Reflections on an Interview with Jan Masschelein.

In this paper, the aim is to study how the work organization in one specific company for one specific trade has changed over time and with these changes, the presence and absence of alienation of employees in this trade. Blauner’s U-shaped alienation development trend has been a reference in discussions on alienation. It displays a connection between the degree of alienation and technological development. The findings from this study verify the trend and the connection in the case company. However, although (...) the development trend may look similar to that of Blauner’s model, it is differently founded. Where previous studies highlight the production system, including technology, as crucial to the presence of alienation, this study documents that external conditions outside or partly outside the company’s control—such as digital information availability, product complexity, and quality requirements—will determine the presence of alienation. Thus, researchers should adjust the content of the concept of alienation accordingly. (shrink)

The intervention attempts to engage critically with the Smittestopp app as a specifically Norwegian technofix. Culturally and politically, much of the Covid-19 response and the success of social distancing rules have been organized around the widespread trust in the government and public health authorities, and a focus on the citizens’ duty to contribute to the dugnaðr. The intervention argues that Smittestopp has been co-created by the mobilization of trust and dugnaðr, resulting in the launch of an incomplete and poorly defined (...) data-hoarding product with significant vulnerabilities. (shrink)

Trust has become an important aspect of evaluating the relationship between lay public and technology implementation. Experiences have shown that a focus on trust provides a richer understanding of reasons for backlashes of technology in society than a mere focus of public understanding of risks and science communication. Therefore, trust is also widely used as a key concept for understanding and predicting trust or distrust in emerging technologies. But whereas trust broadens the scope for understanding established technologies with well-defined questions (...) and controversies, it easily fails to do so with emerging technologies, where there are no shared questions, a lack of public familiarity with the technology in question, and a restricted understanding amongst social researchers as to where distrust is likely to arise and how and under which form the technology will actually be implemented. Rather contrary, ‘trust’ might sometimes even direct social research into fixed structures that makes it even more difficult for social research to provide socially robust knowledge. This article therefore suggests that if trust is to maintain its important role in evaluating emerging technologies, the approach has to be widened and initially focus not on people’s motivations for trust, but rather the object of trust it self, as to predicting how and where distrust might appear, how the object is established as an object of trust, and how it is established in relation with the public. (shrink)

Harald Grimen: Hva er tillit. Universitetsforlaget, 2009. 151 sider.

ABSTRACTRoy Bhaskar's concrete utopianism assumes that a key role for intellectuals, given the current precarious situation of humanity, is the envisaging of alternative possible futures, coherently grounded in the deep structure of what already exists, which includes what people already know and have. Without this grounding, people will not be able to make a persuasive case for change. With this grounding, and by combining the realism of the intellect with the optimism of the will, they may be able to usher (...) in a future of which the youthful Marx said ‘the world has long since dreamed’. This paper is both motivated by Bhaskar's position, and takes it as its starting point. I therefore begin by presenting three scenarios for the world's future, which I take to be real possibilities. I consider which of these possibilities would be worth striving for, and in so doing, I introduce a strategy that I take to be a means to that end. Specifically, this strategy involves harmonizing interventions with critical realist eco-philosophical ambitions. I argue that such interventions should therefore have an interdisciplinary framework, be dedicated to an ethics of dialogue and care, and be directed by dialectical change and learning. (shrink)

Nursing is a complicated and multifaceted profession that sets high demands in preparing nursing students for the profession. In today's education, the emphasis is often on knowledge and skills, that is, epistemology. In caring science another approach is sought, an approach based on human sciences in which knowledge will serve a more profound understanding, that is, the ontology. Consequently, the question of what this ‘understanding’ in clinical education is and how it is promoted in clinical nursing education becomes important to (...) clarify. Therefore, the aim here is to explicate the phenomenon of understanding in clinical education as experienced by third‐year undergraduate nursing students ready for graduation. This study, with a hermeneutic approach, is based on a secondary analysis of focus group interviews with undergraduate nursing students. The analytical expansion of the original material suggests three interrelated themes that illuminate the phenomenon of understanding in clinical education. These findings are deepened and enriched through philosophical abstraction. In the process of understanding, episteme, techne and phronesis can be viewed as inherent parts of the structure of thought in nursing. The perspective advanced in this study adds new aspects to the phenomenon of understanding and its meaning and significance in the dynamic process of formation and becoming in clinical education. The focus in clinical nursing education should be on learning reflective, critical thinking and the ways of being a nurse, rather than drilling students on particular skills. In the rapidly changing world of the 21st century, an understanding‐based education is needed as a more meaningful and authentic approach. Therefore, an ontological turn in nursing education, through which the main focus shifts from a traditional epistemology to an epistemology in the service of ontology, is suggested. Further studies are needed in the development and implementation of an understanding‐based, interpretative education in nursing. (shrink)

