'Mass terms', words like water, rice and traffic, have proved very difficult to accommodate in any theory of meaning since, unlike count nouns such as house or dog, they cannot be viewed as part of a logical set and differ in their grammatical properties. In this study, motivated by the need to design a computer program for understanding natural language utterances incorporating mass terms, Harry Bunt provides a thorough analysis of the problem and offers an original and detailed solution. An (...) extension of classical set theory, Ensemble Theory, is defined, and this provides the conceptual basis of a framework for the analysis of natural language meaning which Dr Bunt calls Two-level model-theoretic semantics. The validity of the framework is convincingly demonstrated by the formal analysis of a fragment of English including sentences with quantified and modified mass terms. Separate chapters of the book are devoted to an axiomatic definition of Ensemble Theory and a detailed discussion of its status as a mathematical formalism. (shrink)

In the past twenty years, the field of science and technology studies (S&TS) has made considerable progress toward illuminating the relationship between scientific knowledge and political power. These insights have not yet been synthesized or presented in a form that systematically highlights the connections between S&TS and other social sciences. This timely collection of essays by some of the leading scholars in the field attempts to fill that gap. The book develops the theme of "co-production", showing how scientific knowledge both (...) embeds and is embedded in social identities, institutions, representations and discourses. Accordingly, the authors argue, ways of knowing the world are inseparably linked to the ways in which people seek to organize and control it. Through studies of emerging knowledges, research practices and political institutions, the authors demonstrate that the idiom of co-production importantly extends the vocabulary of the traditional social sciences, offering fresh analytic perspectiveson the nexus of science, power and culture. (shrink)

For a long time, the transcendental dialectic was not at the center of Kant scholarship but was often treated simply as Kant’s reckoning with contemporary metaphysics. Accordingly, the main interest was in the transcendental analytic, especially the transcendental deduction. It is all the more gratifying that in recent times a rethinking seems to be taking place on this issue. In the following, I shall attempt to show why the transcendental dialectic is something more than an addendum to the core business (...) of the Critique of Pure Reason. Rather, it forms the culmination of the work, demanding our full attention. Indeed, it provides the key to the entire critical philosophy by exhibiting reason itself as the ultimate founding principle in the form of its Idea. (shrink)

Unlike earlier attempts to prove the completeness of the table of judgments, this book takes the fundamental position that an answer can only be found in the context of a basic interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason that encompasses the metaphysical and transcendental deduction of the categories and ideas, the role played by cognitive capacity, transcendental apperception, and the theory of affects.

'Gender Hurts' examines the wider social and political context and implications of the phenomenon of transgenderism. Jeffreys and Gottschalk propose that gender in western culture is socially constructed as the basis of male domination and that the concept of gender has the potential to hurt many.

Scholars in science and technology studies (STS) have recently been called upon to advise governments on the design of procedures for public engagement. Any such instrumental function should be carried out consistently with STS’s interpretive and normative obligations as a social science discipline. This article illustrates how such threefold integration can be achieved by reviewing current US participatory politics against a 70-year backdrop of tacit constitutional developments in governing science and technology. Two broad cycles of constitutional adjustment are discerned: the (...) first enlarging the scope of state action as well as public participation, with liberalized rules of access and sympathetic judicial review; the second cutting back on the role of the state, fostering the rise of an academic-industrial complex for technology transfer, and privatizing value debates through increasing delegation to professional ethicists. New rules for public engagement in the United Sates should take account of these historical developments and seek to counteract some of the anti-democratic tendencies observable in recent decades. (shrink)

From Hippocrates to paternalism to autonomy : the new hegemony -- From autonomy to consent -- Consent, autonomy, and the law -- Autonomy at the end of life -- Autonomy and pregnancy -- Autonomy and genetic information -- Autonomy and organ transplantation -- Autonomy, consent, and the law.

