To do minor activist research is to create and make use of critical neologistic vocabularies hopefully balancing the ascetic impoverishment of direction and syntax in majority vocabularies when conceptualized as universals. To do minor activist research is therefore to unsettle received discourses, narratives, and material social practices of power to develop means of resistance in new and different registers. To do minor activist research is to train the imagination for a collaboratively accomplished re/presentation of data through creating points of (...) encounters, thus engendering an affirmative perspectivist’s ethos. Re/presenting data as a space in which one’s own thinking is challenged, hence providing a perspective of the storying practices across participants and across different disciplinary, ideological, or personal boundaries within the researcher’s and the researched specific positioning. This requires getting everyone to participate in the “analysis” of data, and then getting everyone “inside” the text: situating data-inquiries in immanence. It therefore demands a liberation from old scripts, and challenges how everyone is transformed into text, with perspectivism being simultaneously means and objective for avoiding the reproduction of both old scripts and ethics. Our goal is to enhance (self)reflexivity regarding knowledge production and research methodologies, to influence actual research practices through fostering a more inclusive, open, and collaborative approach to research that transcends traditional boundaries and embraces the fluid and hybrid nature of knowledge production. Ultimately, turning the concept of ethics through minoring into a thinking hub and pedagogy for change. The first and theoretical section is on how to ethically represent data in a new-empiricist and post qualitative environment. We call it data-philosophy. Our ontological approach brings its own concepts, which reflect the perspectives from which we argue. In the three next sections, we follow up by looking more closely into these ideas in re/presenting empirical qualitative research to invite hybrid and fluid configurations. Here, activist research refers to bringing actors into our thinking about the data, to accentuate the collaborative, open to thinking differently through staying close to the data. We then bring it all together in a section on the rebirth of language, to open for what we refer to as a storying personifying, thereby storying data together as a process of becoming, of mutuality and affect as a source of agency. We argue that this creates a theory of science and ethics in data analysis, and in re/presenting data, which are closely entangled. (shrink)

Young people around the world show considerable engagement with climate change. How can education draw on this engagement in order to benefit students and society? In this article, we discuss how inquiry-based dialogues can support students’ development in their societal engagement. We argue that such dialogues should include real-world problems involving disagreement, which promote students’ agency. We elaborate on qualities of dialogues, such as developing argumentation and perspectives together through respect, attentive listening and recognition of others’ viewpoints. Central theoretical perspectives (...) include inquiry-based dialogues and students’ lived democracy. This research draws on data from a classroom activity where 15–16-year-old students in Norway investigate controversial issues related to electrifying offshore oil platforms. The students are in a learning situation, and the teacher wants them to learn about climate change and the oil industry and the skills and attitudes needed to participate in inquiry-based dialogues. The dialogues show that students bring knowledge, opinions and attitudes from outside school, characteristics that are crucial for students’ engagement. We discuss how teachers can facilitate students’ further engagement by addressing multiple aims of inquiry-based dialogues. (shrink)

Peter McHugh was an internationally known sociologist within the field of anti-positivist social theory. As the only collection of McHugh's sole-authored writings, Redefining the Situation presents a comprehensive yet surprising view of this key theorist's influence in his field. Redefining the Situation is a compendium of McHugh's published and unpublished short-form writings, along with three new essays on McHugh's work, one by his long-time collaborator and friend Alan Blum. The collection contributes to the project of reinventing social theory by providing (...) a new perspective from which to imaginatively rethink the development of sociology over the last fifty years. It locates McHugh's work not only within the modern and postmodern sociological tradition but also within contemporary social theory broadly, including hermeneutics, critical theory, deconstruction, and Hannah Arendt's political theory. The essays in this volume show the development of a method to analyze everyday behaviour in light of fundamental questions, exploring conflicts and connections between socialization and recidivism, fragmentation and ethnic cleansing, justice and affirmative action, teaching and university politics, and intimacy and aesthetics. This book moves beyond contemporary debates about big data/postmodernism, and along the way it identifies convergences in Anglo-American and Continental thought. By tracing the development of Analysis, the tradition of social inquiry, from its beginnings until today, Redefining the Situation re-establishes a prominent sociologist as one of the leading intellectuals in the field of interpretive social theory. (shrink)

This paper proposes an original definition of samples as a kind of data within the relational framework of data. The distinction between scientific objects (e.g., samples, data, models) often needs to be clarified in the philosophy of science to understand their role in the scientific inquiry. The relational framework places data at the forefront of knowledge construction. Their epistemic status depends on their evaluation as potential evidence in a research situation and their ability to circulate among (...) researchers. While samples are significant in data-generating science, their role has been underexplored in the philosophy of data literature. I draw on a case study from data-centric microbiology, viz. amplicon sequencing, to introduce specifications of the relational framework. These specifications capture the distinctive epistemic role of samples, allowing the discussion of their significance in the inquiry process. I argue that samples are necessarily transformed to be considered as evidence, portable in the limits of a situation, and they act as world anchors for claims about a phenomenon. I compare these specifications with other data and evidence frameworks and suggest they are compatible. The paper concludes by considering the extension of these criteria in the context of biobanking. The specifications proposed here help analyze other life sciences cases and deepen our understanding of samples and their epistemological role in scientific research. (shrink)

This article presents the emergent findings of research conducted in Iran. It’s main objective was to investigate whether adolescents' thinking could turn polyphonic in CPI and what processes, thinking would go through to achieve this objective. Seventeen adolescents, ten girls, and seven boys participated in fourteen sessions with three iranian and three foreign novels as the materials of inquiry. The sessions were videotaped and analyzed by the researchers. The findings discovered out of pre-determined objectives revealed that CPI was effective in (...) developing adolescents' polyphonic thinking, and polyphonic thinking processes at work were also revealed. At the same time, some unexpected data emerged which gave rise to some emergent findings, among which was that meaning-making is not limited to what happens “inside” the CPI, but some events before, after, and during the sessions are decisive in meaning-making within this communal circle and formation of CPI. We named them ‘paratexts’ of CPI that included WhatsApp chats, religious, educational, scientific, and gender discourses, the extension of issues discussed at CPI to school and home, adolescent dialogues before and after the sessions, and their reading of philosophical ideas and literary commentaries on the materials of inquiry. Gérard Genette, giving currency to the term ‘paratext’, conceives of it as an undefined zone between the inside and the outside of a printed work that forms the complex mediation between book, author, publisher, and reader. It is a border zone in which text and off-text enter dialogue the paratexts associated with CPI directed us to reconfigure the practice in reconsideration of the facilitator’s roles and positions. On this account, the facilitator is someone who needs to be able to actively listen both to the voices of the group members and the voices of existing paratexts, and to manoeuvre between multiple roles and positions as the situation demands. (shrink)

One of the foundational texts of interpersonal psychoanalysis, _Prelogical Experience_ is a pioneering attempt to elaborate an interpersonal theory of personality that encompasses the nonpropositional, nonverbal dimension of human experience. Prelogical processes, the authors hold, cannot be consigned to infancy; rather they shape experience throughout life and are especially salient in relation to dreams, emotion, perception, and the arts. Of special note is Tauber and Green's elaboration of the clinical situation that grows out of an appreciation of prelogical experience. In (...) a striking anticipation of contemporary thinking, they approach patient-therapist interaction in terms of the continuous exchange of "presentational data" by patient and analyst. These data enable patient and therapist alike to "know" more about the other than can ever be expressed in propositional terms. This perspective assigns an important role to what Piaget would term "the cognitive unconscious" in the clinical process. It likewise sustains a view of the countertransference - which includes the analyst's own dreams - as a vital source of presentational data about the patient. As Donnel Stern notes in his Introduction, these and other insights "amount to a surprisingly contemporary description of psychoanalytic treatment.". (shrink)

This article examines the relation between counting, counts and accountability. It does so by comparing the responses of the British government to deaths associated with Covid-19 in 2020 to its responses to deaths associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Similarities and dissimilarities between the cases regarding what counted as data, what data were taken to count, what data counted for, and how data were counted provide the basis for considering how the bounds of democratic accountability (...) are constituted. Based on these two cases, the article sets out the metaphors of leaks and cascades as ways of characterising the data practices whereby counts, counting and accountability get configured. By situating deaths associated with Covid-19 against previous experience with deaths from war, the article also proposes how claims to truth and ignorance might figure in any future official inquiry into the handling of the pandemic. (shrink)

Background: Moral courage is defined as the courage to act in ethical conflicts based on individual or professional values despite the personal risks involved. Nurses justify their decisions to act morally courageously as part of their ethical decision-making. Objective: To describe registered nurses’ justifications for acting morally courageously, or not, in ethical conflicts where they needed moral courage. Research design: A narrative inquiry with a holistic content approach was used. Individual, in-depth interviews were conducted in January–February 2023. The data (...) were analysed using holistic content analysis. Participants and research context: Fourteen registered nurses with experience in situations where they needed moral courage participated. The nurses came from the somatic, palliative, mental health, and substance abuse care fields in Finland. Ethical considerations: Good scientific practice was followed. Ethical approval was obtained before data collection from the university’s ethics committee. Findings: The nurses needed moral courage in ethical conflicts with patients present and between professionals. Individual responsibility, professional ethics, and emotions were identified as bases of nurses’ justifications for morally courageous acts. The justifications for acting morally courageously, or not, had individual, contextual, and organisational perspectives. Morally courageous acts included starting a discussion about the conflict with other professionals and reporting the situation in writing within one’s organisation. Discussion and conclusions: The identified bases and perspectives of justifications illustrate the complexity of nurses’ decision-making in ethical conflicts, either leading to morally courageous acts or not. These results can inform nursing practice and research in developing processes to strengthen nurses’ moral courage and examining relationships between moral courage and other concepts, such as moral resilience. (shrink)

