Here I use aspects of Phil Graham’s discourse analytical work to examine forms of e/valuations and critically analyse the formulation of truths in the constitution of Artificial Intelligence (hereafter, AI). This paper focuses on two 2019 documents: Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI (AI HLEG, Citation2019a) and Policy and investment recommendations for trustworthy AI (AI HLEG, Citation2019b). My aim here is to provide a timely contribution to contemporary philosophical–methodological innovations in documenting the constellation of values that are prefigured in human-centric (...) constructions of AI. The analysis is informed primarily by principles from Graham’s distinctive approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA), which I take to be the philosophical study of valuation. In that approach, political economy is taken as a composite formulation of values whereby neo-liberalism is discursively entwined and progressed through a system of principles of e/valuation. This paper presents a roadmap to demonstrate the usefulness of a philosophically grounded interdisciplinary piece of linguistic research through which evaluative semantic categories can be usefully synthesised with CDA to systematically expose the assumptions which underpin current truth claims and values – in this case, about and around the ethics of AI. (shrink)

The idea of inclusive collective decision-making is important in establishing democratic legitimacy, but it fails when citizens are excluded. Stated-preference methods of valuation, which are commonly used in economics, have been criticised because the principle of willingness to pay may exclude low-income earners who do not have the capacity to pay. Deliberative valuation has been advocated as a way to overcome this problem, but deliberation may also be exclusive. In this review, two deliberative valuation frameworks are compared. (...) The first is grounded on the idea of rational discourse that emphasises argument at the expense of other communicative strategies. It seeks to secure inclusion through procedural rules and prerequisites, but fails to address the underlying democratic limitation of argumentation. The second does not rely on the distinction between rational and rhetorical speech, and therefore admits alternative forms of communication. This approach recognises differences in the communicative capacities and practices of those who take part in deliberation, and so is better equipped to improve, though not to guarantee, inclusion. (shrink)

This paper investigates the role of (DIS)RESPECT a value premise in two landmark civil rights cases given by the United States Supreme Court. It adopts a corpus-assisted approach whereby a keyword analysis and the analysis of key semantic domains are used to identify potential values relied upon by judges in their justifications. The two categories of NO RESPECT and RESPECTED have been selected and examined as one domain of (DIS)RESPECT. (DIS)RESPECT turns out to be the only value marked by strong (...) evaluative polarity and it is found in the majority, as well as in dissenting opinions. The analysis shows how the notion of (DIS)RESPECT has been integrated into the arguments of judges and it highlights the central importance of values and the related evaluative language for legal argumentation. (shrink)

In this interview, Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre introduce their book Enrichment and core concepts for the analysis of new developments in contemporary capitalism. The study focuses the analysis of the enrichment economy, which is grasped as a new form to explore and exploit ‘the past’ as a source for capitalist profits. The interview presents forms of valuation, which are more general principles of how value and prices can be ascribed to goods. The approach of Boltanski and Esquerre assumes (...) an organized plurality of such forms of valuation. Also, the two sociologists stress the importance of discourses of valuation, which bring these forms of valuation into operation. As the interview makes evident, one major aim is to present a new perspective on the relationship between values, prices, and practices how prices are legitimatized or criticized on the basis of discourses of valuation. The interview situates Enrichment in the context of other contemporary sociological works, which focus on the economic core issue of value and valuation. The book can also be recognized as a proposal to reconcile structuralism and pragmatism in sociology. At the end of the interview, the more recent outcomes of the continuing collaborative work of Boltanski and Esquerre after Enrichment are discussed. (shrink)

A frequent justification in the literature for using stated preference methods (SP) is that they are the only methods that can capture the so-called total economic value (TEV) of environmental changes to society. Based on follow-up interviews with SP survey respondents, this paper addresses the implications of that argument by shedding light on the construction of TEV, through respondents’ perspective. It illuminates the deficiencies of willingness to pay (WTP) as a measure of value presented as three aggregated themes considering respondents’ (...) unintentionality, their retraction once they understood that their WTP could be decisive in cost-benefit analysis and the inherent incompleteness of WTP. We discuss why the TEV discourse persists, how it conceals rather than reveals broader notions of value and in what ways our results support the development of alternative approaches that truly endorse plurality in environmental valuation and decision-making. (shrink)

This paper examines the socio-economic and environmental implications of soy development in Santarém, Pará, located in the Brazilian Amazon. The settlement history of the region contributes directly to the way in which soy agriculture is currently proceeding in Santarém. Government policies and perspectives have been shaped by a history of agrarian colonization of Amazon forests, and the small farmers, or colonos, who are now being bought out by soy agribusiness are also rooted in this history. As a means of ascertaining (...) the current state and interaction of soy actors with the burgeoning soy-based economy in the area, field research was conducted on the role of primary and secondary forests for soy production. Research also included an analysis of valuation discourses – that is, how the differing soy actors (local government, agribusiness, conservation NGOs, and small farmers) assign value to types of forests and their different interpretations of what constitutes environmental degradation. The ways in which these different actors assign such values to forests and how they structure the definition of environmental degradation is a key factor in determining who “wins” and “loses” in the realm of Amazon development. Significant environmental and socio-economic implications of soy expansion, especially for the colonos, are not taken into account because the dominant rhetoric of Amazonian development ignores their contribution to social and ecological diversity. This omission keeps colono communities living at poverty level and even exacerbates colono poverty under the soy development project. The colonos and their representatives are responding by setting forth their own, competing valuations of primary and secondary forests that contrast sharply with state soy growing schemes and NGO plans for “sustainable soy.” These have their roots in local knowledge and best practices. (shrink)

Market-like devices that enact quantification and monetization processes (QM) underpin a growing number of valuation practices, but the widespread take-up of QM has given rise to the ‘cooptation charge’: for all the good intentions and results produced by those who deploy QM, they are complicit in reinforcing problematic neoliberal tendencies. A political discourse-theoretical perspective, combined with a pragmatist scholarship that has made significant advances in our understanding of QM, suggests that the cooptation charge relies on an overly simplified (...) picture of both QM and neoliberalism. However, while we acknowledge this as an important advance, we argue that the normative, political, and ideological significance of QM remains surprisingly underspecified. We still lack a convincing theoretical framework that provides a more rounded multi-dimensional critical perspective within which to navigate the evaluative dilemmas produced by these increasingly widespread techniques, including cooptation worries. Drawing on the logics approach of the Essex school of political discourse theory, we develop a framework that brings together the strategic, normative, and ideological dimensions that otherwise tend to be treated separately in the literature, allowing a fuller assessment of such technologies. (shrink)

In this paper, the author revisits “the emotive theory of value” and argues that values are not entities but nothing other than “linguistic fictions”. Accordingly, valuations—i.e., valuing actions—can be defined as approving or disapproving attitudes of a subject to some object. In this perspective, values cannot be true or false: What we can do is just compare them with regard to strength. As a consequence, value judgments are to be understood as sentences which are used either to say that a (...) subject s values an object o positively or negatively, or to express (evince) a valuation. The author then shows some relations between normative and evaluative discourses. First, he claims that norms as well as valuations are not true or false. Second, he argues that both may be explained or justified, even if the former are usually justified teleologically whereas the latter are explained referring back to the subject's background and life‐style. Third, he notes that a legal order originates from the fact that valuations “crystallize” into norms. Finally, the author examines some further questions related to his analysis. In particular, he argues that the different realms of values, e.g., morals, aesthetics, politics, etc., do not correspond to different evaluative attitudes, but to different phenomena and diverse spheres of human life. (shrink)

