Wittgenstein had little to say directly on philosophy of history. But some pertinent remarks in _On Certainty_ have received little attention, apart from in Elizabeth Anscombe's short article on Hume and Julius Caesar. That article acknowledges its debt to _On Certainty,_ which responses to Anscombe have failed to recognise. Wittgenstein focuses in _On Certainty_ on apparently empirical propositions that seem to be certainties, but in fact form a rule-like framework for judging. I have called these _Moorean propositions_, and the present (...) article develops the suggestion that history as a discipline rests on them. The result is a qualification of empiricism in philosophy of history. (shrink)

Critics are calling for the decolonization of AI (artificial intelligence). The problem is that this technology is marginalizing other modes of knowledge with dehumanizing applications. What is needed to remedy this situation is the development of human-centric AI. However, there is a serious blind spot in this strategy that is addressed in this paper. The corrective that is usually proposed—participatory design—lacks the philosophical rigor to undercut the autonomy of AI, and thus the colonization spawned by this technology. A more radical (...) or substantial proposal is advanced in this discussion that is known as community-based design. This alternative makes a theoretical maneuver that allows AI design to be directed by human agency, thereby introducing a safeguard that may help to prevent colonization by this technology. (shrink)

Applying the insights of Donna Haraway (1989, 1991) and Helen Longino (1989, 1990), this paper reviews Sandra Harding's (1986a) tripartite model of feminist critiques of science-empiricist, standpoint, and postmodern-and argues that it is based on misunderstandings of the relationship between scientific inquiry, objectivity, and values. An alternative view of scientific inquiry makes it possible to see feminist scientists as postmodern and postmodern feminists as having standpoints.

Explanations of former South African President Thabo Mbeki’s public and private views on the aetiology of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the country remain partial at best without the recognition that the latter presuppose and imply a postmodernist/postcolonialist philosophy of science that erases the line separating the political from the scientific. Evidence from Mbeki’s public speeches, interviews, and private and anonymous writings suggests that it was postmodernist/postcolonialist theory that inspired him to doubt the “Western” scientific consensus on HIV/AIDS and to implement (...) a public health policy that dragged its feet on full roll-out of antiretroviral therapy, causing thousands of avoidable deaths. A weak reductio ad absurdum allows us to conclude from this premise that postmodernist/postcolonial critique of “Western” science ought to be shunned. A comparative argument from consequences further suggests that in a situation where a misguided health policy has lead to a humanitarian catastrophe, and where postmodernist/postcolonialist critique of science can and has been used to justify this policy, an alternative theory ought to be preferred on which such justification would not be possible. The paper closes with a call for a non-relativist alternative to postmodernist/postcolonialist philosophy of science, and evaluates the potential of recent developments in ‘Studies of Expertise” to yield such. (shrink)

’Death’ and ’Furniture’ are emblems for two very common (predictable, even) objections to relativism. When relativists talk about the social construction of reality, truth, cognition, scientific knowledge, technical capacity, social structure and so on, their realist opponents sooner or later start hitting the furniture, invoking the Holocaust, talking about rocks, guns, killings, human misery, tables and chairs. The force of these objections is to introduce a bottom line, a bedrock of reality that places limits on what may be treated as (...) epistemologically constructed or deconstructible. There are two related kinds of moves: Furniture (tables, rocks, stones, etc. - the reality that cannot be denied) and Death (misery, genocide, poverty, power - the reality that should not be denied). Our aim is to show how these ’but surely not this’ gestures and arguments work, how they trade off each other, and how unconvincing they are, on examination, as refutations of relativism. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper, I try to clarify the cluster of moods and questions we refer to generically as the problem of the meaning of life. I propose that the question of meaning emerges when we perform a spontaneous transcendental reduction on the phenomenon my life, a reduction that leaves us confronting an unjustified and unjustifiable curiosity. In Part 2, I turn to the film ikiru, Kurosawa''s masterpiece of 1952, for an existentialist resolution of the problem.

Theory in sociology is constructed as a canon, a very short list of social theorists who have been endowed with suprahistorical status. Drawing on the feminist analysis of gendered consciousness, the author argues that social theory is organized exactly as it should be if one were thinking like a White male capitalist. The perceptual frameworks it employs—a hierarchy of the social, logical dichotomies, decontextualized abstraction, an individualist approach—resonate well with descriptions of hegemonic masculine consciousness. As a result, social theory has (...) not just distorted social perception, it is becoming functionally irrelevant in contemporary social life. The author argues that reasonable understandings are more likely if we are developing via an epistemology of connection, moving from thinking of theory as a holy text to organizing theory to create bridges between diverse standpoints, across disciplinary boundaries, and between knowing and doing. (shrink)

