This chapter approaches new modes of governance (NMG) with the task of clarity in mind. Its essential function will be first to map the dominant conceptions of NMG that frame existing institutional and academic discourse. Second function is to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of NMG as an alternative means of delivering European Union (EU) law and policy, and finally to consider the future prospects of NMG in a political context that both challenges and reinforces their institutional relevance. The (...) chapter also explores that the greatest obstacle to the inside view is the resolute failure of many NMG processes to display the features of bottom‐up and experimental rule which theorists like Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin attribute to them. Experimentalism's attractive normative conceptualization of NMG may be of limited use given its failure to describe adequately how new governance processes operate. (shrink)

Empirical evidence suggests that while people hold the capacity to control their data in high regard, they increasingly experience a loss of control over their data in the online world. The capacity to exert control over the generation and flow of personal information is a fundamental premise to important values such as autonomy, privacy, and trust. In healthcare and clinical research this capacity is generally achieved indirectly, by agreeing to specific conditions of informational exposure. Such conditions can be openly stated (...) in informed consent documents or be implicit in the norms of confidentiality that govern the relationships of patients and healthcare professionals. However, with medicine becoming a data-intense enterprise, informed consent and medical confidentiality, as mechanisms of control, are put under pressure. In this paper we explore emerging models of informational control in data-intense healthcare and clinical research, which can compensate for the limitations of currently available instruments. More specifically, we discuss three approaches that hold promise in increasing individual control: the emergence of data portability rights as means to control data access, new mechanisms of informed consent as tools to control data use, and finally, new participatory governance schemes that allow individuals to control their data through direct involvement in data governance. We conclude by suggesting that, despite the impression that biomedical big data diminish individual control, the synergistic effect of new data management models can in fact improve it. (shrink)

ArgumentThe recent development of molecular genetics has created concern that society may experience a new eugenics. Notions about eugenics and what took place in the 1930s and 1940s are actively shaping questions about which uses of the new genetics should be considered illegitimate. Drawing upon a body of historiographical literature on Scandinavian eugenics, this paper argues that the dominant view of eugenics as morally and scientifically illegitimate is not tenable when it comes to the uses of compulsion, political motivation, and (...) scientific acceptability. In spite of a general condemnation of eugenics, health authorities today are trying to prevent individuals with deviant behavior from reproducing or at least from rearing children. This may not be argued with reference to the risk of transmitting defective genes, but rather the risk of producing undesirable social problems. Drawing on a Foucauldian approach, the paper concludes that eugenics and new genetics should be seen as two historically specific forms of biopower. (shrink)

Most donated organs in the United States come from brain dead donors, while a small percentage come from patients who die in “controlled,” or expected, circumstances, typically after the family or surrogate makes a decision to withdraw life support. The number of organs available for transplant could be substantially if donations were permitted in “uncontrolled” circumstances–that is, from people who die unexpectedly, often outside the hospital. According to projections from the Institute of Medicine, establishing programs permitting “uncontrolled donation after circulatory (...) determination of death,” or uDCDD, throughout the United States has the potential to provide 22,000 more donation opportunities annually. In contrast, U.S. controlled donation after circulatory determination of death, or cDCDD, cases have increased progressively over the past decade from 87 to 848 donors, but currently account for only 10.6 percent of all deceased donors. Following the IOM recommendations, several projects exploring the feasibility of uDCDD were funded by the federal government, including a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration that supported a pilot project in New York City in which the authors of this article participated.A key feature of our protocol, and indeed of many uDCDD protocols, is the initiation of preservation methods such as chest compressions and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation shortly after death in order to perfuse and preserve the donor's organs. Critics of uDCDD argue that the means of determining death deviates from generally ascribed principles. They assert that reinstituting circulation in order to preserve organs has the effect of “undoing” the prior determination of death. The result is that cDCDD is widely accepted and practiced routinely even though it only marginally increases the number of organs available for transplantation, and uDCDD is widely considered unacceptable despite being ethically embraced and proven to significantly increase organ donation opportunities in other countries. This article explores the evolution of this counterintuitive state of affairs and calls for a policy that, in line with the IOM report, allows for both cDCDD and uDCDD protocols. (shrink)

At the beginning of a new reign it seems appropriate to re-assess the meaning of monarchy in modern Britain. The new King heads a fractured royal family, a divided nation, and a disaffected Commonwealth. How can we as scholars make sense of where the monarchy has been, and where it might be going? This article suggests a new scholarly approach is required. Through a critical analysis of three classic studies of monarchy: Walter Bagehot’s The English constitution (1867), Kingsley Martin’s The (...) magic of monarchy (1937) and Tom Nairn’s The enchanted glass (1988), the lecture traces the lineage of modern interpretations of the British monarchy and points up their limitations. Preoccupied with the symbolism of monarchy, conventional scholarship neglects its important political functions. As the lecture argues, in the era of Brexit at home and populist regimes around the world, modern democracies may actually need monarchy more than ever before. (shrink)

This article discusses the manipulation and measurement of levels of situational self-focus, which is generally labeled ''self-awareness.'' A new scale was developed to quantify levels of public and private self-awareness. Five studies were conducted to assess the psychometric properties, reliability, and validity of the Situational Self-Awareness Scale (SSAS). The SSAS was found to have a reliable factor structure, to detect differences in public and private self-awareness produced by laboratory manipulations, and to be sensitive to changes in self-awareness within individuals over (...) time and across situations. The SSAS can be used as a manipulation check of laboratory self-awareness manipulations and as a means of assessing naturally occurring fluctuations in public and private self-awareness in order to clarify the relation between self-awareness and other variables (e.g., mood and memory). (shrink)

In his latest book, Jedediah Purdy takes up a question of deep and lasting importance: why is property ownership a value to society? His answer returns us to the foundations of American society and enables us to interpret the writings of the patron saint of liberal economics, Adam Smith, in a wholly new light. Unlike Milton Friedman and other free-market scholars, who consider property a key to efficient markets, Purdy draws upon Smith’s theories to argue that the virtues of wealth (...) are social rather than economic. In Purdy’s view, ownership does much more than shield one from government interference. Property shapes social life in ways that bring us closer to, or take us farther from, the ideal of a community of free and equal members. This view of property is neither libertarian nor communitarian but treats the community as the precondition of individual freedom. This view informed U.S. law in the early days of the republic, Purdy writes, and it is one that we need to restore today. Touching upon some of the most charged issues in American politics and law, including slavery, inheritance, international development, and climate change, _The Meaning of Property_ offers a compelling new view of property and freedom and enriches our understanding of democratic society. (shrink)

Professor Weiss's book, in which he attempts to lay bare the structures of historical reality and shed new light on methods used by historians in understanding the past, is a closely reasoned, provocative, and seminal work, exhibiting a philosophical vision reminiscent of the speculative and metaphysical profundity of a Hegel or a Spinoza. The reader of History: Written and Lived soon becomes aware that the author understands philosophy to be a serious enterprise and that he is in possession of the (...) necessary conceptual tools to pursue this enterprise with rigor and insight. In this respect the author's present treatise is no exception to his previous writings, and there is a real sense in which his book on history cannot be fully understood except in light of his previous book, Modes of Being. The metaphysical schematization which he formulated in Modes of Being provides the basis for much that he has to say on the subject of history. The connection between the two works is made explicit by the author himself when he writes: "The historic world is one product resulting from an interrelating of the basic realities which make up the universe. On the basis of other inquiries I have come to the conclusion that these basic realities are four in number. I have called them Actuality, Ideality, Existence and God ". What Professor Weiss thus presents is, in the last analysis, not only a philosophy of history but more specifically a metaphysics of history. It is more the cognitive attitude of Hegel than of Burckhardt, more the categorial analysis of Whitehead than of Comte that govern Weiss's reflections on history. (shrink)

