Artifacts are probably our most obvious everyday encounter with technology. Therefore, a good understanding of the nature of technical artifacts is a relevant part of technological literacy. In this article we draw from the philosophy of technology to develop a conceptualization of technical artifacts that can be used for educational purposes. Furthermore we report a small exploratory empirical study to see to what extent teachers’ intuitive ideas about artifacts match with the way philosophers write about the nature of artifacts. Finally, (...) we suggest a teaching and learning strategy for improving teachers’ concepts of technical artifacts through practical activities. (shrink)

This paper examines one of the historical antecedents of Big Data, the social physics movement. Its origins are in the scientific revolution of the 17th century in Western Europe. But it is not named as such until the middle of the 19th century, and not formally institutionalized until another hundred years later when it is associated with work by George Zipf and John Stewart. Social physics is marked by the belief that large-scale statistical measurement of social variables reveals underlying relational (...) patterns that can be explained by theories and laws found in natural science, and physics in particular. This larger epistemological position is known as monism, the idea that there is only one set of principles that applies to the explanation of both natural and social worlds. Social physics entered geography through the work of the mid-20th-century geographer William Warntz, who developed his own spatial version called “macrogeography.” It involved the computation of large data sets, made ever easier with the contemporaneous development of the computer, joined with the gravitational potential model. Our argument is that Warntz's concerns with numeracy, large data sets, machine-based computing power, relatively simple mathematical formulas drawn from natural science, and an isomorphism between natural and social worlds became grounds on which Big Data later staked its claim to knowledge; it is a past that has not yet passed. (shrink)

Big Data’s calculative ontology relies on and reproduces a form of hyperindividualism in which the ontological unit of analysis is the discrete data point, the meaning and identity of which inheres in itself, preceding, separate, and independent from its context or relation to any other data point. The practice of Big Data governed by an ontology of hyperindividualism is also constitutive of that ontology, naturalizing and diffusing it through practices of governance and, from there, throughout myriad dimensions of everyday life. (...) In this paper, I explicate Big Data’s ontology of hyperindividualism by contrasting it to a coconstitutive ontology that prioritizes relationality, context, and interdependence. I then situate the ontology of hyperindividualism in its genealogical context, drawing from Patrick Joyce’s history of liberalism and John Dewey’s pragmatist account of individualism, liberalism, and social action. True to its genealogical provenance, Big Data’s ontological politics of hyperindividualism reduces governance to the management of atomistic behavior, undermines the contribution of urban complexity as a resource for governance, erodes the potential for urban democracy, and eviscerates the possibility of collective resistance. (shrink)

This study reassesses the concept of the Anthropocene as a new geological age as it is influencing contemporary debates in social theory. As a unit of geological time whose changes are allegedly caused, directly and indirectly, by human beings, this scientific concept challenges the existing constructions of theoretical binaries, such as nature/culture, environment/society, objectivity/subjectivity or happenstance/design, in social theory. The analysis suggests many understandings of the Anthropocene in social theory are politicized over-interpretations of natural events, and these moves appear to (...) be developing moral rhetorics of, and operational plans for, managing the Anthropocene to create specific outcomes for those who are the managers as well as the managed. The fact that human beings do not, in fact, have this measure of technical control is ignored by advocates of Anthropocenarian politics to advance their policy agendas. (shrink)

In this article I have tried to rebut certain types of arguments which purport to show not merely that God does not exist but that the notion of necessary existence is itself either self-contradictory or senseless. In showing that it is not self-contradictory I have allowed myself the luxury of a negative and a positive approach. Negatively, I have had to show that when the accusation of self-contradiction is made, it is often accompanied, not by an argument but by a (...) sheer assertion. On the rare occasions when an argument is forthcoming, the arguments, I have tried to show, have been invalid, not even, inconclusive. And to the extent that Kant may be said to have argued not simply the impossibility of a genuine proof of the existence of God, but indeed the impossibility of the concept of necessary existence, I have argued out the weakness of Kant's arguments, the most notable of which I have discussed in some detail. Finally, to establish the genuineness of the concept of necessary existence, positively, I have paradoxically made use of a notion from Russell's logic. (shrink)

Contributors to the 2016 Special Issue of Discourse Studies on the ‘Epistemics of Epistemics’ claim that studies of epistemics in interaction have lost the ‘radical’ character of groundbreaking work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. We suggest that the critiques and related writings are a kind of mandarin EM, lacking an adequate definition of ‘radical’, other than to invoke brief and by now familiar statements from Garfinkel and Sacks regarding the pursuit of ‘ordinary everyday activities’ and the avoidance of ‘formal analysis’. (...) Drawing on Egon Bittner’s work, we further suggest that the EoE group shares properties and problems common to social movements claiming the mantle of radicalism. Because of their particular focus on CA and Harvey Sacks’ early work, we also demonstrate that Sacks was not, as asserted, preoccupied with the singularity of occasions. Rather, from his earliest available work, Sacks pursued trans-situational aspects of sequential organization, and documented these not only through single cases but also through the comparative analysis of specimen collections. We conclude by considering how EM and CA are compatible endeavors, both in their engagement with traditional research topics – or what Garfinkel called ‘asymmetric alternates’ – and in their appreciation of generic features implicated in the assembly of social actions and social worlds. This implies a relationship of mutual interchange between EM and CA. (shrink)

It would be natural to expect, after all these years, that the language of an author so important as Livy would be adequately represented in the dictionaries. Unfortunately this is very far from being the case. It is disquieting to find numerous Livian words cited without any mention of Livy or of any other writer of the Ciceronian or the Augustan Age. It is equally disquieting to find Livian idioms or constructions attributed only to writers remote from Livy both in (...) time and in genre. To crown all, we find a good many of Livy's notable usages entirely ignored. Perhaps a humble service may be rendered both to Livy and to the history of the Latin language by indicating a few deficiencies, especially in the parts of the alphabet not yet covered by the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. (shrink)

This well-known passage refers to the growth of latifundia, a symptom of Rome's decadence. In v. 170 ignotis is generally taken to mean ‘unknown to the owners,’ and thus, it seems to me, the point of the passage is missed. There is a double antithesis; longa is contrasted with breuίa, parua, and ίgnotίs with notίs, ίnlustrίbus, or the like. The latter antithesis is implied in Camίllί, Curίorum; the other is left to be understood. In the good old days farms were (...) small, but were cultivated by the most eminent citizens, men like Camillus and Curius Dentatus; now these small farms are combined to form latίfundίa, managed by nobodies , whether slaves or tenant farmers. The juxta-position of longa and sub ίgnotίs is intentional. (shrink)