In academic and political spaces, as well as in the dominant culture in the United States, sex workers are granted little authority, and their lived experiences are not privileged as a form of valuable knowledge. As feminist scholars, we seek to counter this pattern by highlighting the situated knowledges and agency of sex workers in the United States. To do so, we share the words of sex workers through I-poems. I-poems are a form of poetic inquiry and a method for (...) qualitative research analysis. As a form of found poetry, these poems are constructed using only the words of the participants. Unlike prior scholars, we use focus groups that capture conversation about people involved in street-based sex work rather than individual interviews. By centering the participants’ own words, we hope to moderate our influence as researchers on the presentation of data. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Re-examining Empirical Data on Conflicts of Interest Through the Lens of Personal NarrativesEmily E. Anderson and Elena M. KrausIntroductionThe personal stories submitted by physicians and researchers for this symposium add much–needed dimension to conversations on conflicts of interest in medicine and research. Narratives from individuals living with conflicts of interest can serve as a unique lens through which to consider psychological and economic theories and survey data (...) on physician and patient views. In our reading of these personal narratives, we identified four primary themes that will serve as springboards for our commentary. We aim to triangulate clusters of meaning drawn from the narratives with relevant data from published empirical studies and identify gaps in knowledge where more research is needed. These themes are: the unique environments of medicine and research; weighing the potential benefits of conflicts of interest against the risks; conflict of interest management; and the roles and responsibilities of diverse stakeholder groups.The Unique Challenges of the Medical and Research EnvironmentsThe reflections of the narrative authors draw attention to many of the unique environmental aspects of medicine and medical research that make physicians and researchers especially vulnerable to conflicts of interest. Conflicts of interest may be more ubiquitous in medicine than in any other industry (Kassirer, 2006). As the narratives demonstrate, conflicts of interest emerge across a range of health care delivery and research activities. Surveys have shown that 94 percent of physicians have some kind of relationship with industry (Campbell, Gruen, Mountford, et al., 2007). There is also evidence that physician interactions with medical industry begin early and are a regular part of a physician’s professional practice along the career continuum (Wazana, 2000).Medicine as a profession is distinct from banking or law. It is often said that medicine is an art; in treating patients, creative individualized solutions and gut instinct are as (if not more) important than the application of scientific knowledge. Uncertainty surrounds medical decision making. There is limited precision with respect to diagnoses and prognoses, limited data regarding the effectiveness of many treatments, and a range of patient values and preferences. Because of this uncertainty, rules about practice standards, especially with respect to avoidance and management of conflicts of interest, cannot be as explicit as they are in law or business. As demonstrated by the story presented by Sal Cruz–Flores, research and practice often intersect. And, there is no system in greater need of reform—and no system about which there are more divergent opinions as to what shape that reform should take—than the United States health care [End Page 91] system. The narratives of Tony Mikulec, Govind Nagaldinne, and David M. Zientek demonstrate how various aspects of the structure of healthcare service provision and third–party payer arrangements have the potential to harm patients. Conflicts of interest comprise more than relationships with pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers.The narratives of Laura Jean Bierut and David M. Zientek also discuss examples of conflicts of interest that arise from factors beyond relationships with industry or the direct potential for financial gain. This may be somewhat unique to the medical milieu. Non-financial conflicts such as a desire for the prestige bestowed upon scientists who make key discoveries, a requirement to publish for tenure and promotion, the need to maintain one’s license or other privileges, or simply the pressure of a competitive environment can influence physician and researcher behavior. As noted by Bierut, more research on how to identify and manage non-financial conflicts is needed.The Potential Benefits and Harms of Conflicts of InterestConflicts of interest are usually presented in a negative light, particularly those that involve physician relationships with the pharmaceutical industry. To “have a conflict of interest” is to be in a situation or role where there is potential for personal interests to be prioritized over professional responsibilities. However, in terms of public perception, it seems that conflicts of interest have become almost synonymous with wrongdoing. Perhaps this is due to the barrage of media reports during the last decade on significant harms caused by financial conflicts of interest in business, journalism, and sports as well as in medicine (Steinbrook, 2004). Amidst... (shrink)

Raymaker offers an interdisciplinary approach to Bernard Lonergan’s work. He presents a series of five “feedback matrices” to situate his work within a historical context. One can best empower Lonergan’s legacy through a correct understanding and implementation of how the data of human consciousness affects all human knowledge and activities.

Tuberculosis (TB) is a potentially fatal infectious disease that, in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ), inequitably affects Asian, Pacific, Middle Eastern, Latin American, and African (MELAA), and Māori people. Medical research involving genome sequencing of TB samples enables more nuanced understanding of disease strains and their transmission. This could inform highly specific health interventions. However, the collection and management of TB isolate samples for research are currently informed by monocultural biomedical models often lacking key ethical considerations. Drawing on a qualitative kaupapa (...) Māori–consistent study, this paper reports on preliminary discussions with groups of Māori, Pacific, and Afghan people in NZ, whose communities have been harmed by TB and TB stigma. Participants’ discussions highlight key concerns and meanings that ought to inform the development of guidelines and a more robust consultative process for the governance of how TB isolate samples are collected and used both retrospectively and in future research. We argue for ethical processes to be culturally nuanced and community-generated, flexible and meaningful, and situated in relation to the physical and symbolic effects of TB. We discuss the significance of Indigenous data sovereignty, rights, and kāwanatanga (governorship) in shaping a multicultural data sovereignty model. (shrink)

Italian mycologist Pier Andrea Saccardo is best remembered for his monumental Sylloge Fungorum, the first ‘modern’ effort to compile all identified fungi within a single classification scheme. The existing history of mycology is limited and has primarily focused on developments within England, but this article argues that Saccardo and his collaborators on the Sylloge supported a vital transnational expansion of mycological knowledge exchange and played a crucial role in stabilizing the tangled knot of local naming and identification among the world's (...) amateur and professional mycologists. Written in the ‘universal’ scientific language of Latin, the Sylloge served as an early database of fungal knowledge and symbolized a broader unification of mycological inquiry in a moment of expanded scientific correspondence. The article situates this proto-database in broader histories of big data in biology and shows how the Sylloge formed a globalizing foundation for the twentieth century's major collecting and taxonomic advances in mycology. (shrink)

Phenomenological inquiry offers a vehicle for transcending conventional disciplinary boundaries and investigative settings. Van Manen's protocol writing offers a hermeneutic tool for human scientific phenomenological research that is ideal for the empirical realm of everyday lived experience. Underlying this approach is the tenet that interpretative phenomenological research and theorizing cannot be separated from the textual practice of writing. The entirety of this paper is a protocol, in the form of a phenomenological self-study. It describes one experience in an unfamiliar environment (...) as a criminal trial juror. It represents data capture that can stand alone for purposes of independent interpretation. Since qualitative research in the venue described is limited by protective judicial restrictions, this phenomenological protocol captures unique data in an otherwise inaccessible setting. It suggests that protocol writing offers potential as a research tool in a myriad situations where conventional data collection techniques are impractical or unavailable. (shrink)

In a lifelog, data from various sources are combined to form a record from which one can retrieve information about oneself and the environment in which one is situated. It could be considered similar to an automated biography. Lifelog technology is still at an early stage of development. However, the history of lifelogs so far shows a clear academic, corporate and governmental interest. Therefore, a thorough inquiry into the ethical aspects of lifelogs could prove beneficial to the responsible development (...) of this field. This article maps the main ethically relevant challenges and opportunities associated with the further development of lifelog technologies as discussed in the scholarly literature. By identifying challenges and opportunities in the current debate, we were able to identify other challenges and opportunities left unmentioned. Some of these challenges are partly explained by a blind spot in the current debate. Whilst the current debate focuses mainly on lifelogs held by individuals, lifelogs held by governmental institutions and corporations pose idiosyncratic ethical concerns as well. We have provided a brief taxonomy of lifelog technology to show the variety in uses for lifelogs. In addition, we provided a general approach to alleviate the ethical challenges identified in the critical analysis. (shrink)

The emergence of personal assistants in the form of smart speakers has begun to significantly alter people’s everyday experiences with technology. The rate at which household Intelligent Personal Assistants such as Amazon’s Echo and Google Home emerged in household spaces has been rapid. They have begun to move human–computer interaction from text-based to voice-activated input, offering a multiplicity of features through speech. The supporting infrastructure connects with artificial intelligence and the internet of things, allowing digital interfaces with domestic appliances, lighting (...) systems, thermostats, media devices and more. Yet this also constitutes a significant new production of situated and sensitive data. This study focuses on how users negotiate and make choices about household Intelligent Personal Assistant use in connection with their data. This study is based on empirical research in Europe with early adopters in Germany and potential users in the Netherlands. This examination of users’ early stage technology acceptance considerations highlights particular practices and choices of users to either preserve their privacy or determine what is acceptable use for their data. Drawing on a simplified version of Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2, a quantitative model for technology acceptance, we demonstrate how acceptance of a household Intelligent Personal Assistants does not imply access to all household data, how users see usefulness in relation to a proliferation of devices, and note the recognition by users regarding the efforts needed for full use and acceptance. The study highlights the complexity of data production at a household level and how these devices produce myopic views of users for platforms. (shrink)

The study aims to explore the roles of Massive Open Online Courses based on deep learning in college students’ English grammar teaching. The data are collected using a survey. After the experimental data are analyzed, it is found that students have a low sense of happiness and satisfaction and are unwilling to practice oral English and learn language points in English learning. They think that college English learning only meets the needs of CET-4 and CET-6 and does not (...) take it as the ultimate learning goal. After the necessity and problems in English grammar teaching are discussed, the advantages of flipped classrooms of MOOCs are discussed in English grammar teaching. A teaching platform is constructed to study the foreign language teaching mode under MOOCs, and classroom teaching is combined with the advantages of MOOCs following the principle of “teaching students according to their personalities” to improve the listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translation skills of foreign language majors. The results show that high-quality online teaching resources and the deep learning-based teaching environment can provide a variety of interactive tools, by which students can communicate with their peers and teachers online. Sharing open online communication, classroom discussion, and situational simulation can enhance teachers’ deep learning ability, like the ability to communication and transfer thoughts. Constructivism with interaction as the core can help students grasp new knowledge easily. Extensive communication and interaction are important ways for learning and thinking. The new model provides students with profound learning experience, expands the teaching resources of MOOCs around the world, and maximizes the interaction between online and offline teachers and students, making knowledge widely rooted in the campus and realizing the combination of online resources and campus classroom teaching. Students can learn the knowledge through autonomous learning and discussion before class, which greatly broadens the learning time and space. In the classroom and after class, the internalization and sublimation of knowledge are completed through group cooperation, inquiry learning, scenario simulation, display, and evaluation, promoting students to know about new knowledge and highlighting the dominant position of students. (shrink)

Background Moral courage means courage to act according to individual’s own ethical values and principles despite the risk of negative consequences for them. Research about the moral courage of whistle-blowers in health care is scarce, although whistleblowing involves a significant risk for the whistle-blower. Objective To analyse the moral courage of potential whistle-blowers and its association with their background variables in health care. Research design Was a descriptive-correlational study using a questionnaire, containing Nurses Moral Courage Scale©, a video vignette of (...) the wrongdoing situation with an open question about the vignette, and several background variables. Data were analysed statistically and inductive content analysis was used for the narratives. Participants and research context Nurses as healthcare professionals (including registered nurses, public health nurses, midwives, and nurse paramedics) were recruited from the membership register of the Nurses’ Association via email in 2019. A total of 454 nurses responded. The research context was simulated using a vignette. Ethical considerations Good scientific inquiry guidelines were followed. Permission to use the Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale© was obtained from the copyright holder. The ethical approval and permission to conduct the study were obtained from the participating university and the Nurses’ Association. Findings The mean value of potential whistle-blowers’ moral courage on a Visual Analogue Scale (0–10) was 8.55 and the mean score was 4.34 on a 5-point Likert scale. Potential whistle-blowers’ moral courage was associated with their socio-demographics, education, work, personality and social responsibility related background variables. Discussion and conclusion In health care, potential whistle-blowers seem to be quite morally courageous actors. The results offer opportunities for developing interventions, practices and education to support and encourage healthcare professionals in their whistleblowing. Research is needed for developing a theoretical construction to eventually increase whistleblowing and decrease and prevent wrongdoing. (shrink)

Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in general, comprehensive models of human cognition. Such models aim to explain higher-order cognitive faculties, such as deliberation and planning. Given a computational representation, the validity of these models can be tested in computer simulations such as software agents or embodied robots. The push to implement computational models of this kind has created the field of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Moral decision making is arguably one of the most challenging tasks for computational (...) approaches to higher-order cognition. The need for increasingly autonomous artificial agents to factor moral considerations into their choices and actions has given rise to another new field of inquiry variously known as Machine Morality, Machine Ethics, Roboethics, or Friendly AI. In this study, we discuss how LIDA, an AGI model of human cognition, can be adapted to model both affective and rational features of moral decision making. Using the LIDA model, we will demonstrate how moral decisions can be made in many domains using the same mechanisms that enable general decision making. Comprehensive models of human cognition typically aim for compatibility with recent research in the cognitive and neural sciences. Global workspace theory, proposed by the neuropsychologist Bernard Baars (1988), is a highly regarded model of human cognition that is currently being computationally instantiated in several software implementations. LIDA (Franklin, Baars, Ramamurthy, & Ventura, 2005) is one such computational implementation. LIDA is both a set of computational tools and an underlying model of human cognition, which provides mechanisms that are capable of explaining how an agent’s selection of its next action arises from bottom-up collection of sensory data and top-down processes for making sense of its current situation. We will describe how the LIDA model helps integrate emotions into the human decision-making process, and we will elucidate a process whereby an agent can work through an ethical problem to reach a solution that takes account of ethically relevant factors. (shrink)

Transgender individuals and families throw existing taxonomic classification systems of identity into perplexing disarray, illuminating sociolegal dilemmas long overdue for critical sociological inquiry. Using interview data collected from 50 cisgender women from across the United States and Canada, who detail 61 unique partnerships with transgender and transsexual men, this work considers the pragmatic choices and choice-making capacities of this social group as embedded within social systems, structures, and institutions. Proposing the analytic constructs of “normative resistance” and “inventive pragmatism” to (...) situate the interactional processes between agency and structure in the everyday lives of this understudied group of cisgender women, this work theorizes the liminal sociolegal status of an understudied family form. In so doing, it exposes the increasingly paradoxical consolidation and destabilization of sociolegal notions of identity, marriage, normativity, and parenthood—challenging, contributing to, and extending current theoretical and empirical understandings of agency and structure in twenty-first-century families. (shrink)

HAUGDAHL HS and STORLI SL. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 238–246 ‘In a way, you have to pull the patient out of that state …’: the competency of ventilator weaningThe introduction of the weaning protocol has reduced weaning time and improved results in patients. However, the evidence is inconsistent. This may reflect that the use of a protocol should not exclude individual considerations and clinical judgement. However, the significant aspects of the context and the competency important in the nurse–patient relationship in (...) weaning have not yet been sufficiently described. This study aimed at exploring these aspects of weaning. Qualitative data from six in‐depth interviews and field observations of three experienced intensive care nurses in weaning situations were analysed through systematic text condensation within a hermeneutic‐phenomenological approach. Competency appeared to be based on thorough knowledge of physiology and ventilator skills, but also on knowing the patient, helping the nurse connect the meaningless to the meaningful for the patient. Behaving competently involves a continuous dialogue with the situation, observation of the patient’s body language and symptoms over a period of time and the ability to see the interrelationships of all these elements. Competency in ventilator weaning may thus be linked to personal qualifications, while it is simultaneously dependent on a professional community that both confirms and acknowledges this competency. (shrink)

Heuristics are often invoked in the philosophical, psychological, and cognitive science literatures to describe or explain methodological techniques or "shortcut" mental operations that help in inference, decision-making, and problem-solving. Yet there has been surprisingly little philosophical work done on the nature of heuristics and heuristic reasoning, and a close inspection of the way(s) in which "heuristic" is used throughout the literature reveals a vagueness and uncertainty with respect to what heuristics are and their role in cognition. This dissertation seeks to (...) remedy this situation by motivating philosophical inquiry into heuristics and heuristic reasoning, and then advancing a theory of how heuristics operate in cognition. I develop a positive working characterization of heuristics that is coherent and robust enough to account for a broad range of phenomena in reasoning and inference, and makes sense of empirical data in a systematic way. I then illustrate the work this characterization does by considering the sorts of problems that many philosophers believe heuristics solve, namely those resulting from the so-called frame problem. Considering the frame problem motivates the need to gain a better understanding of how heuristics work and the cognitive structures over which they operate. I develop a general theory of cognition which I argue underwrites the heuristic operations that concern this dissertation. I argue that heuristics operate over highly organized systems of knowledge, and I offer a cognitive architecture to accommodate this view. I then provide an account of the systems of knowledge that heuristics are supposed to operate over, in which I suggest that such systems of knowledge are concepts. The upshot, then, is that heuristics operate over concepts. I argue, however, that heuristics do not operate over conceptual content, but over metainformational relations between activated and primed concepts and their contents. Finally, to show that my thesis is empirically adequate, I consider empirical evidence on heuristic reasoning and argue that my account of heuristics explains the data. (shrink)

This article offers an anthropological perspective on autism, a condition at once neurological and social, which complements existing psychological accounts of the disorder, expanding the scope of inquiry from the interpersonal domain, in which autism has been predominantly examined, to the socio-cultural one. Persons with autism need to be viewed not only as individuals in relation to other individuals, but as members of social groups and communities who act, displaying both social competencies and difficulties, in relation to socially and culturally (...) ordered expectations of behavior. The article articulates a socio-cultural approach to perspective-taking in autism in three social domains: participating in conversational turn-taking and sequences; formulating situational scenarios; and interpreting socio-cultural meanings of indexical forms and behavior. Providing ethnographic data on the everyday lives of high-functioning children with autism and Asperger syndrome, the article outlines a cline of competence across the three domains, from most success in conversational turn-taking to least in inferring indexical meanings. Implications of these abilities and limitations are considered for theoretical approaches to society and culture, illuminating how members of social groups are at once shaped by, and are agents of, social life and cultural understanding. (shrink)

Recent years have seen the development of an approach both to general philosophy and philosophy of science often referred to as ‘experimental philosophy’ or just ‘X-Phi’. Philosophers often make or presuppose empirical claims about how people would react to hypothetical cases, but their evidence for claims about what ‘we’ would say is usually very limited indeed. Philosophers of science have largely relied on their more or less intimate knowledge of their field of study to draw hypothetical conclusions about the state (...) of scientific concepts and the nature of conceptual change in science. What they are lacking is some more objective quantitative data supporting their hypotheses. A growing number of philosophers , along with a few psychologists and anthropologists, have tried to remedy this situation by designing experiments aimed at systematically exploring people’s reactions to philosophically important thought experiments or scientists’ use of their scientific concepts. Many of the results have been surprising and some of the conclusions drawn from them have been more than a bit provocative. This symposium attempts to provide a window into this new field of philosophical inquiry and to show how experimental philosophy provides crucial tools for the philosopher and encourages two-way interactions between scientists and philosophers.Keywords: Experimental philosophy; Naturalism; Continuity thesis; Philosophy of science; Quantitative data. (shrink)

Over the past three decades, Van Gelder's dynamical hypothesis has been instrumental in reconceptualizing the ways in which perception-action-cognition unfolds over time and in context. Here, I examine how the dynamical approach has enriched the theoretical understanding of social dynamics within cognitive science, with a particular focus on interpersonal coordination. I frame this review around seven principles in dynamical systems: three that are well-represented in interpersonal coordination research to date (emergent behavior, context-sensitive behavior, and attractors) and four that could be (...) useful opportunities for future growth (hysteresis, sensitivity to initial conditions, equifinality, and reciprocal compensation). In addition to identifying specific promising lines of theoretical inquiry, I focus on the significant potential afforded by computationally intensive science—especially in naturally occurring data or trace data. Building on the foundation laid over the past three decades, I argue that looking to increasingly situated and naturalistic settings (and data) is not only necessary to realize the full commitment to the dynamical hypothesis but is also critical to building parsimonious and principled theories of social phenomena. (shrink)

This research study was an interpretive inquiry into the experience of contemporary peacekeepers healing from trauma. Ten contemporary peacekeepers were interviewed who have sought treatment from trauma resulting from deployments to Somalia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia. A thematic analysis of the text was undertaken, in which themes emerged to document and understand the ways in which contemporary peacekeepers heal from trauma. Narratives from the transcribed interviews were reviewed with the participants and reflective journaling by the researcher provided further clarification (...) of the data to understand the experience. The peacekeepers’ descriptions of the situations of their bodies in time, space and relation provided a fresh way into understanding the embodied nature of healing from trauma. Three overarching themes: the centrality of brotherhood and grieving loss in the military family; the centrality of time and the body in healing from trauma; and the military response as betrayal and creating trauma from within emerged from the inquiry which will contribute to more effective practice guidelines for the care of contemporary peacekeepers healing from trauma. (shrink)

This study aims to present culturally situated artefacts as depicted in nursing home environments and to analyse the underlying understandings of disciplining structures that are manifested in these kinds of places. Our personal geographies are often taken for granted, but when moving to a nursing home, geographies are glaringly rearranged. The study design is archival and cross‐sectional observational, and the data are comprised of 38 photographs and 13 videos showing environments from nursing homes. The analysis was inspired by the (...) methodological steps in Roper's and Shapira's description of conducting ethnography. The results are presented in four categories: (i) public areas, (ii) orderliness, (iii) staff's places and (iv) devices. The rearrangement of geography implies a degrading of agency and loss of authority over one's place. The places should be understood in their relation to the agents and their temporarily claims upon them. The material and immaterial artefacts, that is the items, people and behaviours, transform the nursing staff into ‘space invaders’. Future inquiries may take into consideration the ways that space invasion in participative space intersect and construct the identities of the agents it invades upon. (shrink)

