In contrast to China’s efforts to upgrade its system of governance around a stupefying amount of data collection and electronic scoring, countries committed to democracy and human rights did not upgrade their systems. Instead, those countries ended up with surveillance capitalism. It is vital for the survival of those ideas about governance to perform such an upgrade. This paper aims to contribute to that goal. I propose a framework of epistemic actorhood in terms of four roles and characterize digital lifeworlds (...) and what matters about them both in terms of how they fit in with Max Tegmark’s distinctions among stages of life and in terms of how they generate their own episteme, the data episteme, with its immense possibilities of infopower. Epistemic rights that strengthen existing human rights – as part of a fourth generation of rights – are needed to protect epistemic actorhood in those roles. In the long run, we might well need a new kind of right, the right to the exercise of genuinely human intelligence. (shrink)

By comparing three types of hybrid organizations—18th-century scientific academies, 19th-century institutions of higher vocational education, and 20th-century industrial research institutes—it is the purpose here to answer the question of why new hybrid organizations are continuously formed. Traditionally, and often implicitly, it is often assumed that emerging groups of potential knowledge users have their own organizational preferences and demands influencing the setup of new hybrid organizations. By applying the concepts epistemic and academic drift, it will be argued here, however, that internal (...) organizational dynamics are just as important as changing historical conjunctures in the uses of science when understanding why new hybrid organizations are formed. Only seldom have older hybrid organizations sought to make themselves relevant to new categories of knowledge users as the original ones have been marginalized. Instead, they have tended to accede to ideals supported by traditional academic organizations with higher status in terms of knowledge management, primarily universities. Through this process, demand has been generated for the founding of new hybrid organizations rather than the transformation of existing ones. Although this study focuses on Swedish cases, it is argued that since Sweden strove consistently to implement existing international policy trends during the periods in question, the observations may be generalized to apply to other national and transnational contexts. (shrink)

16. ve 17. yüzyıllarda, dirimselci Yeni Platoncu kimya felsefesi doğa araştırmalarında deneysel yönteme taraftar iken, mantıksal ve matematiksel yöntemlere karşı çıkmıştı. Örneğin, Jan Baptist van Helmont, Aristoteles’in yöntemine matematiksel olduğunu söyleyerek karşı çıkmış ve de Aristoteles’in ilk hareket ettirici düşüncesinin onun matematiksel yönteminin bir sonucu olduğunu ileri sürmüştü. Bu yazıda, Francis Bacon’ın da, van Helmont’a benzer şekilde, ilk hareket ettirici düşüncesini Aristoteles’in tasımsal yönteminin bir sonucu olarak gördüğü ileri sürülecektir.