The paper contributes to the current discussion on the role of participatory methods in the context of technology assessment (TA) and science and technology (S&T) governance. It is argued that TA has to be understood as a form of democratic policy consulting in the sense of the Habermasian model of a “pragmatist” relation of science and politics. This notion implies that public participation is an indispensable element of TA in the context of policy advice. Against this background, participatory TA (pTA) (...) is defended against recent criticism of procedures of lay participation which states that pTA is lacking impact on S&T decision making, that pTA instead of opening S&T policies to new perspectives is used as a means to support mainstream S&T policy and that in pTA procedure the authentic lay perspective is systematically contorted by dominant expert knowledge. (shrink)

Bears comprise a subculture of gay men who valorize the larger, hirsute body. This research interrogates Bear culture as a gendered strategy for repudiating effeminacy that simultaneously challenges and reproduces norms of hegemonic masculinity. In this research, the author situates his ethnographic study of a major metropolitan Bear community in its social and historical context to illuminate this paradox, with special emphasis on the embodiment of Bear masculinity and its effect on sexual practice. The author concludes that through a process (...) of embodied agency, Bear culture yields a number of sexually innovative practices that disperse pleasure across the body and disrupt genitally centered, phallusandreceptacle interpretations of sex. However, the subversive potential of these practices is significantly undermined by an attendant set of practices that reflect heteronormative and hegemonically masculine interpretations of sex. (shrink)

To answer the question of whether school can become a non-adultist institution, this article examines the unequal adult–child (teacher–pupil) power relations that characterize school under the framework of bourgeois-capitalist society and that are upheld by certain functions, methods, norms and knowledge standards. Under the influence of the anti-authoritarian youth protest movements from the 1960s onwards, overt power in school (e.g. by means of corporal punishment) has been criticized and, in most countries, abolished. However, power imbalances between teachers and pupils have (...) not disappeared, but rather developed towards a more subtle, covert power, e.g. by framing certain expectations. The hierarchical top-down and one-way learning principles of school institutions are mostly left uncontested. This article does not content itself with simply stating that schools repeatedly reproduce adultism under these societal conditions, but also discusses possible strategies and interventions that could shift unequal power relations and ultimately overturn them. It looks at various concepts and alternative forms of education critical of adultism that have emerged since the beginning of the 20th century both within and outside the state school system. It further explores the contradictions that should be expected to arise in their implementation within the framework of existing educational institutions. Particular attention is paid to the respective possibilities for action on the part of teachers and pupils. We offer a decisive challenge to teachers to rethink how they deal with their power, which is always derived and fragile, and how they can contribute to pupils empowering themselves and significantly influence learning and decision-making processes at school. (shrink)

HTA and TA institutions at national parliaments (PTA) both share the same origin and of course have objectives and some of their methods in common. Nevertheless both TA branches developed in some distance during the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on the case of biomedicine this paper outlines the differences between HTA and PTA, highlighting the “clinical perspective” of HTA and the “societal perspective” of PTA. It is shown that biomedicine which has developed rapidly during the last decade has hardly been (...) dealt with by HTA, whereas it ranked quite prominent on the agendas of PTA institutions. Biomedical technologies became a subject of policy making beyond the boundaries of health care politics since biomedicine is perceived as an ethical challenge to society and not only as a medical innovation that has to be assessed by clinical experts. It is argued that there may however be good reasons to integrate the HTA and the PTA perspective in future TA on biomedical technologies. (shrink)

Using game theory and examples of actual games people play, Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler show how the elements of chance and rules underlie ...

