"Collaboration, at its Heart, isn't about Control". Interview with Sougwen Chung
Interview with Sougwen Chung by Bojana Radovanović
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Interview with Sougwen Chung by Bojana Radovanović
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This essay discusses the historical and textual representations of piracy in the writings of Hugo Grotius, primarily De Indis/De iure praedae (1603-1608) and the Commentarius in Theses XI (c. 1600). Contrary to popular belief, Grotius, in stark contrast to Jean Bodin, was not an advocate of the constitutionally homogenous Nation-State. Rather, his central concept of divisible sovereignty, the lynchpin of the constitutional theory of his early writings, unambiguously presents us with the object of the heterogeneous State. In Grotian theory, the State may be “read” as a composite construction, with a residual degree of inalienable sovereignty accruing at each unit-level. Even if only unconsciously, Grotius describes a concurrent para-political sub-division of the state between institutional Government (the “magistrates”) and civil society, one that constitutes an operational system of governance within the Nation-State. Like his contemporary Johannes Althusius, Grotius’ theory allows for the emergence of a wholly “private,” albeit lawful, mode of authority. This is most apparent in Grotius’ treatment of the mercantile trading Company and its Privateering operations. The corporatist theory of sovereignty permits the Company’s private agents of violence, the legally ambivalent Privateer/Pirate, to be invested with a requisite degree of sovereignty. The Grotian theory of divisible sovereignty, investing the seventeenth-century Pirate band with legal personality, serves as a vital historical precursor to the quasi-statist (trans-) national criminal cartels of the twenty-first century. The Grotian Pirate/Privateer/Just Avenger, therefore, is a “nomad”: a liminal entity that simultaneously transverses both geographical and juro-political spaces, rendering him or herself in-determinable.
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By the 1570’s, Potosí, and its silver, had become the hub of a commodity revolution that reorganized Peru’s peoples and landscapes to serve capital and empire. This was a decisive moment in the world ecological revolution of the long seventeenth century. Primitive accumulation in Peru was particularly successful: the mita’s spatial program enabled the colonial state to marshal a huge supply of low-cost and tractable labor in the midst of sustained demographic contraction. The relatively centralized character of Peru’s mining frontier facilitated imperial control in a way the more dispersed silver frontiers of New Spain did not. Historical capitalism has sustained itself on the basis of exploiting, and thereby undermining, a vast web of socio-ecological relations. As may be observed in colonial Peru, the commodity frontier strategy effected both the destruction and creation of premodern socio-ecological arrangements.
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In this paper, I want to address once more the venerable problem of intentional identity, the problem of how different thoughts can be about the same thing even if this thing does not exist. First, I will try to show that antirealist approaches to this problem are doomed to fail. For they ultimately share a problematic assumption, namely that thinking about something involves identifying it. Second, I will claim that once one rejects this assumption and holds instead that thoughts are constituted either by what they are about, their intentional objects, or by what determines their proposition-like intentional contents, one can address the problem of intentional identity in a different way. One can indeed provide a new solution to it that basically relies on two factors: a) what sort of metaphysical nature intentional objects effectively possess, once they are conceived as schematic objects à la Crane (2001, 2013); b) whether such objects really belong to the overall ontological inventory of what there is. According to this solution, two thoughts are about the same nonexistent intentional object iff i) that object satisfies the identity criterion for objects of that metaphysical kind and ii) objects of that kind belong to the overall ontological inventory of what there is, independently of whether they exist (in a suitable first-order sense of existence). As such, this solution is neither realist nor antirealist: only if condition ii) is satisfied, different thoughts can be about the same nonexistent intentionale; otherwise, they are simply constituted by the same intentional content (provided that this content is not equated with that intentionale). Third, armed with this solution, I will hold that one can find a suitable treatment of the specific and related problem of whether different people may mock-think about the same thing, even if there really is no such thing. Finally, I will try to show that this treatment can be also applied to the case in which different thoughts are, according to phenomenology, about the same intentionale and yet this intentionale is of a kind such that there really are no things of that kind. For in this case, such thoughts are about the same intentionale only fictionally.
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In this article, I analyze the issue of subjectivity in the form in which it appears in Charles Taylor’s and Richard Rorty’s writings. Positions of these philosophers are generally regarded as contradictory. I will, however, argued that the position on subjectivity represented by Rorty finds its complementation in Taylor’s concept. To do this, I will show firstly that both Rorty and Taylor use the category of contingency, presenting some common thesis about subjectivity. This way I will show that the location of the category of subjectivity and the scope of its use in each of them concept is closely related to the understanding of objectivity accepted by each of them. This will allow then to reconstruct the concept of subjectivity presented by Taylor and Rorty. Next, in the conclusion, I will present such a summary of those two standpoints, which will include justification of the thesis of their complementarity.