This book provides an in-depth view of the current issues, problems and approaches in the computation of meaning as expressed in language. Aimed at linguists, computer scientists, and logicians with an interest in the computation of meaning, this book focuses on two main topics in recent research in computational semantics. The first topic is the definition and use of underspecified semantic representations, i.e. formal structures that represent part of the meaning of a linguistic object while leaving other parts unspecified. The (...) second topic discussed is semantic annotation. Annotated corpora have become an indispensable resource both for linguists and for developers of language and speech technology, especially when used in combination with machine learning methods. The annotation in corpora has only marginally addressed semantic information, however, since semantic annotation methodologies are still in their infancy. This book discusses the development and application of such methodologies. (shrink)

South African writer Phaswane Mpe (1970—2004) is often canonized and memorialized as a brave truth-teller who broke the silence on HIV/AIDS in the context of government silence and denial. And yet Mpe’s writings—including poetry, short stories, a novel, and scholarly criticism—contemplate illness as a problem for truth and representation in works that linger in silence and ambiguity. This article analyses the tension between silence and speech in Mpe’s creative writing in response to HIV/AIDS. Using Mpe’s works as an illustrative example, (...) I trouble the desire to read illness narratives as forms of truth-telling and silence-breaking. The desire for the transparency of speech in a global archive of illness narratives also informs a colonial politics of representation that instrumentalizes literature as ethnographic evidence. Mpe’s writing on HIV/AIDS refuses a demand for authenticity by holding the embodied experience of disease at a slight remove from the reader in order to register the forms of spiritual and epistemological crisis that epidemic and social loss produce. My contention is that the political stakes of this writing lie not in Mpe’s ability to render a public health crisis with verisimilitude, but in the capacity for writing to provide solace and sublimity faced with death. Through an analysis of Mpe’s fiction and poetry, this article proposes a methodology for reading the politics of illness narratives across globalized space which attends to the world-building potential of creative expression as a radical practice that resists incorporative models of aesthetic intelligibility. (shrink)

This collection of essays by Sheila Jasanoff explores how democratic governments construct public reason, that is, the forms of evidence and argument used in making state decisions accountable to citizens.

STS research has devoted relatively little attention to the promotion and reception of science and technology by non-scientific actors and institutions. One consequence is that the relationship of science and technology to political power has tended to remain undertheorized. This article aims to fill that gap by introducing the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. Through a comparative examination of the development and regulation of nuclear power in the US and South Korea, the article demonstrates the analytic potential of the imaginaries concept. (...) Although nuclear power and nationhood have long been imagined together in both countries, the nature of those imaginations has remained strikingly different. In the US, the state’s central move was to present itself as a responsible regulator of a potentially runaway technology that demands effective containment. In South Korea, the dominant imaginary was of atoms for development which the state not only imported but incorporated into its scientific, technological and political practices. In turn, these disparate imaginaries have underwritten very different responses to a variety of nuclear shocks and challenges, such as Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl, and the spread of the anti-nuclear movement. (shrink)

The power of technology? -- Risk and responsibility? -- The ethical anatomy of disasters? -- Remaking nature? -- Tinkering with humans? -- Information's wild frontiers? -- Whose knowledge, whose property? -- Reclaiming the future? -- The ethics of invention?

Nearly 70 years after the dawn of the genetic age, biotechnology, scientists proclaim, is poised to rewrite the book of life. Yet, how far can science go in making sense of what "life" means to human beings and societies? This book looks at flash points in law, politics, ethics, and culture to argue that the claims of rewriting life are overblown.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This paper explores the politics of representing events in the world in the form of data points, data sets, or data associations. Data collection involves an act of seeing and recording something that was previously hidden and possibly unnamed. The incidences included in a data set are not random or unrelated but stand for coherent, classifiable phenomena in the world. Moreover, for data to have an impact on law and policy, such information must be seen as actionable, that is, the (...) aggregated data must show people both something they can perceive and something that demands interrogation, explanation, or resolution. Actionable data problematize the taken-for-granted order of society by pointing to questions or imbalances that can be corrected or rectified, or simply better understood, through systematic compilations of occurrences, frequencies, distributions, or correlations. The paper describes and analyzes three different modes of authorized seeing that render data on global environmental phenomena such as climate change both visible and actionable. It argues that the political force of environmental data compilations derives from the divergent epistemological standpoints and expert practices associated with producing views from nowhere, everywhere, and somewhere. (shrink)

An important function of the self is to identify external objects that are potentially personally relevant. We suggest that such objects may be identified through mere ownership. Extant research suggests that encoding information in a self-relevant context enhances memory , thus an experiment was designed to test the impact of ownership on memory performance. Participants either moved or observed the movement of picture cards into two baskets; one of which belonged to self and one which belonged to another participant. A (...) subsequent recognition test revealed that there was a significant memory advantage for objects that were owned by self. Acting on items had no impact on memory. Results are discussed with reference to the importance of self-object associations in cognition. (shrink)