Drawing on the pragmatic turn in contemporary social theory, we explore how corporate elites accused of corruption in the context of weak institutions engage in their justification works. Empirically, we focus on three high-profile corruption scandals that shook Ghana between 2010 and 2020 and inspired widespread public condemnation. Publicly accessible archival documents, such as court reporting, newspaper stories, press conferences, and the digital footprints of corporate elites implicated in the scandals provide data for our inquiry. Focussing on the juxtaposition (...) of ‘sayings’ and ‘doings’, the findings show justification as performative, and rooted in contextual pragmatism that acknowledges the plurality of logics situated between self-interest and folk-logic. Within this framework, the domestic and civic orders of worth emerge as most prominent, with the justification processes manifesting through _victimising, scapegoating,_ and _crusading_. Building on these insights, we develop a framework that highlights how the use of justifications serves as a critique of the inadequacies within climates of weak institutional frameworks consequently fostering an atmosphere conducive to framing unethical conducts as morally acceptable. (shrink)

In the light of requests from certain civil organisations in the Western Cape to the provincial government to establish a judicial commission of inquiry into child killings in this province because of the high incidence of killings, a research committee from three WC universities was put together to review existing research into this matter to determine a way forward. This committee looked at primary drivers of child murders in the WC, gaps in existing government services, the potential value of instigating (...) a commission of inquiry or some other mechanism, and recommending a way forward. A summary of its findings was presented to, among others, the provincial cabinet that adopted all its recommendations. Reflection on these final findings and recommendations forms the first part of the article. The second part focuses in more detail on the research data presented by experts and practitioners who informed the research committee. Important aspects discussed here are child death reviews, age- and sex-specific rates of child homicides, sexual killings of children, the possible influence of unfortunate, traumatic childhood experiences in becoming a violent adult, physical violence against children, children’s perception of their safety and risk factors for children specifically in the WC. The purpose of this article is to provide well-researched information to role-players and decision-makers regarding the lives of children to address the violence and its causes that so many children are exposed to. Although the focus is on the dire situation in the WC, the broader South African and international contexts will also be brought into play in the second part of the article in a way that will be helpful with regard to the crises and challenges the WC is struggling with in this respect. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 40–43. Lance Olsen is a professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Utah, Chair of the FC2 Board of directors, and, most importantly, author or editor of over twenty books of and about innovative literature. He is one of the true champions of prose as a viable contemporary art form. He has just published Architectures of Possibility (written with Trevor Dodge), a book that—as Olsen's works often do—exceeds the usual boundaries of its genre as it (...) explores his interests in narrative theory and pedagogy. The book is a kind of “anti-textbook;” a performative polemic against the stale, conservative and monolithic conception of the literary that so often dominates institutional discourse around creative writing. The following interview takes the occasion of AoP's publication as a chance to speak with Olsen about the book itself as well as to engage with larger, unanswerable, questions about the futures and intersections of literature and education. —Ben Segal INTERVIEW: 1) First, I want to start before the beginning, with the title. I’m really fascinated by the concept it conjures. Can you say something about innovative/experimental/(choose your adjective) literature in relation to both ideas around architecture and possibility? Innovative or experimental are tremendously fraught adjectives, needless to say. But for the purposes of my book, they modify a fiction concerned with the questions: What is fiction? What can it do, and how, and why? Now, of course, what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 17 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” to one at 27 or 57, and what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 1812 may not be what looks “innovative” or “experimental” in 2012. A certain existential and historical perspectivism is always at work. But I think it’s fair to say that innovative and experimental usually refer to a narrativity that includes a self-reflective awareness of and engagement with theoretical inquiry, concerns, and obsessions, as well as a sense of being in conversation with fiction across space and time. One can't create challenging writing in a vacuum; it has to challenge in relation to something. So contemporary writers interested in the subject are not only in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Architectures of Possibility conceives of creativity as a possibility space, a locale just outside our comfort zones where we can and should take multiple chances in order to imagine in new ways, explore fresh strategies for finding and cultivating ideas, re-view what it is we’re doing and why, better understand what Samuel Beckett meant when he wrote: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It reminds us that there are other ways of narrating our worlds and ourselves than those we have inherited from the entertainment industry, the government, academia, previous writing, and so on. 2) AoP seems to be directed at several audiences (and purposes) simultaneously. What I mean is that it seems at times a polemic in favor of innovative literature, at other times a creative writing textbook, and still other times a guide to the network of publishers, journals, and programs that make up the current world of non-mainstream literary art in the U.S. In my mind, Architectures is a theorized anti-textbook about writing. Most textbooks on the subject (think of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft , taught in most creative-writing classroom across the country) orchestrate how to construct conventional stories. They instruct from a place of power how to generate familiar stories that are repeated so often that many of us begin to take them as the primary model for narrativity, if not unconsciously as a kind of truth. The result, as Brian Kiteley points out in 3 A.M. Epiphany (one of the only other alternative textbooks about innovative writing around, by the way, and a tremendous repository of exercises), is merely competent texts. Architectures problematizes that gesture by outlining what conventional narrativity looks like, urging writers to think about its ideology of form as well as content, and invites them to imagine writing, not as a set of relatively stable conventions, but, rather, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought, tried, challenged. It thereby rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer—which is to say Architectures poses complications to the act of writing rather than solutions. 3) One of the most notable things about the book is the use of interviews. This is also one of the reasons that I think the book works so well for a variety of audiences—that anyone with even a passing interest in the state and future of literature will have an interest in your conversation with people like Ben Marcus, Samuel Delany, and Lydia Davis. I was hoping you could just talk a little about how you chose these subjects to interview, how you edited the interview material, and which answers you received struck you the most. Experimentalism , like realism , wants to appear in the plural. The idea of gathering more than forty interviews (with the help of my awesome collaborator, Trevor Dodge, himself a fine innovative author) represents an attempt to suggest that: the wide, rich, exciting opportunities inherent in the term. There are interviews with younger writers, elder statesmen in the field, publishers, editors, hypermedia artists, comic book makers, and so on: Joe Wenderoth, Carole Maso, Scott McCloud, Nick Montfort, Kathy Acker, et al. Trevor and I decided to do flash interviews: short, concentrated Q&As, each focusing on a particular troubling of writing. We only lightly edited the results to match the manuscript’s overall style, and every interview arrived as a surprise housing several unexpected insights. Three brief examples: Michael Mejia, when asked about what he dreads when setting about writing: “Dread is an interesting word here. I associate it less with loathing or aversion, I suppose, than with a kind of productive fear. Do I dread a project’s failure? Sure, who doesn’t? Who wants to waste time on something that comes to nothing, or is unreadable? But then, what do these terms mean, and who or what defines a work as a ‘failure,’ as ‘waste,’ as ‘unreadable’? Should a work actually try to interrogate and exceed these conceptual limitations? My tendency is to write into dread in order to reveal to myself, as much as to any reader that may come after, the varied complacencies that make other, mostly more conventional writings, readable. It’s at the frontier between readability (security) and unreadability (terror) that I want to live creatively.” Carole Maso, when asked what she’d like a sentence to accomplish: “I think a sentence can if allowed carry emotional and intellectual states as they flee, as they come and go, an escaping essence difficult to hold in other ways. In this way I think the sentence can work as a phrase of music does, sounding something large and elusive in us. Alternatively it can provide sometimes a stability, an essence, a moment of being. Unlike music the sentence also of course carries language with all its potential for meaning making and memory traces and association with it as well. I probably love the accretion of sentences most—those patterns, that shimmer, that resonance.” Shelley Jackson, when asked what is innovative about the innovative: “The purpose of the innovative is, I think, to wake us up. We are not quite alive, most of the time; we occupy a sort of cartoon version of our lives, its lines made smooth by repetition. Writing can open the seams in that world, reintroduce us to the real lives that we have forgotten. Maybe all good writing is innovative in some sense, in that it shows or tells or makes you feel something you never felt before—something for which you have no cartoon ready.” 4) You talk a little about N. Katherine Hayles’s concept of Media Specific Analysis and propose the supplemental notion of Medium Specific Generation—basically taking Hayles and applying her thought from the perspective of the writer. I’ve been trying to develop somewhat related theoretical frameworks, so I was really excited to come upon this section of the book. I’m wondering if you can talk a little more about this idea and, in general, about the potentials that you see as being opened up by writers engaging with and exploiting different media as literary platforms? “Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print,” Hayles urges in her (at least for me) transformative 2004 essay, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep,” “literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters.” She goes on to argue critics should learn to become more attuned to the materiality of the medium under investigation—which is to say a story isn’t a story isn’t a story. Rather, the “same” story remediated through film is intrinsically different from that story remediated through conventionally printed books is intrinsically different from that story remediated through hypermedia. “Materiality,” Hayles goes on, “is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset.” My point in Architectures is simply to emphasize Media Specific Generation: the idea that when writing you should be cognizant, not only of the thematics of the text you are working on, and, as it were, the internal components of its narrativity (character, language, plot, etc.), but also of the material embodiment those components take, and, perhaps more important, the material embodiment those components can take. The idea that the way texts matter matters isn’t something usually addressed in any significant way in creative-writing classrooms and textbooks. It may almost go without saying such experimentation with typography, layout, and white space has a long tradition—certainly one that tracks back at least as far as Guillaume Apollinaire’s early twentieth-century Calligrammes , Laurence Sterne’s textually ribald eighteenth-century Tristram Shandy , although one could arguably plot a hypothetical trajectory that reaches to ancient Greek romances like Achilles Tatius’ second-century Leucippe and Clitophon . Experiments into atomic materiality and digital immateriality bracket the definition of “book” at the same time they highlight Michael Martone’s prediction of its present future as increasingly viral, collaborative, and ephemeral. Or, as Matthew Battles points out: the future of the “book” has already arrived, and it is “ethereal and networked” rather than “an immutable brick.”While conventional writing and reading practices are conceptualized as private, individual, relatively fixed experiences, many of the new forms indicate that writing and reading—from production through dissemination—are rapidly becoming public, collective, incrementally unfixed experiences. That strikes me as an astonishing set of opportunities for a writer to investigate. 5) Another concept you elaborate in AoP is that of limit texts, basically texts that, once you read them, change what you imagine as the shape/horizon/potential of literature. You provide a fantastic reading list of limit texts at the end of AoP. I was hoping you could talk about a few of them in terms of how they specifically operate as limit texts for you—how they expand your understanding of what literature could be or do. Karl Jaspers coined the word Grenzsituationen (border/limit situations) to describe existential moments accompanied by anxiety in which the human mind is forced to confront the restrictions of its existing forms—moments that make us abandon, fleetingly, the securities of our limitedness and enter new realms of self-consciousness. Death, for example. Limit texts are a variety of disturbance that carries various elements of narrativity to their brink so the reader can never quite imagine them in the same terms again. Once you’ve taken one down from the shelf, you’ll never be able to put it back up again. They won’t leave you alone. They will continue to work on your imagination long after you’ve read them. Simply by being in the world, they ask us to embrace difficulty, freedom, radical skepticism. One of the most important for me is Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable . Instead of establishing conventional setting and building traditional character, from its first words it unsettles both: “Where now? Who now? When now?” That first trio of question marks broadcasts the thematics of the writing (“novel” may be too strong a word) that will follow: it is all about a voice (or, perhaps, voices, about the grammatical mistake of the first-person pronoun), a consciousness (maybe, again, too strong a word), often genderless, removed from place and chronology and socioeconomic reality, hovering in a state of perpetual aporia. All it knows is what it doesn’t know, and its not-knowing is blackly, sardonically comic. The Unnamable is the embodiment of an unreliable narrator—a subject position that can’t trust itself, let alone be trusted by a reader. It contradicts, takes back, digresses, undoes what it just did, forgets, lies, hallucinates gloriously. The language is abstract, disembodied, devoid of sensory data, grayish rather than painterly in texture. Without knowing this passage is from a novel, a reader might well conclude s/he were reading a patch of (anti-)Cartesian philosophy. It might be helpful to conceive of what Beckett is doing as post-genre writing, then, or perhaps what Raymond Federman referred to as critifiction—a mode that blurs conventional distinctions between theory and narrative. In completely different register, and much more recently, Anne Carson’s Nox blew me away. It takes the form of an elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe. The thing itself arrives in a box that simulates a thick book, as well as the brother’s textual coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that folds out into an arrangement that suggests an ancient scroll (Carson is, perhaps illuminatingly, a professor of classics) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’ poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s dead brother, a doubling of Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that compose that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, the impossibilities of understanding fully, of capturing absences in language. At times Nox feels less an example of what most readers consider a book than something closer to a three-dimensional work of assemblage art. It’s a beautiful mechanism for contemplating Media Specific Analysis, for urging us all to be more extreme. 6) Finally, I want to talk a little about pedagogy and institutions. I’m less interested in questions like “Are MFA programs good for writers?” than in questions about how your role as teacher informs your understanding of literature and your writing practice. I’m also very curious about your take on how commercially marginal literary art is largely patronized by large state institutions and at the same time often imagines itself as a critical and even possibly revolutionary practice. How have your own positions within universities and university-affiliated organizations shaped your thinking about them and about innovative literature? I can imagine in many ways it might make you even more critical. And (I know, another ‘and’...) how does AoP (especially given its relation to Rebel Yell , your previous text on creative writing) reflect your personal history and experience as a teacher and member of communities that are largely defined by institutions? In the classroom, I try to generate the pedagogical field I would have liked to have inhabited as a student, but didn’t. Roland Barthes has a lovely line about this: “We need to substitute for the magisterial [classroom] space of the past (the word delivered by the master from the pulpit above with the audience below, the flock, the sheep, the herd)—a less upright, less Euclidean space where no one, neither teacher nor students, would ever be in his final place.” Easier said than done, of course, but an important life project for all who think of themselves as educators. My own classroom, my own writing, and Architectures of Possibility itself attempt to create the sort of possibility space where, as I mentioned at the outset of our interview, everything should be thought, tried, challenged; where everything rhymes with Roland Barthes’s definition of literature: the question minus the answer. I’m not sure I could write what I’m writing now without the conversations I have almost daily with my students, the conversations they have with each other, the conversations we all have with the texts we study. Especially in light of the paradigm shift over the last, say, quarter century from academia as intellectual exploration to academia as McDonaldized trade school, the irony isn’t lost on me concerning the discrepancy between the safe harbor innovative authors find there and the cultural critiques those authors launch through their writing and pedagogical work. In 2001, I quit my full professorship at one institution precisely because of my disappointment over what had happened to the learning environment there. I had no intentions of reentering the field. In 2007, however, the University of Utah approached me, and I found myself in an environment much more hospitable to the sort of work I want to do—teaching experimental narrative theory and practice. It isn’t by any means a simple irony. One could easily argue innovative writing and pedagogy represents the trace of the paradigm Barthes suggests, and that trace is tremendously productive in all kinds of ways. Innovative writing has never and will never change the world in any large, macrocosmic way. But we’ve all had our lives changed, one by one, by an encounter with a difficult, rich, resonant piece of prose, poetry, music, art, you name it. We’ve all had our lives changed at the ahistorical, microcosmic moment by a class we’ve taken, a teacher we’ve studied with, to such an extent that we became, quite literally, different people. I just came across a stunning set of sentences from Derrida on the topic: “What is education? The death of the parents.” That’s what we’re all up to in the innovative, be it in written texts or the texts we call our classrooms or the texts we call our politics: trying to disrupt what both can and can’t be disrupted, trying to undo what both can and can’t be undone, continuously. (shrink)

