In previous work, we have developed the idea that, in some disputes, speakers appear to use (rather than mention) a term in order to put forward views about how that term should be used. We call such disputes “metalinguistic negotiations”. Herman Cappelen objects that our model of metalinguistic negotiation makes implausible predictions about what speakers really care about, and what kinds of issues they would take to settle their disputes. We highlight a distinction (which we have emphasized in prior work) (...) between the question of which disagreements speakers have vs. which disagreements are immediately expressed in a given linguistic exchange. Once this distinction is clear, we can appreciate that speakers who are engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation (where certain issues in conceptual ethics are immediately expressed) can also disagree about other issues, including both other issues in conceptual ethics and “object-level” issues that aren’t about words or concepts. In many metalinguistic negotiations, speakers (we think correctly) care more about these other issues than they do about ones concerning the meaning of a word. Because of this, Cappelen’s objection fails to identify any data that challenge our model. (shrink)

This paper raises a new form of speaker error objection to the analysis of disputes as metalinguistic negotiations in cases in which disputants reject that analysis. It focuses on an obvious but underexplored form of speaker error: speakers’ misattribution of contents both to others and to themselves. It argues that the analyses of disputes that posit this type of speaker error are uncharitable in three different ways: first, by portraying speakers as mistaken interpreters of their interlocutors; second, by portraying speakers (...) as uncharitable interpreters of their interlocutors; third, by portraying speakers who retract their claims as mistaken interpreters of their own prior utterances. Taken together, these unfavorable consequences weigh significantly against the plausibility of this type of analysis for the cases in question. (shrink)

Negotiation and deliberation are two context types or genres of discourse widely studied in the argumentation literature. Within the pragma-dialectical framework, they have been characterised in terms of the conventions constraining the use of argumentative discourse in each of them. Thanks to these descriptions, it has become possible to analyse the arguers’ strategic manoeuvres and carry out more systematic, context-sensitive evaluations of argumentative discussions. However, one issue that still must be addressed in the pragma-dialectical theory—and other contextual approaches to argumentation—is (...) how to distinguish negotiation and deliberation in practice. In this paper, I seek to develop criteria that can help the analyst identify them in discourse. To this end, I characterise the felicity conditions of the superordinate speech acts defining and structuring deliberation and negotiation encounters. (shrink)

Meetings are complex institutional events at which participants recurrently negotiate institutional roles, which are oriented to, renegotiated, and sometimes challenged. With a view to gaining further understanding of the ongoing negotiation of roles at meetings, this article examines one specific recurring feature of meetings: the act of proposing future action. Based on microanalysis of video recordings of two-party strategy meetings, the study shows that participants orient to at least two aspects when making proposals: 1) the acceptance or rejection of the (...) proposal; and 2) questions of entitlement: who is entitled to launch a proposal, and who is entitled to accept or reject it? The study argues that there is a close interrelation between questions of entitlement, aligning and affiliating moves, and the negotiation of institutional roles. The multimodal analysis also reveals the use of various embodied practices by participants for the local negotiation of entitlement and institutional roles. (shrink)

The problem of moral disagreement has been presented as an objection to contextualist semantics for ‘ought’, since it is not clear that contextualism can accommodate or give a convincing gloss of such disagreement. I argue that independently of our semantics, disagreements over ‘ought’ in non-cooperative contexts are best understood as indirect metalinguistic disputes, which is easily accommodated by contextualism. If this is correct, then rather than posing a problem for contextualism, the data from moral disagreements provides some reason to adopt (...) a semantics that allows contextual variance in the meanings of ‘ought’. (shrink)

Negotiation research primarily focuses on negotiators? interests in order to understand negotiation and offer advice about the prospective outcome. Win-win outcomes, i.e., outcomes that serve the interests of all negotiating parties, have been established and promoted as the ultimate goal for any negotiation situation. We offer a perspective that draws on Aristotle's philosophical program and discuss how the outcome is not defined by the parties? interests, but by the intersubjective validity of claims, which can essentially be treated as representative (...) of the ?truth.? (shrink)

In recent work, we have argued that a number of disputes of interest to philosophers – including some disputes amongst philosophers themselves – are metalinguistic negotiations. Prima facie, many of these disputes seem to concern worldly, non-linguistic issues directly. However, on our view, they in fact concern, in the first instance, normative questions about the use of linguistic expressions. This will strike many ordinary speakers as counterintuitive. In many of the disputes that we analyze as metalinguistic negotiations, speakers might quite (...) strongly resist the idea that their debate is in any sense about language. In this paper, we explore and provide responses to what we take to be the best versions of an objection that our view involves an unacceptable attribution of false beliefs to ordinary speakers. (shrink)

