The truth of the matter is that our deficiency does not lie in the want of well-verified "facts." What we lack is our bearings. The contemporary experience of things technological has repeatedly confounded our vision, our expectations, and our capacity to make intelligent judgments. Categories, arguments, conclusions, and choices that would have been entirely obvious in earlier times are obvious no longer. Patterns of perceptive thinking that were entirely reliable in the past now lead us systematically astray. Many of our (...) standard conceptions of technology reveal a disorientation that borders on dissociation from reality. And as long as we lack the ability to make our situation intelligible, all of the "data" in the world will make no difference.;From the Introduction. (shrink)

"--David Dickson, New York Times Book Review "The Whale and the Reactor is the philosopher's equivalent of superb public history.

In controversies about technology and society, there is no idea more pro vocative than the notion that technical things have political qualities. At issue is the claim that the machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions of efficiency and pro-ductivity, not merely for their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority. Since ideas of this kind (...) have a persistent and troubling presence in discussions about the meaning of technology, they deserve explicit attention... (shrink)

After reviewing factors implicated in the generation of delusional beliefs, we conclude that whilst a perceptual aberration coupled with a particular type of attri‐butional bias may be necessary to explain the specific thematic content of a bizarre delusion, neither of these factors, whether in isolation or in combination, is sufficient to explain the presence of delusional beliefs. In contrast to bias models (theories which explain delusion formation in terms of extremes of normal reasoning biases), we advocate a deficit model of (...) delusion formation–that is, delusions arise when the normal cognitive system which people use to generate, evaluate, and then adopt beliefs is damaged. Mere bias we think inadequate to explain bizarre delusions which defy commonsense and persist despite overwhelming rational counter‐argument. In particular, we propose that two deficits must be present in the normal cognitive system to explain bizarre delusions: (1) there must be some damage to sensory and/or attentional‐orient‐ing mechanisms which causes an aberrant perception–this explains the bizarre content of the causal hypothesis generated to explain what is happening; and (2) there must also be a failure of normal belief evaluation–this explains why a hypothesis, implausible in the light of general commonsense, is adopted as belief. This latter deficit occurs, we suggest, when an individual is incapable of suspending the natural favoured status of direct first‐person evidence in order to critically evaluate hypotheses, given equal pri‐ority whether based on direct or indirect sources of information. In contrast, delusions with ‘ordinary’ content may arise when a single deficit of normal belief evaluation occurs in the context of an extreme (but normal) attentional bias, thus causing failure to critically evaluate hypotheses based on misperceptions and misintrepretations of ambiguous (but ordinary) first‐person experience. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophical discussions about technology mirror a profound distance between technical practice and moral thought. I consider the origins of this gap as reflected in both ancient and modern writings. The philosopher's version of technocracy ? rushing forward with the analysis of moral categories in the hope that policy?makers or the public will find them decisive ? does nothing to bridge this gap and is, therefore, a forlorn strategy. The trouble is not that we lack good arguments and theories, but (...) rather that modern politics does not provide appropriate roles and institutions in which the activity of defining the common good in technology policy is a legitimate project. I find glimmerings of an alternative practice in the ?Scandinavian approach? to democratic participation in technological design. (shrink)

. This is a brief survey of aspects of the modern scientific view of nature to see if implied therein are signs or traces of the sacred–as early religious apprehension surely supposed. Nature's power and order are discussed as is the strange dialectic of death and life, evident in modern biology as it also is in all early religion.

The romanticization of the personal computer as a social panacea threatens to blind society to the fact that without guiding wisdom even the best tool can be misused.

The work reported in this paper investigated the putative functional dependence of pragmatic language skills on general mind‐reading capacity by testing theory‐of‐mind abilities and understanding of non‐literal speech in patients with schizophrenia and in healthy controls. Patients showed difficulties with inferring mental states on a false‐belief picture‐sequencing task and with understanding metaphors and irony on a story‐comprehension task. These difficulties were independent of low verbal IQ and a more generalised problem inhibiting prepotent information. Understanding of metaphors and understanding of irony (...) made significant and independent contributions to discriminating patients from controls, suggesting that metaphor and irony make distinct pragmatic demands. (shrink)