The growing literature on gender in armed conflict and the debates over post-conflict reparations for women, focus on the prevalence and harms of sexual violence. While this focus has recently been critiqued, there are few articulations of other types of gendered injuries. This article decentres the emphasis on sexual violence by examining the intersection between forced displacement and political insecurity. Based on extensive field research in Colombia, and using as an example a case study of an internally displaced women’s grassroots (...) organization in Cartagena, Colombia, this article examines political insecurity as a specifically gendered harm. It reflects on the concrete circumstances of insecurity, on the relevance of traditional gender roles in the constitution of insecurity, and on the challenges for court-ordered remedies. This widening of the scope of attention also invites complex reflection on the possibility of transformative reparations in post-conflict situations. (shrink)

The potential of mitigating the spreading rate and consequences of the coronavirus disease 2019 currently depends on adherence to sanitary protocols. The current study aimed to investigate the role of fatalism and comparative optimism for adherence to COVID-19 protocols. We also tested whether these factors are directly associated with adherence or associated through attitudinal mediation. The results were based on a web survey conducted among university students in Tehran, Iran. The respondents completed a multidimensional measure of fatalism and measures of (...) comparative optimism, attitudes toward COVID-19 health measures, and adherence. The estimated structural equation model explained approximately 40% of the total variance in attitudes toward COVID-19 protocols and adherence. As expected, high internality was associated with stronger adherence, whereas luck was associated with weaker adherence. Comparative optimism was more strongly associated with adherence than fatalism, and somewhat unexpectedly comparative optimism was associated with stronger adherence. Analyses of direct and indirect effects suggested that fatalism was mainly mediated through attitudes, whereas comparative optimism had both direct and mediated effects. The findings are discussed in relation to the role of these social psychological factors for COVID-19 mitigation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTStories pervade sport. In elite spectator sport, stories play out in packed stadiums while being broadcast simultaneously to immense TV audiences. These stories, which present controversial...

Despite the commonly held view that confessing to doping is morally right, few former elite athletes who have doped confess to doping. In this paper, I ask whether elite athletes who have d...

The experiences of multinational engagements in Kosovo in the late 1990s, and then more recently Afghanistan from 2001 and Iraq from 2003, have led to a political debate about the linkage between legality and legitimacy. At the heart of contemporary political and academic discourses about war are questions about the scope and content of the law of armed conflict. Considerably less attention has been given to another mode of regulating warfare, namely Rules of Engagement (ROE), despite their operational significance. This (...) article seeks to begin to bridge this knowledge gap by examining ROE as a means to achieving greater legal accountability for the use of force against civilians. To that end, the article aims to do two things: first, to use examples from the US and the multinational context to develop a typology of the various issues that might affect ROE adversely in a legal accountability perspective, either as a background context or through the deployment and use of ROE itself; and second, to look at ways of rearticulating ROE, setting them on a path toward a more standardized and judicialized form of accountability. (shrink)

Both written and graphic accounts of history can be biased by the perspective of the historian. O’Hara (Biol Philos 7:135–160, 1992) has demonstrated that this also applies to evolutionary history and its historians, and identified four narrative devices that introduce anthropocentricisms into accounts of phylogeny. In the current paper, I identify a fifth such narrative device, viz. the left–right ordering of the taxa at the tips of cladograms. I define two measures that make it possible to quantify the degree of (...) anthropocentricism of cladograms, the human attention score and human rightness score. I then carry out an analysis of the presence of the different distorting mechanisms in phylogenetic textbooks. I deliberately chose two textbooks that adopted a cladistic perspective, since their authors can be assumed to be more conscious about the aim of avoiding anthropocentricisms. Three of the narrative devices are thus absent from cladistic works. However, there is a weak tendency that the resolution of cladogram branches is biased in favour of Homo sapiens. Furthermore, the human perspective is clear and highly significant in the positioning of taxa along the left–right axis of cladograms. I discuss the reasons for and implications of these biased presentations. (shrink)