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one right logic. A particular version of the view, what is sometimes called domain-specific logical pluralism, has it that the right logic and connectives depend somehow on the domain of use, or context of use, or the linguistic framework. This type of view has a problem with cross-framework communication, though: it seems that all such communication turns into merely verbal disputes. If two people approach the same domain with different logics (...) as their guide, then they may be using different connectives, and hence talking past each other. In this situation, if we think we are having a conversation about “¬A\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lnot A$$\end{document}”, but are using different “¬\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lnot $$\end{document}”s, then we are not really talking about the same thing. The communication problem prevents legitimate disagreements about logic, which is a bad result. In this paper I articulate a possible solution to this problem, without giving up pluralism, which requires adopting a notion of metalinguistic negotiation, and allows people to communicate and disagree across domains/contexts/frameworks. (shrink)

AbstractAgroecosystems in the Midwestern United States are undergoing changes that pressure farmers to adapt their farming practices. Because farmers decide what practices to implement on their land, there are needs to understand how they adapt to competing demands of changes in global markets, technology, farm sizes, and decreasing rural populations. Increased understanding of farmer decision-making can also inform agricultural policy in ways that encourage farmer adoption of sustainable practices. In this research we adopt a grounded view of farmers by interpreting (...) their decision-making through their stories of everyday life. We use a narrative analysis to identify recurrent themes that characterize farmer decisions as active negotiations between the demands of efficiency in maximizing crop yields with a desire to steward land through past, present, and future generations. Together these narratives portray farmer decisions as a place-making process that seeks compatibility among distinct aspirations for their land. (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that the traditional Kantian division between two different types of judgments, judgments of personal preference and judgments of taste, does not apply to some contexts in which metalinguistic negotiations take place. To begin, I first highlight some significant similarities between predicates of personal taste and aesthetic predicates. I sustain that aesthetic predicates are gradable and multidimensional, and that they often produce metalinguistic negotiations, characteristics that have motivated an individual treatment for predicates of personal taste. Secondly, (...) contrary to Kant’s claim, I maintain that there are cases where judgments of personal preference are intersubjectively valid; in some contexts of metalinguistic negotiation, judgments of personal preference direct universality to a similar extent as judgments of taste. Some examples of real-life conversations will be presented to illustrate this point. (shrink)

I develop a framework for a narrative approach to personal identity as a practical notion that focuses on the role of narratives employed in common, ordinary contexts and everyday interactions (henceforth ‘ordinary everyday narratives’). However, such narratives can be erroneous and contain factual errors and distortions, including delusions about one’s identity. I review three narrative approaches arguing that they do not account convincingly for the role of erroneous narratives for one’s practical identity. I argue that a practical identity is negotiated (...) in ordinary everyday verbal and embodied narratives. According to my narrative approach, firstly, ordinary everyday narratives often suffice to convey one’s experiences, beliefs and aims within everyday interactions with others. Secondly, embodiment allows one to develop embodied narratives, i.e. temporally organised and goal-directed sequences of actions, habits and skills. Thirdly, one negotiates her practical identity through narratives and embodied interactions that structure first-personal and second-personal practical relations. I argue that a negotiated practical identity allows for the ‘repair’ of minor errors and the recognition of the practical significance of major errors, like delusional narratives, in shaping one’s practical identity. Finally, identity negotiation offers some scope for resistance against oppressive narratives. (shrink)

Negotiating Capability and Diaspora examines Amartya Sen’s theory of capability in dialogue with the American philosopher John Rawls. Sen’s theory arose to show an oriental dimension of the critique of utilitarianism that valorizes will power and honor diversity. Indian philosopher Aurobindo also enters the discourse to complement the theory of capability with supra-rational theory of emotional purification. In addition, feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum plays a major role in the book as do the literary writers of diaspora.

The article provides an instructive in-depth analysis of communicative practices in the personal blog. Its aim is to document the discursive dynamics and interactional ethics of blogging, with a specific focus on negotiations of the blogging self in-between public and private. Based on key findings from an empirical case study of personal blogs, the article addresses the negotiation of the blogging self from three interdependent perspectives: the network structures, patterns of interaction, and thematic orientations of the blog. Instead of approaching (...) the online self as the individual blogger’s self-presentation to an often unknown and unfamiliar audience, I analyse and discuss the ‘blogging self’ as a relational and collaborative accomplishment, as something that is constantly subject to negotiation between author and readers, and is framed by the blog as a communicative genre. The theoretical foundation for this relational approach to the self is inspired by the work of sociologist Georg Simmel on how individuals attune to their networks of affiliation in a process of socialisation (Simmel 1955). The article contributes to the discussion of ethical behaviour and privacy protection in social media by highlighting the role of phatic communication in the blog. Specifically, I demonstrate how participants in the blog network negotiate and maintain an ethos of privacy protection in and through practices associated with the phatic. They do this by adhering to a ‘principle of sociability’, allowing them to experience their communication as personal but not private. (shrink)

