaging: BOLD fMRI. While there are several practical limits on the biological information that current technologies can measure, these limits—as important as they are—are minor in comparison to the fundamental logical restraints on the conclusions that can be drawn from brain imaging studies. (shrink)