This paper examines the discourses and practices of pedigree livestock breeding, focusing on beef cattle and sheep in the UK, concentrating on an under-examined aspect of this—the deselection and rejection of some animals from future breeding populations. In the context of exploring how animals are valued and represented in different ways in relation to particular agricultural knowledge-practices, it focuses on deselecting particular animals from breeding populations, drawing attention to shifts in such knowledge-practices related to the emergence of “genetic” techniques in (...) livestock breeding which are arguably displacing “traditional” visual and experiential knowledge’s of livestock animals. The paper situates this discussion in the analytical framework provided by Foucault’s conception of “biopower,” exploring how interventions in livestock populations aimed at the fostering of domestic animal life are necessarily also associated with the imperative that certain animals must die and not contribute to the future reproduction of their breed. The “geneticization” of livestock breeding produces new articulations of this process associated with different understandings of animal life and the possibilities of different modes of intervention in livestock populations. Genetic techniques increasingly quantify and rationalize processes of selection and deselection, and affect how animals are perceived and valued both as groups and as individuals. The paper concludes by emphasizing that the valuation of livestock animals is contested, and that the entanglement of “traditional” and “genetic” modes of valuation means that there are multiple layers of valuation and (de)selection involved in breeding knowledge-practices. (shrink)

Moral philosophy and education, by H. D. Aiken.--The moral sense and contributory values, by C. I. Lewis.--Realms of value, by P. W. Taylor.--The role of value theory in education, by J. D. Butler.--Does ethics make a difference? By K. Price.--Educational value statements, by C. Beck.--Educational values and goals, by W. K. Frankena.--Conflicts in values, by H. S. Broudy.--Levels of valuational discourse in education, by J. F. Perry and P. G. Smith.--Education and some moves toward a value methodology, by A. (...) S. Clayton.--You can't pray a lie, by M. Twain.--Men, machines, and morality, by J. F. Soltis.--Teaching and telling, by I. Scheffler.--Reason and habit, by R. S. Peters.--The two moralists of the child, by J. Piaget.--Causes and morality, by R. S. Peters.--On education and morals, by R. W. Sleeper.--Moral autonomy and reasonableness, by T. D. Perry. (shrink)

This article presents an argument for the return to the original meaning of the concept value. This is achieved by revisiting the genealogy of the concept and by placing in perspective and questioning the common parlance thereof in contemporary legal discourse. The approach is decidedly against the often casual way in which courts and commentators treat the concept, seemingly as concretisation, validation, exegesis or reinforcement of fundamental norms, but without paying attention to its original meaning and use. It is (...) submitted that we confine our talk of values to the products of valuation, that is, the taste, the will, the esteem and/or perspective of some individual or group. Yet, it is not suggested that we completely discard the use of values discourse in law, the goal is rather to restate the inherent relativity of values language in legal discourse. This will bring necessary order to the current conceptual disarray and will foster mutual understanding and alliance. (shrink)

Public sector adoption of AI techniques in welfare systems recasts historic national data as resource for machine learning. In this paper, we examine how the use of register data for development of predictive models produces new ‘afterlives’ for citizen data. First, we document a Danish research project’s practical efforts to develop an algorithmic decision-support model for social workers to classify children’s risk of maltreatment. Second, we outline the tensions emerging from project members’ negotiations about which datasets to include. Third, we (...) identify three types of afterlives for citizen data in machine learning projects: (1) data afterlives for training and testing the algorithm, acting as ‘ground truth’ for inferring futures, (2) data afterlives for validating the algorithmic model, acting as markers of robustness, and (3) data afterlives for improving the model’s fairness, valuated for reasons of data ethics. We conclude by discussing how, on one hand, these afterlives engender new ethical relations between state and citizens; and how they, on the other hand, also articulate an alternative view on the value of datasets, posing interesting contrasts between machine learning projects developed within the context of the Danish welfare state and mainstream corporate AI discourses of the bigger, the better. (shrink)

Objectives: To analyse and compare the surveys on German doctors and judges on end of life decision making regarding their attitudes on the advance directive and on the dying process.Design: The respondents were to indicate their agreement or disagreement to eight statements on the advance directive and to specify their personal view on the beginning of the dying process.Participants: 727 doctors in three federal states and 469 judges dealing with guardianship matters all over Germany.Main measurements: Comparisons of means, analyses of (...) variance, pivot tables and factor analyses .Results: Three attitude groups on advance directive were disclosed by the analysis: the decision model, which emphasises the binding character of a situational advance directive; the deliberation model, which puts more emphasis on the communicative aspect; and the delegation model, which regards the advance directive as a legal instrument. The answers regarding the beginning of the dying process were broadly distributed, but no marked difference was observed between the responding professions. The dying process was assumed by most participants to begin with a life expectancy of only a few days.Conclusions: A high degree of valuation for advance directive was seen in both German doctors and judges; most agreed to the binding character of the situational directive. Regarding the different individual concepts of the dying process, a cross-professional discourse on the contents of this term seems to be overdue. (shrink)

This paper explores how philosophical inquiry and Critical Discourse Analysis can mutually benefit from each other to produce new methodological and reflexive directions in neo-liberal policy research to examine the phenomenon of 'What is '. Through this we argue that augmenting linguistic analysis with philosophical perspectives develops and supports CDA scholarship more broadly by accommodating the shifting complexity of social problems of ideologically driven inequality that are inbuilt through, in our case, social policy texts. In discussing philosophical-methodological issues, the (...) paper argues for the need to continually adapt CDA to the particular data so as to remain sensitive to and avoid hegemonic tendencies in analysis. Through adopting the principles of a working methodology, we discuss a micro-meso-macro CDA framework that draws on the analytical concepts of movement, metaphorical superfluidity, thematic condensation, and surrealism to conceive of a research approach capable of examining and comprehending evolving discourses of political economies. The most immediate benefit of this framework is its capacity to illustrate how forms of valuations perpetuated by and through policy discourse are the motivational locus of meaning making insofar as they strongly inform the moral underpinning the ideology of economic growth. (shrink)

This article proceeds from a perspective on value and valuation that is distinct from moral and economic discourses of value in that it conceives of value as primarily, and even paradigmatically, political. Drawing from the insights of Anna Julia Cooper's political-economic writings, this article argues that value and values, markets and morals, and the constellation of issues entangled in modern discourses of valuation all have the effect of devaluing black life. It explores the tensions between economics and moral (...) sentiments, as Cooper depicts them in her discussion of the concepts of worth and material. Cooper demonstrates the concept of matter to rely upon a tension between material goods and the common good. Cooper's discussion is therefore pivotal to understanding how political priorities mesh with systems of material interdependence. (shrink)

The article discusses main contributions and results of the monograph Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities, written by the French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre. Boltanski and Esquerre focus on the strategy to transform ‘the past’ (patrimony, luxury objects, tradition, collections) into new sources of richness. The book focuses on valuation forms and valuation discourses. Enrichment links Boltanski’s work again to the socio-economic movement of the economics and sociology of conventions (in short, EC/SC), which is part of the (...) new French social sciences and regards conventions as logics of valuation and interpretation. This approach of EC/SC is introduced as a frame to evaluate the recombination of pragmatism and structuralism which is proposed by Boltanski and Esquerre. Finally, open questions and desiderata are addressed from the standpoint of EC/SC. (shrink)

A modal logic for translating a sequence of English sentences to a sequence of logical forms is presented, characterized by Kripke models with points formed from input/output sequences, and valuations determined by entailment relations. Previous approaches based (to one degree or another) on Quantified Dynamic Logic are embeddable within it. Applications to presupposition and ambiguity are described, and decision procedures and axiomatizations supplied.

