This article offers an underexplored resistance strategy to gender norms, based on a feminist and queer reading of the work of French thinker Roland Barthes. Building on Barthes’s peculiar conception of what he calls “the Neutral” and revisiting his work in light of feminist and queer scholarship on sexual (in)difference, my main goal is to reshape our understanding of what it means to be gender neutral. In opposition to classical conceptions of neutrality associated with passivity, indifference, and blandness, I show (...) that Barthes’s Neutral can be conceived as an active gesture, which alters common systems of meanings and power, including the gender binary. But this conception of the Neutral, I argue, neither refers to a call for an androgynous, queer, or nonbinary gender experience. It does not target gender embodiments but gender regulations—that is, the social enforcement of gender categories (by way, for instance, of administrative forms, single-sex bathrooms, or normalizing attitudes toward others). A gender-neutral arrangement, therefore, refers to an ethical, administrative, social, or spatial relation in which subjects are not assigned based on gender categories. This practice of gender suspension, I show, has two main transformative effects. First, it opens a space of freedom and livability for gender-nonconforming subjects. Second, it contributes to lessening the significance of sexual difference in social life and therefore alleviating its symbolic and normative weight for everyone. (shrink)

"Ist der Mensch in seinem Denken und Handeln ein geistig freies Wesen oder steht er unter dem Zwange einer rein naturgesetzlichen ehernen Notwendigkeit? Auf wenige Fragen ist so viel Scharfsinn gewendet worden als auf diese. Die Idee der Freiheit des menschlichen Willens hat warme Anhänger wie hartnäckige Gegner in reicher Zahl gefunden. Ein und dasselbe Ding wird hier gleich oft für das kostbarste Gut der Menschheit wie für die ärgste Illusion erklärt." Rudolf Steiner (Gröls-Klassiker - Edition Werke der Weltliteratur).

APA PsycNET abstract: This is the first volume of a two-volume work on Probability and Induction. Because the writer holds that probability logic is identical with inductive logic, this work is devoted to philosophical problems concerning the nature of probability and inductive reasoning. The author rejects a statistical frequency basis for probability in favor of a logical relation between two statements or propositions. Probability "is the degree of confirmation of a hypothesis (or conclusion) on the basis of some given evidence (...) (or premises)." Furthermore, all principles and theorems of inductive logic are analytic, and the entire system is to be constructed by means of symbolic logic and semantic methods. This means that the author confines himself to the formalistic procedures of word and symbol systems. The resulting sentence or language structures are presumed to separate off logic from all subjectivist or psychological elements. Despite the abstractionism, the claim is made that if an inductive probability system of logic can be constructed it will have its practical application in mathematical statistics, and in various sciences. 16-page bibliography. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In this article we introduce an argument developed in Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani (2006). We attempt to draw some consequences from several decades of work in Freud history. We argue that such work has had the cumulative effect of showing up the legendary nature of Freud's epistemology, and has demonstrated the direct linkages between his interpretive procedures and rewriting of history. The Freud legend was by no means a supplementary accessory which accompanied substantive advances, akin to the legend of Newton's (...) apple: rather, it was constitutive of the very identity of psychoanalysis, and enabled its differentiation from rival psychologies and psychotherapies, and promoted the claim that it formed the only viable science of mind and the most advanced form of psychotherapy. Historical research enables one to grasp the legendary nature of Freud's achievement. (shrink)

Although long forgotten, the sociology of Gabriel Tarde has suddenly re-emerged. This article backs up the renewed interest in Tarde in four ways. First, drawing upon the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, it demonstrates that the usual critique of Tarde is false: Tarde’s theory of imitation is not trapped in any kind of psychologism but is, indeed, a pure sociology. Against this background, the second part of the article argues that the notion of imitation is closely tied to urbanity, which (...) brings Tarde close to the spatial turn of social thought. While Tarde’s work thus seems compatible with contemporary sociological currents, it also transcends what is presently discussed. The third part of the article therefore examines Tarde’s analysis of urban crowds, as the crowd demonstrates the paradoxical nature of the social. Finally, drawing upon Henri Lefebvre, the article outlines the contours of a particular, contemporary Tardean analysis of imitations. More specifically, the suggestion is to add a more explicitly structural dimension to Tarde’s work, which, it is argued, may be accomplished by pursuing a rhythmanalysis. The rhythmanalysis enables one to bring together Tarde’s focus on imitation, urbanity and crowds. (shrink)

