This volume contains a selection of contributions to the workshop 'Linguistic realization of evidentiality in European languages', held at the 30th Annual ...

Dieser Band bietet eine Auswahl der Beiträge der Tagung "Modalität und Evidentialität", die vom 31. Mai bis 2. Juni 2010 an der Leibniz Universität Hannover stattfand, sowie weitere einschlägige Aufsätze. Die Tagung führte die Tradition der Treffen des Arbeitskreises "Modalität im Deutschen" fort und nahm mit dem Schwerpunkt "Modalität und Evidentialität" ein in der Linguistik aktuelles und intensiv diskutiertes Thema auf. Evidentialität, d.h. die sprachliche Kennzeichnung der Informationsquellen für Äußerungen, und Modalität sind eng verwandt, weshalb sich der Band intensiv mit (...) grundsätzlichen Fragen nach dem Verhältnis zwischen diesen beiden Kategorien befasst. Es wird gefragt, ob und wie die semantisch-funktionalen Domänen Modalität und Evidentialität und ihre Realisierungsformen im Deutschen (und in anderen Sprachen) voneinander zu unterscheiden sind und wie genau ihr Verhältnis zueinander am besten beschrieben werden kann. Über die Frage der kategoriellen Einordnung hinaus werden auch synchrone und diachrone Aspekte der Grammatikalisierung evidentieller und modaler Ausdrucksmittel sowie funktionale Differenzierungen in textsortenspezifischen und kontrastiven Blickwinkeln erörtert und so das Spektrum relevanter Probleme in diesem Feld bearbeitet. Die spezifischen Erkenntnisse zum Deutschen, die dieser Band bietet, sind bedeutsam für die germanistische sprachwissenschaftliche Forschung und auch für die Grammatikschreibung des Deutschen, die der Evidentialität bislang keine angemessene Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt hat. (shrink)

The question whether AI systems have agency is gaining increasing importance in discussions of responsibility for AI behavior. This paper argues that an approach to artificial agency needs to be teleological, and consider the role of human goals in particular if it is to adequately address the issue of responsibility. I will defend the view that while AI systems can be viewed as autonomous in the sense of identifying or pursuing goals, they rely on human goals and other values incorporated (...) into their design, and are, as such, dependent on human agents. As a consequence, AI systems cannot be held morally responsible, and responsibility attributions should take into account normative and social aspects involved in the design and deployment of the said AI. My argument falls in line with approaches critical of attributing moral agency to artificial agents, but draws from the philosophy of action, highlighting further philosophical underpinnings of current debates on artificial agency. (shrink)

This paper addresses the phenomenological experience of precarity and vulnerability in racialized gender-based violence from a structural perspective. Informed by Indigenous social theory and anti-colonial approaches to intergenerational trauma that link settler colonial violence to the modalities of stress-inducing social, institutional, and cultural violences in marginalized women’s lives, I argue that philosophical failures to understand trauma as a functional, organizational tool of settler colonial violence amplify the impact of traumatic experience on specific populations. It is trauma by design. I explore (...) this through the history of the concept of trauma and its connection to tragedy. I give a brief overview of prominent theories of trauma and contrast these with the work of Indigenous feminist scholar Dian Million (2013), who highlights functional complicity of settler colonial institutions in shaping accounts of trauma in the west. I begin the piece with an important illustration of the kinds of lives and experiences that call for a politicized understanding of trauma in anti-colonial feminist theory. I end by offering an expansive notion of structural trauma that is a methodological pivot for conducting trauma-based gender-based violence research in a decolonial context, which calls for an end to narratives of trauma that are severed from the settler colonial project of Native land dispossession and genocide. [Volume 23, no.1]. (shrink)

Symmetry considerations dominate modern fundamental physics, both in quantum theory and in relativity. Philosophers are now beginning to devote increasing attention to such issues as the significance of gauge symmetry, quantum particle identity in the light of permutation symmetry, how to make sense of parity violation, the role of symmetry breaking, the empirical status of symmetry principles, and so forth. These issues relate directly to traditional problems in the philosophy of science, including the status of the laws of nature, the (...) relationships between mathematics, physical theory, and the world, and the extent to which mathematics suggests new physics.This entry begins with a brief description of the historical roots and emergence of the concept of symmetry that is at work in modern science. It then turns to the application of this concept to physics, distinguishing between two different uses of symmetry: symmetry principles versus symmetry arguments. It mentions the different varieties of physical symmetries, outlining the ways in which they were introduced into physics. Then, stepping back from the details of the various symmetries, it makes some remarks of a general nature concerning the status and significance of symmetries in physics. (shrink)