In this paper, we want to analyze conceptually whether and when merely using economic discourse – talking money – can crowd out people's positive attitudes towards environmental goods and their reasons to protect them. We concentrate on the specific case of market-based or monetary valuation as an instance of ‘commodification in discourse’ and argue that it can have the same moral problems as real commodification. We aim to bring together insights from philosophy, ethics, economics and psychology to (...) argue that there are good reasons to think about how and when to apply MV in environmental cases. On the basis of this interdisciplinary analysis and in order to promote further empirical research, we develop four empirically falsifiable hypotheses. Commodification in discourse can bring about real commodification. MV can have framing and crowding effects on those who come into contact with it. Intrinsic motivation is more robust than extrinsic motivation and leads less to freeriding. MV's framing and crowding effects can decrease environmental protection. (shrink)

Analysts of political culture within the "civil religion" tradition have generally assumed that discourse in civil society is structured by a single set of enduring codes based on liberal traditions that actors draw upon to resolve crises. Based on two case studies of national crises and debate in Brazil during its transition to democracy, I challenge this assumption by demonstrating that not only do actors draw upon two distinct but interrelated codes, they actively seek to impose one or another (...) as dominant. In Brazil this is manifest in actors who defend elements from the code of liberty and its valuation of the freestanding citizen, and those who defend the corporate code and its valuation of the collectivity over the individual. In an earlier debate on crime the corporate code was dominant, but in a later debate surrounding presidential improprieties, the liberal code became dominant. This analysis makes two contributions to the literature: it highlights the importance of nonindividualist cultural codes, such as the corporate code, in animating discourse in the public sphere in democratizing societies, raising attention to the importance of the symbolic contestation between actors seeking to establish one or another code during political transitions. Second, it offers a subtle commentary on the literature on democratization: changes in collective representations in the public sphere may not proceed apace of institutional changes and may be contingent on the kinds of crisis events and actors willing to contest previously dominant codes. (shrink)

This article critiques Australia's official discourse of multiculturalism, with its rhetoric of ‘celebrating cultural diversity’ and tolerance, by looking at the way in which this discourse suppresses the ambivalent positioning of ‘Asians’ in Australian social space. The discourse of multiculturalism and the official, economically motivated desire for Australia to become ‘part of Asia’ has resulted in a relatively positive valuation of ‘Asia’ and ‘Asians’, an inversion from the racist exclusionism of the past. Against the self-congratulatory stance (...) of this discourse, this article signals the operation of ambivalence at two levels: at the structural level, insofar as it points to the inherent contradictions in the idea of the ‘multicultural nation’ and its fantasy of a harmonious ‘unity-in-diversity’, and at the subjective level, in the sense that the ethos of multiculturalism doesn't erase the ambivalent relations of acceptance/rejection between majority and minority subjects. Several instances of such ambivalence pertaining to the positioning and representation of the ‘Asian’ woman are given. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dante’s Poetics Of The Sacred WordSteven BotterillI hope to make a case that, until recently, would probably have seemed self-evident, or at least uncontroversial: namely, that a positive valuation of the power of human language to express and to represent informs the textual practice of Dante’s Commedia—or, to put it more bluntly, that Dante believes in words.1The language of poetry was, for Dante, the supremely demanding and supremely (...) rewarding form of human eloquence. This much is made clear in his significantly titled treatise De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular), which, having set out—and failed—to identify a truly noble form of the Italian vernacular, takes it as axiomatic that if (or rather when) such a language is brought into being, it will primarily be used by poets in the composition of their poetry. Despite the many subsequent developments in his thought, and despite, above all, the drastic and often underestimated effects of his shift after 1300 from lyric to narrative-dramatic forms and techniques, nothing in Dante’s later works gives us any reason to think that he ever modified this view.Within the narrative of the Commedia, the overriding importance of eloquence is amply demonstrated by the fact that, without it, Dante-character’s journey would never have taken place. It is to poetic eloquence that Dante owes both his visionary experience and his eventual salvation. Confirmation of this initially startling proposition occurs in canto II of Inferno, where Virgil describes his commission from Beatrice to come to the aid of her errant admirer, and explains that he is charged to do so through the use of his “parola ornata” (“ornamented [End Page 154] word”: Inf., II. 67)—not merely a word plucked from the dictionary, however potently charged with salvific meaning, but a word (or, by synecdoche, a language) that is perceptibly embellished with the technical and rhetorical devices recognized by its hearers as constituting eloquence. Virgil, then, is not just to speak the saving word but to pay attention, as both his historical identity and his creator’s agenda require, to the aesthetic and intellectual implications of its usage; and the efficacy of his speech is manifestly dependent on the elegance and persuasiveness of its formulation.Dante-character’s initial recognition of his mysterious interlocutor in Inferno I as “quella fonte / che spandi di parlar sì largo fiume” (“that spring / that pours forth so rich a stream of speech”: Inf., I. 79–80) is thus retrospectively justified: this is the immediately relevant aspect of Virgil’s historical personality, the one that best equips him to become Dante-character’s guide and mentor in Hell and (most of) Purgatory. Likewise, it is under the auspices of another renowned possessor of eloquence, Bernard of Clairvaux, that Dante’s journey reaches its appointed end. The narrative movement through the Commedia is, among much else, a movement from one “parola ornata” to another, from Virgil’s eloquence to Bernard’s, from the pagan word that offers worldly renown to the Christian word that both transfigures the believer in this life and promises bliss in the life to come. The former, however, grounds the process that leads to the latter; and at both ends of the journey the functional significance of the word and its usage remains paramount.We need, however, to be careful at this point, lest we begin too quickly to entertain the notion that the centrality of eloquence in Dante’s thought immediately justifies the conclusion that he accepted the intrinsic validity of poetic language, or, more controversial still, its supremacy over other forms of eloquent discourse. Firstly, Virgil’s is not the only word in the poem distinguished as “ornata.” The epithet recurs in the bolgia of the seducers, as part of the tale of Jason, who “con segni e con parole ornate” (“with signs and with ornamented words”: Inf., XVIII. 91) led Hypsipyle astray and earned himself damnation. Clearly, Jason’s “parole ornate” are morally quite different from Virgil’s: instead of saving they betray, instead of embodying the truth they act as a vehicle of deceit. Their ornamental quality is specious, employed to conceal their... (shrink)

The West has created categories of property, including intellectual property, which divides peoples and things according to the same colonizing discourses of possessive individualism that historically disentitled and disenfranchised Native peoples in North America. These categories are often presented as one or both of neutral and natural, and often racialized. The commodification and removal of land from people’s social relations which inform Western valuations of cultural value and human beings living in communities represents only one particular, partial way of categorizing (...) the world. Legal and cultural manifestations of authorship, culture, and property are contingent upon Enlightenment and Romantic notions built upon a colonial foundation. I will argue that the law rips apart what First Nations peoples view as integrally and relationally joined, but traditional Western understandings of culture, identity, and property are provoked, challenged, and undermined by the concept of Aboriginal Title in a fashion that is both necessary and long overdue. (shrink)