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is described as a new way of doing science that brings science closer to society. Based on a qualitatively oriented case study, this article supports previous research indicating that researchers face a variety of ethical problems and dilemmas when implementing RRI for the first time. These include difficulties with anticipating and controlling future impacts, an asymmetry of power between project partners and an elusive understanding of the RRI concept. The researchers’ challenges were rooted in conventional (...) research ethics and could be boiled down to one core dilemma: If RRI had been applied from the very beginning of the project period, the chance of realising proof of concept within the scheduled time may decrease. The researchers’ solution to this dilemma was to prioritize proof of concept and postpone RRI activities to later stages of the project. If RRI is expected to live up to its ambition of representing a new way of doing science, more effort is needed at the political level to facilitate change. (shrink)

Available for the first time in 20 years, here is the Rudolf Carnap's famous principle of tolerance by which everyone is free to mix and match the rules of ...

This is identical with the first edition (see 21: 2716) except for the addition of a Supplement containing 5 previously published articles and the bringing of the bibliography (now 73 items) up to date. The 5 added articles present clarifications or modifications of views expressed in the first edition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved).

Is mental illness an object of knowledge? The history of psychiatry teaches us to doubt it, by emphasizing the infinitely variable and fluctuating character of psychiatric entities. Mental illness is not simply ‘out there’, waiting to be described and theorized by psychiatrists; it interacts with psychiatric theories, clinical entities waxing and waning in accordance with diagnostic fashions, institutional practices and methods of treatment. This should be a warning to psychiatrists and therapists: their intervention is part of the ‘etiological equation’ of (...) the syndromes that they claim to observe from the outside. But this should also be a warning to historians of psychiatry, who can no longer be content with writing the history of ready-made syndromes and psychiatric theories. They must, if they want to remain faithful to their improbable ‘object’, study the complex interactions from which those syndromes and those theories emerge, somewhere between the doctors, the patients and the society that surrounds them. In short, they must study the making of psychiatric history, and understand that they participate in it. (shrink)

The mass theory of the Austrian novelist and philosopher Hermann Broch has been virtually ignored in social theory. However, the recent theoretical interest in crowds makes it pertinent to scrutinize this part of his work. This article presents and examines the fundamental architecture of Broch's Massenwahntheorie, its historical context and how it may contribute to contemporary social theory. Specifically, Broch's insistence on the irrational dimensions of human behaviour is analysed as well as his emphasis on psychological anxiety in modern society. (...) It is argued that both aspects may point beyond the specific context of his writings and illuminate important general aspects of social and political life. (shrink)

In the late 19th century, a comprehensive semantics of crowds emerged in European social theory, dominated in particular by Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde. This article extracts two essential, but widely neglected, sociological arguments from this semantics. First, the idea that irrationality is intrinsic to society and, second, the claim that individuality is plastic rather than constitutive. By following the destiny of this semantics in its American reception, the article demonstrates how American scholars soon transformed the conception of crowds. (...) Most importantly, the theoretical cornerstone of the European semantics, the notion of suggestion, was severely challenged in the USA. It is argued that this rejection of the suggestion doctrine paved the way for a distinctive American approach to crowds and collective behaviour in which the early European emphasis on irrationality was ignored and crowds were analysed as rational entities. This may have relieved the discomfort of irrationality but it is also entirely disposed of what were in fact crucial sociological insights. The article recalls the semantics of crowds in order to evoke an early branch of social theory that still contains a provocative gesture. (shrink)

Since its publication fifty years ago, this work has established itself as a classic. It casts the visual process in psychological terms and describes the creative way one's eye organizes visual material according to specific psychological premises. In 1974 this book was revised and expanded, and since then it has continued to burnish Rudolf Arnheim's reputation as a groundbreaking theoretician in the fields of art and psychology.