The biological sciences have become increasingly reliant on so-called ‘model organisms’. I argue that in this domain, the concept of a descriptive model is essential for understanding scientific practice. Using a case study, I show how such a model was formulated in a preexplanatory context for subsequent use as a prototype from which explanations ultimately may be generated both within the immediate domain of the original model and in additional, related domains. To develop this concept of a descriptive model, I (...) focus on use of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans and the wiring diagrams that were developed as models of its neural structure. In addition, implications of the concept of a descriptive model, particularly its relevance for the data-phenomena distinction as well as its relation to long-standing debates on realism, are briefly examined. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that an operational organism concept can help to overcome the structural deficiency of mathematical models in biology. In our opinion, the structural deficiency of mathematical models lies mainly in our inability to identify functionally relevant biological characters in biological systems, and not so much in a lack of adequate mathematical representations of biological processes. We argue that the problem of character identification in biological systems is linked to the question of a properly formulated organism concept. (...) Lastly, we demonstrate how a decomposition of an organism into independent characters in the context of a specific biological process--such as adaptation by means of natural selection--depends on the dynamical properties and invariance conditions of the equations that describe this process. (shrink)

T. 1. Wortschatz -- T. 2. Überlieferung, Textkritik, Grammatik.

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--Freiburg (Breisgau), Universitèat, 1996.

Die vorliegende Arbeit, die als Diplom-Arbeit verfasst und im September 1980 bei Johannes Agnoli eingereicht wurde, war das Resultat einer Auseinandersetzung mit Michel Foucault, der man sich in Berlin Ende der 1970er Jahren nur schwer entziehen konnte. »Jeder Aussage, gleichgültig, ob sie als Affirmation, als Kritik oder als Negation gemeint ist, liegt ein positiver Gehalt zugrunde. Die Reflexion auf diesen, meist unbewußten Gehalt gibt anderen erst die Möglichkeit, aber auch sich selbst, abgegebene Urteile auf ihren Wirklichkeitsgehalt hin zu überprüfen. Letzteres (...) will nichts anderes besagen, als daß ein konsequent durchgeführter Skeptizismus sich über die eigene Positivität ebenso hinwegtäuscht, wie jede Form von Partikularismus (Empirismus, wissenschaftlicher Rationalismus und auch der Positivismus à la Foucault) darüber stolpert – und hiermit benenne ich das versteckte Problem in Foucaults Machtbegriff auf allgemeinster Ebene – daß auch noch so vereinzelte Aussagen immer auf eine, in letzter Instanz positiv beschreibbare Totalität verweisen. Die weitgehende Mißachtung dieses Aspektes einer jeden Reflexion auch im Marxismus ist der Punkt, den ich für die Entstehung der Krisen des Marxismus (mit-)verantwortlich mache.«. (shrink)

Da nur der einzelne Mensch, nicht aber etwas ihn (seinen individuellen Leib im Sinne Jean Amérys) Überschreitendes frei sein kann, darum, so lautet Sartres logisch nicht zu widerlegendes Urteil, kann keinem Objekt eine in diesem selbst angelegte Fähigkeit, Entscheidungen zu fällen, zugesprochen werden. Wenn ein Subjekt einem ihm Äußeren – etwa Gott, der Natur, dem Staat, dem Kapital oder dem Schönen, dem Glück oder sonst etwas –, eine derartige Autonomie zuschreibt, belügt es sich, meint Sartre: um der Angst vor seiner (...) Freiheit Herr zu werden und sich für seine Taten nicht verantwortlich fühlen zu müssen. Wenn man Adornos Ästhetik dieser Subjektbestimmung konfrontiert, läßt sich jedoch zeigen, daß, so sehr Sartre logisch im Recht sein mag, die Kritik im Grunde darauf zielen muß, genau jenes für Sartre Unmögliche dennoch zur Darstellung zu bringen: um die Verkehrungen erkennen zu können, dank derer das Kapital als automatisches Subjekt, als Souverän, agieren kann. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that an operational organism concept can help to overcome the structural deficiency of mathematical models in biology. In our opinion, the structural deficiency of mathematical models lies mainly in our inability to identify functionally relevant biological characters in biological systems, and not so much in a lack of adequate mathematical representations of biological processes. We argue that the problem of character identification in biological systems is linked to the question of a properly formulated organism concept. (...) Lastly, we demonstrate how a decomposition of an organism into independent characters in the context of a specific biological process—such as adaptation by means of natural selection—depends on the dynamical properties and invariance conditions of the equations that describe this process. (shrink)