The category-theoretic representation of quantum event structures provides a canonical setting for confronting the fundamental problem of truth valuation in quantum mechanics as exemplified, in particular, by Kochen-Specker’s theorem. In the present study, this is realized by representing categorically the global structure of a quantum algebra of events in terms of sheaves of local Boolean frames forming Boolean localization functors. The category of sheaves is a topos providing the possibility of applying the powerful logical classification methodology of topos theory (...) with reference to the quantum world. In particular, we show that the topos-theoretic representation scheme of quantum event algebras by means of Boolean localization functors incorporates an object of truth values, which constitutes the appropriate tool for the definition of quantum truth-value assignments to propositions describing the behavior of quantum systems. Effectively, this scheme induces a contextualist account of truth in the quantum domain of discourse. The philosophical implications of the resulting account are analyzed. Such an account essentially denies that there can be a universal context of reference or an Archimedean standpoint from which to state the totality of facts of nature. (shrink)

Epictetus, a former slave who lived in Rome during Nero’s reign but was exiled (along with all those who practiced philosophy in Rome) to Greece by Domitian’s decree in 93 CE, espoused an austere ethical philosophy which aimed at happiness (eudaimonia), or tranquility (ataraxia), through the delimitation of valuation to things within one’s control. Although Epictetus never set to writing his beliefs, his disciple Arrian recorded eight books of his sayings (entitled Discourses [ διατριβαί ] of which only four (...) books survive) and edited a compendium entitled the Handbook ( Ἐγχειρίδιον). In his preface to the volume under review, editor Theodore Scaltsas writes that “there is no message that would be of greater value in the face of today’s threats to society than Epictetus’ ‘bear and forbear.'” (1) Although Epictetus’ “forbearance” is not exactly the philosophy of hope much in vogue in contemporary politics, there is no doubt that Epictetus offers a perennial source of strength and self-reliance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.3 (2003) 477-481 [Access article in PDF] Martha C. Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola, eds. The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. viii + 457 pp. Paper, $26. The Sleep of Reason derives from a conference held at the Finnish Institute at Rome in 1997. In their introduction to the volume, the editors, (...) Martha Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola, note that the incommensurability between sexual behavior/desire and reason was a perennial concern to ancient philosophers and that the modern discipline of philosophy has avoided this topic because of skittishness about "emotional topics" (3) and a pronounced tendency to consider ancient philosophy in a decontextualized manner. The editors accordingly have assembled a mixture of papers on ancient philosophy and other aspects of ancient culture to bring philosophical rigor and context to discussions of ancient sexual ethics. With only a third of the papers specifically about philosophy, however, the volume is more "context" than philosophy. Of greater concern, however, is their claim that the book covers both Greece and Rome. With the exception of Cantarella's discussion of Roman marriage law, Konstan's of Catullus, and Goldhill's few pages on Tertullian, substantive discussion of Latin sources is lacking. The book treats classical Greece in some detail and then skips through Greek sources to the Second Sophistic. Indeed, the failure to engage imperial Rome substantively leaves Goldhill's essay damagingly decontextualized. The editors' tendentious sketch of modern scholarship on ancient sexual behavior (7-8), which overlooks important contributions of Eva Keuls and Amy Richlin, is likewise regrettable.In the first paper, "Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality," David Halperin prescribes a proper way to investigate ancient sexual activity. Beginning with a discussion of Michel Foucault's famous statement on the progress from sodomy ("a category of forbidden acts") to the homosexual ("a life form... a species"), Halperin persuasively argues that Foucault's statement has been misunderstood as social history when it is better regarded "as a claim about the internal logic and systematic functioning of two different discursive styles of sexual disqualification" (28). Elsewhere, however, Halperin's disciplining zeal is wearisome. Opposing the terms deviant sexual morphology and deviant sexual subjectivity (the former deviance in gender presentation and the latter identity based on sexual activity), Halperin predictably asserts that the cinaedus possessed a deviant sexual morphology whose non-normative sexual behavior sprang from innate effeminacy. According to ideology recoverable from the sources, this is correct. Consideration of the cinaedus latens (from Firmicus [End Page 477] Maternus; see below), to take an example, brings up a question: what are we to make of this cinaedus if "the kinaidos's betrayal of his masculine gender identity was so spectacular as to brand him a deviant type of person and to inscribe his deviant identity all over his face and body" (34)? Caution is called for here; discourse surely produces less schematic results (see, e.g., Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 [1978], 96, or Judith Butler, GenderTrouble [1990], 28).In "Eros and Ethical Norms: Philosophers Respond to a Cultural Dilemma," Nussbaum surveys different approaches to the uneasy coexistence of sexual desire and education in pederastic relationships: if Eros is about loss of control in the face of desire, will the ero \ menos be cared for properly or merely be the means for desire's satisfaction? Nussbaum compares Socrates' explication of a "generous madness," wherein reverence and gratitude inspire kindly care, to the Stoics' valuation of friendship undertaken with consummate self-control. Nussbaum's work here has considerable value in its explication of the Stoic position and in her conclusion on the usefulness of analysis of ancient philosophic responses to ero \ s in current debates about sexuality (86-87).The next two papers, Maarit Kaimio's "Erotic Experience in the Conjugal Bed: Good Wives in Greek Tragedy" and Stephen Halliwell's "Aristophanic Sex: The Erotics of Shamelessness," take us to the Athenian stage. Starting from the observation that words for "bed"... (shrink)

The “free” in “free software” refers to a cluster of four specific freedoms identified by the Free Software Definition. The first freedom, termed “Freedom Zero,” intends to protect the right of the user to deploy software in whatever fashion, towards whatever end, he or she sees fit. But software may be used to achieve ethically questionable ends. This highlights a tension in the provision of software freedoms: while the definition explicitly forbids direct restrictions on users’ freedoms, it does not address (...) other means by which software may indirectly restrict freedoms. In particular, ethically-inflected debate has featured prominently in the discussion of restrictions on digital rights management and privacy-violating code in version 3 of the GPL (GPLv3). The discussion of this proposed language revealed the spectrum of ethical positions and valuations held by members of the free software community. In our analysis, we will provide arguments for upholding Freedom Zero; we embed the problem of possible uses of software in the broader context of the uses of scientific knowledge, and go on to argue that the provision of Freedom Zero mitigates against too great a moral burden—of anticipating possible uses of software—being placed on the programmer and that, most importantly, it facilitates deliberative discourse in the free software community. (shrink)

This article develops some of the many ways in which Leonardo and Descartes, throughout the prolific period of human valuation from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, seem to have approached and anchored their seminal contributions on the Cartesian body and metaphysical mind. While Leonardo masterfully developed an iterative thinking system of visual design applied to nature and artifacts, Descartes laid the groundwork for methodical critical thinking in dimensions that ironically ranged from dreams to the controlled narrative, from a (...) deceptive body to a rational man. In an interdisciplinary articulation of historical and neurobiological leanings, contemporary concepts of the cognitive emotional brain, led by Damasio as the basis for his conclusions about the "Descartes Error", as well as a torrent of growing evidence that supports high cognitive abilities in associative processes mediated by action/body lead us to a re-evaluation today of the legacies of Leonardo and Descartes, rescuing a scientific mind/brain/body process that underlies the human mastering of a universal technology of discourse that would revolutionize science. (shrink)

