13 found
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  1. Antirepresentationalism Before and After Rorty.Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 2022 - Common Knowledge 28 (3):424-442.
    Richard Rorty's rejection of prevailing interior-mirror understandings of the presumed relationship between “minds” and “nature,” along with his promotion of nonrepresentational accounts of knowledge, truth, and science, participates in a rich tradition of jointly pragmatist and constructivist views that spans the twentieth century. This contribution to the symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” considers Rorty's complex and ambivalent relation to that tradition, particularly to the work of his American pragmatist predecessors, William James and John Dewey, and to subsequent pragmatist-constructivist antirepresentationalism (...)
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  2. Scientizing the humanities.Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 2016 - Common Knowledge 22 (3):353-372.
    Advocates of literary Darwinism, cognitive cultural studies, neuroaesthetics, digital humanities, and other such hybrid fields now seek explicitly to make the aims and methods of one or another humanities discipline approximate more closely the aims and methods of science, and at their most visionary, they urge as well the overall integration of the humanities and natural sciences. This essay indicates some major considerations—historical, conceptual, and pragmatic—that may be useful for assessing these efforts and predicting their future. Arguments promoting integration often (...)
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  3. Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene: On Science, belief, and the Humanities.Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 2018 - London UK: Open Humanities Press.
    Contemporary issues involving knowledge and science examined from a constructivist-pragmatist perspective often labeled "relativism." Individual chapters include a review of the difference between constructivist-pragmatist epistemology and "social constructivism;" an examination of recent writings by Bruno Latour; a critique of computational methods in literary studies; a skeptical look at current efforts to "integrate" the humanities and the natural sciences; and reflections on the social dynamics of belief in relation to denials of climate change and to hopes expressed by environmentalists.
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  4. (1 other version)Unloading the self-refutation charge.Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 1996 - In Roger T. Ames (ed.), Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry. Albany: SUNY Press.
    A critical examination of the charge of self-refutation, particularly as leveled by orthodoxy-defending philosophers against those maintaining epistemologically unorthodox, especially relativistic or skeptical, views. Beginning with an analysis of its classic illustration in Plato’s *Theaetetus* as leveled against Protagoras’s “Man is the measure ...,” I consider various aspects of the charge, including logical, rhetorical, pedagogic, affective, and cognitive.
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  5. Relativism, Today and Yesterday.Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 2007 - Common Knowledge 13 (2-3):227-249.
    An analysis of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's statements regarding relativism in his 2005 homily to the conclave meeting to elect the new pope in the context of the charge of "relativism" in 20th-century philosophy. Parts of this essay are adapted from Barbara Herrnstein Smith,"Pre-Post-Modern Relativism," in *Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human* (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 18 – 45.
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  6. Cutting-Edge Equivocation: Conceptual Moves and Rhetorical Strategies in Contemporary Anti-Epistemology".Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 2002 - South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (1):187-212.
    An examination of conceptually and rhetorically equivocating positions among academic philosophers and other theorists who are sympathetic to constructivist epistemological developments but unwilling to relinquish key aspects of traditional understandings of truth and knowledge and/or anxious to avoid charges of relativism. A major problem with the resulting hybrid formulations is that, seeking, as they often claim, to “steer a course between Scylla and Charybdis” and being composed of essentially incompatible elements, they can do little theoretical work. While the personal-intellectual and (...)
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  7. Reply to an Analytic Philosopher.Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 2002 - South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (1):229-242.
    I reply here to an article by philosopher Paul Boghossian in which my article "Cutting-Edge Equivocation: Conceptual Moves and Rhetorical Strategies in Contemporary Anti-Epistemology" (Smith, *SAQ* 2002) provides him with an occasion for a supposed exposure and refutation of the alleged illogic of the "unpalatable relativism" of what Boghossian, at some distance from his topic, (mis)understands as the "constructivism" of contemporary sociology of science.
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  8. Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations.Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 2004 - Differences 15 (1):1-20.
    The essay considers two sets of interrelated difficulties that follow from our kinship to animals: those that arise chronically from our individual psychologically complex and often ambivalent relations to animals, and those that reflect the intellectually and ideologically criss-crossed connections among the various discourses currently concerned with those relations, including the movement for animal rights, ecological ethics, posthumanist theory, and such fields as primatology and evolutionary psychology. I begin with some general observations on classification and then turn to the increasingly (...)
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  9. Cognitively unnatural science?Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 2012 - In Simen Andersen Øyen & Tone Lund-Olsen (eds.), Sacred Science?: On Science and its Interrelations with Religious Worldviews. Wageningen Academic Publishers.
    A critique of dubious contrasts between "science" and "religion" drawn on the basis of cognitive-evolutionary accounts of human psychology, e.g.,. the claim that religious concepts are “likely” and “natural” for the human mind whereas scientific thinking is “rare” and “unnatural.” Initially made by biologist Lewis Wolpert in *The Unnatural Nature of Science* (1993) and anthropologist Pascal Boyer in *Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought* (2001), they are developed at length by philosopher R. N. McCauley in a*Why Religion is (...)
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  10. Chinese comparisons and questionable acts.Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 2011 - Common Knowledge 17 (1):42-47.
    In this response to comments on my article, “The Chimera of Relativism,” in the same issue of *Common Knowledge* , by cognitive neuroscientist Andreas Roepstorff, classicist G. E. R. Lloyd, and anthropologist Martin Holbraad, I illustrate and reinforce Lloyd's cautions regarding the hazards of intercultural—here, Chinese-Western—comparisons in studies of culture and cognition. Examination of a foundational study in East-West cultural/cognitive differences cited by Roepstorff indicates extensive conceptual and methodological problems in that tradition of research. Although Holbraad champions a more radical (...)
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  11. The Emergence of Relativism: German Thought from the Enlightenment to National Socialism. [REVIEW]Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 2022 - Common Knowledge 28 (2):284-286.
    The Emergence of Relativism offers a range of perspectives on how “the problem of relativism” was framed in German intellectual discourses over the course of the long nineteenth century. The review suggests that the volume is at odds with itself in various ways and, both wittingly and unwittingly, illuminates some problems of philosophy, both across the period examined and in our own.
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  12. Review of Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life. [REVIEW]Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 2009 - London Review of Books 31 (3):10-12.
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  13. (1 other version)An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns[REVIEW]Barbara Herrnstein Smith - 2014 - Common Knowledge 20 (3):491-493.
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