This book is a consideration of Hegel’s view on logic and basic logical concepts such as truth, form, validity, and contradiction, and aims to assess this view’s relevance for contemporary philosophical logic. The literature on Hegel’s logic is fairly rich. The attention to contemporary philosophical logic places the present research closer to those works interested in the link between Hegel’s thought and analytical philosophy, Koch 2014, Brandom 2014, 1-15, Pippin 2016, Moyar 2017, Quante & Mooren 2018 among others). In this (...) context, one particularity of this book consists in focusing on something that has been generally underrated in the literature: the idea that, for Hegel as well as for Aristotle and many other authors, logic is the study of the forms of truth, i.e. the forms that our thought can assume in searching for truth. In this light, Hegel’s thinking about logic is a fundamental reference point for anyone interested in a philosophical foundation of logic. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to lay bare the roots of dialetheism in discussions about dialectics and dialectical logic at the time of the first development of paraconsistent logics. In other words, th...

In recent years postcolonial and decolonial feminisms have become increasingly salient in philosophy, yet they are often deployed as conceptual stand-ins for generalized feminist critiques of eurocentrism (without reference to the material contexts anti-colonial feminisms emanate from), or as a platform to re-center internal debates between dominant European theories/ists under the guise of being conceptually ‘decolonized’. By contrast, this article focuses on the specific contexts, issues and lifeworld concerns that ground anti-colonial feminisms and provides a brief survey of the literature. (...) Because the terms implicated in the analysis (Third World, transnational, women of color, postcolonial, decolonial and indigenous feminisms) are highly contested on their own, I only provide provisional and non-foundational histories and definitions for the purposes of resisting philosophical appropriations of anti-colonial feminist theory. (shrink)

Intersectionality is a term that arose within the black feminist intellectual tradition for the purposes of identifying interlocking systems of oppression. As a descriptive term, it refers to the ways human identity is shaped by multiple social vectors and overlapping identity categories (such as sex, race, class) that may not be readily visible in single-axis formulations of identity, but which are taken to be integral to robustly capture the multifaceted nature of human experience. As a diagnostic term, it captures the (...) confluence of power and domination on the social construction of identity in order to remedy concrete harms that result from this convergence. It is not a prescriptive methodology or closed system of analysis, but rather an open-ended hermeneutic lens through which interconnected systems of oppression can come into focus in the fight for social justice. (shrink)

In this paper, I reconstruct the reasons why Aristotle thinks that musical education is important for moral education. Musical education teaches us to enjoy appropriately and to recognize perceptually fine melodies and rhythms. Fine melodies and rhythms are similar to the kind of movements fine actions consist in and fine characters display. By teaching us to enjoy and recognise fine melodies and rhythms, musical education can train us to recognize and to take pleasure in fine actions and characters. Thus, musical (...) education can, up to a point, lead us toward the actions and character dispositions a virtuous life requires. (shrink)

This chapter proceeds in two ways. First, I argue that Fanon’s structural witnessing of racism yields important insights about the nature of violence that challenges the settler colonial concept of violence as the extra-legal use of force. Second, I argue that his analysis of violence is insufficient for combating colonial racism and violence because, using the terms of his own analysis, it leaves intact logics and mechanisms that allow racism to structurally renew itself in perpetuity: violence against women. Without a (...) critical feminism that tracks the alterities of structural violence against women, and women of color in particular, Fanonianism is just another lifeline of colonialism. I thus caution against uncritical uses of Fanon’s structural account of violence for any emancipatory social theory that fails to acknowledge the attendant alterities, asymmetries, and axes of coordinated subordination involved in racialized violence against women. (shrink)

Systemic epistemic failings in institutions are often explained through settler epistemologies and settler colonial frameworks that both obscure and reproduce the conditions necessary for those failings to endure. What is never questioned in the standard picture of institutional epistemic injustice is the implicit origin myth of an ‘institutional big bang’ that spawned many modern social institutions out of presumably noble orienting goals for a well-functioning society in democratic nation-states. We are concerned with the functional outcomes of institutions in settler colonial (...) societies, and how these outcomes consistently undermine whitewashed narratives of any inherent institutional design allegedly aimed at promoting testimonial justice in settler colonial societies. Institutions are built to target and maintain a status quo, especially (but not only) when they are charged with securing part of the social order or fabric of settler colonial societies. We will illustrate this concern through a discussion of various functional outcomes of the U.S. institution of asylum using Shannon Speed’s (2019. Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State. The University of North Carolina Press) analysis of the violence Indigenous women migrants from Latin America experience within the complex administrative web of U.S. migration and asylum systems. (shrink)