Autonomy seems to be a core issue for lifelogging technology as it can influence our understanding as well as our personal freedom but a comprehensive discussion on the effect of it on the autonomy of the lifelogger and others affected seems still missing in the current academic debate. In this article we provide a preliminary inquiry into this topic. First, the concept of lifelogging will be briefly clarified. In a lifelog, different data sources are combined in an archive that (...) can be used to retrieve information about the lifelogger and the environment in which the lifelogger is situated. Second, we will discuss the effect of lifelogs on an element of autonomy, namely understanding. Lifelogs can both advance understanding as well as hinder it. Information of lifelogs is the result of social processes that can bias information and can be used to manipulate lifeloggers. Third, we will discuss another aspect of autonomy, namely being free from controlling influences. Also on this level the effect of lifelogs is ambiguous. Fourth, we will discuss the conditions under which prospective lifelogger become lifeloggers. By discussing both the effect of lifelogs on autonomy as well as joining the community of lifeloggers we aim to show the many ways in which lifelogs can compromise and advance autonomy. Fifth, some recommendations are provided that aim to address the above mentioned concerns. (shrink)

What does it mean to be a realist about science if one takes seriously the view that scientific knowledge is always perspectival, namely historically and culturally situated? In this book, Michela Massimi articulates an original answer to this question. The book begins with an exploration of how scientific communities often resort to several models and a plurality of practices in some areas of inquiry, drawing on examples from nuclear physics, climate science, and developmental psychology. Taking this plurality in science as (...) a starting point, Massimi explains the perspectival nature of scientific representation, the role of scientific models as inferential blueprints, and the variety of scientific realism that naturally accompanies such a view. Perspectival realism is realism about phenomena (rather than about theories or unobservable entities). The book defends this novel realist view, which places epistemic communities and their situated knowledge center stage. The result is a portrait of scientific knowledge as a collaborative inquiry, where the reliability of science is made possible by a plurality of historically and culturally situated scientific perspectives. Along the way, Massimi offers insights into the nature of scientific modelling, scientific knowledge qua modal knowledge, data-to-phenomena inferences, and natural kinds as sortal concepts. Perspectival realism is ultimately realism that takes the multicultural nature of science seriously and couples it with cosmopolitan duties about how one ought to think about scientific knowledge and the distribution of the benefits resulting from scientific advancements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Guest Editors' NoteKevin Taylor (bio) and Johnathan Flowers (bio)Welcome to this special fall 2021 issue of Education & Culture. we are pleased to bring you the second installment of this special three-part issue on Deweyan approaches to contemporary issues at the intersection of data and technology.In his extensive writings on philosophy and technology, Luciano Floridi has argued that "the time has come to translate environmental ethics into terms (...) of infosphere and informational entities, for the land we now inhabit is not just the earth."1 This may be appropriate from a Deweyan perspective as Dewey's approach to aesthetic experience focuses on the living organism within its environment and we have become digital humans in digital environments. Our digital world feels unstable because it is in constant change, but Dewey reminds us that "all interactions that effect stability and order in the whirling flux of change are rhythms. There is ebb and flow, systole and diastole: ordered change."2 The rhythms of our digital world pervade all experience in what he termed "doing and undergoing." We are swimming in a sea of data and leaving behind what investigative reporter Julia Angwin terms data pollution.3 But in the data-driven world, that data pollution is collected, analyzed, and monetized by big data tech firms in a kind of societal harm that threatens digital democracy.Whereas part one saw contributions from five scholars throwing curriculum and technology into sharp relief, this issue asks questions such as "Where ought we to begin?", "What does feminist pragmatism have to tell us about the pandemic and online teaching and learning?", and "Do the aims and means of data and technology align with human experience?"John Machielsen's "Responsible Imagineering: John Dewey's Pluralistic Ethics and Technological Innovation" seems like a good place to begin. Machielsen argues for placing Dewey's ethics at the starting point from which technological innovation can flourish. Driven by Deweyan concepts of intelligence, education, and imagination, Machielsen explores, among other themes, socially disruptive technology from the perspective of pragmatists who constantly reconstruct concepts and values through the process of Deweyan inquiry. Human beings are imaginative and plastic with regard to problem solving, and what is needed here is to keep the barriers between technology and everyday life porous so that we do not risk compartmentalizing them as distinctly different realms.In the next two essays, we turn our attention to the growing concerns surrounding intelligent technology in online educational environments. Great strides have been made in the field of artificial intelligence, and intelligent technology has inserted itself into various aspects of data and technology, such as machine learning that creates personalized learning paths for students. Whether these technologies fall under the [End Page 1] category of algorithms, machine learning, or artificial intelligence, they raise questions about their potential impact on teaching and learning.Olivier Del Fabbro is also suspicious of the current state of intelligent technology in his article, "How to Teach Machines in Artificial Intelligence: Technical Education in John Dewey, Gilbert Simondon, and Machine Learning." Citing the Google machine learning model that classified African Americans as gorillas, Del Fabbro utilizes Dewey and Gilbert Simondon to argue that the human–machine relationship is still immature and at risk of creating an alienated situation out of undesirable bad habits. Intelligent technology requires constant care by engineers and programmers to form good habits and adapt to social life if their aims are to align with Deweyan pedagogy.As Del Fabbro focuses on intelligent technology, the human dimension of online learning comes under scrutiny in two articles that adopt feminist pragmatist methods. Krissah Marga B. Taganas's article, "Feminist-Pragmatist Perspectives on Online Education: Challenging and Changing Online Educational Conversation," rightfully acknowledges how the pandemic has magnified existing inequalities in society. The rapid migration to online learning was necessarily expedited in the face of uncertainties surrounding public health, but how do educators migrate classes that were not designed with online learning in mind to begin with? Dewey emphasized schools as sites and tools for change, but how does online education provide an optimal social environment for learning? Taganas utilizes feminist pragmatism as an important philosophical resource to... (shrink)