In this article it is argued that the apparent vagueness and broadness of the concept ‘spirituality’ and the difficulty in finding an agreeable definition for it are related to the different meanings of the concept within different intellectual and religious contexts and, subsequently, to different valuations of spirituality in relation to religion and lived religiosity. This article also examines the concept spirituality in the context of the psychology of religion’s historical entanglement with theology. On the one hand, the psychology of (...) religion has emancipated itself from theological discourse and theological institutions. On the other hand, the psychology of religion is still closely connected to a modernist theological project of founding religiousness in a province of the mind that resists religious critique of traditional contents and institutional structures in a secular era. The author pleas for more differentiation between theistic and non-theistic dimensions of the concept spirituality. (shrink)

Building upon the extended notion of conceptual history as a diachronic study of conceptual interactions, the article begins with deconstructing the paradoxical semantic core of incomparability statements that, it is claimed, endows them with a capacity of stabilizing social semantics. By declaring certain foundational values—positive (Shoah) or negative (God)—“incomparable” and thus immune to the challenges of cross-evaluation, the users of discourse uphold the boundaries of civilized society. On a smaller scale, this exclusion of competitive valuation is undergirded by (...) the ascription of “incomparability” to the small pool of political and cultural figures, literary artifacts, social events, and representative allegories. The conclusion outlines the social contingency of conventions regulating the ascriptions of “incomparability” against the backdrop of their discursive stability across genres, epochs, and languages. (shrink)

Holiness is an important but problematic concept for religious discourse. It is unclear what it means, both in classical texts and in contemporary usage. Holiness seems to signify a property in some cases and a relation in others. The Bible itself preserves a range of usages. Some of these are ontological: holiness as a would-be property inheres in objects, places, persons, or times. Other uses are imputed: holiness connotes a status that human beings ascribe to things. The range of (...) use can be explicated by the concept of a social or institutional reality developed by Searle. Social facts entail valuations, intentions, and practices; they presuppose a basis of brute fact. A plausible contemporary view of holiness will link ontological and axiological commitments in such a way as to express the underlying goodness of being. (shrink)

Interpretation is the process whereby a hearer reasons to an interpretation of a speaker's discourse. The hearer normally adopts a credulous attitude to the discourse, at least for the purposes of interpreting it. That is to say the hearer tries to accommodate the truth of all the speaker's utterances in deriving an intended model. We present a nonmonotonic logical model of this process which defines unique minimal preferred models and efficiently simulates a kind of closed‐world reasoning of particular (...) interest for human cognition. Byrne's “suppression” data (Byrne, 1989) are used to illustrate how variants on this logic can capture and motivate subtly different interpretative stances which different subjects adopt, thus indicating where more fine‐grained empirical data are required to understand what subjects are doing in this task. We then show that this logical competence model can be implemented in spreading activation network models. A one pass process interprets the textual input by constructing a network which then computes minimal preferred models for (3‐valued) valuations of the set of propositions of the text. The neural implementation distinguishes easy forward reasoning from more complex backward reasoning in a way that may be useful in explaining directionality in human reasoning. (shrink)

Interpretation is the process whereby a hearer reasons to an interpretation of a speaker's discourse. The hearer normally adopts a credulous attitude to the discourse, at least for the purposes of interpreting it. That is to say the hearer tries to accommodate the truth of all the speaker's utterances in deriving an intended model. We present a nonmonotonic logical model of this process which defines unique minimal preferred models and efficiently simulates a kind of closed-world reasoning of particular (...) interest for human cognition. Byrne's “suppression” data (Byrne, 1989) are used to illustrate how variants on this logic can capture and motivate subtly different interpretative stances which different subjects adopt, thus indicating where more fine-grained empirical data are required to understand what subjects are doing in this task. We then show that this logical competence model can be implemented in spreading activation network models. A one pass process interprets the textual input by constructing a network which then computes minimal preferred models for (3-valued) valuations of the set of propositions of the text. The neural implementation distinguishes easy forward reasoning from more complex backward reasoning in a way that may be useful in explaining directionality in human reasoning. (shrink)

The “New Biology” that arose in the Eastern Block during Stalinist times was based on the idea of the heritability of acquired characteristics. In rejecting the paradigm of Mendelian chromosome genetics as well as science-based farming, the New Biology led to a deterioration of scientific life and the free exchange of ideas. In imposing Lysenko’s ideas onto zoology, the New Biology adopted the totalitarian language of Newspeak, which dominated public discourse in communist countries. Newspeak had several defining elements: a (...) limited dictionary, strong valuations, binary oppositions, the magical function of language, militarization, and ritualization of language. In this study, the concept of Newspeak is used to analyze primary sources in Polish zoology in the period between 1948 and 1956. Once the practice of Newspeak began to wane, so did the New Biology that had been founded on this specific ritualistic language. (shrink)

This article investigates the biopolitical dimensions that have grown out of the union between biocapitalism and current science education reform in the US. Drawing on science and technology study theorists, I utilize the analytics of promissory valuation and salvationary discourses to understand how scientific literacy in the neo‐Sputnik era has deeply involved educational life in biocapitalist circuits of exchange and production. I lay out this emerging terrain of ‘futuricity’ through a biopolitical analysis of the National Academies highly influential policy (...) recommendation on science education, Rising Above the Gathering Storm as well as the Association of American Universities' National Defense Education and Innovation Initiative. Here it is argued that the educational subject usually seen as a site of human capital investment can better be understood as a ‘biovalue’ in at least two senses: the educational subject's body as a site of investment and as an extractable source of value directly related to the larger globally competitive regime of the rapidly growing bioeconomy. I conclude my analysis of the vital politics at play in the biocapitalist articulation of science education with an alternative model of scientific literacy that is based in what I call biodemocratic practices. I explore such a rereading of scientific literacy through the example of the GrowHaus—a sustainable urban farm situated in a marginalized community in a major US city. The GrowHaus offers a model of scientific literacy that rejects extractive ethics associated with biocapitalist production and instead promotes a sustainable and socially just practice of science. (shrink)

Under models of moral and global citizenship education, compassion and caring are emphasized as a counterpoint to pervasive, heartless, neo-liberal globalization. According to such views, these and related emotions such as empathy, sympathy, and pity, can cause people to act righteously to aid others who are disadvantaged through no fault of their own. When applied to the contemporary issue of alleviating child poverty, it seems such emotions are both appropriate and easily developed through education. However, emotional appeals increasing a sense (...) of urgency regarding such a dire issue should not necessarily be prioritized in the face of competing possibilities. Emotions can be difficult to develop, regulate, and sustain. Their appropriate expression and application in global contexts can be problematic, as people’s valuation and understanding of feelings varies across societies. Additionally, there are tensions between discourses of emotional care and compassion and rational duty to social justice. This article examines competing views on education for understanding and responding to child poverty, and defends post-humanitarian imaginaries and the possibility of non-relational care ethics. Care, compassion, empathy, and emotion may be involved in learning about child poverty, but an a priori rational orientation is also essential in such grave matters of social injustice. (shrink)