: Governance means the policy and strategy adopted in the process of running a country. In the long history of more than two thousand years, Confucianism had become the cultural core and political doctrine of the imperial autocracy, and the theory of “governance of the whole country” contained in it had become an important category in traditional Chinese culture. We should dig deep into the rich connotation of Confucian governance thought, and build a national governance system that suits society, (...) the overall situation and future through innovative development and creative transformation, so as to let excellent traditional Chinese culture return to open a new road and make the past serve the present, thus providing important theoretical guidance and historical reference for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Resumo: Governança significa a política e a estratégia adotadas no processo de gestão de um país. Na longa história de mais de dois mil anos, o confucionismo tornou-se o núcleo cultural e a doutrina política da autocracia imperial, e a teoria da “governança de todo o país” contida nele tornou-se uma categoria importante na cultura tradicional chinesa. Deve-se aprofundar na rica conotação do pensamento de governança confucionista e construir um sistema de governança nacional que se adapte à sociedade, à situação geral e ao futuro, por meio de desenvolvimento inovador e transformação criativa, de modo a permitir que a excelente cultura tradicional chinesa retorne à base, para abrir um novo caminho e fazer o passado servir ao presente, fornecendo, assim, importante orientação teórica e referência histórica para o grande rejuvenescimento da nação chinesa. (shrink)

In this set of previously unpublished essays, noted scholars from North America and Europe describe how the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1684-1753) continues to inspire debates about his views on knowledge, reality, God, freedom, mathematics, and religion. Here discussions about Berkeley's account of physical objects, minds, and God's role in human experience are resolved within explicitly ethical and theological contexts. This collection uses debates about Berkeley's immaterialism and theory of ideas to open up a discussion of how divine activity and (...) human experience are reconciled in a recurring appeal to the laws of nature. In that context, objects in the world are linked to one another by means of the perceptions and affections whereby minds come into being. The laws of nature thus become crucial for Berkeley in revealing how objects are unintelligible apart from being apprehended by minds that are themselves connected to one another in virtue of their ideas. -/- Overall, the essays indicate that, for Berkeley, our apprehension of the world as real depends on recognizing how the world expressed by our ideas is not a mere aggregate of disconnected bodies but is rather an integrated unity of the things we experience. This provides an antidote against the loss of unity created by Descartes' isolation of the self from nature and Locke's account of objects in terms of simple, discrete ideas. -/- In juxtaposing discussions of Berkeley's later writings with his earlier works, this volume shows not only how, for Berkeley, mind is intrinsically linked to things in nature as the principle of their determination in law-governed ways, but also how minds are practically related to the objects of the physical world, one another, and ultimately God. (shrink)

Although the structure of nation-states increasingly decline, but it is in the organization of economic globalization, political globalization and the emerging global civil society, still occupies the first position. Not in the demise of the nation-state, but is being re-imagined, re-design, re-adjust direction in response to a series of challenges. Accordingly, the country's research in the present era is still important in the context of globalization, global capital, global civil society, global governance and the relationship between the nation-state study of (...) the theory constitutes a new form of state. The nation-state has been eroded, but it still takes a pride of place on organizing global economy, global politics, global civil society which is coming into being. The nation-state is not vanished, but re-imagined, re-designed, re-adjusted to response to a series of challenges. Accordingly, under the context of globalization, the research of the state still has an important meaning, and the relations between global capital, global civil society, global governance arid the nation-state constitute the new forms of state theory. (shrink)

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, the ways in which knowledge--scientific, social, and cultural--is produced are undergoing fundamental changes. In The New Production of Knowledge, a distinguished group of authors analyze these changes as marking the transition from established institutions, disciplines, practices, and policies to a new mode of knowledge production. Identifying such elements as reflexivity, transdisciplinarity, and heterogeneity within this new mode, the authors consider their impact and interplay with the role of knowledge in social relations. (...) While the knowledge produced by research and development in science and technology is accorded central focus, the authors also outline the changing dimensions of social scientific and humanities knowledge and the relations between the production of knowledge and its dissemination through education. Placing science policy and scientific knowledge within the broader context of contemporary society, this book will be essential reading for all those concerned with the changing nature of knowledge, with the social study of science, with educational systems, and with the correlation between research and development and social, economic, and technological development. "Thought-provoking in its identification of issues that are global in scope; for policy makers in higher education, government, or the commercial sector." --Choice "By their insightful identification of the recent social transformation of knowledge production, the authors have been able to assert new imperatives for policy institutions. The lessons of the book are deep." --Alexis Jacquemin, Universite Catholique de Louvain and Advisor, Foreign Studies Unit, European Commission "Should we celebrate the emergence of a 'post-academic' mode of postmodern knowledge production of the post-industrial society of the 21st Century? Or should we turn away from it with increasing fear and loathing as we also uncover its contradictions. A generation of enthusiasts and/or critics will be indebted to the team of authors for exposing so forcefully the intimate connections between all the cognitive, educational, organizational, and commercial changes that are together revolutionizing the sciences, the technologies, and the humanities. This book will surely spark off a vigorous and fruitful debate about the meaning and purpose of knowledge in our culture." --Professor John Ziman, (Wendy, Janey at Ltd. is going to provide affiliation. Contact if you don't hear from her.) "Jointly authored by a team of distinguished scholars spanning a number of disciplines, The New Production of Knowledge maps the changes in the mode of knowledge production and the global impact of such transformations. . . . The authors succeed . . . at sketching out, in very large strokes, the emerging trends in knowledge production and their implications for future society. The macro focus of the book is a welcome change from the micro obsession of most sociologists of science, who have pretty much deconstructed institutions and even scientific knowledge out of existence." --Contemporary Sociology "This book is a timely contribution to current discussion on the breakdown of and need to renegotiate the social contract between science and society that Vannevar Bush and likeminded architects of science policy constructed immediately after World War II. It goes far beyond the usual scattering of fragmentary insights into changing institutional landscapes, cognitive structures, or quality control mechanisms of present day science, and their linkages with society at large. Tapping a wide variety of sources, the authors provide a coherent picture of important new characteristics that, taken altogether, fundamentally challenge our traditional notions of what academic research is all about. This well-founded analysis of the social redistribution of knowledge and its associated power patterns helps articulate what otherwise tends to remain an--albeit widespread--intuition. Unless they adapt to the new situation, universities in the future will find the centers of gravity of knowledge production moving even further beyond their ken. Knowledge of the social and cognitive dynamics of science in research is much needed as a basis of science and technology policymaking. The New Production of Knowledge does a lot to fill this gap. Another unique feature is its discussion of the humanities, which are usually left out in works coming out of the social studies of science." --Aant Elzinga, University od Goteborg. (shrink)

There is a growing demand to incorporate social, economic and ethical considerations into biotechnology governance. However, there is currently little guidance available for understanding what this means or how it should be done. A framework of care-based ethics and politics can capture many of the concerns maintaining a persistent socio-political conflict over biotechnologies and provide a novel way to incorporate such considerations into regulatory assessments. A care-based approach to ethics and politics has six key defining features. These include: 1) (...) a relational worldview, 2) an emphasis on the importance of context, 3) a recognition of the significance of dependence, 4) an analysis of power, including a particular concern for those most vulnerable, 5) a granting of weight to the significance of affect, and 6) an acknowledgment of an important role for narrative. This policy brief provides an overview of these defining features, illustrates how they can appear in a real world example and provides a list of guiding questions for assessing these features and advancing a politics of care in the governance of biotechnology. (shrink)

Hannah Ginsborg has recently offered a new account of normativity, according to which normative attitudes are essential to the meaningful use of language. The kind of normativity she has in mind –– not semantic but ‘primitive’ — is supposed to help us to avoid the pitfalls of both non-reductionist and reductive dispositionalist theories of meaning. For, according to her, it enables us both to account for meaning in non-semantic terms, which non-reductionism cannot do, and to make room for the normativity (...) of meaning, which reductive dispositionalism cannot do. I argue that the main problem with Ginsborg’s account is that it fails to say what makes it possible for expressions to be governed by conditions of correct application to begin with. I do believe, however, that normative attitudes are essential to meaning, but they have to be thought of as fully semantic. And I suggest that conditions of correct application can be present only when those attitudes are present. (shrink)

