Monday, 4 Feb 2008
Portrait: Charles Taylor by Ben Rogers. Prospect.
At the heart of Taylor’s thought is a critique of “naturalist” modes of thinking, whether manifest in philosophy, social science, economics or psychology. For Taylor, naturalism is the view that all human and social phenomena, including our subjectivity, are best understood on the model of natural phenomena, by using scientific canons of explanation. So wherever possible, apparently complicated social entities should be reduced to their simple component parts; social and cultural institutions and practices explained in terms of the beliefs and actions of individuals; value judgements reduced to brute animal preferences; the physical world to sense data; sense data to neurological activity and so on. Taylor believes that in the last 400 years, naturalism has fundamentally reshaped our individual and collective self-understanding. Seeing the limits of this mode of thought promises to give us a critical purchase on ourselves and our culture.
Taylor’s critique starts from the belief that you can’t understand human actions unless you make an imaginative leap into the worlds of the agents—a leap which has no counterpart in natural science. You can’t understand ethical or aesthetic values on the model of animal preferences because all human cultures give central place to some version of the distinction between “lower” appetites and higher goals by which appetites should be judged and regulated. Taylor argues, in short, that narrowly scientific, reductive approaches to the human world always prove “terribly implausible.”
I really need to look into Taylor’s views on naturalism because as much as I am a child of Big Science I, too, believe that naturalism ala Taylor is not an unmitigated good and, in fact, is quite dangerous. Science cannot, nor should it try, to explain everything.
Harris, Roy. 2005. The Semantics of Science. London: Continuum.
Re-read ch. 7: Science and common sense.
Brachman, R.J. 1983. What IS-A Is and Isn’t: An Analysis of Taxonomic Links in Semantic Networks. Computer 16, no. 10:30-36.
For Ontology Development. This article gave me the giggles in so many places; especially in the context of my current work. With this many facets of what it is to be an IS-A relationship, much less the combination of those facets, it simply boggles the mind to think we’ll ever be able to globally represent these relationships in our statements about the/our world(s).
There are several axes along which IS-A links can vary:
- type of conceptual entity that a node can represent (description, set, predicate)
- basic syntactic function of the link (sentence-forming vs. description-forming)
- for sentence-forming ones:
- quantifier (e.g., universal vs. default)
- modality (necessity vs. contingency)
- does the link make an assertion (33).
Highly recommended. Not as difficult as one might think.
Tuesday – Wednesday, 5 – 6 Feb 2008
MacDorman, Karl F. 2007. Life After the Symbol System Metaphor. Interaction Studies 8, no. 1:143-158.
Found at Wikipedia via UIUC Language Evolution Group wiki back in late Sep 2007.
Wednesday, 6 Feb 2008
Bates, Marcia J. Hjørland’s critique of Bates’ work on defining information. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
Sent my way by Christina.
Thursday – Friday, 7 – 8 Feb 2008
Harris. The Semantics of Science. [see above]
Re-read ch. 8: Supercategory semantics.
Saturday, 9 Feb 2008
Wright, Lawrence. The Spymaster. The New Yorker. Jan. 21, 2008: 42-59.
Given to me by Pauline Cochrane as a possible job opportunity.
Zotero
I am really loving the newest update to Zotero. I can now drag-n-drop citations directly from Zotero into WordPress. Talk about a serious reduction in work flow! Previously I was exporting a citation as HTML, opening the web page, viewing the source, copying the piece of HTML I needed, and then pasting it into the Code view of WordPress. Now I just drag-n-drop a citation right out of Zotero into the WYSIWYG editor of WordPress and it is automatically formatted and includes the COinS metadata. Woohoo!!
The only issue at the moment is some slightly wonky formatting in WordPress. I’m not sure if it is WordPress or Zotero causing it though. I need to play with other citation formats and see if they cause the same issues. It could be WordPress though as they seem to have changed some of their HTML formatting in the version I upgraded to last week.
Nonetheless, this is a massive improvement in functionality and will probably encourage me to actually input more stuff into Zotero in the first place.