This book considers the question: to what extent does it make sense to qualify technical artefacts as moral entities? The authors’ contributions trace recent proposals and topics including instrumental and non-instrumental values of artefacts, agency and artefactual agency, values in and around technologies, and the moral significance of technology. The editors’ introduction explains that as ‘agents’ rather than simply passive instruments, technical artefacts may actively influence their users, changing the way they perceive the world, the way they act in the (...) world and the way they interact with each other. This volume features the work of various experts from around the world, representing a variety of positions on the topic. Contributions explore the contested discourse on agency in humans and artefacts, defend the Value Neutrality Thesis by arguing that technological artefacts do not contain, have or exhibit values, or argue that moral agency involves both human and non-human elements. The book also investigates technological fields that are subject to negative moral valuations due to the harmful effects of some of their products. It includes an analysis of some difficulties arising in Artificial Intelligence and an exploration of values in Chemistry and in Engineering. The Moral Status of Technical Artefacts is an advanced exploration of the various dimensions of the relations between technology and morality. (shrink)

Moral intuitionism, once an apparently moribund metaethical position, has seen a resurgence of interest of late. Robert Audi, a leading moral intuitionist, has argued that in order for a moral belief to qualify as intuitional, it must fulfill four criteria: it must be non-inferential, firmly held, comprehended, and pre-theoretical. This paper centers on the fourth and seemingly most problematic criterion: pre-theoreticality. The paper begins by stipulating the defensibility of the moral cognitivism upon which moral intuitionism turns. Next, the paper develops (...) the distinction between semantic and epistemic pre-theoreticality, and goes on to explore and reject the putative ubiquity of the theoreticality of first-order moral discourse: it argues that on a defensible understanding of theoryhood, both semantic and epistemic pre-theoretical moral belief is not only possible, but in fact frequently realized. The paper then briefly explores and rebuts objections to (epistemic) pre-theoreticality issuing from (i) the “Cornell Realists” and (ii) considerations of the epistemic relevance of the epistemic/valuational background of moral belief. The paper concludes that, so far as the pre-theoreticality criterion is concerned, moral intuitionism remains in the running as a viable thesis regarding foundationally justified first-order moral belief and knowledge. (shrink)

The category-theoretic representation of quantum event structures provides a canonical setting for confronting the fundamental problem of truth valua- tion in quantum mechanics as exemplified, in particular, by Kochen-Specker’s theorem. In the present study, this is realized on the basis of the existence of a categorical adjunction between the category of sheaves of variable local Boolean frames, constituting a topos, and the category of quantum event al- gebras. We show explicitly that the latter category is equipped with an object of (...) truth values, or classifying object, which constitutes the appropriate tool for assigning truth values to propositions describing the behavior of quantum systems. Effectively, this category-theoretic representation scheme circumvents consistently the semantic ambiguity with respect to truth valuation that is in- herent in conventional quantum mechanics by inducing an objective contextual account of truth in the quantum domain of discourse. The philosophical im- plications of the resulting account are analyzed. We argue that it subscribes neither to a pragmatic instrumental nor to a relative notion of truth. Such an account essentially denies that there can be a universal context of reference or an Archimedean standpoint from which to evaluate logically the totality of facts of nature. In this light, the transcendence condition of the usual concep- tion of correspondence truth is superseded by a reflective-like transcendental reasoning of the proposed account of truth that is suitable to the quantum domain of discourse. (shrink)

Boys, Boyz, Bois concerns questions of ethics, gender and race in popular American images, national discourse and cultural production by and about black men. The book proposes an ethics of masculinity, as ethnics refers to a system of morality and valuation and as ethics refers to a care of the self and ethical subject formation. The texts of analysis include recent films by black/African American filmmakers, gansta rap and hip-hop and black star persona: texts ranging from Blaxploitation and (...) New Black Cinema to contemporary music video to autobiography and the public image of Sidney Poitier. The book is a significant contribution to cultural studies and gender studies and critical race theory. What is distinctive about the book is the question of ethics as a question of race and gender. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 208-212. … intervals of destructuring paradoxically carry the momentum for the ongoing process by which thought and perception are brought into relation toward transformative action. —Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation 1 Facing a blank canvas or blank page is a moment of pure potential, one that can be enervating or paralyzing. It causes a pause, a hesitation, in anticipation of the moment of inception—even of one that never comes. The implication is that the (...) blank is yours in that moment, and it calls on you to act on it, to think into it, to create on it. Each blank canvas gives you time, of an undefined length, to transform that canvas’ inherent potential into a work. This two-dimensional plane of potential can be projected into a space, which the body can then occupy. When you “destructure” a space in the same way, prepare it to be a blank, much as you build a canvas, you allow your entire body to enter the space of potential, and you rest in anticipation of work, like the hand poised above the page. Artists have found that the deliberate creation of that space of potential through sealing the space and painting it white, thereby erasing details and distractions, can be such a transformative experience as to help define their whole practice. The cessation of distraction, the absence of indicator that a “blanked” workspace provides allows for a new presence of mind, it gives them the room, literally, to move into their work, and from there to move their work into the world. The workspace for the artist, the studio, is often perceived as a lab-like condensation of the gallery or museum, the traditional and idealized white cube. Similarly, with the blank page, a concrete relation between space and time comes forward as the intentional simplification of the architecture changes behavior and perception within the space. The work of “blanking” the studio space is a meditative reduction, an erasure, and in a way, an attempt at drawing away from the world beyond the studio - the sealed space is meant to recede from reality, to become abstracted by its willed lack of details and distractions. Within that space the time for a new beginning is made more present, more attainable, and the focus it fosters becomes another tool to aid creation. At the formative moment of his artistic practice, Tom Friedman used the blank of his studio, saturated in white, sealed off from the world, to fight velocity. He describes how he projected his vision of the end goal, the museum - a place he believes to be defined by slow contemplation - onto his own studio experience. He then sat and reflected on common objects, one by one, framed by the blank box he had created. The domestic objects he brought into the space to study foreshadow his mature works, where often the quotidian object has a single additional element – his intense labor. Friedman makes discrete objects through absurdly intense and focused labor, epitomized, perhaps by his 1,000 hours of Staring , made from 1992-97: Tom Friedman. 1000 Hours of Staring (1992-1997) His labor, to use his own words, is his way to “bring all of who you are to the experience.” Friedman shares his labor, allows the slow, deliberate pace of his work born in the studio to penetrate the museum. Nothing seems effortless, or a gesture, the labor is apparent, displayed, and tangible. He gives us the labor, the personal investment in the physical that saved art for him, that divorced the work from the language he cites as a factor of alienation. When we see his work we do not see words, we see acts, we see objects. He has forced the studio as workspace into the exhibition space, as he stuffs hundreds of more hours of labor into his shows with each new piece, filling the space with material and labor, material and labor – his involvement, his investment, is his gift to us as the viewers, as he introduces the laborious and contemplative pace he feels belongs to the museum. He saves us also from the alienation of language, which first drove him into the sealed studio and away from the discourse of his school. He presents us with his real, the object which stands in stark contrast to the white slate of the studio, the sealed white box he started from, where his individual, self-contained objects begin and end, completed through the intensity of isolation, first of the individual artist, and then of the material he chooses to slowly, slowly, slowly work: Tom Friedman. Untitled (1992) In his in-depth analysis of galleries as a blank white cube, Brian O’Doherty emphasizes the religious connotations implied in the strict laws of the exhibition space and the valuation, aesthetics and elements of control he feels it imposes upon the work. Like Friedman, he recognizes the power of the restricted space – indicating the “perceptual fields of force” – that act on any object introduced into it. Going beyond Friedman’s assessment of the space as highly utilitarian for focusing his perception, O’Doherty emphasizes the rejection of the physical body of the artist or observer, saying that the cube allows for only observation - eyes and mind. He later parallels the picture frame as a psychological container for the artist with the room as the same for the observer. In both cases, this is an emphasis on the alienating nature of the relationship – just as the artist is kept out of the frame by the picture, in the gallery the art forces the body of the spectator out, calling for a self-referential purity. Patrick Ireland. White Cube (1998) O’Doherty makes a point of saying that the installation shot of the gallery without figures is “one of the icons of our visual culture.” In recent years, however, installation shots have begun to include figures, in some cases they are essential to understanding the scale and even the nature of the work, specifically with work that captures the experience of the space and the way that it varies from a white cube. The work of Olafur Eliasson is a case in point, as the Danish artist uses elements of scientific and natural phenomena to alter perception within the controlled gallery environment, tweaking and redirecting O’Doherty’s “perceptual fields of force” to make points about the act of seeing, or seeing yourself seeing, to quote the artist. This indicates a shift in the role of the artwork, not to exclude the body and stand discretely and self-sufficiently, but to include it, to manipulate it and to make the observer aware of the nature of that manipulation and the work’s ability to manipulate. Olafur Eliasson. 360º room for all colours (2002) So though in O’Doherty’s analysis, the intense blankness of the gallery pushed the observer out in favor of the artwork’s isolation, artists can replicate this inhumane sterility in their own workspace to focus their work on the influence of the gallery right from inception. This can be interpreted as an almost opposite understanding of the purpose of sealing and whitewashing the workspace as stated by Friedman. He sought a refuge from the critical language of the art school, and a space that, like the museum, gave him a protracted sense of time, and, he felt, welcomed him in, “to bring all of who you are,” as opposed to O’Doherty’s feeling that the museum was asking you, at least in body, to leave, and allow the work to take on its own life. Friedman does not seem to imply the tension with the cube and critical stance that O’Doherty prioritizes. Where Friedman finds a refuge, O’Doherty defines an opponent. In a third position, Robert Irwin describes his sealed studio space as “the world.” Though he made the same effort as Friedman to seal out all influences and distractions, he implies that he is in dialogue with the world through his own concentration and perception. This is reminiscent of the nature of the monad, as interpreted by Deleuze, a unity that envelops a multiplicity, a sealed container that contains the universe. He went through the same ritual described by Friedman, sealing up the space, painting it white, and then forcing himself to remain inside, staring at his own work, training his concentration relentlessly. But he found that the room became the distraction: …he became aware that a thin crack along the wall a few yards away from the canvas likewise exerted its presence; that when he plastered that crack over and repainted the wall, the canvas itself presented an entirely new aspect.2 The context was in a relentless dialogue with the work, and trying to neutralize that dialogue, to mute the conversation between space and object, became part of his ritual as he “fixed” his space each day in the hope of total concentration on the work. Ultimately, Irwin shaped the trajectory of his art by relinquishing the studio, establishing a post-studio practice, where the work is conceived and created out in the world, in dialogue with the world and reflective of the conditions it finds surrounding it. The white cube failed to ever achieve neutrality, his heightened concentration prevented him from ever neutralizing the space, so, instead of continuing to try to maintain the charade of a perfect blank, he acknowledged the unstoppable voice of place and turned all his efforts onto the object and the world, as a constant dialogue. Some artists push their studio space far from purity, domesticating it like a lair or a living room, and others destroy it, fill it with chaos or detritus, blacken or clutter it so as never to be starting from a blank, and thereby try to avoid the anxiety of facing that void. Similarly artists may never prepare a white canvas, a clean page, a marble block, or other form that is intentionally lacking, in order to try to escape the dialogue with emptiness. But Irwin, like O’Doherty, found an opponent in the white cube, and he learned not to fight it, rather he ended the conflict by making it an ally, an interlocutor, a collaborator. We can vainly strive to start from nothing, to find the lull, the clearing, and to always consider what we do in balance with the empty set. Somehow that intangible cloud of hazy nothingness, that softness of a lapse continually offers a place to bounce off of, to react to, to wrestle with, to rest with, in tension, or a place to begin. Robert Irwin. Excursus: Homage to the Square3 (1998) NOTES 1 Massumi. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. p271. 2 MOMA, NY. Eliasson, 360 ? Room for All Colours . Installation. 2002. (shrink)