What I consider in this paper are various forms of government, various technologies and discursive regimes of government that are in common use today. What interests me are the categories and tools, practical dispositifs and languages that developed over the last decades ‘to constitute, define, organize, and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals, acting freely, may use to deal with one another’ (Foucault). The paper considers first the neo-liberal wish to reassert the individual as alone in responsibility for his/her (...) own life after the unfortunate digression into Welfare Statism and Keynesian economics, source of all ills. It then focuses on some material and social technologies that encourage people to accept full and complete ‘self-sovereignty’. This section leads to a discussion on the new demands (and resistance) society imposed on this liberal normative ideal. It notably considers the growing demands to ‘participate’ in decision processes and to be environmentally friendly. In section Les Mots et Les Choses: A New Discursive Regime , it considers the discursive regime that progressively took shape and which currently permeates international governance bodies of all stripes—from the World Bank to the Conference of Parties for Climate Change. In the final section, it comes back to the initial question and considers what these changes actually mean for the democratic order as constituted over the past 250 years. (shrink)

The article discusses the meanings of life and value priorities of the post- Soviet society. The author argues that, at present, there are symptoms of a global ideological crisis in the world, that the West does not have its own vision of where and how to move on and has no understanding of the future. Unfortunately, most of the post-Soviet countries do not have such vision as well. In these conditions, there are mistrust, confusion, paradoxical manifestation of human consciousness. The (...) main meanings that determine our life-world are: the desire of citizens for social justice and social security, the desire to figure out and understand the basic values of modern society, how honestly and equally the authorities act toward their fellow citizens, and to what extent they reflect their interests. The meanings of life, which are the answers to the challenges of the time, are embodied in the cultural code of each nation, state. The growth points of new values, which will become the basis for the future sustainable development of a new civilization, have yet to be discovered in the systemic transformative changes of the culture. In this process, the emergence of a new system of values that governs human life is inevitable. However, modern technology brings new troubles to humans. It has provided wide opportunities for informational violence and public consciousness manipulation. Nowadays, the scenario that is implemented in Western consumer societies claims to be the dominant scenario. Meanwhile, today there is no country in the world that is a role model, there is no ideal that others would like to borrow. Most post-Soviet states failed to advance their societies to more decent levels of economic development, to meet the challenges of the modern information age, and to provide the population with new high living standards. Therefore, in conditions of growing confrontation, we should realistically understand the world and be ready to implement changes that will ensure sustainable development of the state and society without losing our national identity. (shrink)

Focusing on the United Kingdom, this paper examines the mechanisms of 2020’s ‘lockdown’ strategy from a governmental perspective, with ‘governmentality’ being defined as the art of, or rationale behind, governing populations at a given time. By investigating a series of recent imperatives given to the population by the UK government, and comparing these with the previously dominant form of governmentality (neoliberalism), I hope to shed light on some new features of the current art of government. Indeed, the paper (...) argues that neoliberalism is no longer the dominant form of governmentality in the UK, although some important legacies remain. I therefore argue that new forms of governmentality have risen to prominence. In particular, I use the concept of ‘algorithmic governmentality’ to address features of lockdown subjectivity and economy, such as the ‘doppelgänger logic’ of consumption and production, as well as the government’s attempts to continuously manage and re-manage the population based on biometric data. However, I also show that this concept does not adequately encompass contemporary realities of surveillance, exposition and coercion. As such, I introduce ‘instrumentarian governmentality’ to denote the use of digital surveillance instruments to control the behaviour of the population. Additionally, the term is intended to denote an ‘authoritarian’ turn in the ways in which people are governed. Overall, what it means to govern in 2020 is posited as a fluctuating composite of three key forms of governmentality: neoliberal, algorithmic, and instrumentarian. (shrink)

This article highlights the significance of the “Za shuo” 雜說 (Miscellaneous discourses) series for the study of Han Yu’s 韓愈 (768–824) political ideology, which proposes a three-tier system of governance that is made up of the emperor, the feudal lords, and the bureaucrats. The emperor is the pinnacle of the system; he collaborates with his ministers to devise state policies in the inner palace. The feudal lords protect the emperor in the regional areas. The bureaucrats form the machinery of the (...) government and implement its policies. Challenging current scholarship, which treats each of Han Yu’s essays independently, the article proposes a new interpretation of them as a whole It argues that the three essays “Long shuo” 龍說 (Discourse on the dragon), “Yi shuo” 醫說 (Discourse on physicians), and “Ma shuo” 馬說 (Discourse on horses) form an organic unit that provides internally consistent counsel to the ruler for his governance, and that a fourth essay, “Ti Cui Shanjun zhuan” 題崔山君傳 (Foreword to the biography of Cui Shanjun), is likely an interpolation. Through unearthing the true meaning of this series, the article also narrows down its time of composition, which has traditionally been left unspecified. This article also reveals Han Yu’s attitude toward the revived concern over the enfeoffment of princes in medieval China and toward his political ideology, which is not purely Confucian. The article thus is a contribution to the study of both political history and literary creation in the mid-Tang era. (shrink)

Plato, in his dialog Charmides, presents the question of how society can determine whether a person who claims superior expertise in a particular field of knowledge does, in fact, possess superior expertise. In the modern era, society tends to answer this question by funding institutions (universities) that award credentials to certain individuals, asserting that those individuals possess a particular expertise; and then other institutions (the journalistic media and government) are expected to defer to the credentials. When, however, the sequential (...) reasoning and theorizing and conclusion-stating of generation after generation of credential-bearing experts (i.e., scientists) leads to the assertion of the truth of statements that large segments of society find to be in conflict with the statements of persons who have earned credentials of expertise bestowed by an alternative institutional structure (i.e., religious teachers), representatives of the people are put to a choice. And when the conflicting statements present substantial implications for the moral and sexual behavior of people in the society, addressing the conflict brings into play not only the highest intellectual speculations and analyses, but also the most animal emotions and motivations. This paper, taking the form of a dialog, presents a scientist (Avram Codosia) named after an ancient Jewish patriarch and makes him a supplicant to a U.S. Senator (Helen Astartian) named after a pagan goddess. The stakes turn out to be not merely financial and intellectual, but personal and moral, involving the scientist's son (Isaac), an art student, and the senator's niece (Halia), a philosophy student. In a four-phase encounter, the paper hopes to offer some innovative observations on age-old issues and to stimulate productive new thinking on questions that too often seem to be debated by means of repetitions of the same old points. (shrink)

Offering a cautionary tale about the abuses of paradigm‐shift rhetoric in secondary school reforms, the paper shows potential misuses and ethical effects of the relativistic language‐game in post‐compulsory education. Those initiating the shift often shelter their reform from the criticism of non‐adepts, marginalizing expert teachers that adhere to ‘antiquated’ or ‘folk’ pedagogies. The rhetoric herds educators uncritically into the citadel of new discourses and policies that often lack practical foundations; consequently, teachers often dissimulate compliance to the reform in order to (...) evade surveillance within such disciplinary apparatuses as teacher training and regimes of inspection. Turning to Foucault, the author views education reforms in terms of power relations within a form of governance: ‘games of truth’, or political and veridical discourses in which dividing practices for sorting out ‘sound’ and ‘unsound’ teaching practices become institutionalised. Wittgenstein's attention to initiate training in practices points to an alternative to naïve forms of relativism; educators must incorporate the new techniques they gradually master and adapt within a viable, shared form of life. Instead of teachers’ normalization and subjugation in what Foucault refers to as education ‘blocks’, new pedagogic practices are better adopted ‘freely’ as arts of self‐transformation. With Hacking, Foucault and Wittgenstein's accounts of the true‐and‐false are blended into an ‘historical ontology’ of present and emergent paradigms: a critique of the limits set down within education reforms that sanction or legitimize certain conduct. Sympathetic to the journal call, this kind of philosophical investigation and genealogical critique of teaching practices gives us a perspicuous view of the local, contingent and at times arbitrary nature of change initiatives. Critical awareness of how our pictures of education can captivate us heightens respect for professional eclecticism. Without ignoring the mandates and official scripts of public education reforms, experienced educators need to be able to conserve their tried and warranted ‘best practices’, while negotiating ranges of tolerance for alternative means. (shrink)