This volume provides a valuable discussion of Husserl's lifelong project of the critique of science which makes no attempt to conflate the pre-World War I ...

This article examines what the rise in machine learning systems might mean for social theory. Focusing on financial markets, in which algorithmic securities trading founded on ML-based decision-making is gaining traction, I discuss the extent to which established sociological notions remain relevant or demand a reconsideration when applied to an ML context. I argue that ML systems have some capacity for agency and for engaging in forms of collective machine behaviour, in which ML systems interact with other machines. However, ML-based (...) collective machine behaviour is irreducible to human decision-making and thereby challenges established sociological notions of financial markets. I argue that such behaviour can nonetheless be analysed through an adaptation of sociological theories of interaction and collective behaviour. (shrink)

Two chief problems of the theory of knowledge are the question of meaning and the question of verification. The first question asks under what conditions a sentence has meaning, in the sense of cognitive, factual meaning. The second one asks how we get to know something, how we can find out whether a given sentence is true or false. The second question presupposes the first one. Obviously we must understand a sentence, i.e. we must know its meaning, before we can (...) try to find out whether it is true or not. But, from the point of view of empiricism, there is a still closer connection between the two problems. In a certain sense, there is only one answer to the two questions. If we knew what it would be for a given sentence to be found true then we would know what its meaning is. And if for two sentences the conditions under which we would have to take them as true are the same, then they have the same meaning. Thus the meaning of a sentence is in a certain sense identical with the way we determine its truth or falsehood; and a sentence has meaning only if such a determination is possible. (shrink)

Social media commentary, satellite imagery and GPS data are a part of ‘alternative data’, that is, data that originate outside of the standard repertoire of market data but are considered useful for predicting stock prices, detecting different risk exposures and discovering new price movement indicators. With the availability of sophisticated machine-learning analytics tools, alternative data are gaining traction within the investment management and algorithmic trading industries. Drawing on interviews with people working in investment management and algorithmic trading firms utilizing alternative (...) data, as well as firms providing and sourcing such data, we emphasize social media-based sentiment analytics as one manifestation of how alternative data are deployed for stock price prediction purposes. This demonstrates both how sentiment analytics are developed and subsequently utilized by investment management firms. We argue that ‘alternative data’ are an open-ended placeholder for every data source potentially relevant for investment management purposes and harnessing these disparate data sources requires certain standardization efforts by different market participants. Besides showing how market participants understand and use alternative data, we demonstrate that alternative data often undergo processes of prospecting and assetization. We further contend that the widespread embracement of alternative data in investment management and trading encourages a financialization process at the data level which raises new governance issues. (shrink)

Available for the first time in 20 years, here are two important works from the 1920s by the best-known representative of the Vienna Circle.

Das Ziel: Konstitutionssystem der Begriffe Das Ziel der vorliegenden Untersuchungen ist die Aufstellung eines erkenntnismäßig-logischen Systems der ...

Rudolf Arnheim has been known, since the publication of his groundbreaking _Art and Visual Perception_ in 1974, as an authority on the psychological interpretation of the visual arts. Two anniversary volumes celebrate the landmark anniversaries of his works in 2009. In _The Power of the Center_, Arnheim uses a wealth of examples to consider the factors that determine the overall organization of visual form in works of painting, sculpture, and architecture. _The Dynamics of Architectural Form_ explores the unexpected perceptual (...) consequences of architecture with Arnheim's customary clarity and precision. (shrink)

'My endeavour in these pages is to explain the main features of the method of philosophizing which we, the Vienna Circle, use, and by using try to develop further. It is the method of the logical analysis of science, or more precisely, of the syntactical analysis of scientific language.... The purpose of the book -- as of the lectures -- is to give a first impression of our method and of the direction of our questions and investigations to those who (...) are not yet acquainted with them.' -- From the Preface. (shrink)

A basic system of inductive logic; An axiomatic foundation for the logic of inductive generalization; A survey of inductive systems; On the condition of partial exchangeability; Representation theorems of the de finetti type; De finetti's generalizations of excahngeability; The structure of probabilities defined on first-order languages; A subjectivit's guide to objective chance.