Argumentation mining is an application of natural language processing (NLP) that emerged a few years ago and has recently enjoyed considerable popularity, as demonstrated by a series of international workshops and by a rising number of publications at the major conferences and journals of the field. Its goals are to identify argumentation in text or dialogue; to construct representations of the constellation of claims, supporting and attacking moves (in different levels of detail); and to characterize the patterns of reasoning that (...) appear to license the argumentation. Furthermore, recent work also addresses the difficult tasks of evaluating the persuasiveness and quality of arguments. Some of the linguistic genres that are being studied include legal text, student essays, political discourse and debate, newspaper editorials, scientific writing, and others. The book starts with a discussion of the linguistic perspective, characteristics of argumentative language, and their relationship to certain other notions such as subjectivity. Besides the connection to linguistics, argumentation has for a long time been a topic in Artificial Intelligence, where the focus is on devising adequate representations and reasoning formalisms that capture the properties of argumentative exchange. It is generally very difficult to connect the two realms of reasoning and text analysis, but we are convinced that it should be attempted in the long term, and therefore we also touch upon some fundamentals of reasoning approaches. Then the book turns to its focus, the computational side of mining argumentation in text. We first introduce a number of annotated corpora that have been used in the research. From the NLP perspective, argumentation mining shares subtasks with research fields such as subjectivity and sentiment analysis, semantic relation extraction, and discourse parsing. Therefore, many technical approaches are being borrowed from those (and other) fields. We break argumentation mining into a series of subtasks, starting with the preparatory steps of classifying text as argumentative (or not) and segmenting it into elementary units. Then, central steps are the automatic identification of claims, and finding statements that support or oppose the claim. For certain applications, it is also of interest to compute a full structure of an argumentative constellation of statements. Next, we discuss a few steps that try to 'dig deeper': to infer the underlying reasoning pattern for a textual argument, to reconstruct unstated premises (so-called 'enthymemes'), and to evaluate the quality of the argumentation. We also take a brief look at 'the other side' of mining, i.e., the generation or synthesis of argumentative text. The book finishes with a summary of the argumentation mining tasks, a sketch of potential applications, and a—necessarily subjective—outlook for the field. Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Argumentative Language / Modeling Arguments / Corpus Annotation / Finding Claims / Finding Supporting and Objecting Statements / Deriving the Structure of Argumentation / Assessing Argumentation / Generating Argumentative Text / Summary and Perspectives / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies / Index. (shrink)

The foundations of psychoanalysis in the German idealist concepts of the reflexive human self have been the subject of detailed investigations devoted to the intertwined processes of introspection,...

The European Legacy, Volume 16, Issue 7, Page 851-854, December 2011.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction A Brief History of Developmental Explanations of Phenotypic Evolution Research Questions of Evo‐Devo Unifying Themes of the Conceptual Basis of Evo‐Devo Conclusion: A Mechanistic Theory of Evo‐Devo Challenges the Modern Synthesis Postscript: Counterpoint References.

Bd. 1. Lebensbeschreibungen und Dokumente -- Bd. 2. Kommentar.

Whether second language teaching contributes to the enslavement or empowerment of learners has become a branch in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages research. More and more discussions are emerging, and they tend to base on more and more diverse theoretical frameworks. This article aims to shed light on this issue by exploring it from a Hegelian framework of language. Among Hegel’s theories of language, two notions, namely, mutual recognition and universalisation of culture are selected for discussions. The conclusion (...) is that based on Hegel’s theories of language L2 teaching has a stronger tendency of contributing to the empowerment of learners. (shrink)