The way a society speaks about its different groups and sub-groups determines its general behavior toward them. Discriminated minorities oftentimes suffer from humiliating descriptions, and part of their project to change societal attitudes will evolve around the attempt to redescribe themselves in terms more acceptable to them. ;Advancing from these considerations, I examine the rhetoric of the emerging discourse of homosexuality between 1880 and 1920. During this time period the homosexual was invented as a new personality type, a being (...) almost totally determined in all of his expressions by his sexual desire. Different professions like law, medicine, sociology, psychiatry, literature, and philosophy attempted to define this novel species. And they all converged in one aspect, namely in their rhetorical attitude. The writings of people like Nietzsche, Krafft-Ebing, Proust, Symonds, Gide, and Mann share the common feature of diagnosing a vital and important difference between the homosexual person and her heterosexual fellow citizen. This rhetoric of emphasizing the dividing features between desires I call maximalism. The invention of the homosexual as a person occurred under the reign of maximalizing ways of writing. It was, however, widely disputed where exactly the relevant difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals was to be located, whether in anatomico-biological variations, in an overabundance or lack of masculine determinants, in psychological dispositions, or an exceeding portion of courage, intelligence, and creativity. Equally problematic was the valuation of this difference. But one thing was easily agreed upon: the description of the homosexual had to follow a maximalizing pattern. ;I trace this pattern from its first precursory appearance in the Marquis de Sade to its breakdown in the psychoanalytic texts by Sigmund Freud. The shattering of this mode of thinking, though, has not been final, since in some of the rhetoric of "Queer Studies" it has reemerged. Family resemblances often appear most striking when one looks back past the parents. Our contemporaries bear their grandparents' smile. (shrink)

In the recent decade the perspectives of historical epistemology have turned economic practices into a novel object of study: the focus lies on how discourses, techniques of measurement and valuation produce economic facts.1 The research on the historical epistemologies of economic facts belongs to a broader scholarly endeavor that takes place in cultural anthropology, social theory, literary studies, political theory and history. This interdisciplinary work brings to light how deeply economic issues are constituted by intermingling a set of cultural, (...) political, technical and legal distinctions, which distinguish what counts as properly economic from what does not.2 In this perspective, the very definition of economy becomes a hybrid and contentious affair.The central theoretical question for the historical epistemology and cultural anthropology of economy is currently how to conceptualize the link between epistemic practices and acts of ‘doing the economy’. This special issue on the Historical Episte mology of the Economic pushes us to think about this crucial link. Monika Dommann, Daniel Speich Chassé and Mischa Suter explore different modes of approaching the interlacing of epistemology and economy. These modes can be discussed under the following headings: 1) Pragmatics and Poetologies of Knowledge, 2) Economic Discourses and Epistemic Techniques, 3) Boundaries of Economy. On the basis of the richness of the historical material and the finely grained arguments that these papers bring forth, I will elaborate on the conceptualization of these linkages between epistemology and economy. My discussion culminates in the attempt to clarify an analytical distinction that is freely used in this special issue but that deserves further discussion: the distinction between the economic and the economy as an object of historical epistemology. My question is, does it matter if we write a historical epistemology of the economic or of the economy? What distinction do we wish to make by juxtaposing these two? (shrink)