In this paper, we demonstrate how the language and reasonings that academics, developers, consumers, marketers, and journalists deploy to accept or reject AI as authentic intelligence has far-reaching bearing on how we understand our human intelligence and condition. The discourse on AI is part of what we call the “authenticity negotiation process” through which AI’s “intelligence” is given a particular meaning and value. This has implications for scientific theory, research directions, ethical guidelines, design principles, funding, media attention, and the way (...) people relate to and act upon AI. It also has great impact on humanity’s self-image and the way we negotiate what it means to be human, existentially, culturally, politically, and legally. We use a discourse analysis of academic papers, AI education programs, and online discussions to demonstrate how AI itself, as well as the products, services, and decisions delivered by AI systems are negotiated as authentic or inauthentic intelligence. In this negotiation process, AI stakeholders indirectly define and essentialize what being human(like) means. The main argument we will develop is that this process of indirectly defining and essentializing humans results in an elimination of the space for humans to be indeterminate. By eliminating this space and, hence, denying indeterminacy, the existential condition of the human being is jeopardized. Rather than re-creating humanity in AI, the AI discourse is re-defining what it means to be human and how humanity is valued and should be treated. (shrink)

Negotiating clinical knowledge: a field study of psychiatric nurses’ everyday communication Nursing practices at psychiatric hospitals have changed significantly over the last decades. In this paper, everyday nursing practices were interpreted in light of these institutional changes. The objective was to examine how mental health nurses’ production of clinical knowledge was influenced by the particular social relations on hospital wards. Empirical data stemming from an extended fieldwork at two Danish psychiatric hospital wards were interpreted using interactionistic theory and the (...) metaphor: ‘the game of clinical knowledge’. The results indicated that the nurses’ production of clinical knowledge was highly dependent on the individual nurses’ practical ability to participate in the game. Furthermore, the nurses colluded in their mutual communication to enable the collective display and sense of knowing that protected them against explicit signs of uncertainty about the clinic. The game of clinical knowledge influenced processes of clinical decision‐making among the nurses as the game added to a distorted widening of a ‘fictional distance’ between patients and the representations produced by the nurses. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the influence of cultural familiarity on getting the most out of an e-negotiation for merger or acquisition based on subjective and objective negotiation behaviors. We examined if cultural awareness could increase the rate of negotiation self-efficacy, shorten the length of negotiation and optimize deal closure results. To do so, firstly we investigate the concept of e-negotiation and its development in the last two decades. Then a series of systematic reviews is performed on the parameters influencing the (...) success in offline and online merger or acquisition negotiations. We also considered the main traits of Western and Middle Eastern Arab cultures on negotiations. The results show that many of the requirements of successful collaboration, or negotiations, with Arab managers can currently happen only through face-to-face meetings. (shrink)

In economically meaningful interactions negotiations are particularly important because they allow agents to improve their information about the environment and even to change accordingly their own characteristics. In each step of a negotiation an agent has to emit a message. This message conveys information about her preferences and endowments. Given that the information she uses to decide which message to emit comes from beliefs generated in previous stages of the negotiation, she has to cope with the uncertainty associated with them. (...) The assessment of the states of the world also evolves during the negotiation. In this paper we analyze the intertwined dynamics of beliefs and decision, in order to determine conditions on the agents that allow them to reach agreements. The framework for decision making we consider here is based on defeasible evaluation of possibilities: an argument for a choice defeats another one if it is based on a computation that better uses all the available information. (shrink)

In 2004, twelve capuchin monkeys were moved from the labs of the Danish psychiatric hospital of Sankt Hans to a small private-owned zoo in another part of Denmark in order to be rehabilitated. These monkeys were the last nonhuman primates to be used as research animals in Danish biomedical laboratories. The normal procedure would be to kill research animals after the termination of an experiment; in this case, however, a decision was reached to close down the lab. The moral landscape (...) had changed, and it was no longer considered acceptable to use nonhuman primates in Danish biomedicine. From being considered a biological resource serving as a model of man, the monkeys had become moral subjects with a claim to a life suiting their natural needs. Simultaneously, the monkeys became instrumental in creating moral legitimacy for the actors involved in their rescue. What we see is an instance of pathfinding in a changing moral landscape where actors negotiate nonhuman primate nature as they create new moral positions for themselves. (shrink)

Women's community participation re community and identity. In this article, the author explores the collective identities that are built around motherhood, rape-crisis work, Latino empowerment, and political activism for 39 Anglo and 11 Latina women. The reflexive relationship between communities and identities in relation to class background, gender, age, generation, and race-ethnicity are examined. It is argued that women embrace—as well as negotiate—cultural expectations of mothers, homemakers, and elders through their community participation. The author explores work in the community as (...) a venue for women to stretch across class-based interests and race-ethnic identities even while both influence women's community involvements. Finally, the often overlooked relationships between women's community participation and discourses of state responsibility for citizens are considered by indicating ways in which women channel state resources and expand the parameters of the needs and meaning of “community.”. (shrink)