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The 20th Cracow Methodological Conference took place on May 30-31, 2016, at the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kraków. The meeting brought together physicists, cosmologists, mathematicians and philosophers interested in research program called philosophy in science started and popularized by Michał Heller. It is worth noting that the 20th Cracow Methodological Conference was dedicated to Professor Heller and can be considered as a contribution to the celebration of the 80th anniversary of his birthday.
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In this paper, we utilized triangular conorms (S-norm). The essence of using S-norm is that the similarity order does not change using different norms. In fact, we are investigating for a new conception for calculating the similarity of two Fermatean fuzzy sets. For this purpose, utilizing an S-norm, we first present a formula for calculating the similarity of two Fermatean fuzzy values, so that they are truthful in similarity properties. Following that, we generalize a formula for calculating the similarity of the two Fermatean fuzzy sets which prove truthful in similarity conditions. Finally, various numerical examples have been presented to elaborate this method.
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The theory of mental models considers sentential connectives to refer to semantic possibilities. The theory also proposes that the possibilities can be amended by virtue of modulation processes, that is, processes in which semantics or pragmatics can have an influence. The definition of modulation the theory of mental models gives has been deemed as a scientific definition within Carnap’s framework. This is because it is easy to find reduction sentences corresponding to it. What seems to be harder is to think about bilateral reduction sentences for that definition. This paper addresses this issue. It shows that at least a bilateral reduction sentence is possible for modulation.
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The debate on genetically modified foods has been characterized by a heteroglosia of voices, ranging from experts, authorities, to scholars, community organizations, media, or consumers. Within such a context where there have been observed various food safety scares over the past decades or some public ignorance regarding the use of biotechnology related to food issues, the Debating Europe platform launched debates on arguments for and against GMOs. Thus citizens turn into prosumers of content regarding food safety and (de)legitimators of EU policies and/or other social institutions. In our study of the comments posted by e-citizens on four debates on GM foods launched on the Debating Europe platform, we will use framing theory (Goffman, 1974; Entman, 1993; Wynne, 2001; Cook et al., 2004) and the Integrated Crisis Mapping Model (Jin et al., 2012) for negative emotions and Plutchik’s wheel of emotions (2001) for positive emotions to determine the salience of (de)legitimating frames employed by the supporters and opponents of GM foods, and to examine the role of affective stance in the evaluation of the social actors related to GMOs. Using QDA miner and WordStat, computer assisted qualitative data analysis softwares, we will conduct a content, cluster and correspondence analysis of the (de)legitimating frames and emotion valences. Whereas the content analysis provides an insight into the frequency of frames used by e-debaters and into the key lexical items that express evaluation and affective stance related to GM foods, the explorative analyses reveal the types of (sub)clusters which prevail in the e-debaters’ comments on GM foods. The findings of this study suggest that e-citizens mainly perceive the issue of GMO through a political frame associated with anger and a health frame associated with fright.
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The present paper outlines the development of international trade thought, from the pre-doctrinal contributions of Greek philosophers and scholastic theologians, through the theories of the first schools of economic thought, and up to modern and contemporary trade theories. I follow filiations of ideas in a chronological order, and show how theoretical investigation into the causes and effects of international trade—and the rationale for government intervention—has evolved over the last two centuries.
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In the natural deduction system for classical propositional logic given by G. Gentzen, there are some inference rules with assumptions discharged by the rule. D. Prawitz calls such inference rules improper as opposed to proper ones. Improper inference rules are more complicated than proper ones and more difficult to understand. In 2022, we provided a sequent system based solely on the application of proper rules. In the present paper, on the basis of our system from 2022, we classify improper inference rules.
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Modern economics is based on the idea that every good and service is scarce, but the standard defenses of this premise by reference to zero prices and infinite resources are invalid. The concept of scarcity is defined and used to show that ordinary scarcities are not economic scarcities. The errors regarding scarcity are traced to the methodology of modern economics, and an alternative method is suggested for a science whose subject matter is real human beings. The concept of relative scarcity is explained, and used to illuminate some important aspects of the functioning of a market economy. Some of the consequences are identified for economics if economists recognized that universal scarcity is not a fact.
