Diane Vaughan’s analysis of the causes of the Challenger accident suggests ways to apply science and technology studies to the teaching of engineering ethics. By sensitizing future engineers to the ongoing construction of risk during mundane engineering practice, we can better prepare them to address issues of public health, safety, and welfare before they require heroic intervention. Understanding the importance of precedents, incremental change, and fallible engineering judgment in engineering design may help them anticipate potential threats to public safety arising (...) from routine aspects of workplace culture. We suggest modifications of both detailed case studies on engineering disasters and hypothetical, ethical dilemmas employed in engineering ethics classes. Investigating the sociotechnical aspects of engineering practice can improve the initial recognition of ethical problems in real-world settings and provide an understanding of the role of workplace organization and culture in facilitating or impeding remedial action. (shrink)

The essay examines local resistance to the New Deal rural electrification program in the United States before World War II as a crucial aspect of sociotechnical change. Large numbers of farm men and women opposed the introduction of the new technology, did not purchase a full complement of electrical appliances, and did not use electric lights and appliances in the manner prescribed by the government modernisers and manufacturers. These acts of 'transformative resistance' helped to shape artefacts and social practices.

Cybernetics as a usable past Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9497-x Authors Ronald R. Kline, Science and Technology Studies Department, 334 Rockefeller Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Rather than assume a unitary cybernetics, I ask how its disunity mattered to the history of the human sciences in the United States from about 1940 to 1980. I compare the work of four prominent social scientists – Herbert Simon, George Miller, Karl Deutsch, and Talcott Parsons – who created cybernetic models in psychology, economics, political science, and sociology with the work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and relate their interpretations of cybernetics to those of such well-known cyberneticians as Norbert Wiener, (...) Warren McCulloch, W. Ross Ashby, and Heinz von Foerster. I argue that viewing cybernetics through the lens of disunity – asking what was at stake in choosing a specific cybernetic model – shows the complexity of the relationship between first-order cybernetics and the postwar human sciences, and helps us rethink the history of second-order cybernetics. (shrink)

This is the first publication of these ideas in book form. 'It is a rare treat--important, original philosophy that is also a pleasure to read.

This chapter contains section titled: Part I Part II Part III Part IV.

The value foundation for a global society -- Ethics and international business -- Human rights concepts and principles -- Political involvements by business -- The foreign production process -- Product and export controls -- Marketing motives and methods -- Culture and the human environment -- Nature and the physical environment -- Business guidance and control mechanisms -- Deciding ethical dilemmas.

Many people assume that the claims of scientists are objective truths. But historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science have long argued that scientific claims reflect the particular historical, cultural, and social context in which those claims were made. The nature of scientific knowledge is not absolute because it is influenced by the practice and perspective of human agents. Scientific Perspectivism argues that the acts of observing and theorizing are both perspectival, and this nature makes scientific knowledge contingent, as Thomas Kuhn (...) theorized forty years ago. Using the example of color vision in humans to illustrate how his theory of “perspectivism” works, Ronald N. Giere argues that colors do not actually exist in objects; rather, color is the result of an interaction between aspects of the world and the human visual system. Giere extends this argument into a general interpretation of human perception and, more controversially, to scientific observation, conjecturing that the output of scientific instruments is perspectival. Furthermore, complex scientific principles—such as Maxwell’s equations describing the behavior of both the electric and magnetic fields—make no claims about the world, but models based on those principles can be used to make claims about specific aspects of the world. Offering a solution to the most contentious debate in the philosophy of science over the past thirty years, Scientific Perspectivism will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of science. (shrink)

The underlying thesis of the research in ethical autonomy for lethal autonomous unmanned systems is that they will potentially be capable of performing more ethically on the battlefield than are human soldiers. In this article this hypothesis is supported by ongoing and foreseen technological advances and perhaps equally important by an assessment of the fundamental ability of human warfighters in today's battlespace. If this goal of better-than-human performance is achieved, even if still imperfect, it can result in a reduction in (...) noncombatant casualties and property damage consistent with adherence to the Laws of War as prescribed in international treaties and conventions, and is thus worth pursuing vigorously. (shrink)