Based on ethnographic research, this study investigates the meaning and impact of women’s involvement in South Korean evangelicalism. While recent works addressing the “paradox” of women’s participation in conservative religions have highlighted the significance of these religions as unexpected vehicles of gender empowerment and contestation, this study finds that the experiences and consequences of Korean evangelical women’s religiosity are highly contradictory; although crucial in women’s efforts to negotiate the injuries of the modern Confucian-patriarchal family, conversion, for many women, also signifies (...) their effective redomestication to this family/gender regime, which helps maintain current gender arrangements. To address this tension, the article explores the meaning of religious submission in the Korean context, focusing on the motivations behind women’s consent to patriarchy, which are rooted in women’s contradictory desires regarding the family system and the ambivalent subjectivities that they evoke. (shrink)

This paper defends negotiation as a way of rationally overcoming disagreements. Negotiation is a type of dialogue where the parties begin with a conflict and a need for cooperation, and their main goal is to make a deal as reported (Walton and Krabbe 1995, p 72). It has been discussed whether differences of opinion can be shifted from persuasion to negotiation dialogue. If two parties disagree, is it reasonable to overcome their disagreement by employing negotiation? Van Laar and Krabbe (2018a) (...) argue that negotiation is the correct way to settle disagreements when the parties arrive at a stalemate. Godden and Casey (2020) deny this. They argue that the goal of persuasion dialogue (to resolve a conflict by verbal means) can never be replaced by a bargaining procedure. This paper claims that shifts to negotiation are reasonable, but only if the shift meets two conditions. The practical condition requires the disagreement to be practical rather than theoretical, and the sacrifice condition requires that the parties freely agree to shift the dialogue to negotiation. When the parties do not meet these conditions, they commit fallacies such as ad consequentiam, ad baculum or the fallacy of middle ground. Finally, I argue that negotiation arises in practical argumentation when the parties assign different relative values to their goals. When this process occurs, we see negotiation as a small step within the practical argumentation process. Persuasion, deliberation and negotiation dialogue are, then, deeply intertwined and are sometimes indistinguishable. (shrink)

Philosophers of language and metaethicists are concerned with persistent normative and evaluative disagreements – how can we explain persistent intelligible disagreements in spite of agreement over the described facts? Tim Sundell recently argued that evaluative aesthetic and personal taste disputes could be explained as metalinguistic negotiations – conversations where interlocutors negotiate how best to use a word relative to a context. I argue here that metalinguistic negotiations are neither necessary nor sufficient for genuine evaluative and normative disputes to occur. A (...) comprehensive account of value talk requires stronger metanormative commitments than metalinguistic negotiations afford. (shrink)

The metalinguistic approach to conceptual engineering construes disputes between linguistic reformers and linguistic conservatives as metalinguistic disagreements on how best to use particular expressions. As the present paper argues, this approach has various merits. However, it was recently criticised in Cappelen’s seminal Fixing Language. Cappelen raises an important objection against the metalinguistic picture. According to this objection – the Babel objection, as I shall call it – the metalinguistic account cannot accommodate the intuition of disagreement between linguistic conservatives and reformers (...) who are speaking different languages. The objection generalises to metalinguistic approaches to e.g. moral disagreements. This paper discusses the Babel objection and shows how to dispel it. (shrink)

Research has shown that negotiators sometimes misrepresent their emotions, and communicate a different emotion to opponents than they actually experience. Less is known about how people evaluate such negotiation tactics. Building on person perception literature, we investigated in three preregistered studies (N = 853) how participants evaluate negotiators who deceptively (vs. genuinely) communicate anger or happiness, on the dimensions of morality, sociability, and competence. Study 1 employed a buyer/seller setting, Studies 2 and 3 employed an Ultimatum Bargaining Game (UBG). In (...) all studies, participants learned a negotiator’s (the target’s) experienced and communicated emotions (anger or happiness), before evaluating the target. Across studies, targets were evaluated lower on morality if they deceptively (vs. genuinely) communicated anger or happiness. Notably, negotiators deceptively communicating anger were evaluated lower on morality and sociability but higher on competence than those deceptively communicating happiness. Studies 2 and 3 investigated behavioral consequences by examining whether in a future negotiation participants chose the target to be their opponent or representative. Results showed that for opponents, participants preferred targets who genuinely communicated happiness (vs. anger), which was associated with their perceived morality or sociability. For representatives, participants not only preferred targets who had genuinely communicated happiness (vs. anger), but also targets who had deceptively communicated anger (vs. happiness), which was associated with their perceived competence. These findings show that when evaluating deceptive (vs. genuine) communication strategies, people distinguish between morality, sociability, and competence. The importance they attach to these dimensions is also contingent on the behavioral decisions they face. (shrink)

The authors examine the experiences and ideals of African American working-class mothers through 20 intensive interviews. They focus on the women's negotiations with racialized norms of motherhood, represented in the assumptions that legal marriage and an exclusively bonded dyadic relationship with one's children are requisite to good mothering. The authors find, as did earlier phenomenological studies, that the mothers draw from distinct ideals of community-based independence to resist each of these assumptions and carve out alternative scripts based on nonmarital relationships (...) with male partners and shared care of children. (shrink)