Slurs have become a big topic of discussion both in philosophy and in linguistics. Slurs are usually characterised as pejorative terms, co-extensional with other, neutral, terms referring to ethnic or social groups. However, slurs are not the only ethnic/social words with pejorative senses. Our aim in this paper is to introduce a different kind of pejoratives, which we will call “ethnic/social terms used as insults”, as exemplified in Spanish, though present in many other languages and mostly absent in English. These (...) are ethnic terms like gitano, ‘Romani’, which can have an extensional and neutral use, but also a pejorative meaning building on a negative stereotypical representation of the Romani community. (shrink)

The first to use Judith Butlers work as a reading of how the legal subject is formed, this book traces how Butler comes to the themes of ethics, law and ...

It has been a long-standing puzzle that Negative Polarity Items appear to split into two subvarieties when their effect on the interpretation of questions is taken into account: while questions with any and ever can be used as unbiased requests of information, questions with so-called `minimizers', i.e. idioms like lift a finger and the faintest idea, are always biased towards a negative answer (cf. Ladusaw 1979). Focusing on yes/no questions, this paper presents a solution to this puzzle. Specifically it is (...) shown that in virtue of containing even (cf. Heim 1984), minimizers, unlike any, trigger a presupposition, which reduces the set of the possible answers to a question to the singleton containing the negative answer. (shrink)

This essay addresses structural violence against Latinas by looking at the existential toll different forms of cultural violence take on us. In particular, it looks at linguistic violence and the role lesser-known violences play in the intergenerational continuation of colonial violence, such as hermeneutic violence. Defined as violence done to systems of meaning and interpretation, hermeneutic violence is discussed at length in relation to the experience of harm and injury. The essay further explores some resistant epistemic practices Latina feminists have (...) generated to address systemic violence. The work of Gloria Anzaldúa is elaborated as an example of resistant epistemic practices. (shrink)

Approaching mental health on a global scale with particular reference to low- and mid-income countries raises issues concerning the disregard of the local context and values and the imposition of values characteristic of the Global North. Seeking a philosophical viewpoint to surmount these problems, the present paper argues for a value-laden framework for psychiatry with the specific incorporation of value pluralism, particularly in relation to the Global South context, while also emphasizing personal values such as the choice of treatment. In (...) sketching out this framework, the paper aims to overcome the clash between universalism and relativism about psychiatric categories by focusing on how overlaps between cultures can contribute to ontology-building. A case study analyzing ethnopsychiatric research in the context of South India will illustrate the proposed view, while also pointing out avenues for further research on the causal efficacy of local shared beliefs about mental disorder. If approaches across different traditions and theoretical frames are shown to work in treating similar ailments, causal connections appear to cut across the different ontologies. Ethnopsychiatry would play a central role in such research, namely in disclosing the variables and mechanisms at work within the local approaches. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the possibility of interpreting Hegel’s dialectic as dialetheism. After a first basic recapitulation about the meaning of the words ‘dialetheism’ and ‘dialectic’ and a consideration of Priest’s own account of the relation between dialectical and dialetheic logic in 1989, I discuss some controversial issues, not directly considered by Priest. As a matter of fact, the reflection on paraconsistent logics and dialetheism has enormously grown in recent years. In addition, the reception of Hegel’s logic and metaphysics (...) has also impressively improved. So I suggest that the discussion about the binomial dialectic/dialetheism should be reopened, on these new bases. (shrink)

Fictions feature prominently in several of Hume’s important arguments about the external world. For example, Hume is clear that there would be no belief in the continued existence of objects, were it not for the fictions that are causally responsible for effecting this belief. Interpreters of Hume on the topic of fiction generally argue that the formation of fiction requires the possession of general ideas and the use of language. Drawing upon recent attempts in the literature to advance this claim, (...) I offer reasons for why this general approach is undesirable. By examining Hume’s comments on the capabilities of children, this paper advances a novel approach to the topic of fictions in Hume’s philosophy that separates the matter of fiction formation from the use of language, arguing instead that it is not the use of language that establishes fictions; fictions exert their influence upon the mind before the use of language becomes available to us. (shrink)