This paper begins by examining the claim that the practice of medicine is essentially a moral endeavor. According to this view, all clinical practice has moral content, and each clinical situation has a moral dimension. I suggest that in order to recognize this moral dimension, clinicians must engage in an interpretive process, and that they must be able to interpret clinical data in ethical terms. However, clinicians often lack the ‘moral perception’ required to appreciate this moral dimension. I will (...) argue that physicians lack moral perception when the clinical data they are given do not offer sufficient opportunity for interpretation. This paper draws on the work of Merleau-Ponty to suggest that this loss of interpretation is, paradoxically, the result of the way that patients experience illness. This thesis may be productive, first, because it suggests opportunities to explore the process of moral perception. This thesis also suggests ways for ethicists and educators to enhance clinicians' perception of the ethical dimensions of clinical practice. Finally, the concept of moral perception, when grounded in the patient's experience of illness, creates a fruitful area of inquiry that warrants inclusion in what may someday be the philosophy of medicine's canon. (shrink)

A process-based approach to archaeology combines traditional third-person data collection methods with first- and second-person inquiries. Drawing from the traditions of cognitive archaeology, transpersonal psychology, and ecopsychology, this mixed-methods approach can be thought of as a movement toward a more holistic or “integral” archaeology. By way of example, a prehistoric rock art site on Ometepe Island, Nicaragua is explored from the inside (through the researcher's lucid dreaming incubations) as well as in relationship with the researcher's embodied presence (an (...) exploration of environmental hermeneutics). These multiple perspectives can be seen to situate the researcher's worldview and biases within the context of the study as well as perhaps lead to new questions about the significance of these cognitive artifacts. (shrink)

Searching for better ways to inspire people to pursue wisdom, Frederick D. Aquino argues that teachers and researchers should focus less on state-of-the-art techniques and learning outcomes and instead pay more attention to the intellectual formation of their students. We should, Aquino contends, encourage the development of an integrative habit of mind, which entails cultivating the capacity to grasp how various pieces of data and areas of inquiry fit together and to understand how to apply this information to new (...) situations. To fully explore this notion, _An Integrative Habit of Mind_ brings the work of the great religious figure and educator John Henry Newman into fruitful conversation with recent philosophical developments in epistemology, cognition, and education. Aquino unearths some crucial but neglected themes from Newman’s writings and carries them forward into the contemporary context, revealing how his ideas can help us broaden our horizons, render apt judgments, and better understand our world and how we think about it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Teacher as Public ArtSheila Wright (bio)I entered the public art arena as an idealist optimist. Now, two decades later, I am a pragmatist realist. How did my dream of a populist marketplace turn into a nightmare?—Richard Posner, Artist vs. PublicLike Posner, many faculty members enter the academy as idealists, optimistic that their goals for and the promise of higher education will be fulfilled and their quest for knowledge inspired, (...) only to discover years later that they have become pragmatist realists.1 For many, change is necessary for survival, career success, and fulfilling dreams. At what point, however, might otherwise idealistic, visionary, and highly capable people become oppressed, disillusioned, and/or marginalized as professors? Under what conditions do professional dreams of transforming education and critical pedagogy become frustrated by rigid adherence to the status quo? How might initial aspirations of achieving a higher education become politicized and racialized as seemingly inescapable nightmares?For some faculty—particularly those of color and, especially, women working in historically white institutions—the assault on dreams occurs not only in nightmares during sleep but as monochrome, white-mares while awake.2 So, what does it mean just to be a professor in an environment where the simple quest to teach, conduct research, and serve can be frustrated by faulty, stereotypical, and often hostile assumptions, attitudes, and reactions to gender and skin? How might professors in these circumstances [End Page 83] respond to social constructions that manifest as body politics and racialized consciousness while simultaneously celebrating their identity, inner spirit, and cultural self—their ideals and visions? How do professors in these situations respond to institutional policies and practices and the social, cultural, and political nuances of place? Further, how can professors learn from their experiences and strive for meaningful transformation without the risk of being viewed as an "other," "unorthodox," an "activist," or worse?In this article "teacher as public art" is used as a metaphor to describe and explain the all-too-common perceptions and experiences of professors of color, especially women, within the academy. More specifically, this article reports findings from a qualitative study focused on what it means to be a woman of color in the academy. The findings presented are consistent with those encountered in a growing body of literature on the topic. Like other work in this area, an analysis of historical contexts can provide a critical link to understanding the cultural nuances framing the formation of professors' work identities. Triangulated data for this study included a visual art exhibition, personal reflections on the experiences of teaching in higher education, and formal research involving women faculty of color. Data were analyzed and interpreted based on literature defining the three worlds of professorship (scholarship, teaching, and service). The presentation of results and findings included here is intended to encourage further conversation regarding the retention, promotion, and tenure of faculty of color.Information and PerspectiveHighlighted throughout this discussion are (1) the relevance of locating self within the context of people and place; and (2) the importance of bringing meaning, authenticity, and credibility to teaching and research through continued reflection, self-assessment, and inquiry. The case presented is essentially a first attempt to accomplish these goals using self-study, personal experience, and public knowledge as an integrated vehicle for professional transformation. As both the researcher and a participant, the process required that I be simultaneously subjective and objective in order to examine the multiplicity of dialogues related to the professional self. In other words, the process required that I honor the voice of the person within—for example, artist, professor, woman, person of color—while, as a researcher, at the same time honoring the voices of those who participated in the study. As someone who came late to the academy (I was forty when I received my first tenure-track position), I drew for this study not only upon my prior experience and identity as a professor and educational researcher but also upon a myriad of pre-academy experiences and identities as, for example, an artist, art educator, administrator, and aspiring social reformer. The dynamic relationship [End Page 84] between those various identities facilitated and sustained a more cohesive... (shrink)

Through a case study, this paper contributes to answer the call to inquiries set by John Dewey in the conclusion of his Theory of Valuation. To move on to ethnography, some requirements explained by Alfred Schutz have also been followed: the study of choices, transactions, and evaluations must be confronted with real situations in real temporality, not with puppets set in motion by social scientists. The present case study is based upon a thorough ethnography of evaluation in a Spanish (...) Moroccan community milieu, conducted in Andalusia and Morocco from 2007 to 2010. The observation discipline, which leads to an original kind of ethnographic data, has been called ethno-accounting by the author, as the point is to take into account what people do actually take into account, instead of claiming to assess things and situations directly. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Man and Animal in Severan Rome: The Literary Imagination of Claudius Aelianus by Steven D. SmithFabio TutroneSteven D. Smith. Man and Animal in Severan Rome: The Literary Imagination of Claudius Aelianus. Greek Culture in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 308pp. $99.When Otto Keller published his meticulous work Die Antike Tierwelt (1909–13), classical scholars still conceived of ancient zoological knowledge as an astonishingly labyrinthine corpus of (...) tales. One felt the need to separate objective truths and fabulous accounts on the basis of a modern-oriented comparatist approach which was especially suspicious of Aelian’s De Natura Animalium and the so-called paradoxographic tradition. At that time, classicists were also keen to [End Page 532] see Severan literature as a scarcely original (and relatively uninteresting) digest of earlier writings—a faithful mirror of the beginning of the end.Steven Smith’s book on Aelian’s “literary imagination” and its culturally embedded use of animal figures is paradigmatic of the notable progress of scholarship in both such fields of research—the role of animals as revealing symbolic constructs and the intellectual life of Severan Rome. Throughout his well-structured survey, Smith offers new insights into Aelian’s worldview as a profoundly Hellenized Roman writer creatively combining biological notions and literary mirabilia, socio-political patterns, and sophistic aesthetics. On the one hand, the book clearly situates itself in the flourishing area of cultural and animal studies, making the most of both well-known and newly emerging theoretical frameworks (from Michel Foucault to Donna Haraway, from Derrida and Deleuze to Giorgio Agamben). Of course, the purpose of Smith as well as of other contemporary scholars interested in the ancient representation of animals is no longer to identify reliable “scientific” data as distinct from ancient folklore. Rather, it is the intersection of rhetorical, historical, and anthropological factors which seems to characterize most properly the Graeco-Roman discourse on animal life. On the other hand, however, Smith engages in an ambitious reconfiguration of Aelian’s (admittedly enigmatic) profile as an exponent of the Second Sophistic, at the same time indebted and alien to the milieu of the third century c.e. The multifaceted textual construction of Aelian’s animal narratives is shown to entail a critical (and at times ambiguous) reflection on such different issues as gender, religion, ethnicity, natural philosophy, and kingship.The book is composed of ten chapters, each one investigating a specific aspect of Aelian’s Weltanschauung on the basis of thematically connected passages. While the main focus is on De Natura Animalium (and thus on animal-related topics), two chapters (2 and 10, respectively) extend the scope of the inquiry to Aelian’s Rustic Letters and Varia Historia (VH). The monograph as a whole is framed by an introductory overview (starting with a fictional first-person speech by Aelian) and a conclusive note which sums up Smith’s most relevant theses. In addition, a more “philological” appendix discusses seventeen short fragments possibly pertaining to Aelian’s lost Katēgoria tou gunnidos (“The Indictment of the Little Woman”), a bitter invective against Elagabalus prudently written after the emperor’s death (cf. Philostr. Vit. Soph. 625).The question of Aelian’s elusive literary persona figures prominently in the general introduction and is the core subject of chapter 1. By qualifying the author of the De Natura Animalium (NA) as “independent” and “countercultural,” Smith does not mean to remove him from his social and political context. On the contrary, the evidence drawn from the NA itself (especially from the impressionistic self-portrait of the preface and the epilogue), together with the biographical sketches in Philostratus’ Lives of the Sophists and in the Byzantine Souda lexicon, is used to demonstrate that, though “inextricably bound up with and perhaps even unwittingly celebratory of urban Roman culture of the early third century c.e., Aelian nevertheless also fashions a literary persona that is critical of that same [End Page 533] cultural milieu” (16). In Smith’s view, such a fascinatingly ambivalent effect is made possible by the overwhelming stylistic variety (poikilia) of the NA, which appears as an “open” work (in Umberto Eco’s terms) intentionally lacking any large-scale... (shrink)