Authorship, as a form of professional recognition, is an important topic in the study of reward systems in science. Empirical studies have shown that reward systems in science vary by historical periods and institutional contexts. Yet existing theoretical perspectives prove inadequate in explaining these variations. This study extends existing literature by investigating organizational mechanisms that shape “cycles of credit” in science and local institutional logics of authorship practices. Qualitative analysis is primarily based on in-depth interviews with thirty-one life scientists from (...) an elite and a provincial university in China, a country that has undergone unparalleled growth in scientific productivity in the past decade. I identify two different institutional logics of authorship. In the elite university, a logic of “autonomy” prevails. Researchers tend to remain independent and equal in negotiated coalitions and give coauthorship credit based on individuals’ scientific contributions to each paper. By contrast, in the provincial university, a logic of “dependence” prevails. Research teams assign coauthorship credit based on members’ long-term contributions regardless of whether they are scientific or not. Organizational factors, including historical development path, resource distribution pattern, and incentive scheme, are crucial in shaping and maintaining these divergent logics. (shrink)

Drawing on in-depth interviews with thirty-six lesbians, this article offers a feminist qualitative analysis of lesbian conception practices. The article examines the ways lesbian actors negotiate biomedical discourse in ways that reveal the co-constitutiveness of nature and culture, bodies and technologies, and biomedical and subjective knowledge. The article offers the concept of hybrid technologies, which are described as lesbian pragmatic negotiations of shifting control loci of technoscience. The author argues that lesbians' pathways to pregnancy are characterized by a negotiation of (...) discursive elements from alternative health discourses and biomedical knowledge, of various forms of technology, and of what is often termed the authoritative, objective, and scientific with the subjugated, subjective, and the embodied. In doing so these actors complicate through multiple agencies what is often interpreted as a totalizing force of biomedicalization. (shrink)

In post-Gricean pragmatics, communication is said to be successful when a hearer recovers a speaker’s intended message. On this assumption, proposals for ‘what is said’ – the semantic, propositional meaning of a speaker’s utterance – are typically centred around the content the speaker aimed to communicate. However, these proposals tend not to account for the fact that speakers can be deliberately vague, leaving no clear proposition to be recovered, or that a speaker can accept a hearer’s misconstrual even though the (...) speaker didn’t intend it. In such cases, identifying ‘what is said’ is more contentious, even though communication is arguably no less successful. Building on recent interactionist approaches to meaning, this chapter offers a proposal for ‘what is said’ that can account for cases of ‘imperfect’ communication in which the recovery of a speaker’s intention goes awry. This involves taking ‘what is said’ as the co-constructed meaning that the speaker and hearer jointly agree on, giving ‘grounded meanings’ – those mutually and manifestly accepted into the discourse by speaker and hearer – higher precedence in a theory of communication than simply the speaker’s intended meaning. In such cases, rather than speaker and hearer converging at the level of explicit utterance content, communication is expected to be successful as long as the hearer recovers a proposition which is compatible with the speaker’s higher-order discursive goal. The hearer’s uptake is then allowed to override the content of the speaker’s intended meaning in the process of negotiating ‘what is said’. (shrink)

Suppose I assert “Jim is rich”. According to negotiated contextualism, my assertion should be understood as a proposal to adopt a standard of wealth such that Jim counts as “rich” by that standard. Furthermore, according to negotiated contextualism, this is so in virtue of the semantic properties of the word “rich”. Defenders of negotiated contextualism (Khoo & Knobe in Noûs 52(1):109–143, 2016; Khoo in Philos. Phenomenol. Res. 100(1):26–53, 2020) claim that this view is uniquely well-placed to account for certain disagreement (...) data; for example, that if your standard for the application of the word “rich” is more constraining than mine, you can sensibly assert “no, Jim is not rich” without thereby making an incompatible claim. This paper outlines a simpler explanation of the data: speakers can sensibly reject a given assertion provided that they think that the asserted sentence is false in the context which they take to be relevant to that sentence’s interpretation. I argue that, combined with standard semantic tools, this explanation can account for the original data and for new empirical results. Along the way, I present new empirical data to argue against negotiated contextualism. (shrink)

Focusing on South Korean biologists and their efforts to establish national parks in the 1960s and 1970s, I illuminate the ways in which they negotiated their relationship with the ecological diplomacy of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the anti-communist and developmentalist diplomacy of the South Korean government. To justify their activities, these South Korean biologists emphasized the importance of nature conservation activities in the competition for international recognition and economic development with their northern counterparts. The national-park (...) initiative was thus subsumed into the politics of this legitimacy competition between the two Koreas, or what I call ‘victory-over-communism’ diplomacy. The IUCN's influence over South Korea was limited to the extent that both the government and scientists recognized the diplomatic merit they could gain in the context of their Cold War competition and developmentalism. It is also shown how, during the short detente period of the two Koreas, South Korean biologists used victory-over-communism diplomacy to renew their government's attention to their activities. This Korean episode contributes to the wider perspective of decentralizing the Cold War history of environmental diplomacy in the free-world bloc by illustrating the importance of its entanglement with the Cold War politics surrounding Asian developmentalism. (shrink)