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The contextual concept of science regards a scientific theory as a whole simulation for the mechanism of natural world under the given context. It argues that a scientific theory is to understand the reality only in the sense of intentionality in the process of reality simulation, rather than to describe reality in the sense of one-to-one correspondence. This concept of understanding reality is totally different from that of describing reality.Compared with the realist approaches and the anti-realist approach, the contextual approach has the following advantages: (1) it contributes to bridge the communication between the preachers of scientism and the humanists;(2) it has helped to solve the problem of underdetermination faced by scientific realism; (3) it is relatively easy to understand the correction about the concept and theory; (4) it could reflect the true process of science more properly. Therefore, it is a more promising and convincing new perspective to understand science.
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Many economists working within the framework of behavioral economics (BE) label the conventional way of modeling as unrealistic, and consider their own approach as more realistic than the standard practice. However, a criterion for realism is lacking in behavioral economics literature. This paper offers a simple criterion for predicating realism to economic models, and provides an illustration of such criterion at work on a particular BE model.
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In this paper I argue that Barry Dainton’s proposed Compound Presentist view in (Dainton, 2010) is unsuccessful in solving two of the problems that Presentism incurs; firstly, the relation/relata problem and secondly, the clash with Truthmaker Theory. I begin by outlining Presentism, and describing its advantages and disadvantages. I then describe Dainton’s Compound Presentism in Section Two before critiquing it in Section Three. Finally, I conclude that Presentists must do more work to defend their view against the two problems I explore.
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The purpose of this study was to measure the freshmen’s level of knowledge about genetics, evolution, human evolution, the nature of science, and opinions on evolution and the presence of non-scientific explanations among Czech, Slovakian, Slovenian and Turkish students. Determination of prior knowledge and pre-conceptions about these issues is important because they are filters to learning other related concepts. The results are going to be a starting point for developing teaching strategies concerning Darwinian evolution and preparing prospective science teachers for working with students in national and international contexts. A total of 994 first-year university students from the Czech Republic (276; 27.8%), Slovakia (212, 21.3%), Slovenia (217, 27.3%) and Turkey (235, 23.6%) participated in this study. The findings can be summarized as follows: knowledge especially that of the nature of science at the freshmen level was seriously flawed. Non-scientific explanations were present in high percentages. Both were regarded as barriers towards scientific reasoning and acceptance of general human evolution especially for students expressing orthodox religious beliefs.
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The foreword to this issue focuses on the core functional differences between the humanities and hard sciences (i.e. different approaches to such phenomena as language, translation, teamwork, writing, discipline.s history, publishing, tradition, innovation). Yet, this dichotomy is questioned in the conlusion. The author argues that whenever human artifacts are at stake, both the humanites and experimental sciences are equally hard, because they inquire the same matter, ie. how the products of human cognitive activities were created and what are their social functions. Therefore, the author calls for a new model for interdisciplinary studies.
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The paper focuses on the issues of philosophical foundations of science policy theoreticians, experts and educators. These persons eagerly contain human prosperity within a (quasi)scientific agenda. The paper contends that this universal techno-scientific approach is not directly connected with and owes very little to the socio-political arrangements of certain governments or agencies. Therefore, the claim that societal challenges ought to be dealt with scientifically should be separated from the claim that the techno-scientific problem-solving is the only virtuous way to human enhancement. Consequently, the issues of scientific autonomy and representationist and nonrepresentationist paradigms of scientific knowledge are considered and their brief conceptual assessment is proposed.
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The article addresses the structure of scientific research in the context of the methodology of science. This goal is realized through the concrete material of physical theory, detailing the structure of scientific research and its elements; its process and the laws it obeys; its results, which leadthe process; its motives, e.g. the "driving forces" of research and the role of philosophy in the process.The paperexamines the theoretical phase of researches as a synthesis of the empirical and the speculative,in contrast to the existing literature that presents the opposition between theoretical and empirical research. The steps of knowledge of the objective laws in a particular area are analysed: the empirical research,the non-fundamental theoretical,the speculative, and the fundamental theoretical; this analysis allows the generalization of the patterns of scientific research. Particular attention is paid to the speculative research and its main elements. The“methodological mechanism” of formation of new fundamental conceptions in science is unravelled. The essence of this mechanism consists of some non-logical cognitive operations (idealization, choice of “Gestalt”, substitution, generalization). The knowledge of corresponding combinations of these operations made by the investigator facilitates the process of research, decreases the probability of errors in the scientific cognition.
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