[Opening sentences:]What business does the government have in sticking its nose into people’s private affairs? What affairs could be more legitimately private than relationships involving sex and love? LOCKEAN LIBERTARIANISM These questions resonate with many individuals across a wide range of ideologies and beliefs. For many of us these questions will strike us as rhetorical questions to which the obvious answers are “none” and “none.” These responses reflect a Lockean libertarian strain in the social thinking of many intelligent and (...) thoughtful people. But of course matters are more complex, even as viewed from a Lockean libertarian perspective.1 Sex and love tend to bring about new children, and causing a child to exist is a social act with wide consequences for other people who could not be supposed to consent to bear these consequences. Libertarians will regard with equanimity the showering of externalities in the form of benefits that typically accompany the creation and upbringing of a responsible competent person who becomes a useful member of society. The libertarian will insist that the receipt of such benefits does not generate any reciprocal obligations to benefit those who benefit us in these unconsented to ways.—at least, not obligations that are legitimately enforceable and that justify forcible imposition on people’s liberty to lead their lives as they choose. But bringing children into the world can and often does impose net costs on people who do not consent to bear these costs. The introduction of one extra person may strain scarce resources... (shrink)

Although the French Doctrinaires built up one of the most important political theories of the 19th century and had a decisive influence on Tocqueville, Marx, and J. S. Mill, they have remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. This article examines the Doctrinaires’ theory of political power by concentrating on François Guizot’s Des moyens de gouvernement et d’opposition dans l’état actuel de la France(On the Means of Government and Opposition in the Current State of France) and Prosper de (...) Barante’s Des communes et de l’aristocratie(On the Communes and the Aristocracy), both published in 1821. Special attention is paid to Guizot’s rejection of laissez-faire and his critique of Rousseau. I then present Guizot’s theory of the ‘new means of government’ that stressed the importance of communication between government and society. Guizot predicted that the growth of liberty would be accompanied by a simultaneous extension of state power and understood that the development of representative government would inevitably lead to a considerable extension of state power over society, made possible by a social demand unseen before. In the final section, I seek to nuance the conventional image of the Doctrinaires as rigid defenders of centralization and critically discuss the virtues and limitations of their elitist liberalism. After commenting on the specificity of French political tradition, I point out a few lessons for contemporary political theorists interested in issues such as political power and the mutual empowerment of state and society. (shrink)

The Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) global governance of education has been gradually increasing. Its field of interest is currently expanding from educational evaluation through the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to curriculum reform through the Education 2030 project. Here, it is interesting to note that the nature of the terms the OECD has been creating reveals a ‘humanistic turn’. This shows up well in the frequent occurrence of terms such as ‘well-being’, ‘attitudes and values’, ‘inclusiveness’, ‘responsibility’, (...) and ‘sustainability’ in the ongoing Education 2030 project. Perhaps this new humanistic discourse increases the likelihood of the smooth adoption of the OECD’s proposed curriculum redesign in more countries. If the OECD’s new discourse captures and transforms contemporary people’s ways of thought and practice about education, then this is related to the problem of colonialism in our era. It is also worth noting that language plays a vital role in colonization. In particular, the need for translation between different languages serves as a useful means for colonization. Conversely, it is also seen as having a potential decolonizing power. In this context, I would like to examine the new language the OECD has adopted, specifically regarding student experience and the nature of knowing. Next, I shall attempt to criticize the underlying educational assumptions in the OECD’s pronouncements. Following this, I shall explore how the OECD’s new discourse has been translated in South Korea, taking this as an example of wider experience in the East Asian context and possibly elsewhere. Finally, I shall conclude by considering the direction of curriculum decolonization in terms of translation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 1-18 [Access article in PDF] Aesthetic Inquiry in Education:Community,Transcendence, and the Meaning of Pedagogy Hanan A. Alexander What does it mean to understand education as an art, to conceive inquiry in education aesthetically, or to assess pedagogy artistically? Answers to these queries are often grounded in Deweyan instrumentalism, neo-Marxist critical theory, or postmodern skepticism that tend to fall prey to the paradoxes (...) of radical relativism and extreme subjectivism. 1 This essay offers an alternative, communitarian account of education as an art and a neo-Kantian approach to aesthetic inquiry in education that avoids these difficulties.I begin by examining the emergence of aesthetic inquiry in education in the context of the larger qualitative revolution in educational research. The struggle to justify the qualitative turn in educational thought was initially framed in terms of two influential doctrines: that cognition and affect on the one hand, and truth, beauty, and goodness on the other, can be clearly distinguished from one another. Qualitative methods were conceived as an alternative research paradigm — a new epistemology — in keeping with Thomas Kuhn's influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2 Qualitative research, on this account, is a cognitive endeavor aimed at discovering a form of knowledge no less valid and reliable than that produced by quantitative methodologies. This way of framing the discussion led to the dichotomizing of positivist and postpositivist epistemologies, one embracing absolutism, objectivism, and rationalism, the other relativism, subjectivism, and romanticism. 3 This approach succeeded in pointing to some serious flaws in the prevailing positivist account of social research, yet it left qualitative inquiry dependent on versions of epistemological relativism and subjectivism that philosophers of knowledge have shown to be self-contradictory and incoherent. 4 [End Page 1]Conceiving of pedagogy in aesthetic terms challenges the prevailing positivist epistemology on a deeper level because it questions the accepted distinctions between thinking and feeling, and between truth, beauty, and goodness. If art can be conceived as a form of cognitive inquiry in addition to affective expression, then the appreciation and assessment of education as art requires not merely a new research paradigm or an alternative epistemology. Rather, it entails a reshuffling of our very conception of the relations between science, art, and ethics.These concepts can be reconceived to avoid the paradoxes of radical relativism and extreme subjectivism if we recognize with Iris Murdoch that sovereignty belongs to communal conceptions of a transcendent good. Educational arts empower people to express, appreciate, and critique collective conceptions of goodness, and artistic criticism of pedagogy celebrates a sacred dimension in educational thought and practice. 5 This approach occasions a fresh look not only at the practice, appreciation, and assessment of pedagogy, but also at the very meaning of the concept of education and the sorts of inquiry that can fruitfully inform its practice. Two Dogmas of Educational Research Two dogmas have dominated educational research for most of this century: the idea that there exists a clear disjunction between the cognitive and affective domains; and the supposed radical independence from one another of truth, beauty, and goodness. 6 According to a popular view rooted in these doctrines, the search for truth is a cognitive affair governed by science, while ethics and the arts are tied to the emotions and the humanities. Inquiry into the former is objective — reliability depends on method not researcher — and into the latter, subjective — results can vary according to interpreter. In this attitude, the cognitive domain dominates the public arena through the influence and prestige of science and measurement. 7Until the middle 1970s, behavioral and social research in education expressed these dichotomies in the distinction made between quantitative and qualitative research. The former was thought to be scientific and objective, the latter, humanistic and subjective. As qualitative inquiry came into its own in the 1980s, its proponents sought justification and legitimization in accord with cognitive dominance. 8 First, they argued that qualitative research methods had checks against error as rigorous as its quantitative counterparts. 9 Later, the cognitive domain... (shrink)

This article examines a changing global reality that manifests itself in new forms of social activism. The struggle of the multitude challenges political representation and contemporary art seems to corroborate this observation. Becoming a form of social intervention, it turns into an active force and leaves behind the need to double action with representation, representational practices being the hallmark of classical art. A new theory of the image would have to incorporate this dynamic: it would have to treat and develop (...) the basic categories of action and relation. There are few philosophies of the act, and the existing semiotic models mostly deal with dual structures (signifier/signified; sign/meaning; image/referent, and so on). It is necessary to sketch out a dynamic theory of the image that would: (1) reveal the limitations of the concept of representation; (2) conceive of the image as a set of multiple changing relations. The image would thus be seen as a necessary part of the relations governing the world in its entirety, that is, as part of the movement of matter itself. Which is another way of saying that those relations are actualized, or expressed, in the image. (shrink)