This paper intends to address social robotics from the Actor-network theory (ANT) perspective. Starting from the critique of Seibt’s approach and the distinction between anthropomorphing and sociomorphing, the paper proposes a new methodological approach based on ANT and negotiation concepts. This approach allows us to: a) assume a more symmetrical ontology in which robots are considered as social agents, like humans; b) consider all the interactional elements as of equal importance; and c) overcome the dualistic limit that is often imposed (...) on social robotics studies, i.e., the tendency to consider only the one-to-one relationship, one man-one robot, inside the laboratory. Anthropomorphing and sociomorphing are the results of a negotiation process that cannot be reduced to a series of degrees of simulation, but must be understood as a complex interactional process between many agents and material mediations. (shrink)

Negotiating proves a precarious ability. The development of the arts of compromise and negotiating is not self-evident. Confrontation, flight and direct physical attack prove much more tempting in human history. How did these skills develop? The typical power and dependency network that evolved in western Europe in particular, is a significant factor. Different patterns of emotion management emerged in interaction with changing power balances. These patterns bred the skills of negotiating and compromise.

When trust is broken, how should we determine who is at fault? Previous discus- sions of broken trust typically attribute the fault to trusters who place trust foolishly or trustees who act in an untrustworthy manner. These discussions take for granted the ability of the truster and trustee to communicate and understand the boundaries of what is being entrusted, that is, the domain of trust. However, the boundaries of entrusted domains are not always clear to either party which can result (...) in broken trust despite the best efforts of both truster and trustee. In this paper, I argue that deter- mining who to blame when trust is broken is a messy affair in which disagreements over fault regularly arise. I introduce three features of trust domains that take center stage in negotiations regarding who is at fault when trust is broken: scope, rigidity and ordering. (shrink)

This essay looks to the complex intercultural relations of China and Korea to highlight two important issues in political theory and international relations: the transnational nature of world politics and the limits of analytical binaries such as East‐West and tradition‐modernity. Discussions of international politics in East Asia characteristically address issues of security and development studies. More recently, Confucianism has been mobilized as part of the clash of civilizations of Asia with the West. This essay will consider how cultural boundaries are (...) negotiated within the region via an analysis of the workings of the transnational discourse of Confucianism in the construction of Korean identity. While many make truth claims about what ‘Confucianism’ means in Korea, this essay examines the discursive economies of ‘Confucian events’ in three overlapping social spaces: official, mass media, and academic. This essay will show the diversity of Confucianism within East Asia, and underline how rather than being a simple orthodoxy, the shape of Confucianism is an active political issue. While many try to define a core ‘Korean Confucianism’, I argue that we should use Confucianism as an analytical tool to understand something else, citing how some scholars are using Confucianism for the specific project of building democracy in Korea. (shrink)

This study examines negotiations of motherhood among women in the illegal hard drug economy in Norway. Based on interviews with mothers who are users and dealers, this study analyzes four predominant maternal identities: grieving mothers, detached mothers, motherly dealers, and working mothers. Particularly relevant factors explaining variations in maternal identities include the timing of pregnancy, time spent with children, control over drug use, and place in the drug market hierarchy. By revealing patterns of intra-group variations by gender performances and work (...) situation, the study expands upon previous work on how mothers who are structurally disadvantaged negotiate motherhood ideals. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of how local and global norms and requirements are negotiated in the early stages of development of Social Science research ethics policy in a Global South context. A review of relevant literature followed by analysis of relevant national and institutional policies highlights both tensions and creative potential for ongoing research ethics initiatives. It was found that safety, trust and confidentiality issues are common problems reported by social science researchers in Kyrgyzstan. National level documents do not (...) directly address these ethical research issues, but the need for international research ethics principles is recognized. A limited number of institutional policies address research ethics issues, with the majority of relevant documents being codes of conduct focused on virtue ethics. The paper argues that this analysis of the current situation in Kyrgyzstan is likely to be of relevance to many countries, where those responsible for governance of research at all levels are grappling with the tensions of navigating research ethics in ways that are meaningful in local contexts while being congruent with Global North ethics requirements of funders and publishers. (shrink)

The 1950s were a frenetic moment in the European integration process during which the European Economic Community (EEC), the ultimately abortive Free Trade Area (FTA), and subsequently the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) were all negotiated. Trade unions showed keen interest in these schemes; moreover, their own highly institutionalised cooperation suggested they might come to play a key role in shaping them. And yet scholars have argued how divergent traditions and domestic pressures precluded the emergence of a coherent trade union (...) platform on European unity. While not rejecting the structural weaknesses of union internationalism in this regard, this article asks why union centres nevertheless continued to engage with one another on the integration question. Focusing on the British Trade Unions Congress (TUC) and deploying a transnational approach to best understand the interaction between the national and international levels, it shows that union linkages still offered the TUC and its counterparts a valuable chance to learn from and persuade others – and even their governments – of their views, objectives and affairs. Such trade union diplomacy was thus in and of itself valuable despite wider union spats and misgivings, and did at times impact the broader language and approach of the countries involved. (shrink)