Ideal theory in social and political philosophy generally works to hide philosophical theories’ complicity in sustaining the structural violence and maintenance of white supremacy that are foundational to settler colonial societies. While non-ideal theory can provide a corrective to some of ideal theory’s intended omissions, it can also work to conceal the same systems of violence that ideal theory does, especially when framed primarily as a response to ideal theory. This article takes a decolonial approach to exploring the limitations of (...) non-ideal theory in its ability to respond to and redress the continuing harms done to Indigenous peoples by settler colonialism, including by outlining non-ideal theory’s relationship to a colonial politics of recognition. (shrink)

Is there more that one "Curie's principle"? How far are different formulations legitimate? What are the aspects that make it so scientifically fruitful, independently of how it is formulated? The paper is devoted to exploring these questions. We start with illustrating Curie's original 1894 article and his focus. Then, we consider the way that the discussion of the principle took shape from early commentators to its modern form. We say why we think that the modern focus on the inter-state version (...) of the principle loses sight of some of the most interesting significant applications of the principle. Finally, we address criticism of the principle put forward by Norton and purported counterexamples due to Roberts. (shrink)

The idea at the basis of this special issue is that reopening the old debate about the logical status of Hegel’s dialectics is extremely interesting, for various reasons.1 The first reason is that...

One could say that we are human beings to the degree to which our conscience is developed. My paper analyses the conscience from an ethical point of view and states that it is to be understood as the measure of morality within a person. [‘Moral’ refers to a sense of right and wrong, and ethics to the principles of “good” and “bad” agreed by a society]. Taking into consideration that there are people who feel an acute sense of guilt when (...) committing a crime and others who feel nothing, my work tries to identify the factors responsible for such a state of affairs. Therefore, it deals with the question, “Why are there considerable differences among people from the point of view of morality?”. I shall elaborate mainly on the role of education and genetic heritage, which are instrumental in the development of moral conscience within a person. Their influence in shaping it is ensured by the activity of the neurons and of other processes within the brain, which firstly produce the human consciousness. Other elements ‘grow’ on it. (shrink)

This paper investigates Negative Concord, arguing that it results from a systematic lexical ambiguity: the items that participate in Negative Concord ("n-words" in Laka's 1990 terminology) are ambiguous between negative polarity items and their genuinely negative counterparts. I try to show that on empirical grounds the proposed account compares favorably with other analyses that shy away from ambiguity. I furthermore suggest that the ambiguity is not implausible conceptually because it can be viewed as reflecting an intermediate stage of the Jespersen (...) Cycle. Negative Concord can be observed in many languages. The data discussed here are taken from Romance, primarily Spanish. (shrink)

This essay discusses the ethical challenges and dilemmas in allocating scarce medical resources during the COVID-19 pandemic, using the German legislative process as a starting point. It is guided by the right to non-discrimination of people with disability and generally contrasts utilitarian and rights-based principles of allocation. Three approaches that were suggested in the German discussion, are presented, the lottery principle, the first come first served principle and the probability to survive principle. Arguments in favour and against each principle are (...) discussed. The focus is on the utilitarian probability to survive principle, which was adopted in German legislation in 2022, and its discriminatory potential against people with disability. The essay suggests ways to mitigate the concerns of discrimination related to the probability to survive principle. It concludes that resolving the triage dilemma requires a balanced approach between utilitarian and rights-based concerns, which promotes both maximising the number of patients surviving and the right not to be discriminated against and be treated equally. It calls for a further debate on how many ethical values such as equity, fairness and non-discrimination we are willing to sacrifice for a higher number of survivors and when we are willing to sacrifice survivors to secure ethical values. (shrink)

This comment considers the Italian Law 194 on abortion forty years after its approval in 1978 and it focuses on how its meaning has emerged as a result of its interpretation and application over that forty-year period.