Historically, companies have communicated taxes as a burden, as the benefits provided by governments are not perceived to be in proportion to their payments. With sustainable development becoming central in many policy areas, new discourses including ‘fair’ or ‘sustainable’ tax have become omnipresent in public talk on taxes. This paper analyzes tax discourses in corporate annual reports within this changing context to examine the use of language in the construction of the meaning of tax. By analyzing tax reporting by a (...) state-owned multinational company over two decades, we observe that the communication of taxes increased in both number and types of discourses. Importantly, this highlights the shift in tax discourses from one dominated by codified accounting discourse reinforcing the monolithic representation of tax as an unfair expense, to one where tax is given a multidimensional meaning within a broader discursive context, where tax is a meaningful corporate responsibility to society. (shrink)

Various consequences of social networks in virtual space are expanding as a new phenomenon in Islamic societies in line with other societies. Social science thinkers point to the two-sided role of the Internet and virtual space in economic, cultural and religious development. Humans need to communicate collectively based on their inherent nature. The media and means of mass communication, which had a slow growth in the past, have faced significant changes in the present era, in such a way that (...) the present age is called the age of information and communication. At such a time when virtual space and social networks have turned the world into a small village and people with different cultures and beliefs are connected with each other, the issues of children’s education (especially in Islamic societies where the focus is on Islamic education) has faced the challenge, what is important for parents in this age is to get familiar with the basics of education and to pay attention to the educational challenges of social networks in the virtual space. One of the necessities of the era of information and communication in Islamic societies is the need for education in accordance with religious teachings that prepares people to face the changing and unpredictable challenges of life. New media are accused of creating new challenges in life from two perspectives. On the one hand, the media are competitors of educational activities in the field of education, and on the other hand, they are considered to be the foundation of many new challenges. In addition, it is worth mentioning that the religious teachings that form the basis of Islamic governments are the answer to all the problems of the human society and its requirements in every age. Contribution: This research presents the effectiveness of religious teachings (Qur’an, Sunnah and Hadiths) as the best sources of Islamic education, which can be used in the cultural policy of virtual space and raise the level of awareness of families and individuals in knowing the points of threat and opportunity in the virtual space. (shrink)

The perennial question – What is meaning? – receives many answers. In this paper I present and discuss inferentialism – a recent approach to semantics based on the thesis that to have ( such and such ) a meaning is to be governed by ( such and such ) a cluster of inferential rules . I point out that this thesis presupposes that looking for meaning requires seeing language as a social institution (rather than, say, a psychological reality). I also (...) indicate that this approach may be seen as a new embodiment of the old ideas of structuralism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Anchors of Democracy: A New Division of Powers, Representation, Sense of Limits by Rocco PezzimentiAdam CarringtonPEZZIMENTI, Rocco. The Anchors of Democracy: A New Division of Powers, Representation, Sense of Limits. Herefordshire, U.K.: Gracewing, 2021. 207 pp. Paper, $22.00Rocco Pezzimenti's The Anchors of Democracy: A New Division of Powers, Representation, Sense of Limits is an ambitious book. A professor at LUMSA, Rome, he seeks to consider anew the (...) nature, structure, and purposes of democracy as well as the society in which this form of government best operates. He sees this task as needed because, he argues, contemporary democracies face new challenges that threaten their legitimacy and their capacity to fulfill their just and needed purposes. He notes that democracies are not "infallible," either morally or in their ability to maintain themselves, and thus need conscious understanding and prudent maintenance.The subtitle establishes the three main themes by which he diagnoses and addresses democracy's trials. Pezzimenti orders his argument most through the lens of limits. While present in all spheres and regimes, popular government in particular partakes of limitation, since "mutual limitation... is the basis of our democracies." Limits for Pezzimenti stem from distinct elements of a society competing for finite power ordered toward action. Many of our political and social problems, both past and present, stem from denying limitations or misordering their interactions. The presentism that tempts democracy must be tempered by the limits the past places on it. Institutions are one helpful means for this interaction, which helps guard against a "utopianism which wants to solve everything immediately, deceiving itself that it can perform miracles." Law itself involves limits, placing boundaries on the action of private persons and public entities. So does pluralism and "polyarchy," whereby we recognize the limits particular persons and communities place on politics' universalism as well as how politics restrains these other elements from descending into intolerant, selfish particularity. Important to this point is Pezzimenti's discussion of sovereignty, which must not be reduced to a mere question of who rules and where but to the question of rightly pursuing a common good respectful of individual rights. True freedom inheres in the proper cohering of these elements.Pezzimenti turns to the distribution of powers within a community as part of the discussion of limits. He argues that "the traditional tripartition, theorized by Polybius and on to Montesquieu, today appears certainly insufficient." To define all political power as legislative, executive, and judicial, then to distribute them among competing institutions, does not fully account for the contemporary political landscape. Moreover, those [End Page 361] "classic" powers themselves need to be rethought to meet today's concerns. Legislative power must account for claims that its representative systems either are oligarchic in practice or lead to crass populism, and that they fail to account for group identities as opposed to class ones. The executive must evolve in pursuit of a better "efficiency and efficacy"—including speed of response to problems—that requires a better relationship with the modern bureaucracy, which he describes as "the other face of the executive." The judicial power must focus on a renewed impartiality, especially in relation to the additional powers Pezzimenti thinks need to be named and then tamed. The new powers that he says we must recognize include the press, mass media, technology, and more. Here, Pezzimenti categorizes as powers the functions of government (making, enforcing, and adjudication of the law) alongside avenues or means for exercising political influence, if not outright control. These other forces have distorted democracy's needed limits partly because law and custom have not adequately accounted for their evolving role in power.These issues lead to the last challenge, that of representation. The problem of representation threatens democracy's legitimacy, since this form of government is grounded more than any other in the idea that "power must be the expression of the community." Yet even here the issue of limits orders the discussion. The unaccounted-for new powers described above remove too many limitations either on crass populism or encroaching rule of elites. The former can abuse individual rights, which he says "are not negotiable," based on oppressive whims... (shrink)

Applying fresh tools from economics to explain puzzling behaviors of religious radicals: Muslim, Christian, and Jewish; violent and benign. How do radical religious sects run such deadly terrorist organizations? Hezbollah, Hamas, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Taliban all began as religious groups dedicated to piety and charity. Yet once they turned to violence, they became horribly potent, executing campaigns of terrorism deadlier than those of their secular rivals. In Radical, Religious, and Violent, Eli Berman approaches the question using the economics of organizations. (...) He first dispels some myths: radical religious terrorists are not generally motivated by the promise of rewards in the afterlife (including the infamous seventy-two virgins) or even by religious ideas in general. He argues that these terrorists (even suicide terrorists) are best understood as rational altruists seeking to help their own communities. Yet despite the vast pool of potential recruits—young altruists who feel their communities are repressed or endangered—there are less than a dozen highly lethal terrorist organizations in the world capable of sustained and coordinated violence that threatens governments and makes hundreds of millions of civilians hesitate before boarding an airplane. What's special about these organizations, and why are most of their followers religious radicals? Drawing on parallel research on radical religious Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Berman shows that the most lethal terrorist groups have a common characteristic: their leaders have found a way to control defection. Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Taliban, for example, built loyalty and cohesion by means of mutual aid, weeding out “free riders” and producing a cadre of members they could rely on. The secret of their deadly effectiveness lies in their resilience and cohesion when incentives to defect are strong.These insights suggest that provision of basic social services by competent governments adds a critical, nonviolent component to counterterrorism strategies. It undermines the violent potential of radical religious organizations without disturbing free religious practice, being drawn into theological debates with Jihadists, or endangering civilians. (shrink)

The concept of “ethical research” holds considerable sway over the ways in which contemporary biomedical, natural, and social science investigations are funded, regulated, and practiced within a variety of countries. Some commentators have viewed this “new” means of governance positively; others, however, have been resoundingly critical, regarding it as restrictive and ethics bodies and regulations unfit for the task they have been set. Regardless, it is clear that science today is an “ethical” business. The ways in which formal and (...) informal ethical discourses and practices—what might be called “regimes of normativity”—structure scientific work and the meanings it is ascribed with have, however, been underexplored. This article attends to how science and ethics articulate; how they are, in many ways, co-produced. Exploring these processes of co-production casts into sharp relief the essential emotionality of science; the relationships investigators have with their colleagues, work, and research participants pulse with emotion, potentially shaping in important ways the very kinds of knowledge that laboratories produce. (shrink)