This commentary identifies a range of flaws and contradictions in Parker’s critical realist position and his critique of relativism. In particular we highlight: (1) a range of basic errors in formulating the nature of relativism; (2) contradictions in the understanding and use of rhetoric; (3) problematic recruitment of the oppressed to support his argument; (4) tensions arising from the distinction between working in and against psychology. We conclude that critical realism is used to avoid doing empirical work, on the one (...) hand, and to avoid scholarly interdisciplinary engagement, on the other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Communicative Implications of Kant’s Aesthetic TheoryThomas HoveIn recent discussions of aesthetic theory, critics who raise social, cultural, and political concerns have issued important challenges to the Kantian legacy. Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) continues to be widely regarded as one of the founding documents of modern aesthetic theory. But the arguments he laid out in that notoriously enigmatic work remain controversial on a variety of fronts. (...) One of those arguments concerns his distinction between pleasures that are beautiful and those that are agreeable. According to Kant’s definition, what makes experiences of the beautiful special is that they have a potentially communicable universal validity. By contrast, pleasures that are merely agreeable are incommunicable and remain confined to private sensation. Philosophers have found this distinction problematic for a variety of reasons. Their detailed commentaries have examined the intricate logical and conceptual difficulties that Kant’s theory raises (see Allison 2001; Guyer 1982, 1997, 2002; Kalar 2000; Wenzel 2005). On another front, sociologists and cultural critics—whom I will broadly refer to as “social critics”—typically raise concerns about the theory’s hidden social implications (Bourdieu 1984; Eagleton 1990; Smith 1988; Shumway 2005). Specifically, they question Kant’s proposal that judgments about the beautiful ought to have universal validity. Taking an external standpoint, they tend to regard aesthetic judgments either as the peculiar habits of [End Page 103] specific social classes, or as badges of hierarchical distinction, or as weapons in symbolic struggles for cultural dominance.To suggest why Kant’s theory is worth revisiting in the wake of such critiques, the following analysis defends his theoretical effort to distinguish the experience of the beautiful from that of the agreeable. This feature of his aesthetic theory highlights an alternative to the cognitive and practical concerns that social critics emphasize. In particular, I indicate how Kant’s aesthetic theory offers directions for the effort to explain how aesthetic experience promotes communicative sociability. By emphasizing this theme, I hope to supplement the rival emphasis that social critics place on the Kantian legacy’s elitist undercurrents. Social critiques characteristically overlook the affective type of sociability to which aesthetic experience gives rise. This oversight occurs because those critiques tend to privilege the theoretical and practical dimensions of communication. In the process, they disregard the special types of validity claims that are unique to aesthetic discourse. Following the lead of his academic precursors Meier and Baumgarten, Kant tried to define a possible third mental “faculty” that differs from cognitive and practical reason (see Henrich 1992, 31–36). But the difficulty of defining this third faculty, much less determining its existence, continues to vex both philosophers and communication theorists.Kant’s Account of Aesthetic Experience and Its CriticsIn the opening sections of the Critique of Judgment, Kant attempts to establish the independence of aesthetic judgment from theoretical and practical cognition. Those faculties are concerned with cognitive and moral concepts. By contrast, the aesthetic properties that concern taste judgments have a unique ontological and epistemological status. Kant’s argument about that status is itself enormously complex, involving as it does an intricate network of idiosyncratically defined concepts (for example, the understanding, the imagination, intuition, representations, objects, etc.). But to avoid getting lost in those intricacies, we can bracket them by simply referring to aesthetic “experience.” Also, we can concentrate on the two properties that distinguish aesthetic experience from other kinds of experience. First, aesthetic properties relate to the feelings of pleasure that are aroused by certain encounters with objects. Second, aesthetic properties are “merely subjective” (Kant 2000, 75). They do not have an objective status because we cannot associate the feelings they arouse with determinate concepts and objects. [End Page 104] As Miles Rind puts it, “in making a cognitive judgment one requires everyone to conceptualize an object in a certain way, while in making a judgment of taste one requires others to share one’s liking for an object” (Rind 2000, 83). In sum, Kant differentiates aesthetic judgment from both theoretical and practical cognition because it is radically subjective and because its unique grounding lies in feelings of pleasure and displeasure.Social critics tend to downplay the idea that there... (shrink)

Can economic value express the ‘total’ value of cultural goods or does cultural value somehow elude economic valuation methods? Some prominent cultural economists – such as Throsby, Hutter and Frey – have questioned whether cultural value can be ‘translated’ into economic values using the methods of contingent valuation. The claim is that cultural value cannot be disaggregated into individual utilities, and by extension, broken down into individual preferences and choices. Rather, it captures something ‘irreducibly social’ that cannot be accounted for (...) using economic valuation techniques. We are left with value pluralism where cultural and economic values are not mutually exchangeable. As the current chapter suggests, this might have consequences for how we think about the value of arts and culture and how we communicate this value to policy makers and the public at large. (shrink)