Recent decades have seen a development of a variety of approaches for examining lived experience in the context of cognitive science. However, the field of first-person research has yet to develop a pragmatic epistemological framework that would enable researchers to compare and integrate – as well as understand the epistemic status of – different methods and their findings. In this article, we present the foundation of such a framework, grounded in an epistemological investigation of gestures involved in acquiring data (...) on experience. We examine the acts of turning towards one’s experiential field and attending to experience within the process of reflection. We describe what we call the horizon of attending to experience by analogy to the “experimental arrangement” in quantum observation: this horizon, we argue, co-defines experiential phenomena that end up being observed and reported; at the same time, it itself forms an element of experience and is therefore amenable to phenomenological investigation. Drawing on the constructivist notion of enaction, we show that acknowledging the inherently constructive nature of attending to experience and accepting one’s lack of epistemic access to the “original”, observation-independent pre-reflective experience is not a dead end for first-person research when situated in a constructivist (but not relativist) understanding of the reflective act and its results. Expanding the notion of the horizon to encompass all epistemic acts involved in producing phenomenological data and final results of a first-person study (i.e., horizon of the method), we suggest some lines of inquiry that would allow researchers to identify and articulate horizons of particular methods, opening a way towards integrating past and future findings of different complementary first-person approaches into a comprehensive map of lived experience. (shrink)

This book analyses the state of development of Muslims at the regional level. It explains the linkages between the findings of global, national, and state-level studies with regard to the current status of Muslims and broadens understanding of Muslims and their participation in virtually all major sectors, including the economy, housing, demography, health, migration, state policy, and affirmative action. The book presents the challenges faced by the community and reflects upon the socio-economic and educational conditions of Muslims in Telangana State. (...) It presents a comparative analysis of mortality data, maternal health, delivery care, and child immunization, as well as reproductive health aspects and children’s nutritional status. It shares valuable insights into the impacts of emigration and internal migration on health among local Muslims and presents a detailed analysis of data from the Census of India, NSSO, and Commission of Inquiry on Socio-Economic and Educational Status of Muslims regarding the social, economic, and demographic situation of Muslims in Telangana, as well as their opportunities for development under the newly formed state government. The book would be of great interest to scholars and researchers in development economics, sociology, politics, history, cultural studies, minority studies, Islamic studies, and policy studies, as well as policymakers, civil society activists, and those working in media and journalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dewey on Metaphysics, Meaning Making, and Maps James W. Garrison Blueprints and maps are propositions and they exemplify what it is to be propositional.1 [E]very characteristic trait is a quality.... produced and destroyed by existential conditions.2 John Dewey's claim that there are metaphysical generic traits of existence the theory of which provides "a ground-map" for cultural criticism remains controversial. I will work along two intertwining lines to try and (...) clear things up a bit. First, many assume that his reference to a metaphysical map is a metaphor. My paper will show that he uses the idea of a map consistently in many different places throughout his career. Second, my paper will examine how Dewey functionally coordinates ordinary existential traits and their maps within his theory of judgment. We will find that the generic traits and the ground-map of criticism connect in much the same way. Before examining Dewey's theory of judgment, I want to say something about where Dewey's metaphysics fits into his empirical "denotative method." In the conclusion, we wiU look at where metaphysics fits into the architectonic of his entire phUosophy. In between, we wiU examine maps functioning as propositions (especiaUy logical and mathematical universals) as weU as ever-evolving guides to unending inquiry in an unfinished and unfinishable universe. Eventually we wiU see why Dewey insists that "the social" is "The Inclusive PhUosophic Idea." Metaphysics, for Dewey, is simply one tool of cultural criticism among others. First and Last Philosophy in Dewey's Denotative Method Dewey's "denotative method" moves from the immediately given intuitive meanings of qualitative "having" of experience that impart a "sense" of a qualitative, organically whole TRANSACTIONS OFTHE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY Vol. 41, No. 4 ©2005 O situation from whence we may select traits, through the experience of "significant " linguistic meanings, such as the propositions of judgment, to the experience of "knowing" as the product of the logical process of inquiry, and back again to primary experience.4 Each phase interpenetrates every 3 other. Here is how Dewey describes the trans-action between primary, noncognitive and secondary, cognitive experience in his original (1925) >■$ introduction to Experience and Nature: ^r There are two avenues of approach to the goal of philosophy. We may " begin with experience in gross, experience in its primary and crude forms ^ [e.g., traits].... Or, we may begin with refined selective products, the a most authentic statements of commended methods of science [e.g., ¿q maps], and work from them back to the primary facts of life. ^ P TT ϕ > Philosophy may start with either immediate existential experience or the 3 experience of mediating meanings. While we may distinguish these two L starting points, we should never construct a dualism from them since both jx occur within experience.6 Dewey explains that "the subject-matter of primary experience sets the problems and furnishes the first data of reflection ""O which constructs the secondary objects of reflection."7 Further, "crude or macroscopic experience" provides the "test and verification" of the secondary objects of reflection. Secondary objects "explain the primary objects, 2 they enable us to grasp them with understanding!'9 The two starting points " differ in direction, but eventually they close to form a circle of expanding? dence. They may then pioneer new pathways, or, having different values, D choose to construct different kinds of maps. ^ Douglas Browning distinguishes "three phases of discussion of the start- 0 ing point."23 The first concerns "the designation of a certain subject matter P1 referred to under the names 'experience' and 'my life'."24 Dewey's empirical « denotative method selects aspects from immediate qualitative experience. The >% second phase involves two things: First, "a reflective moving away from and looking back upon that subject-matter" and, second, "the bringing of a puta- S tive characterization against it." Browning's example of characterization is g "the catalogue of the generic traits of experience." The generic traits are not S antecedent to inquiry; rather they are the products of reflection used to char- 5 ' acterize primary experience. Browning observes that characterization is always ^ provisional; as we wiU find, Dewey insists that the theoretical map proposi- ^ tionaUy representing the existential... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Approaching History through the Future: Some Thoughts from a Feminist PragmatistErin McKennai was recently asked to write on the philosophy of history from a pragmatist perspective. My initial response was that this is not my area of specialization and that I didn’t really have much to say. Then I realized that it was interesting to think about how I view and use notions of history in my work as (...) a feminist pragmatist. It turns out that in my own work, there is a theme of approaching/understanding history through the possibilities of the future. Rather than being confined by settled or fixed views of the present or the past, the present and past are better seen as possibilities for shaping new and different futures. This can be unsettling for many, as humans often like to justify practices and institutions with the idea that “it has to be this way” and/or “it has always been this way.” But unsettling this habit is important if we hope to approach conflict and disagreements in a productive manner that avoids dogmatism and division.Examining my own use of history in my varied philosophical work turned out to be interesting and instructive. It also revealed my reliance on theorists such as Jane Addams, Anna Julia Cooper, and John Dewey in my writing and my teaching. Usually, I work with implicit notions of history and its role in my philosophical writing. The one exception to that was in writing American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, co-authored with Scott L. Pratt. In that work, we explicitly took up a pragmatist approach to history rooted in the work of John Dewey. There, we wrote:For Peirce, James, and Dewey, philosophy worth the name began in response to experienced problems—situations marked by confusion, doubt, indeterminacy—and then returned to these problems, aiming to transform and reconstruct them in ways that allowed the inquirer to go forward, to encounter still more experience. Philosophy, then should be understood as an activity that arises from experience. Since [End Page 71] experience is framed by language, culture and history, philosophy is not a transcendental practice engaged with the really real and truly true.(McKenna and Pratt 3)In “Philosophy and Civilization,” Dewey noted that philosophy is closely tied to the histories of cultures. These ties are mutually transformative, as the philosophy produced is rooted in, and shaped by, the place and time just as it then transforms the place, time, and traditions that give rise to it.Dewey’s own philosophy of history guided our work in American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present as we strove to offer a history of American philosophy that acknowledges its rootedness in particular times and places. In Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, Dewey noted that history is always in the making, when he wrote:The slightest reflection shows that the conceptual material employed in writing history is that of the period in which a history is written. There is no material available for leading principles and hypotheses save that of the historic present. As culture changes, the conceptions that are dominant in a culture change. Of necessity, new standpoints for viewing, appraising and ordering data arise. History is then rewritten. Material that had formerly been passed by, offers itself as data because the new conceptions propose new problems for solution requiring new factual material for statement and test.(LW 12:232–33)Dewey went on to argue that changes happening in the present put the past into a new perspective and bring to light new problems. This means that one’s understanding of the past is changed, and “we gain new instruments for estimating the force of present conditions as potentialities of the future” (LW 12:238). For this reason, in American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, Pratt and I embedded the history of American philosophy in actual historical events that we thought could profitably provide context for the philosophy and could themselves be rethought from our present vantage point. We were guided by the standpoint that American philosophy is a tradition committed “to a dynamic, pluralistic world of experience in which knowledge is a... (shrink)

Attempting art: an essay on intention-dependenceIt is a truism among philosophers that art is intention-dependent—that is to say, art-making is an activity that depends in some way on the maker's intentions. Not much thought has been given to just what this entails, however. For instance, most philosophers of art assume that intention-dependence entails concept-dependence—i.e. possessing a concept of art is necessary for art-making, so that what prospective artists must intend is to make art. And yet, a mounting body of anthropological (...) and art-historical evidence and philosophical argument suggests that not only is such a criterion unsatisfied by most of the art-historical canon, but it also rests on a false premise: concepts of 'art' are not shared between cultures, nor even in the same culture across time. My dissertation aims to rectify this error by first exploring what our commitment to art's intention-dependence actually entails, and then showing that, properly understood, intention-dependence sets a number of important constraints on theories of art with respect to explanatory desiderata such as the success- and failure-conditions of art-attempts, the cross-cultural identification of art, and the reference of 'art' and art-kind terms. I begin by situating art's intention-dependence in the philosophical literature on intentional action, arguing that, properly conceived, intention-dependence is a weak criterion which can be satisfied either directly or indirectly. It therefore does not necessarily entail concept-dependence. I then use this distinction to motivate a new treatment of the success- and failure-conditions for art-attempts, arguing that the extant model's emphasis on compliance with 'the manner intended' is far too restrictive to capture actual artistic practices. I go on to show that Ruth Millikan's model of linguistic conventions supplies an independently plausible explanation of art's concept-independent origins in terms of the development of a system of indirectly intention-dependent conventions called an 'artworld'. I argue that this account of artworld development supplies us with the tools we need to distinguish art-kinds from other artifactual kinds. Finally, I turn my attention to methodological issues, arguing that even though 'art' is a social kind with its roots in arbitrary and historically-contingent networks of conventions, the philosophy of art is not merely an exercise in bare conceptual analysis. In fact, there is now a great deal of evidence to show that the ways we think about 'art' are inconsistent, incomplete, imperialistic, and largely unprincipled. Yet I argue that this does not mean that the artworld data have no bearing on theories of art. Instead, I argue that our best reflective understanding of our artworld practices sets the constraints on the reference of 'art' and art-kind terms. I argue that we have no privileged epistemic access to the ontology of social kinds; our only privilege lies in our ability to determine the proper subject of our inquiries. (shrink)

