Using a new materialist line of questioning that looks at the agential potentialities of water and its entanglements with Big Data and surveillance, this article explores how the recent Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency have reignited media scholars to engage with the infrastructures that enable intercepting, hosting, and processing immeasurable amounts of data. Focusing on the expansive architecture, location, and resource dependence of the NSA’s Utah Data Center, I demonstrate how surveillance and privacy can never be disconnected from (...) the material infrastructures that allow and render natural the epistemological state of mass surveillance. Specifically, I explore the NSA’s infrastructure and the million of gallons of water it requires daily to cool its servers, while located in one of the driest states in the US. Complicating surveillance beyond the NSA, as also already imbricated with various social media companies, this article questions the emplacement and impact of corporate data centers more generally, and the changes they are causing to the landscape and local economies. I look at how water is an intriguing and politically relevant part of the surveillance infrastructure and how it has been constructed as the main tool for activism in this case, and how it may eventually help transform the public’s conceptualization of Big Data, as deeply material. (shrink)

There is a parallel between Plato's argument for the forms at 74b7-c5 in the Phaedo and Frege's argument for the claim that proper names express senses. There is also, I claim, an important asymmetry. The asymmetry explains why it is consistent to accept the conclusion of the Phaedo argument without accepting the conclusion of Frege's argument. The Phaedo argument turns on the possibility of a specific kind of mistaken judgement that may be termed "brute error". Frege's argument does not so (...) depend on the possibility of brute error. (shrink)

This book contains a defense of representationalism—the thesis that all mental facts are representational facts. Some mental facts—such as facts about what a person believes—seem obviously to be representational facts—that is, facts about how things are represented to be. Other mental facts—such as certain facts about the character of sense experience, for example the painfulness of pain, or the fact that one’s knowledge of it is immediate and authoritative— seem less obviously to be facts about how things are represented to (...) be. In this book, Dretske takes on the task of explaining in representational terms such features as the qualitative nature of sense experience and the source of the special authority we have about our own minds. (shrink)

Kant and the Mind is for philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists as well as Kant scholars. Brook's central claim is that Kant's discoveries have not been assimilated in current theorizing about the mind, much less superseded. Of course, Kant's general framework has affinities with contemporary functionalism and representationalism. What Brook shows is that more specific Kantian themes and arguments can continue to bear fruit. These include Kant's account of synthesis--the tying of elements together into a single representation, his account (...) of the unity of consciousness, and most centrally, Kant's account of apperceptive self-awareness. (shrink)