Is the traditional understanding of cause and effect in aetiology so certain that Arthur Eddington therefore proposed in 1927 "the arrow of time, or time's arrow" involving "the 'one-way direction' or 'asymmetry' of time", such that "a cause precedes its effect: the causal event occurs before the event it affects. Thus causality is intimately bound up with time's arrow"? (WK 2014) This certain view on cause and effect can be contrasted with an opposing view by Michael Dummett, who suggested instead, (...) back in 1957, that "there was no philosophical objection to effects preceding their causes", or what is now known as "retrocausality". (WK 2014a) Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), aetiology (in relation to cause and effect) are neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe. Of course, this questioning of different opposing views on cause and effect does not mean that the study of aetiology is useless, or that those diverse fields (related to aetiology) -- like physics, engineering, biology, philosophy, medicine, epidemiology, government, geography, spatial analysis, psychology, statistics, mathematics, economics, management, history, law, sociology, theology, and so on -- are worthless. (WK 2014b & 2014c) In fact, neither of these extreme views is plausible. Rather, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of aetiology in regard to the dialectic relationship between cause and effect -- while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favouring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the pluralist theory of aetiology) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way, and is organised in four chapters. (shrink)

Governing nursing conduct: the rise of evidence‐based practice Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of ‘governmentality’ to analyse the evidence‐based movement in nursing, we argue that it is possible to identify the governance of nursing practice and hence nurses across two distinct axes; that of the political (governance through political and economic means) and the personal (governance of the self through the cultivation of the practices required by nurses to put evidence into practice). The evaluation of nursing work through evidence‐based (...) reviews provides detailed information that may enable governments to target and instruct nurses regarding their work in the interest of preserving the health of the population as a whole. Political governance of the nursing population becomes possible through centralised discursive mechanisms, such as evidence‐based reviews that present nursing practice as an intelligible field whose elements are connected in a more or less systematic manner. The identity of the evidence‐based nurse requires the modern nurse to develop new skills and attitudes. Evidence‐based nursing is an emerging technology of government that judges nursing research and knowledge and has the capacity to direct nursing practice at both the political and personal level. (shrink)

The paper explores how several commissions of inquiry established in Quebec, Canada, have, over time, contributed in redefining the meaning of quality in health-care and its management. Adopting an interpretive analysis of commissions’ reports, the paper examines the particular ‘conceptual boxes’ used by their members to tackle quality and the embedded nature of their work. It is shown that although quality was always considered, this was generally done by bringing into focus specific quality domains and issues, some new, others not (...) so new. In addition, the various management approaches to quality featured in the reports were informed by evolving templates; although this evolution was not as straight and unwavering as some retrospective studies of quality in health-care seem to indicate. A common thread to all commissions is the fact that, beyond the definition of general principles, responsibility for quality oversight was not clearly assigned and criteria on whether quality initiatives should be voluntary or compulsory were often left unspecified. Further, quality was never regarded by the commissions as a strategic aspect of health-care. It is speculated that these failings on the part of commissions may partly explain the unassertive course of action taken by the provincial government in the area. (shrink)

With technologies like machine learning and data analytics being deployed as privileged means to improve how contemporary bureaucracies work, many governments around the world have turned to artificial intelligence as a tool of statecraft. In that context, our paper uses Canada as a critical case to investigate the relationship between ideals of good government and good technology. We do so through not one, but two Trudeaus—celebrity Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (2015—…) and his equally famous father, former Prime Minister (...) Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1968–1979, 1980–1984). Both shared a similar interest in new ideas and practices of both intelligent government and artificial intelligence. Influenced by Marshall McLuhan and his media theory, Pierre Elliott Trudeau deployed new communication technologies to restore centralized control in an otherwise decentralized state. Partly successful, he left his son with an informationally inclined political legacy, which decades later animated Justin Trudeau's own turn toward Big Data and artificial intelligence. Compared with one another, these two visions for both government and artificial intelligence illustrate the broader tensions between cybernetic and neoliberal approaches to government, which inform how new technologies are conceived of, and adopted, as political ones. As this article argues, Canada offers a paradigmatic case for how artificial intelligence is as much shaped by theories of government as by investments and innovations in computing research, which together delimit the contours of intelligence by defining which technical systems, people, and organizations come to be recognized as its privileged bearers. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an ontological interpretation of the wave function in terms of random discontinuous motion of particles. According to this interpretation, the wave function of an N-body quantum system describes the state of random discontinuous motion of N particles, and in particular, the modulus squared of the wave function gives the probability density that the particles appear in every possible group of positions in space. We present three arguments supporting this new interpretation of the wave function. These (...) arguments are mainly based on an analysis of the mass and charge properties of a quantum system. It is realized that the Schroedinger equation, which governs the evolution of a quantum system, contains more information about the system than the wave function of the system, such as the mass and charge properties of the system, which might help understand the ontological meaning of the wave function. Finally, we briefly analyze possible implications of the suggested ontological interpretation of the wave function for the solutions to the measurement problem. (shrink)

Globalization impacts on education everywhere; it is impossible to consider issues of curriculum or pedagogy without bearing in mind the effects of globalization. Here I consider to what extent it is possible to imagine curricula and pedagogies which could function at a global level? I do so from an anglo-phone perspective, from within the UK in the early part of the 21st century. The challenge is to develop means of analysis which allow distanced reflection on local issues and at (...) the same time facilitate descriptions at a global level, relatively free of the ‘skew’ of the local. The article deals with four issues: dominant myths which still govern contemporary thinking about education; addressing the transitional generation, a generation which straddles the shifts produced by the fault-lines in present social and political transitions of arrangements of power and authority; the characteristics and effects of present and likely future environments of learning, distinct historically and geographically; and the urgent need to develop apt theories of learning, that is, theories of learning which are apt for these new givens. What unites all these is the commonality of the experience of learning in a world of instability and multiplicity of meaning. (shrink)

This book offers an empirical and theoretical account of the mode of governance that characterizes the Bologna Process. In addition, it shows how the reform materializes and is translated in everyday working life among professors and managers in higher education. It examines the so-called Open Method of Coordination as a powerful actor that uses “soft governance” to advance transnational standards in higher education. The book shows how these standards no longer serve as tools for what were once human organizational, national (...) or international, regulators. Instead, the standards have become regulators themselves – the faceless masters of higher education. By exploring this, the book reveals the close connections between the Bologna Process and the EU regarding regulative and monitoring techniques such as standardizations and comparisons, which are carried out through the Open Method of Coordination. It suggests that the Bologna Process works as a subtle means to circumvent the EU’s subsidiarity principle, making it possible to accomplish a European governance of higher education despite the fact that education falls outside EU’s legislative reach. The book’s research interest in translation processes, agency and power relations among policy actors positions it in studies on policy transfer, policy borrowing and globalization. However, different from conventional approaches, this study draws on additional interpretive frameworks such as new materialism. (shrink)

Transparency is a crucial condition to implement a CSR policy based on the reputation mechanism. The central question of this contribution is how a transparency policy ought to be organised in order to enhance the CSR behaviour of companies. Governments endorsing CSR as a new means of governance have different strategies to foster CSR transparency. In this paper we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of two conventional policy strategies: the facilitation policy and the command and control strategy. Using three (...) criteria (efficiency, freedom and virtue) we conclude that both strategies are defective. Most attention is paid to the facilitation strategy since governments nowadays mainly use this. In evaluating this strategy we analyse the Dutch case. As an alternative we introduce a third government policy: the development of a self-regulating sub-system. By construing an analogy with the historical development of corporate financial disclosure, we point out that the vital step in the creation of a self-regulating subsys- tem is the creation of strong informational intermediate organisations. (shrink)

