Material culture, strictly speaking, is substance culture. Nevertheless, studies on material culture are almost exclusively concerned with things. The specificities in the perception of substances and the related everyday practices are rarely taken into consideration. Although this can be explained by the history of anthropology, the bias towards associating material culture with “formed matter” is a foundational shortcoming. In consequence, particular perspectives on the material remain understudied, and the cultural relevance of substances as such is rarely taken into consideration. Taking (...) a perspective grounded in anthropology and phenomenology, this article intends to provide new approaches to substances that elucidate the particular modes of their perception, reveal their characteristics and reflect on particular notions implicit to substances. The final section of this contribution discusses two exemplary studies on substances and proposes transformation and incorporation as new fields of research that would contribute to a more explicit engagement with substances in material culture studies. (shrink)

Some physicists seem to believe that quantum information theory requires a new concept of information , Introduction to Quantum Computation and Information, World Scientific, Singapore, ; Deutsch & Hayden, 1999, Information flow in entangled quantum subsystems, preprint quant-ph/9906007). I will argue that no new concept is necessary. Shannon's concept of information is sufficient for quantum information theory. Properties that are cited to contrast quantum information and classical information actually point to differences in our ability to manipulate, access, and transfer information (...) depending on whether quantum systems, opposed to classical systems, are used in a communication system. I also demonstrate that conceptually puzzling phenomena in quantum information theory, such as dense coding, teleportation, and Schumacher coding, all of which are cited as evidence that a new concept of information is required, do not have to be regarded as such. (shrink)

One might well wonder—is there a category under which every thing falls? Offering an informative account of such a category is no easy task. For nothing would distinguish things that fall under it from those that don’t—there being, after all, none of the latter. It seems hard, then, to say much about any fully general category; and it would appear to do no carving or categorizing or dividing at all. Nonetheless there are candidates for such a fully general office, including (...) thing, being, entity, item, existent, and—especially—object.[ It is not obvious that there is any fully general category (whether object or otherwise). Accordingly, not all accounts of object assign it to a fully general category, instead allowing that there are non-objects. On those views, object does indeed divide. Accounts of object, then, differ with respect to whether there are non-objects. And this is not the only fault line. Other dimensions of difference include what objects there are and what objects are. Accordingly, this entry will survey three broad questions about the category object: What, if any, is its contrast or complement? What is its extension? What is its nature? (shrink)