The history of Physical Science appears to exhibit, periodically, a race between the acmulation of data and the ability of its codification to find a natural place for much of the empirical findings. If the codifying scheme is a mathematical theory, capable of interpolation and extrapolation, according to the rules of the particular branch of mathematics employed, the ablest handlers of the theory are frequently confronted with a situation in which mathematical computation alone does not suffice. In such a situation (...) the introduction of symbols, whose interpretation is not direct and simple is resorted to. This symbol is usually involved in a mathematical relation by a species of reasoning, which may be somewhat unfamiliar and remote from customary habits of thought. It is generally accepted as physically valid, if the mathematical formulation which involves it can produce results which account for the mass of data uncovered by experimenters. As an example of such a procedure we may mention the case of the Schrödinger Ψ-symbol, a symbol which was involved in Schrödinger's famous matter wave equation. The successes which such a theory enjoyed, particularly, in its initial stages, in formally relating the relative positions and intensities of spectral lines, with the atomistic concepts of gross matter which were inferred from the data of macroscopic measurement, such as the atomic mass, the electronic charge, Planck quantum of action, etc.,—these successes, gave a certain physical dignity to the Ψ-function itself. This dignity was further enhanced by the disclosure, by Schrödinger, of four functions of the Ψ-symbol which held the same place in the “continuity equation” as the classical charge density and the three components of current density. The successes accompanying this discovery for spectroscopic problems, in particular, are well known to Physicists. (shrink)

Gilkey's paper had two parts. Part I, Analysis and Theses, is reproduced here only slightly altered. Part II, Narrative, though extremely rich and moving, is heavily summarized. Then his concluding remarks are presented practically in the precise form in which he presented them.

In this paper the quantum covariant relativistic dynamics of many bodies is reconsidered. It is emphasized that this is an event dynamics. The events are quantum statistically correlated by the global parameter τ. The derivation of an event Boltzmann equation emphasizes this. It is shown that this Boltzmann equation may be viewed as exact in a dilute event limit ignoring three event correlations. A quantum entropy principle is obtained for the marginal Wigner distribution function. By means of event linking (concatenations) (...) particle properties such as the equation of state may be obtained. We further reconsider the generalized quantum equilibrium ensemble theory and the free event case of the Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein distributions, and some consequences. The ultra-relativistic limit differs from the non-covariant theory and is a test of this point of view. (shrink)

This book offers a new paradigm for religious pluralism by exploring Indic insights of Jainism and the nature of paradox.

Although Ludwig Wittgenstein did not offer a fully developed philosophy of technology, his writings contain an approach to inquiry that can be employed to explore situations in which people contend with technological devices and systems. His notions of ‘language games’ and ‘forms of life’ as well as the dramatic, imaginary dialogues in his later writings offer ways to transcend the sometimes rigid theoretical frameworks in contemporary technology studies. Especially as applied to rapidly moving infusions of computing and digital electronics in (...) contemporary society, Wittgenstein’s writings offer possibilities for fresh insight and even some practical alternatives. (shrink)

Article copyright 2002. We provide a battery of examples of delusions against which theoretical accounts can be tested. Then we identify neuropsychological anomalies that could produce the unusual experiences that may lead, in turn, to the delusions in our battery. However, we argue against Maher's view that delusions are false beliefs that arise as normal responses to anomalous experiences. We propose, instead, that a second factor is required to account for the transition from unusual experience to delusional belief. The second (...) factor in the etiology of delusions can be described superficially as a loss of the ability to reject a candidate for belief on the grounds of its implausibility and its inconsistency with everything else that the patient knows, but we point out some problems that confront any attempt to say more about the nature of this second factor. (shrink)

The impact of our desires and preferences upon our ordinary, everyday beliefs is well-documented [Gilovich, T. . How we know what isn’t so: The fallibility of human reason in everyday life. New York: The Free Press.]. The influence of such motivational factors on delusions, which are instances of pathological misbelief, has tended however to be neglected by certain prevailing models of delusion formation and maintenance. This paper explores a distinction between two general classes of theoretical explanation for delusions; the motivational (...) and the deficit. Motivational approaches view delusions as extreme instances of self-deception; as defensive attempts to relieve pain and distress. Deficit approaches, in contrast, view delusions as the consequence of defects in the normal functioning of belief mechanisms, underpinned by neuroanatomical or neurophysiological abnormalities. It is argued that although there are good reasons to be sceptical of motivational theories , recent experiments confirm that motives are important causal forces where delusions are concerned. It is therefore concluded that the most comprehensive account of delusions will involve a theoretical unification of both motivational and deficit approaches. (shrink)

Tradução de artigo de Langdon Winner Translation in portuguese of the article "Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, by Langdon Winner.