The ecological impact of alien species is a function of the area colonised. Impact assessments of alien species are thus incomplete unless they take the spatial component of invasion processes into account. This paper describes a measure, termed expansion speed, that quantifies the speed with which a species increases its spatial presence in an assessment area. It is based on the area of occupancy and can be estimated from grid occupancies. Expansion speed is defined as the yearly increase in the (...) radius of a coherent circle having the same area as the AOO, irrespective of whether the increase is due to natural dispersal or anthropogenic transport. Two methods for estimating expansion speed are presented: one that requires several years of spatio-temporal observation data and explicitly takes detection rates into account; and one that can be used under a situation with sparse data. Using simulations and real-world data from natural history collections, it is shown that the method provides a good fit to observational datasets. Expansion speed has several valuable properties. Being based on AOO, it is an intuitive measure; as it only requires occupancy data, it is comparatively easy to estimate; and because it is a quantitative and generic measure, it increases the testability and comparability of impact assessments of alien species. (shrink)

This paper explores a redescription of ‘fair play’ as loyalty. Focusing on the context of elite sport and the case of anti-doping, the paper develops an adaptation of Richard Rorty’s call to dispen...

When analysing and evaluating discourse, the discourse itself, the speech event and the activity type it represents, forces the analyst to search for a theoretical and methodological framework which is suitable for analysing the activity exposed in the data. Interactive political argumentation demands both a theory of argumentation and a theory of spoken language to fully grasp what is going on in the discourse. The pragma-dialectical argumentation theory offers both analytical and evaluative tools, but rests upon a reconstruction of the (...) argumentative discourse which is hierarchical and static. If applied to interactive argumentation this kind of reconstruction will not reveal interactive aspects of the parties' argumentation. On the other hand, conversation analysis, which concentrates on interactive aspects of the discourse, does not offer a tool for the evaluation of the quality of each party's argumentation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPatric Baert suggests that ‘encountering difference’, as we might when immersing ourselves in new cultural settings, allows us to redescribe and reconceptualise ourselves, our culture and our surroundings. By so doing, individuals can learn to see themselves, their own culture and their own presuppositions from a different point of view. They can then contrast their interpretations with alternative forms of life; and this is a requirement both for learning about themselves and coming to understand others. There is evidence that such (...) learning can reduce animosity towards others and encourage reciprocity. In this paper, I discuss the possibility that such an approach could also be useful if applied to the more-than-human world, as an antidote to nature’s exploitation by humans. I therefore argue that we need to ‘encounter difference’ with nature’s forms, which will allow us to learn from it. The meaning and implications of such ‘encountering difference’ will be developed in relation to Bhaskar’s philosophy of metaReality. (shrink)

Hilary Kornblith argues that many traditional philosophical accounts involve problematic views of reflection (understood as second-order mental states). According to Kornblith, reflection does not add reliability, which makes it unfit to underlie a separate form of knowledge. We show that a broader understanding of reflection, encompassing Type 2 processes, working memory, and episodic long-term memory, can provide philosophy with elucidating input that a restricted view misses. We further argue that reflection in fact often does add reliability, through generalizability, flexibility, and (...) creativity that is helpful in newly encountered situations, even if the restricted sense of both reflection and knowledge is accepted. And so, a division of knowledge into one reflexive (animal) form and one reflective form remains a plausible, and possibly fruitful, option. (shrink)

The generality problem is commonly considered to be a critical difficulty for reliabilism. In this paper, we present a dynamical perspective on the problem in the spirit of naturalized epistemology. According to this outlook, it is worth investigating how token belief-forming processes instantiate specific types in the biological agent’s cognitive architecture and background experience, consisting in the process of attractor-guided neural activation. While our discussion of the generality problem assigns “scientific types” to token processes, it represents a unified account in (...) the sense that it incorporates contextual and common sense features emphasized by other authors. (shrink)

Reinforcement learning systems usually assume that a value function is defined over all states that can immediately give the value of a particular state or action. These values are used by a selection mechanism to decide which action to take. In contrast, when humans and animals make decisions, they collect evidence for different alternatives over time and take action only when sufficient evidence has been accumulated. We have previously developed a model of memory processing that includes semantic, episodic and working (...) memory in a comprehensive architecture. Here, we describe how this memory mechanism can support decision making when the alternatives cannot be evaluated based on immediate sensory information alone. Instead we first imagine, and then evaluate a possible future that will result from choosing one of the alternatives. Here we present an extended model that can be used as a model for decision making that depends on accumulating evidence over time, whether that information comes from the sequential attention to different sensory properties or from internal simulation of the consequences of making a particular choice. We show how the new model explains both simple immediate choices, choices that depend on multiple sensory factors and complicated selections between alternatives that require forward looking simulations based on episodic and semantic memory structures. In this framework, vicarious trial and error is explained as an internal simulation that accumulates evidence for a particular choice. We argue that a system like this forms the “missing link” between more traditional ideas of semantic and episodic memory, and the associative nature of reinforcement learning. (shrink)