We are about to see the emergence of religions devoted to the worship of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Such religions pose acute risks, both to their followers and to the public. We should require their creators, and governments, to acknowledge these risks and to manage them as best they can. However, these new religions cannot be stopped altogether, nor should we try to stop them if we could. We must accept that AI worship will become part of our culture, and we (...) must learn to live with it. Indeed, we should do much more than this. We should value it as a new source of meaning in a rapidly-changing world. AI-based religions deserve respect and recognition alongside other, more established ones, and they should be granted the same level of legal protection. (shrink)

This paper challenges Stephen Turner’s reading of Feyerabend’s Science in a Free Society. In particular, according to Turner, Feyerabend’s “critique represents a recognition that the regimes of science and expertise are ineradicably political and coercive. But if regimes of science and expertise are ineradicably political and coercive, what remains is the problem of our choice of regimes, and how to accommodate them in a democratic order.” This paper shows that by stretching the meaning of coercion so widely, Turner has misrepresented (...) Feyerabend’s position. In fact, the paper argues that Feyerabend offers a vision of liberal politics and science that can be made uncoercive, or at least worth having. In particular, this paper offers a new reading of Feyerabend’s account of ‘free exchange’ as an immanent critique of J.S. Mill’s liberalism. The paper concludes by diagnosing some tensions in Feyerabend’s vision and thereby also criticize Turner. (shrink)

My target in this paper is a view that has sometimes been called the ‘ Linguistic Doctrine of Necessary Truth ’ and sometimes ‘Conventionalism about Necessity’. It is the view that necessity is grounded in the meanings of our expressions—meanings which are sometimes identified with the conventions governing those expressions—and that our knowledge of that necessity is based on our knowledge of those meanings or conventions. In its simplest form the view states that a truth, if it is necessary, is (...) necessary because it is analytic. It is widely recognized that this simple version of the view faces a prima facie problem with the existence of the necessary a posteriori. Assuming that all analytic truths are a priori, if there are necessary a posteriori truths then there are necessary synthetic truths—contradicting the view’s claim that all necessary truths are analytic. Contemporary L-DONTers have things to say about the problem, but in this paper I want to suggest that there is a different, more serious, problem which arises from the phenomenon of indexicality, which L-DONTers have not taken account of. Though there are many versions of the problem, a simple one is this. Consider Kaplan’s celebrated sentence. (shrink)

We are living in an algorithmic age where mathematics and computer science are coming together in powerful new ways to influence, shape and guide our behaviour and the governance of our societies. As these algorithmic governance structures proliferate, it is vital that we ensure their effectiveness and legitimacy. That is, we need to ensure that they are an effective means for achieving a legitimate policy goal that are also procedurally fair, open and unbiased. But how can we ensure that (...) algorithmic governance structures are both? This article shares the results of a collective intelligence workshop that addressed exactly this question. The workshop brought together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to consider barriers to legitimate and effective algorithmic governance and the research methods needed to address the nature and impact of specific barriers. An interactive management workshop technique was used to harness the collective intelligence of this multidisciplinary group. This method enabled participants to produce a framework and research agenda for those who are concerned about algorithmic governance. We outline this research agenda below, providing a detailed map of key research themes, questions and methods that our workshop felt ought to be pursued. This builds upon existing work on research agendas for critical algorithm studies in a unique way through the method of collective intelligence. (shrink)

International large-scale assessments have gained much attention since the beginning of the twenty-first century, influencing education legislation in many countries. This includes Spain, where they have been used by successive governments to justify education policy change. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the PISA 2018 reading scores for this country, meaning the OECD refused to initially release the results. Therefore, in this paper we attempt to estimate the likely PISA 2018 reading scores for Spain, and for each region within. The (...) figure finally published by the OECD for Spain – in terms of reading scores – was 476.5 points, which is between the lower and upper bound of the interval we find (475 to 483 test points in 2018). Additionally, we report some robustness checks for the OCED countries participating in PISA 2018, which show that the difference between the actual scores and the ones we found with the imputation methods are quite close. (shrink)

Assertion is a speech act that stands at the intersection of the philosophy of language and social epistemology. It is a phenomenon that bears on such wide-ranging topics as testimony, truth, meaning, knowledge and trust. It is thus no surprise that analytic philosophers have devoted innumerable pages to assertion, trying to give the norms that govern it, its role in the transmission of knowledge, and most importantly, what assertion is, or how assertion is to be defined. -/- In this thesis (...) I attempt to show that all previous answers to the question “What is assertion?” are flawed. There are four major traditions in the literature: constitutive norm theories of assertion, accounts that treat assertion as the expression of speaker attitudes, accounts that treat assertion as a proposal to add some proposition to the common ground, and accounts that treat assertion as the taking of responsibility for some claim. Each tradition is explored here, the leading theories within the tradition developed, and then placed under scrutiny to demonstrate flaws within the positions surveyed. -/- I follow the work of G.E. Moore and William P. Alston, whilst drawing on the work of Robert Brandom in order to give a new bipartite theory of assertion. I argue that assertion consists in the explicit presentation of a proposition, along with a taking of responsibility for that proposition. Taking Alston’s explicit presentation condition and repairing it in order to deal with problems it faces, whilst combining it with Brandom’s responsibility condition, provides, I believe, the best account of assertion. (shrink)