In debates over abortion, the foetus and the woman have been continually positioned as antagonists. Given the stakes involved in such debates about personal integrity, individual responsibility, life and death, it is no wonder that many radical feminist authors have concentrated on refocusing the attention on women and away from the disembodied foetus. Such writers have worked hard to decode and deconstruct the public foetus in our midst and have mobilized interpretative tools such as cultural criticism to contextualize the production (...) and consumption of foetal images. Barbara Duden's book, The Public Foetus, is an important and interesting contribution to this effort, which is still taken up by authors writing in this field. Duden's strategy is to seek to remind us (and in particular those who are involved in reproductive medicine) that pregnancy is concentrated in the embedded pregnant woman rather than the disembodied ‘public foetus’ and she attempts to retrieve the embodied woman as the site of pregnancy through what Michaels has termed a ‘fetal disappearing act’. While this may create as many problems for women as it resolves, I would argue that, while the ‘public foetus’ continues to loom large in the politics of abortion and women's positions in relation to the new reproductive technologies remain contested, Duden's work remains important in the continuing debate about how women's reproductive freedom can be continually re-negotiated and re-established. (shrink)

This is the first of four chapters on belief democracy, and discusses democratic bargaining in relation to beliefs. Disputes over beliefs sometimes get resolved through persuasion, but in the real world of democratic politics, more are resolved through negotiation; each person still believes the truth of the proposition they originally advocated, but each sees the need to ‘get on with it’, so all agree to treat certain propositions ‘as if true’, for the particular purposes at hand. The latter process is (...) what is called here ‘bargaining over beliefs’, and the aim in this chapter is to show that that is a form of bargaining, on a par with any other, in ways that economists and democratic theorists inspired by them can and should take on board. Ordinarily, many different modes of bargaining are intertwined, and the presence of the more familiar forms blinds us to the presence of less familiar ones ; in the different cases analysed in this chapter, in order to bracket out these confounding factors, the focus is on situations in which familiar forms of bargaining seem necessarily absent. Even there, however, it is shown that bargaining of a sort might still occur; moreover, the sort of ‘bargaining over beliefs’ identified in those atypical situations is not confined to them alone, since elements of it can also be perceived to be at work in more common sorts of social and political bargaining. (shrink)

Proposed changes to the Common Rule would require publicly funded researchers to disclose whether a subject's biospecimens could be used for commercial profit and whether the subject will share in those proceeds. Disclosing commercial interests will inform research participants that their tissue may have commercial value, a possibility that those individuals might not have previously considered. The proposed changes may then provide people with an opportunity to negotiate commercial rights in their biospecimens despite the well-accepted legal precedent that individuals maintain (...) no interests in their excised tissue. (shrink)

Differential academic language proficiency is an issue of major educational concern, bearing on problems varying from pupil performance, to social prospects, and citizenship. In this paper we develop a conception of the language‐acquiring subject, and we discuss the consequences for understanding differential language proficiency in schools. Starting from Wittgenstein's meaning‐as‐use theory we show that learning a language requires an activity that relates the subject both to the community of language users, and to the things language is about. In opposition to (...) Luntley, we contend that this does not mean that linguistic development involves linguistic adjustment to the world ‘as it is’. It is argued that, in as far as linguistic development involves a process of adjustment, this concerns conceptions about the world as it is presupposed to be—a ‘world’ that is subjected to doubt and revision time and again. With respect to dealing with differential academic language proficiency, this approach to linguistic development suggests bringing pupils into situations which require active participation in processes of ‘negotiating meaning’, including negotiating the prevailing presuppositions about what the world is like. This also puts novices in a different position—less assimilatory—recognising their co‐constructive potencies at a more fundamental level. (shrink)

This article explores precarity as a conceptual framework to understand the intersection of migration and low-waged work in the global south. Using a case study of cross-border migrant domestic workers in South Africa, I discuss current debates on framing and understanding precarity, especially in the global south, and test its use as a conceptual framework to understand the everyday lived experiences and strategies of a group that face multiple forms of exclusion and vulnerability. I argue that a form of negotiated (...) precarity, defined as transactions which provide opportunities for survival but also render people vulnerable, can be a useful way to make sense of questions around legality and formality in the context of poorly protected work, insecure citizenship and social exclusion. Precarity as a negotiated strategy shows the ways in which people interact with systems and institutions and foregrounds their agency. But it also illustrates that the negative outcomes inherent in more traditional notions of precarity, expressed in physical and economic vulnerability, and discrimination in employment relations, mostly hurt the poor. This suggests the importance of an intersectional approach to understanding precarity in labour migration studies. (shrink)