In Jean Baudrillard and Radical Education Theory: Turning Right to Go Left, the authors argue that Baudrillard has been underappreciated in philosophical and theoretical work in education. They introduce him here as an important figure in radical thought who has something to add to theoretical lines of inquiry in education. The book does not offer an introduction to Baudrillard. Rather, his corpus is mined in order to describe how it functions as a counter to the code of education, rational thought, (...) critical reason, etc. In effect, they establish that Baudrillard advocates for a counter-path to thinking that can shake us out of our ready-made thoughts and realize the radical potential for change. (shrink)

In Dangerous Minds, Ronald Beiner traces the deeper philosophical roots of such far-right ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon, to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger—and specifically to the aspects of their thought that express revulsion for the liberal-democratic view of life.

Absolutely no one still believes that every physical interactionconsists of material bodies bumping into each other. Those who have tried to work out a completely mechanistic physics have been unable to explain common phenomena like liquidity, gravitation and magnetism. In fact, there is great reason to doubt that such a physics could ever account for attractive forces in general.

Despite both positive and negative perceptions of the current state of higher education, the contemporary debate over what it is to be a university is limited. Most of all, it is limited imaginatively. The range of imagined options is narrow. The imagination has not been given anything even approaching a wide scope. As a result, our sense as to what a university could be and could become in the modern age is itself impoverished. If we are seriously to develop a (...) wide range of ideas of the university that is adequate to the challenges of the modern world, the imagination itself needs to be freed. Imagining the University seeks to address each of these sets of issues and will do so by first, identifying a very wide range of ideas of the university as it is now unfolding and could become; secondly, by evaluating those conceptions of the university with a classification of ideas of the university; and thirdly, by reflecting on the imagination itself, its current impoverishment and its possibilities. Whether studying, researching or deciding policy, this book is vital reading to all those involved in the planning and delivery of higher education. (shrink)

Religious atheism? -- The universe -- Religious freedom -- Death and immortality.

Ronald Barnett pursues this quest through an exploration of pairs of contending concepts that speak to the idea of the university such as space and time; being ...

All these specialist aspects of one life are different facets of the intellectual diamond which scintillates in the huge quarry of The Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. This is the quintessential man, the bundle of contradictions passionately dedicated to intellect, at times carrying the rational argument to irrational extremes; the natural-born emotional adventurer forever hampered by orphaned youth and too-early marriage. This Russell in the round is greater than the sum of his constituent parts, a man of (...) epic proportions, struggling through a lifetime beset with frustration and near-disaster; in youth the constitutional sceptic, in old age the sometimes splendid figure with "courage never to submit or yield.". (shrink)

Inner speech is commonly understood as the conscious experience of a voice within the mind. One recurrent theme in the scientific literature is that the phenomenon involves a representation of overt speech, for example, a representation of phonetic properties that result from a copy of speech instructions that were ultimately suppressed. I propose a larger picture that involves some embodied objects and their misperception. I call it “the Body Error Theory,” or BET for short. BET is a form of illusionism, (...) but the particular version I favor is a cross-modal illusion. Newly described here, my hypothesis is that the experience of inner speech arises from a mix of interoception and audition. Specifically, there is the detection of slight but well-confirmed activities in the speech musculature that occur during inner speech, which helps to transform representations of normal but quiet nonverbal sounds that inevitably occur during inner speech, from breathing to background noise, into a mistaken perception of inner speech. Simply put, activities in the speech musculature mix with sounds to create the appearance of speech sounds, which thus explains the “voice within the mind.” I also show how BET’s cross-modal system fits with standard information processing accounts for speech monitoring and how it accommodates the central insights of leading theories of inner speech. In addition, I show how BET is supported by data from experience-sampling surveys and how it can be empirically tested against its rivals. (shrink)

The part that the university plays is increasingly of external and economic value, ignoring the importance of the value of knowledge in itself. By analyzing the university's current relationship with knowledge, this book tackles the problem head-on. It considers how the concept of knowledge can be reclaimed in an era of post truth and alternative fact, provides conceptual tools for people to think and debate about knowledge and education in new ways and offers a clear focus for the future development (...) of academia. This fascinating book is recommended reading to anyone engaged with the idea of rethinking universities in the 21st century. (shrink)