Ethics is of vital importance to the Swedish educational system, as in many other educational systems around the world.Yet, it is unclear how ethics should be dealt with in school, and prior research and evaluations have found serious problems regarding ethics in education.The field of moral education lacks clear and widely accepted definitions of key concepts, and these ambiguities negatively impact both research and educational practice. This thesis draws a distinction between three approaches to ethics in school – the descriptive (...) ethics approach, the value transmission approach, and the inquiry ethics approach – and studies in what way (if at all) they are prescribed by the national curriculum for the Swedish compulsory school, how they relate to students’ moral reasoning about technology choices and online behaviour, and what pedagogical merits and disadvantages they have. Hopefully, this both contributes to reducing the ambiguities of the field, and to answering the question of how ethics should be dealt with in education. The descriptive ethics approach asserts that school should teach students empirical facts about ethics, such as what views and opinions people have. The value transmission approach holds that school should mediate some set of predefined values to the students and make sure the students come to accept these values.The inquiry ethics approach is the view that school should teach students to reason and think critically about ethics and to engage in ethical inquiry. The role of ethics in the curriculum has not been studied in light of the above distinction, in prior research,and such an investigation is undertaken here.The results suggest that ethics has a prominent, but complicated, role in the Swedish national curriculum. Although no explicit distinction is drawn or acknowledged in the curriculum, all three approaches are prescribed throughout the curriculum, albeit to different degrees. In the general section of the curriculum, the value transmission and inquiry ethics approaches are more extensively prescribed than the descriptive ethics approach. It was found that most of the syllabi contained explicit references to ethics, while some only contained implicit references to ethics, and two syllabi lacked references to ethics altogether. In the syllabi, the inquiry ethics approach is the most dominant, both in the sense of being present in the most syllabi, and in the sense of being more strongly prescribed in many of the syllabi where several approaches occur.The value transmission approach has the weakest role in the syllabi. In total, the inquiry ethics approach is the approach most strongly prescribed by the curriculum. But prior research has shown that inquiry ethics is very rarely implemented in the classroom. In this thesis, it is found that the inquiry ethics and the value transmission approaches are incompatible, given certain reasonable interpretations, which makes the finding that inquiry ethics is rarely implemented less surprising, since value transmission is practiced in schools. Some possible causes, and some consequences, of this is discussed. The students, in their moral reasoning about technology choices, reasoned in accordance with several classical normative theories – including consequentialism, deontological ethics and virtue ethics – and in doing so, they expressed reasoning that in the discussion is found to be in conflict with the values of the value foundation in the curriculum. These findings complement earlier findings, for example that students in their actions contradict the value foundation, by adding that such conflicts also exist in their reasoning. The existence of these conflicts is found to be problematic for a value transmission approach. Many of the students defended very restrictive views on disclosing personal information online, and prior research as well as the present data has shown that adults typically hold views that are very similar to these, concerning how they think that young people ought to act online. On the other hand, youths’ actual online behaviour, as reported in earlier studies, differs considerably from this. In line with this, the students also seemed to endorse a form of private morals view, according to which moral choices are simply up to one’s own taste, which would yield an escape exit from the restrictive views mentioned above, and permit any behaviour. In the discussion, it is argued that this is the result of an attempt at value transmission from the grown-up community, probably including teachers, which might seem to work, since the students claim to hold certain views, but which likely instead constitutes a false security, since these values are not actually accepted, but only paid lip service to, and the adults are therefore wrong in their belief that the students are protected by a certain set of values (that they think the students are upholding), since the students in fact do not uphold, and therefore do not act based upon, these values. This situation risks making the students more vulnerable than had no value transmission attempt been taken in the first place. Hence, the attempted value transmission runs the risk of counteracting its purpose of helping the students acquire a safe online behaviour. Throughout the moral reasoning mentioned above, extensive variations in the students’ reasoning were found, both interpersonally and intrapersonally, both in the decision method and in the rightness criterion dimensions, as well as in between the dimensions.The existence of such variations is a novel finding, and while possible applications in future research are discussed, it is also noted that this existence constitutes a reason to question the successfulness of both the value transmission and the inquiry ethics endeavours of the educational system. The results and discussions described above highlight the importance of investigating the merits of the different approaches. Several arguments that arise from the material of this thesis are presented, evaluated and discussed. The ability of each approach to fulfil some alleged key aims of ethics education is scrutinised; their abilities to educate for good citizenship, to educate for quality of life of the individual, and to facilitate better educational results in other subjects are all investigated, as well as the ability of each approach to help counteract the influence from online extremist propaganda aimed at young people and to promote safe online behaviour in general. It is concluded that the inquiry ethics approach has the strongest support from the material of this thesis. Some consequences for school practice are discussed, and it is concluded that changing the role of ethics in the curriculum would be beneficial, downplaying the role of value transmission and further increasing, and making more explicit and clear, the role of inquiry ethics. It is also shown that there are strong reasons for the inclusion of a new subject in the Swedish compulsory education with special focus on ethics. 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What could a social-justice oriented, feminist data studies look like? The current datalogical turn foregrounds the digital datafication of everyday life, increasing algorithmic processing and data as an emergent regime of power/knowledge. Scholars celebrate the politics of big data knowledge production for its omnipotent objectivity or dismiss it outright as data fundamentalism that may lead to methodological genocide. In this feminist and postcolonial intervention into gender-, race- and geography-blind ‘big data’ ideologies, I call for ethical, (...) anti-oppressive digital data-driven research in the social sciences and humanities. I argue that a reflexive data scholarship can emerge from the reintegration of feminist and postcolonial science studies and ethics of care ideals. Although it is not a panacea for all ails of data mining, I offer a road map for an alternative data-analysis practice that is more power-sensitive and accountable. By incorporating a people-centric and context-aware perspective that acknowledges relationships of dependency, reflects on temptations, and scrutinises benefits and harm, an ‘asymmetrically reciprocal’ (Young, 1997) research encounter may be achieved. I bring this perspective to bear on experiences of a two-year research project with eighty-four young Londoners on digital identities and living in a highly diverse city. I align awareness of uneven relations of power and knowledge with the messy relation of dependency between human and non-human actors in data analysis. This framework productively recognises that digital data cannot be expected to speak for itself, that data do not emerge from a vacuum, and that isolated data patterns cannot be the end-goal of a situated and reflexive research endeavor. Data-driven research, in turn, shows the urgency for renewed feminist ethical reflection on how digital mediation impacts upon responsibility, intersectional power relations, human subjectivity and the autonomy of research participants over their own data. (shrink)

I respond to H. M. Collins's claim (1985, 1990, 1993) that experimental inquiry cannot be objective because the only criterium experimentalists have for determining whether a technique is "working" is the production of "correct" (i.e., the expected) data. Collins claims that the "experimenters' regress," the name he gives to this data-technique circle, cannot be broken using the resources of experiment alone. I argue that the data-technique circle, can be broken even though any interpretation of the raw (...) class='Hi'>data produced by techniques is theory-dependent. However, it is possible to break this circle by eliminating dependence on even those theoretical presuppositions that are shared by an entire scientific community through the use of multiple independently theory-dependent techniques to produce robust bodies of data. Moreover, I argue, that it is the production of robust bodies of data that convinces experimentalists of the objectivity of their data interpretations. (shrink)

This ‘story from the field’ emerges from qualitative research conducted with relatives of patients admitted to intensive care. A disturbing feature of researching the needs of family members of critically ill patients is the intense emotion that is often generated during the course of interviewing. For some the opportunity to talk about the experience of having a loved one in an intensive care unit was therapeutic; for others it meant anguish and despair as they relived the event that resulted in (...) a life‐threatening illness. Despite being a reasonably experienced educator and critical care nurse, I was unprepared for the intensity of feelings shown by many of the participants. I found that exposure to this kind of suffering was emotionally draining, experiencing the various roles of confidante, nurse, counsellor and researcher. It became important to share my thoughts and feelings and unwind with an independent friend and colleague as a way of debriefing. Methodological and ethical issues that arose included: generating a situation that potentially required therapeutic intervention; the impact on the ‘purity’ of data of becoming emotionally enmeshed; and the level of investigator preparedness when researching sensitive topics. The issue of walking away from an intensely emotional and intimate interview often leaves one with a sense of ‘unfinished business’. (shrink)

Anthony Freeman (2006) proposes that Dennett's heterophenomenology (HP) be fully integrated into transpersonal studies as a solution to the 'subtle Cartesianism' that Jorge Ferrer (2002) detects within the field. Methods virtually indistinguishable from HP are already in use within transpersonal research, so the issue of comparison lies deeper. On close analysis, Ferrer's approach cannot be situated within Dennett's (2003) data levels at all, for participatory transpersonalism conceives a profoundly different relationship between conscious subject and the world: a relational matrix (...) of interacting subjects participating in the co- creation of the cosmos. HP, while valuable, is not adequate for a comprehensive study of consciousness. Its shortcomings can be illustrated by imagining an analogical discipline in the natural sciences: heterobotany. Limiting transpersonal inquiry to HP would represent a step backwards in the ongoing process of pioneering effective methods of consciousness research. (shrink)

The aim of this collection is to create a curated set of key German source texts from the eighteenth-century life sciences devoted to theories of generation, heredity, and race. The criteria for inclusion stem from our sense that there is an argument to be made for connecting three domains of inquiry that have heretofore remained mostly distinct in both their presentation and scholarly analysis: i) life science debates regarding generation and embryogenesis, ii) emerging philosophical and anthropological theories regarding the nature (...) of racial typology, and iii) the role of empire in supplying the ethnographic materials in use as evidence for the various investigations and theories being proposed. The Key Texts volume thus has three sections. The first section is devoted to selections from theorists working to create an account of the processes guiding generation and embryogenetic development. Given that at the time there were few ways to definitively prove that babies received contributions from both parents in their creation, mixed-race children became increasingly valuable sources of evidence for those insisting on joint inheritance. Although this sets up the second section of the volume—since one can trace a clear facet of racial biometric science out of this original set of enquiries—the bulk of section two is devoted to the many different accounts created at the time to understand and delineate racial differences. The third section is focused on ‘race and empire’ in order to situate the scientific texts of the previous sections in their socio-historical context. By including these pieces, it is our aim to remind readers that scientific curiosity over the nature and origin of racial diversity did not develop in a vacuum but indeed existed in full knowledge of the exploitation and dispossession of human beings. The ‘materials’ for this research program were in many cases either directly taken from black and brown human beings caught up in Europe’s colonial projects or were provided by the data gathered during large-scale voyages of exploration. The material basis of this type of research was rarely reflected upon by any of the theorists in sections one and two of the volume, a fact that has led many historians of science to focus on these theories without attention to the socio-historical context; we are deliberately trying to avoid this and indeed to deepen our own readers’ appreciation of the fact. (shrink)