The force of globalization has greatly challenged people’s conceptualization of national identity. The traditional definition of national identity as being distinct, stable and generated by such internal factors as ethnic, religion, citizenship and so on, has been replaced by the understanding that national identity is invested with more dynamic and complex features and is actually constructed differently in different situations. By following Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive perspective in critical discourse analysis and drawing on the 47 news reports collected on the websites (...) of People’s Daily Online and Xinhuanet, this study explores how China’s national identities are negotiated in its news reports of the Sino-US trade war. It is found that China’s news reports have constructed three types of Sino-US relations, namely, antagonistic, negotiatory and cooperative relations. Out of these relations, China has been constructed as victim of the trade war, defender of free trade, driver for negotiations and beneficiary of mutual cooperation. The construction of these identities and relations is realized through constructive, destructive, justification and transformation strategies. It is further found that the diversity of both China’s national identities and Sino-US relations in China’s news reports is the result of the political, social and economic differences between the two countries. (shrink)

Decision-making is an integral part of business meetings in an organization. Research has suggested that a participant’s engagement in the decision-making process has direct relevance to his or her role in the team or organization. This study extends the investigation of communicative behavior in decision-making to a special meeting setting where all participants assume similar organizational roles and where there is no designated chair. In particular, it draws on conversation analytic methods and a recently developed framework of participant roles to (...) examine discursive strategies and discourse roles on a moment-by-moment basis in the process of consensus negotiation. Findings show that participants’ choices of discursive strategies and the display of discourse roles vary as the discussion proceeds. A limited range of discursive strategies and discourse roles are identified when the discussion fails to lead to consensus. Our analysis also suggests that certain discourse roles appear to have a greater impact on reaching consensus decisions. (shrink)

This research explores the impact of media engagement on the identity perceptions of the Aeta Ambala, an indigenous group in the Philippines, particularly after the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption. This catastrophic event led to significant displacement and cultural shifts for the Aeta, who were forced to adapt to urban lifestyles. The study focuses on the differences in identity perceptions between the older and younger generations, with the former holding onto pre-eruption cultural norms and the latter aligning more with urban and (...) resettlement community cultures. Employing in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, the study finds that media representations often negatively portray the Aeta Ambala, leading to discrimination and altering self-perception. Despite this, the community maintains a strong sense of ethnic identity, viewing it as an immutable aspect of their heritage. Media engagement is seen as inevitable for staying informed, particularly in emergencies, but it also influences perceptions of the outside world and reshapes cultural and ethnic identity. Younger generations, more engaged with media, tend to adopt external beauty standards and lifestyles, leading to early marriages and cultural indifference. There is also a noted mistrust towards media organizations due to exploitation concerns. In conclusion, the study highlights the complex relationship between media interaction and self identification within the Aeta Ambala community, suggesting that while media engagement alters perceptions and behaviors, the core Aeta Ambala culture remains strong and resilient. (shrink)

Ugar and Malele write that generic machine learning (ML) technologies for mental health diagnosis would be challenging to implement in sub-Saharan Africa due to cultural specificities in how those conditions are diagnosed. For example, they say that in South Africa, the appearance of ‘schizophrenia’ might be understood as a type of spiritual possession, rather than a mental disorder caused by a brain dysfunction. Hence, a generic ML system is likely to ‘misdiagnose’ persons whose symptomatology matches that of schizophrenia in the (...) South African context. The authors thus claim that ‘a generic or universal design cannot be effective given the heterogeneity of value judgements in defining what mental health disorders are in different contexts’.1 Should we take this to mean that ML systems ‘should not be designed with a generalised perception of mental disorders,’1 as the authors suggest? On the contrary, my view is that generic ML can be useful, with the caveat that issues of cultural sensitivity may engender translational challenges in various national and cultural contexts. Yet, if it can be demonstrated that a generic ML system can reliably and accurately pick up on shared symptomatologies across cultures despite what any individual or community might believe about their actual causes, this aspect is surely the function and value of diagnostic ML which we should take to matter. Cultural gaps in aetiological understandings of mental health conditions make it all the more important to advance generic ML as a calibrating diagnostic tool. In this commentary, therefore, I will endeavour to make a case for generic ML in mental healthcare. ### Aetiological (mis)understanding across cultures The fundamental complexity to which Ugar and Malele direct our attention is the fact that mental health conditions are attributed to variable causal explanations, rather than a …. (shrink)

Are human rights negotiable? Jacques Derrida argued that it is necessary to negotiate the nonnegotiable to save the nonnegotiable. This paper defends this claim while arguing for what Calvin Schrag called an ethics of the fitting response and finding such a response in Amartya Sen’s realization-focused comparative approach to justice. For Derrida, the aporetic character of urgency produces decisions which must be made outside the institutional limits of decision theory. That calls for a deconstruction of the axiomatics of rights in (...) institutional settings. It also makes urgent the need for a deinstitutionalized ethics undeceived by the challenge of making judgments in aporias. Using Ted Honderich’s humanism as counterfoil, the argument moves through Derrida’s concept of "contradictory coherence" to Schrag’s transverse rationality, which thinks with deconstruction in order to think against its negative outcomes. The paper ends by suggesting that Schrag's communicative praxeology forges an ethics compatible with Sen’s threshold conditions to determine rights through freedoms. (shrink)