This paper investigates the concept of behavioral autonomy in Artificial Life by drawing a parallel to the use of teleological notions in the study of biological life. Contrary to one of the leading assumptions in Artificial Life research, I argue that there is a significant difference in how autonomous behavior is understood in artificial and biological life forms: the former is underlain by human goals in a way that the latter is not. While behavioral traits can be explained in relation (...) to evolutionary history in biological organisms, in synthetic life forms behavior depends on a design driven by a research agenda, further shaped by broader human goals. This point will be illustrated with a case study on a synthetic life form. Consequently, the putative epistemic benefit of reaching a better understanding of behavioral autonomy in biological organisms by synthesizing artificial life forms is subject to doubt: the autonomy observed in such artificial organisms may be a mere projection of human agency. Further questions arise in relation to the need to spell out the relevant human aims when addressing potential social or ethical implications of synthesizing artificial life forms. (shrink)

One way to track the many critical impacts of women of color feminisms is through the powerful structural analyses of gendered and racialized oppression they offer. This article discusses diverse lineages of women of color feminisms in the global South that tackle systemic structures of power and domination from their situated perspectives. It offers an introduction to structuralist theories in the humanities and differentiates them from women of color feminist theorizing, which begins analyses of structures from embodied and phenomenological st¬¬andpoints--with (...) the day-to-day concerns of our lives. The essay is divided into three sections. In section one, I discuss theories of structure in the humanities and sciences, differentiating them from women of color’s analysis of structure as diagnostic of the ways colonial power relations are functionalized through social structures. In section two, I discuss the diverse contexts of interpretation that background women of color feminisms, outlining key themes and ideas related to theories of structure. I argue against a unified theory of women of color structural feminisms that supplants difference, favoring a rehabilitated concept of structure for the purposes of making targeted interventions in contemporary radical anti-colonial politics. I offer the example of systematic marginalization produced by colonial violence and mythology as one reason to take up this approach. In section three, I outline four provisional characteristics of women of color structural feminisms. I conclude that, when divested from colonial myths that guide mainstream notions of structure, it can be a useful hermeneutic tactic in the fight for liberation from ongoing colonial violence. (shrink)

Asumiendo que la decolonialidad planetaria es apodíctica de la complejidad y de la transdisciplinariedad, bajo rupturas asignificantes, en condiciones abiertas para conformar al ser humano a pensar complejamente, sustentamos transepistemes devinientes de las rupturas asignificantes de la decolonialidad planetaria-complejidad como objetivo complejo de indagación; en _las líneas de investigación_: educación-transepistemologías transcomplejas, Decolonialidad planetaria-complejidad en re-ligaje y transepistemologías de los conocimientos-saberes y transmetodologías transcomplejas. Lo realizamos con el transmétodo la hermenéutica comprensiva, ecosófica y diatópica; en los momentos analíticos, empíricos y propositivos. (...) En el momento propositivo los transepistemes decoloniales planetarios – complejos van desmitificando des-ligando los epistemes fi_jos con pretendidas y vendidas aseveraciones hacia el colonizador. _Los transepistemes por su esencia decolonial planetaria ponen en igual grado de importancia todos los saberes ancestrales, y desde el patrimonio histórico de las civilizaciones aportan al conocer desde transmetodologías otras, abiertas, inclusivas; transdisciplinares fuera de los i_mpositores de la destrucción de la naturaleza en una falsa conquista_; por ello salvaguardar los saberes ancestrales como transepistemes ricos en amor por la humanidad es aceptar que somos naturaleza en la Tierra como patria. _Transepistemes transdisciplinares como ejercicios de liberación_, _conocedores y promotores de la complejidad de la vida_; es una esencia característica de los transepistemes que nos incitan a una nueva civilización de hacer ciencia, de conocer rompiendo las fronteras de las ciencias. (shrink)

The relevance of symmetry to today's physics is a widely acknowledged fact. A significant part of recent physical inquiry – especially the physics concerned with investigating the fundamentalbuilding blocks of nature – is grounded on symmetry principles andtheir many and far-reaching consequences. But where these symmetries come from and what their real meaning is are open questions, at the center of a developing debate among physicists and philosophers of science. To tackle the problems arising in considering the symmetry issue is (...) the main purpose of this paper. Starting with briefly recalling the bases for the discussion – how symmetry enters and operates in physics, its special effectiveness in the quantum domain and the many relevant functions it performs (Sections 1–3), the paper then focus on the general interpretative questions that arise and the sorts of answers that have been given (Section 4). (shrink)

This note introduces a framework incorporating multiple sources of evidence into the response to COVID-19 to overcome the neglect of social and psychological causes of illness. By using the example of psychological research on loneliness and its effects on physical and mental health with particular focus on aging and disability, I seek to open further inquiry into how relevant psychological and social aspects of health can be addressed at policy level.