The metaphor of space/place has always been crucial to theological discourse. Throughout its history, theology has expressed itself in spatial images correlative to its concomitant culture. The phenomenon of globalization makes possible a revolution in the concept of space/place. It is this transformation which we seek to examine in order to bear out some methodological consequences for theological reflection. This article consists in three parts. First, we explore the notions of space in two contemporary theorists of globalization – Anthony (...) Giddens and David Harvey. We have seen that both Giddens’ “empty spaces” and Harvey’s “compression of time and space”, even as they partly describe the present-day global situation, are also deficient if only considered individually. In a second step, we propose to integrate into the analytical framework Raymond Williams’ concept of “placeable social identities” as establishing a complementary relationship between Giddens and Harvey. In this powerful spatial metaphor, Williams has argued for the primacy of real “placeable” communities of peoples where meaning is constantly constructed and negociated. His assertion of identifiable settlements and rooted communal identities is an antidote to the often ideological talk of the high-speed movement and constantly shifting identities in globalization. But these are not nostalgic identities since in their borders, they constantly reshape their own meanings and valuations as they interact with contemporary global challenges. In a third move, we examine two spatial views of the church , two ways of doing theology) as response to globalization: Milbank’s “enclave” and Schreiter’s “World Church”. While Milbank’s discourse of the “difference” of the Christian traditions echoes the postmodern sensibilities of a globalized world, his concept of the Church as “enclave” also reminds us of a reactionary persecuted Church which hides behind its mantle the rhetoric of universalism characteristic of an isolated minority. Schreiter’s “World Church” is much more open; but his concern for “universality” and “catholicity” almost erases the asymmetry and disruption which the global culture has done to Two-Thirds of the world population. Beyond Milbank and Schreiter , we conclude by suggesting that Williams’ placeable social identities may thus provide a metaphor for theorizing spatiality in a global world that would be consistent with liberative theological methodology. (shrink)

Do doctors fix patients? Or do they heal them? For all of modern medicine’s many successes, discontent with the quality of patient care has combined with a host of new developments, from aging populations to the resurgence of infectious diseases, which challenge medicine’s overreliance on narrowly mechanistic and technical methods of explanation and intervention, or “fixing’ patients. The need for a better balance, for more humane “healing” rationales and practices that attend to the social and environmental aspects of health and (...) illness and the experiencing person, is more urgent than ever. Yet, in public health and bioethics, the fields best positioned to offer countervailing values and orientations, the dominant approaches largely extend and reinforce the reductionism and individualism of biomedicine. The collected essays in To Fix or To Heal do more than document the persistence of reductionist approaches and the attendant extension of medicalization to more and more aspects of our lives. The contributors also shed valuable light on why reductionism has persisted and why more holistic models, incorporating social and environmental factors, have gained so little traction. The contributors examine the moral appeal of reductionism, the larger rationalist dream of technological mastery, the growing valuation of health, and the enshrining of individual responsibility as the seemingly non-coercive means of intervention and control. This paradigm-challenging volume advances new lines of criticism of our dominant medical regime, even while proposing ways of bringing medical practice, bioethics, and public health more closely into line with their original goals. Precisely because of the centrality of the biomedical approach to our society, the contributors argue, challenging the reductionist model and its ever-widening effects is perhaps the best way to press for a much-needed renewal of our ethical and political discourse. (shrink)

In science and technology studies today, there is a troubling tendency to portray actors in the biosciences as “cultural dopes” and technology as having monolithic qualities with predetermined outcomes. To remedy this analytical impasse, this article introduces the concept styles of valuation to analyze how actors struggle with valuing technology in practice. Empirically, this article examines how actors in a bioscientific laboratory struggle with valuing the properties and qualities of algorithms in a high-throughput setting and identifies the copresence of (...) several different styles. The question that the actors struggle with is what different configurations of algorithms, devices, and humans are “good bioscience,” that is, what do the actors perform as a good distribution of agency between algorithms and humans? A key finding is that algorithms, robots, and humans are valued in multiple ways in the same setting. For the actors, it is not apparent which configuration of agency and devices is more authoritative nor is it obvious which skills and functions should be redistributed to the algorithms. Thus, rather than tying algorithms to one set of values, such as “speed,” “precision,” or “automation,” this article demonstrates the broad utility of attending to the multivalence of algorithms and technology in practice. (shrink)

This article draws upon thirteen months of ethnographic research in a Chicago pawnshop to show how prices of objects in pawnshops are actively, socially negotiated using what I term discursive strategies of valuation. Three kinds of discursive strategies of valuation emerge repeatedly in the data: a. references to the specific material attributes of the objects, b. references to the unique biographical histories of the objects, c. reference to the financial need and (relative) social positioning of the customer involved (...) in the negotiation. Examining these strategies reveals the relationship between socially contingent and culturally constructed perceptions of value and the production of price. I find that rhetorical strategies can and do affect price, within limits. Perhaps most surprisingly, the data show that discursive strategies emphasizing a lower socio-economic status can inflate the value, and ultimately the price, of an object during negotiations. (shrink)

The category-theoretic representation of quantum event structures provides a canonical setting for confronting the fundamental problem of truth valuation in quantum mechanics as exemplified, in particular, by Kochen–Specker’s theorem. In the present study, this is realized on the basis of the existence of a categorical adjunction between the category of sheaves of variable local Boolean frames, constituting a topos, and the category of quantum event algebras. We show explicitly that the latter category is equipped with an object of truth (...) values, or classifying object, which constitutes the appropriate tool for assigning truth values to propositions describing the behavior of quantum systems. Effectively, this category-theoretic representation scheme circumvents consistently the semantic ambiguity with respect to truth valuation that is inherent in conventional quantum mechanics by inducing an objective contextual account of truth in the quantum domain of discourse. The philosophical implications of the resulting account are analyzed. We argue that it subscribes neither to a pragmatic instrumental nor to a relative notion of truth. Such an account essentially denies that there can be a universal context of reference or an Archimedean standpoint from which to evaluate logically the totality of facts of nature. (shrink)

This article shows that forms of analysis and calculation specific to finance are spreading, and changing valuation processes in various social settings. This perspective is used to contribute to the study of the recent transformations of capitalism, as financialisation is usually seen as marking the past three decades. After defining what is meant by “financialised valuation,” different examples are discussed. Recent developments concerning the valuation of assets in accounting standards and credit risk in banking regulations are used (...) to suggest that colonisation of financial activities by financialised valuations is taking place. Other changes, concerning the valuation of social or cultural activities and environmental issues are also highlighted in order to support the hypothesis of a parallel colonisation of non-financial activities by financialised valuations. Specifically, the language of finance appears to gradually being incorporated into public policies, especially in Europe—and this trend seems to have gathered pace since the 2000s. Some interpretations are proposed to understand why public policies are seemingly increasingly reliant on financialised valuations. (shrink)

Alternatives in the History of Science. The paper deals with the function of the scientist's subjective activity in the research process. This will be discussed at the background of the discourse between distant action and narrow action theories of electromagnetism in 19th century physics. The analysis shows in which high degree the protagonists of these theories regarded this situation consciously as a bifurcation in the development of their science. This article describes then how the history of science values the (...) case. The result of this valuation is dependent on the different philosophical points of view. Finally we point out some desiderata for the further discussion on methodology of science that would be the consequence of the acknowledgement of real bifurcations in scientific thought. (shrink)