Hilary Kornblith argues that many traditional philosophical accounts involve problematic views of reflection. According to Kornblith, reflection does not add reliability, which makes it unfit to underlie a separate form of knowledge. We show that a broader understanding of reflection, encompassing Type 2 processes, working memory, and episodic long-term memory, can provide philosophy with elucidating input that a restricted view misses. We further argue that reflection in fact often does add reliability, through generalizability, flexibility, and creativity that is helpful in (...) newly encountered situations, even if the restricted sense of both reflection and knowledge is accepted. And so, a division of knowledge into one reflexive form and one reflective form remains a plausible, and possibly fruitful, option. (shrink)

Innovation plays a central role in economic development, at regional and national level. The paper takes a practical approach to innovation and the support of entrepreneurship, based on experience of facilitating two contrasting networks of enterprises. Action research is seen as having a central role, but with different approaches according to the innovation process concerned, and the part of the process.

Incremental change and innovation are often regarded as two separate concepts, with some interconnections. Based on two practical cases that emphasize respectively incremental change and innovation, the article discusses whether a division between these concepts can be maintained. Action research is seen as having a central role, offering an integral working method in industrial networks.

This work describes the nano field in Norway as currently emerging in the dynamics between two forms of nano research activities described along a centre-periphery axis. 1) There are strategic research initiatives committed to redeem the envisioned potential of the field by means of social and material reorganisation of existing research activities. This activity is seen as central as it is one of our premises that the standard circulating nano vision implies such a work of reorganisation. The fact that nano (...) is often taken as a paradigmatic example of the shift from Mode-1 to Mode-2 research, supports this assumption. 2) In parallel to this activity, a wide variety of research projects pursuing nano strategies are being funded. We regard such research activity as peripheral in so far as the activity is not marked by being committed to the circulating nano vision, as may often be the case. In the process of reorganising, this article argues, the research activity at the periphery provides a crucial arena for discussing and validating what is to be achieved through the work of reorganisation that takes place at the centre. Our analysis is informed by two Norwegian cases. We examine a major nano research initiative at a Norwegian university as a centre and a research project utilising nanoparticles in fish vaccines as a periphery. (shrink)

This paper argues that intelligence can be approximated by the ability to produce accurate predictions. It is further argued that general intelligence can be approximated by context dependent predictive abilities combined with the ability to use working memory to abstract away contextual information. The flexibility associated with general intelligence can be understood as the ability to use selective attention to focus on specific aspects of sensory impressions to identify patterns, which can then be used to predict events in novel situations (...) and environments. The argumentation synthesizes Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity theory, adding the notion of niche broadness as well as changes concerning the view of cognition and control, and Hohwy’s predictive mind theory, making explicit the significance of accuracy as a composite of trueness and precision where the nervous system acts as a distributed controller motivating actions that keep the body in homeostasis. (shrink)

This paper argues that intelligence can be approximated by the ability to produce accurate predictions. It is further argued that general intelligence can be approximated by context dependent predictive abilities combined with the ability to use working memory to abstract away contextual information. The flexibility associated with general intelligence can be understood as the ability to use selective attention to focus on specific aspects of sensory impressions to identify patterns, which can then be used to predict events in novel situations (...) and environments. The argumentation synthesizes Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity theory, adding the notion of niche broadness as well as changes concerning the view of cognition and control, and Hohwy’s predictive mind theory, making explicit the significance of accuracy as a composite of trueness and precision where the nervous system acts as a distributed controller motivating actions that keep the body in homeostasis. (shrink)

Numerous species use different forms of communication in order to successfully interact in their respective environment. This article seeks to elucidate limitations of the classical conduit metaphor by investigating communication from the perspectives of biology and artificial neural networks. First, communication is a biological natural phenomenon, found to be fruitfully grounded in an organism’s embodied structures and memory system, where specific abilities are tied to procedural, semantic, and episodic long-term memory as well as to working memory. Second, the account explicates (...) differences between non-verbal and verbal communication and shows how artificial neural networks can communicate by means of ontologically non-committal modelling. This approach enables new perspectives of communication to emerge regarding both sender and receiver. It is further shown that communication features gradient properties that are plausibly divided into a reflexive and a reflective form, parallel to knowledge and reflection. (shrink)