Caretaker-infant attachment is a complex but well-recognized adaptation in humans. An early instance of (or precursor to) attachment behavior is the dyadic interaction between adults and infants of 6 to 24 weeks, commonly called "babytalk." Detailed analysis of 1 minute of spontaneous babytalk with an 8-week infant shows that the poetic texture of the mother’s speech—specifically its use of metrics, phonetics, and foregrounding—helps to shape and direct the baby’s attention, as it also coordinates the partners’ emotional communication. We hypothesize that (...) the ability to respond to poetic features of language is present as early as the first few weeks of life and that this ability attunes cognitive and affective capacities in ways that provide a foundation for the skills at work in later aesthetic production and response. By linking developmental social processes with formal cognitive aspects of art, we challenge predominant views in evolutionary psychology that literary art is a superfluous byproduct of adaptive evolutionary mechanisms or primarily an ornament created by sexual selection. (shrink)

As recent studies in economic and financial sociology have underscored, calculation is central to economic practices. While some sociological accounts locate the performance of calculation within individual ability, networks of human agents or their cultural embeddedness, studies operating on the background of the sociology of (scientific) knowledge conceive of calculation as situated in the practice of the participants engaged, the technological tools used and their requirements. The article explores this point further, using a distinction which can be traced back to (...) Heidegger’s notion of Gestell (enframing): the ‘calculation of something’ and the ‘calculation with something’ are analysed taking the practices of risk management departments of big international banks as an example. It is argued that, through the use of calculation tools, the corporate clients are constituted anew and that written documents which are the outcome of this process constitute a social prosthesis for remote communication taking place between subsidiaries and the headquarters of international banks. (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)

A radical opponent of Western higher education asserts that its pedagogy and content depend on belief in objective truth and knowledge. This epistemology and education are attacked as exclusive and domineering toward women, minorities, and non-Westerners. The critic puts forward a pragmatist epistemology, leading to multi-cultural education aimed at social criticism and personal autonomy. The critic's dialogue with a defender of traditional epistemological ideas provides a critical introduction to the claims justifying many radical criticisms of Western curricula and pedagogy.

There has been a longstanding and acrimonious debate in the human sciences over the role played by classic texts. Advocates of the classic insist its value is timeless and rests on the intrinsic superiority of its cognitive insights and aesthetic virtues. Critics, by contrast, argue that the respect accorded the classic is spurious because it conceals the ideological assumptions, tensions and discontinuities of tradition. This paper seeks a solution through the account of ‘the classical’ brought by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth (...) and Method, which acknowledges a text’s ‘eminence’ as well as its ‘historicity’. Following the introduction, the paper divides into four sections. Section one, notes that the hermeneutic account of tradition describes it as being open to challenge rather than closed and unchangeable, and that the classic, as grounded in tradition, will conserve difficulty as readily as comfortable certainty. Section two focuses on the idea that in the classic we find matter ‘properly portrayed’, while section three notes the importance of ‘application’ for an understanding of classic texts. It is noted that both ‘proper portrayal’ and ‘application’ depend on recognising the role of the fusion of historical horizons in generating classic texts. The final section challenges the criticism that the classic is no more than a reflection of the institutional power wielded by the canon, arguing instead that the classic and the canon are different entities, and conflating them in favour of the latter, misleadingly reduces classic-ness to being no more than an effect of canonicity. (shrink)

This paper critically examines Ken Wilber's transpersonal evolutionary theory in the context of the philosophical discourse of postmodernity. The critique focuses on Wilber's refutation of non?absolutist and non?universalist approaches to rationality, truth, and morality?such as cultural relativism, pluralism, constructivism or perspectivism?under the charges of being epistemologically self?refuting and morally pernicious. First, it is suggested that Wilber offers a faulty dichotomy between his absolutist?universalist metanarrative and a self?contradictory and pernicious vulgar relativism. Second, it is shown that Wilber's arguments for the self?refuting (...) and pernicious nature of other non?absolutist approaches are both fallacious and distorting. Finally, the problematic consequences of absolutist discourse for academic and cross?cultural dialogue are pinpointed. Taking Wilber's treatment of Nagarjuna's thinking as a paradigmatic example, it is suggested that absolutist thinking both usually leads to ?bad? hermeneutics, and potentially hinders genuine dialogue among people and traditions holding different world views. (shrink)

Christopher Southgate has made important contributions to theodicy and the theory of divine action in light of the contingency in evolution and the suffering of creation. What happens then when one thinks through the implications of contingency for Christology? One can admit that aesthetic and moral judgments are products of a contingent history and yet affirm that they really are valid. Similarly, we argue, one can acknowledge the contingency of Jesus’ existence, actions, and subsequent impact and still maintain that his (...) will was uniquely united with the divine will. Following a critical engagement with the recent work of Keith Ward, we argue that a high Christology is compatible with the actual contingencies of evolutionary and social history, without the necessity of interventionist divine action. (shrink)