This paper studies the effects of social comparison on risk taking behavior. In our theoretical framework, decision makers evaluate the consequences of their choices relative to both their own and their peers’ conditions. We test experimentally whether the position in the social ranking affects risk attitudes. Subjects interact in a simulated workplace environment where they perform a work task, receive possibly different wages, and then undertake a risky decision that may produce an extra gain. We find that social comparison matters (...) for risk attitudes. Subjects are more risk averse in the presence of small social gain than social loss. In addition, risk aversion is decreasing in the size of the social gain. (shrink)

Aristotle is a political scientist and a student of biology. Political science, in his view, is concerned with the human good and thus it includes the study of ethics. He approaches many subjects from the perspective of both political science and biology: the virtues, the function of humans, and the political nature of humans. In light of the overlap between the two disciplines, I look at whether or not Aristotle’s views in biology influence or explain some of his theses in (...) political science. I show that we should not seek a unified answer to this question, for the relationship between the two disciplines varies depending on the topic. In some cases, e.g. the nature of the human function, the biological background is likely to be endorsed as one of the presuppositions of the ethical enquiry. In other cases, e.g. the study of social hierarchies, even though the ethical works and the biological works come to similar conclusions, it is hard to establish that the biological approach is intended to provide support to the ethico-political approach. In conclusion, I show that Aristotle’s political science and his biology are in conflict at least in two important cases: his account of justice towards non-human animals and his exhortation to contemplate. (shrink)

Can recognition theories distinguish legitimate from illegitimate claims to recognition put forward by social movements? This paper identifies an under-theorised problem of recognition theories: in viewing struggles for recognition as a force for social progress in the mould of the New Social Movements of the 1960s and 1970s, existing accounts have trouble identifying and ruling out illegitimate claims to recognition as formulated by contemporary counter-movements like white supremacists or men’s rights activists. I refer to this issue as the symmetry problem (...) of recognition since it amounts to difficulties in identifying grounds for excluding illegitimate claims to recognition that do not also symmetrically justify the exclusion of legitimate ones (and vice versa). I argue that criteria for telling apart legitimate from illegitimate claims to recognition need to include interpretation issues as a dimension of analysis, which consequently requires incorporating democratic deliberation as a necessary component of recognition theory. (shrink)

The paper argues in favour of a direct realist reading of Aquinas’s theory of intelligible species, in opposition to the recent representationalist challenges. In order to secure the direct realist reading, the paper follows three steps: a short description of Aquinas’s process of cognition, a survey of the direct realist arguments and the analysis of the representationalist interpretation. The final step consists of investigating the representationalist reading as it is suggested by two scholars, Claude Panaccio in Aquinas on Intellectual Representation (...) and Robert Pasnau in Theories of Cognition in the Latter Middle Ages. Thus, the paper can be construed as a reply to these two authors, due to the thorough attention paid to their argumentative trails. With regard to Panaccio’s reading the paper focuses on the identity between the intelligible species and the essence of the extra-mental object and argues that Panaccio understands identity in a very narrow sense. Concerning Pasnau’s line of reasoning the focus is on the primum cognitum status of the intelligible species, and the main argument is that intelligible species is understood by Aquinas as the quo and not the quod of cognition. As the paper shows, neither one, nor the other interpretation poses a threat to the direct realist reading of Aquinas’s intelligible species. (shrink)

Naukovedenie (literarily meaning ‘science studies’), was first institutionalized in the Soviet Union in the twenties, then resurfaced and was widely publicized in the sixties, as a new mode of reflection on science, its history, its intellectual foundations, and its management, after which it dominated Soviet historiography of science until perestroika . Tracing the history of meta-studies of science in the USSR from its early institutionalization in the twenties when various political, theoretical and institutional struggles set the stage for the development (...) of the field, to the sixties when the field resurfaced within the particular political context of the Cold War, and using the history of Moscow Institute for the History of Science and Technology as a case-study, I situate Soviet naukovedenie project within the culture of late-socialism in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, asking what this discourse meant for its creators and practitioners, as well as for the high-ranked Soviet officials who provided the authoritative support for this field. (shrink)

This is a draft of the introduction to the collective volume "The birth of string theory", including the book's index and preface. The book explores the history of the theory’s early stages of development, as told by its main protagonists. It journeys from the first version of the theory in the late 1960s, as an attempt to describe the physics of strong interactions outside the framework of quantum field theory, to its reinterpretation around the mid-1970s as a quantum theory of (...) gravity unified with the other interactions, and its successive developments up to the superstring revolution in 1984. The introductive Chapter summarizes the main developments and contains a chronological synopsis with a list of key results and publications. (shrink)