In this ninth chapter of Interpreting Kant in Education, I respond to familiar criticisms in education theory of a dualism that is seen to be at the heart of Kant's philosophy. This, and related charges of a detached conception of mind, are addressed through a discussion of concepts—conceptual unity, conceptual distinctions, how these are learnt and developed, and the idea of a dynamic system of concepts. Sebastian Rödl's work on the general and particular is used to re-emphasise the unity of (...) the capacities in perception and experience, and to help show how thought and reality can be understood together. Alternative interpretations of Kant's terms, introduced through the chapters, are expanded on, to bring out more of the fine-tuned richness of Kant's view that is obscured in characterisations that make up the familiar ‘Kantian’ picture in education. The aim is to further delineate the Kant who is not a ‘Kantian’. (shrink)

Dreamscapes of Modernity offers the first book-length treatment of sociotechnical imaginaries, a concept originated by Sheila Jasanoff and developed in close collaboration with Sang-Hyun Kim to describe how visions of scientific and technological progress carry with them implicit ideas about public purposes, collective futures, and the common good. The book presents a mix of case studies—including nuclear power in Austria, Chinese rice biotechnology, Korean stem cell research, the Indonesian Internet, US bioethics, global health, and more—to illustrate how the concept (...) of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the national and transnational politics of science and technology. A theoretical introduction sets the stage for the contributors’ wide-ranging analyses, and a conclusion gathers and synthesizes their collective findings. The book marks a major theoretical advance for a concept that has been rapidly taken up across the social sciences and promises to become central to scholarship in science and technology studies. (shrink)

Until recently, Australia had little installed wind capacity, although there had been many investigations into its potential during the preceding decades. Formerly, state-owned monopoly utilities showed only token interest in wind power and could dictate the terms of energy debates. This situation changed in the late 1990s: Installed wind capacity began growing rapidly following the introduction of supportive renewable energy policies and the restructuring of the electricity industry. However, wind farms still provide only 1% of Australia's electricity, the future of (...) supportive policies is uncertain, and industry momentum is yet to become self-sustaining. Wind power, the authors argue, faces significant technological and institutional barriers, which need to be overcome if wind power is to play a significant role in Australia's electricity supply. The current window of opportunity is providing—for the first time—a significant space in which these barriers can be better understood and addressed and the requirements for wind power institutionally embedded. (shrink)

Los discursos de odio y las retóricas que estigmatizan, deshumanizan y demonizan al colectivo inmigrante son una palanca necesaria para la necropolítica. La permisividad en el discurso público a ideas y prejuicios contrarios a la inmigración es consustancial al formato necropolítico de gestión de las migraciones en la Unión Europea. Este trabajo, inspirado en las aportaciones de Achille Mbembe y Judith Butler, reflexiona sobre la configuración del sentimiento antinmigrante que, articulado a través de la violencia simbólica que atraviesa medios de (...) comunicación y redes sociales, repercute en la creciente vulnerabilidad que afecta a este colectivo. (shrink)

_Explores the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings._ Editing has been called the language of cinema, and thus a film’s ending can be considered the final punctuation mark of this language, framing everything that came before and offering the key to both our interpretation and our enjoyment of a film. In _Cinematic Cuts_, scholars explore the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings, analyzing how film endings engage our fantasies of cheating death, finding true love, or determining (...) the meaning of life. They examine how endings offer various forms of enjoyment for the spectator, from the momentary fulfillment of desire in the happy ending to the pleasurable torment of an indeterminate ending. The contributors also consider how film endings open onto larger questions relating to endings in our time. They suggest how a film ending’s hidden counternarrative can be read as a political act, how our interpretation of a film ending parallels the end of a psychoanalytical session, how film endings reveal our anxieties and fears, and how cinema itself might end with the increasing intervention of digital technologies that reorient the spectator’s sense of temporality and closure. Films by Akira Kurosawa, Lars von Trier, Joon-Hwan Jang, Claire Denis, Christopher Nolan, Jane Campion, John Huston, and Spike Jonze, among others, are discussed. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: An Introduction to Motherhood – Philosophy for Everyone Notes.