Place mouse over image continent. 2.1 (2012): 36–39. From an ethical and political perspective, people and property can hardly be separated. Indeed, the modern political subject – that is, the individual, the person, the self, the autonomous actor, the rational self-interest maximizer, etc. – has taken shape in and through the elaboration, institutionalization, and enactment of that which rightfully belongs to it. This thread can be traced back perhaps most directly to Locke’s notion that the origin of the political state (...) occurs when people rise above the state of nature by ceding the power to prosecute offenses. The rule of law begins then with a defense of the right to property. People become subjects by adhering to the social contract, which they do by deferring the defense of their own property to the state. In this light, the response of the United States federal government to the financial crisis of 2008 appears to many as a breach of the social contract. The chant “banks got bailed out, we got sold out” states the claim plainly. Why exactly did some subjects (e.g., the banks) have their property defended by the state (i.e., through the variety of programs including TARP, the discount window at the US Federal Reserve, etc.), when other subjects (e.g., homeowners) found themselves without protection of their property rights, forced to default on mortgage debts and face dispossession? Even if the rhetoric about “too big to fail” can be believed, and the collapse of the financial system would lead to negative consequences for people who had little or no connection to the activities that brought it about, such consequences need not call into question the notion that everyone stands equally before the law. To occupy, then, appears as a form of civil disobedience, an intentional, retaliatory breach of the social contract by those who feel that they have lost the support of the state to which they ceded their power as sovereign agents. The visible and the invisible The violation of property rights of people who have recognition, protection and power under the law destabilizes their very status as citizens and tests the limit of democracy. Does the financial system force the dematerialized victimization of individuals? Do people become numbers, or worse still, percentages of unemployed, tranches of defaulted mortgages and foreclosures? Are they perhaps instead disenfranchised prospectively from the privileged position occupied by virtual entities and actors such as those involved in the derivatives markets, always already exiled back into the physical, visible realm? The line of conflict appears to be drawn between invisibility/absence/deferral and visibility/presence/realization. The demonstrators occupy an excess property of those subjects, namely, the banks and financial elite, who did receive recognition and protection under the law. By domesticating this excess property, rendering its invisibility visible within the political economy, the protesters raise a new form of threat to the hegemonic order. To occupy, then, involves a rejection of the order under which the “99%” have been subjected to erasure. The occupation seeks creatively to establish a new means of communication and law for its subjects. In the face of an existing power structure that is increasingly disenfranchising the majority of people while consolidating nodes of power and influence, the “occupation”, or the work of the Occupy movement, involves seizing a space that refuses the rules of the existing, allegedly corrupt sovereign state. This refusal of governance extends even to include a steadfast refusal to articulate a strategy, to formulate a list of demands, to converse with the sovereign power on the grounds of its own conventions, to put forth a leader, to resolve the ambiguity of the movement into a discreet identity, face, or voice. Do these tactics provide a resolution to the problem that was its genesis? Not in such a direct and easily resolved manner, but it remains difficult to imagine a direct and simple resolution to the problematic of the breach of the social contract. The ambiguity of the situation has generated significant interest within the broader populace, though many people sympathetic to the cause appear to be frustrated because the movement has not simply put forward a short list of concrete demands, or even a set of leaders and spokespeople, much less a resolution. And yet, this lack of coherence appears as a resolution of a problem generic to protest movements in the past, where individual leaders can be removed or discredited, and lists of demands can be co-opted by others holding more political power. Meanwhile, the ambiguity has compelled imitations on a global scale, with the Occupy Wall Street participants consciously taking actions that can be replicated by anyone anywhere without significant cost. These actions have taken place not in a peripheral location such as a parking lot in New Jersey, but instead close to the centers of power and governance, adjacent to Wall Street, close to the White House, on college campuses, etc. This spontaneous archipelago of protests becomes an irritant, a negation of the accepted order of protests, but when the protesters themselves move outside of their encampments, they are escorted by the police, constantly monitored and maintained so that a permanent state of paranoid persecution takes hold. To occupy, occupying, occupation – these actions involve a variable degree of danger – are you willing to step into a different space, where the rule of law is unclear and evolving? Are you presenting yourself as a representative of the majority, the 99%? Who has a sense of belonging to the 99%? This previously invisible population becomes a focal point of political power, garners increasing public support, infects the public dialogue. The government recognizes this population by forcing it from the occupied space, removing the element of possession of property. It is at this point of conflict, in the struggle to hold the physical property, where the greatest friction and violence occurs. Scaling the rule of law While occupied, the property calls for a redress of grievances, a restoration of the rule of law. The Occupy movement does not select and put forward individuals or leaders, it puts forward places – the occupied property represents the point of conflict, not the individual. And it is this very property that the government then tries to reclaim. The movement remains faceless, anonymous, uncounted, or rather counted only as a mass, the self-labeled mass of 99%. These spaces are like refugee camps or favelas, but constructed to unite the political life and private life of the protesters. This objective is presented as a tactical necessity, as all other means of protest and communication have failed, leaving only the option of seizing, holding, occupying a property. But to what end, exactly? Can anyone deliberately return to the prior social contract, embrace, affirm, and govern in strict accordance with the earlier relationship to property, following the logic of Locke’s arguments? In this respect, the contemporary crisis indicates a new, transitional phase in the way that property operates, or rather, in the balance between real and virtual value. The roots of the crisis lay in the massive overvaluation of property caused by lax lending practices, as more people were encouraged to borrow more money, which drove up the prices of property. At the same time, these individual properties, these mortgages for homes actual families lived in and worked to support, were bundled into securities that could be bought, sold, and speculated on. The reduction of a physical house or piece of real estate to an almost incalculably small element in an investment vehicle appears as a scaling of the hedge that radically diminishes the value of any individually owned property. Moreover, a number of recently-innovated financial products allow investors to hedge in new ways, to deliberately spread risk around a portfolio in hopes of bringing returns even when the individual mortgage defaults. At the level of the ‘free’ market, these virtual negative valuations are designed to balance the physical positive valuation, though many of the biggest lenders are now being investigated for controlling both sides of this valuation, the positive and the negative, to facilitate both the creation and failure of the investments and to profit from both. The ability to benefit from both the negative and positive value of an investment is a result of a technologically enabled capacity to operate within a complex field. These layered and scaled investment vehicles and the simultaneous negation of their value together represent a commingling of the virtual and physical existence that is both complex and multiple. The valuation of a virtual property has tremendous power to change the valuation of the physical - either injecting it with or depriving it of funds, pumping in or draining life and energy. This situation has roots of its own – the notion of property advanced e.g., throughout the enclosure movement in Britain was, from the outset, an imposition of virtuality (i.e., the concept of law, the institutions associated with ownership, etc.) on the physical reality of land. 1 The difference today is that technological trading platforms combined with innovations within the financial services industry have enabled the reduction of each individual property receiving or losing value in scale to an almost atomic level. In turn, the number of properties held simultaneously and valued as a massive, multiple wholes – i.e., the derivatives market in mortgage-backed securities – is a new phenomenon made possible through the application of similar technologies and institutional structures. And those actors who can trade in these layers of complexity can then profit from the new phase of disassociation of the virtual and the physical – unconcerned with and operating at such a virtual distance from the individual residing physically on a particular piece of real estate that they no longer feel the tug of the physical tying them back to the physical, operating literally as in a video game, in a virtually distanced world. What can or should be done about this situation? Answers lie outside the scope of this current essay, but merit consideration in the near future… NOTE 1) Hernando de Soto has emphasized this dimension by empirically demonstrating its non-existence in many countries in The Mystery of Capital. (shrink)

There is an abundance of enthusiasm and optimism about how governments at all levels can make use of big data, algorithms and artificial intelligence. There is also growing concern about the risks that come with these new systems. This article makes the case for greater government transparency and accountability about uses of big data through a Government of Canada qualitative research case study. Adapting a method from critical cartographers, I employ counter-mapping to map government big data practices (...) and internal discussions of risk and challenge. I do so by drawing on interviews and freedom of information requests. The analysis reveals that there are more concerns and risks than often publicly discussed and that there are significant areas of silence that need greater attention. The article underlines the need for our democratic systems to respond to our new datafied contexts by ensuring that our institutions make changes to better protect citizen rights, uphold democratic principles and ensure means for citizen intervention. (shrink)

The paper aims to explore the phenomenon of the spread in democracy of new powers – produced by inexhaustible technological developments – from the perspective of the philosophy of Institutions. It traces the original idea of democracy, in which the «government of the people» arises from the conversion of natural liberty into social and political liberty, dwells on the political and juridical meaning of authority, analyses the traditional instruments used to condition human opinions and behaviours, and reconstructs – in (...) light of this itinerary – the functioning and new grammar of the digital order. What opens before us is a fluid and disorganized scenario, dominated by digital systems, algorithms and artificial intelligence, that draws the attention of philosophers and sociologists, jurists and scholars of language and of anthropology. The old single order, outlined by the political and juridical machine of the modern State – which, through an aloof and solemn language, aimed to impart regularity to human behaviour and to give society direction – is replaced by multifarious models of order, each of which is generated by its own logic, practices, and autonomous control techniques. Under the omnipotence of technology, concepts such as authority, liberty, truth and power undergo a vortex of semantic transformations that penetrate a new symbolic space into human reasoning and actions. (shrink)

In The Government of the Living, Foucault demonstrates elegantly and convincingly the emergence of a new idea and practice of penitence within the early Church, one that traced its origins to the Bible but in fact represented a departure from earlier Christian beliefs. This shift occurred largely under the influence of monastic and ascetic tendencies that came to play an increasingly powerful role in the second and third centuries after Christ. I suggest that this is the fundamental contribution of (...) the lectures, rather than the framing narrative concerning truth and power. In my comments, I focus on the ideas of conversion, change of heart, remorse, and repentance, and show how the classical Greek and Latin terms for a change of mind assume meanings as widely different as “conversion” and “penitence.” This semantic slide or instability mirrors and enables the reinterpretation of Biblical faith as penitence. I also discuss the relationship between self-disclosure, as the classical writers understood it, and confession, and relate this to a new conception of the inviolable self. (shrink)

Earth’s life-support system is facing megaproblems of sustainability. One important way of how these problems can be addressed is through innovation. This paper argues that responsible innovation that contributes to sustainable development consists of three dimensions: innovations avoid harming people and the planet, innovations ‘do good’ by offering new products, services, or technologies that foster SD, and global governance schemes are in place that facilitate innovations that avoid harm and ‘do good.’ The paper discusses global governance schemes based on deliberation (...) as a means to foster such responsible innovation. These schemes can provide voluntary soft-law regulations that complement and extend national and international hard-law regulations and facilitate collective innovation that contributes to SD goals. The article addresses the facilitative role of governments and international organizations in overcoming problems of deliberation and offers illustrative examples of such governance schemes. (shrink)