Two chief problems of the theory of knowledge are the question of meaning and the question of verification. The first question asks under what conditions a sentence has meaning, in the sense of cognitive, factual meaning. The second one asks how we get to know something, how we can find out whether a given sentence is true or false. The second question presupposes the first one. Obviously we must understand a sentence, i.e. we must know its meaning, before we can (...) try to find out whether it is true or not. But, from the point of view of empiricism, there is a still closer connection between the two problems. In a certain sense, there is only one answer to the two questions. If we knew what it would be for a given sentence to be found true then we would know what its meaning is. And if for two sentences the conditions under which we would have to take them as true are the same, then they have the same meaning. Thus the meaning of a sentence is in a certain sense identical with the way we determine its truth or falsehood; and a sentence has meaning only if such a determination is possible. (shrink)

Clear, comprehensive, intermediate introduction to logical languages, applications of symbolic logic to physics, mathematics, biology.

In the fall of 1957 the University of California Press expanded Arnheim’s 1933 book _Film_ by four essays and brought that landmark work back into print as _Film as Art._ Now nearly fifty years after that re-edition, the book continues to occupy an important place in the literature of film. Arnheim’s method, provocative in this age of technological wizardry, was to focus on the way art in film was derived from that medium’s early limitations: no sound, no color, no three-dimensional (...) depth. (shrink)

A clarification of Husserl's changing conceptions of imaginary consciousness ( phantasy ) and memory, especially at the level of auto-affective time-consciousness, suggests an interpretation of Freud's concept of the Unconscious. Phenomenology of consciousness can show how it is possible that consciousness can bring to present appearance something unconscious, that is, something foreign or absent to consciousness, without incorporating it into or subordinating it to the conscious present. This phenomenological analysis of Freud's concept of the Unconscious leads to a partial critique (...) of Freud's metapsychological determination of the Unconscious as a simple, internally unperceived representational consciousness. It also suggests an account of how a reproductive inner consciousness can free the subject from the experience of anxiety by allowing for possibilities of self-distanciation and symbolic self-representation that protect the subject from traumatic affection by and through its own instinctual drives. (shrink)

"Groundbreaking when first published in 1969, this book is now of even greater relevance to make the reader aware of the need to educate the visual sense, a ...

Dieses Buch stellt eine neue, von CARNAP entwickelte Theorie der Induktion und Wahrscheinlichkeit dar, die durch die folgenden grund legenden Auffassungen charakterisiert ist. 1. Jedes induktive Schließen, im weiten Sinne des nichtdeduktiven oder nichtdemonstrativen Schlu߭ folgerns, ist ein Schließen auf Grund von Wahrscheinlichkeit. 2. Daher ist die induktive Logik als Theorie von den Prinzipien des induktiven Schließens dasselbe wie Wahrscheinlichkeitslogik. 3. Der Begriff der Wahrscheinlichkeit, der als Grundbegriff der induktiven Logik dienen soll, ist eine logische Relation zwischen zwei Aussagen oder (...) Sätzen, näm lich der Grad der Bestätigung einer Hypothese auf der Grundlage gegebe ner Prämissen. 4. Der sogenannte Häufigkeitsbegriff der Wahrschein lichkeit, wie er in statistischen Untersuchungen verwendet wird, ist zwar an und für sich ein wichtiger wissenschaftlicher Begriff, als Grundbegriff der induktiven Logik jedoch unbrauchbar. 5. Alle Prinzipien und Lehr sätze der induktiven Logik sind analytisch. 6. Daher hängt die Gültig keit des induktiven Schließens nicht von irgendwelchen synthetischen Voraussetzungen ab, wie etwa dem vielumstrittenen Prinzip der Gleich förmigkeit der Welt. Die erste Aufgabe dieses Buches ist die Erörterung der allgemeinen philosophischen Probleme betreffend die Natur der Wahrscheinlichkeit und des induktiven Schließens, die uns zu den eben erwähnten Auffassun gen führen wird. Das zweite Ziel ist der tatsächliche Aufbau eines Systems der induktiven Logik, einer Theorie, die auf den angeführten Prinzipien beruht. Ein besonderes Augenmerk wurde in diesem Buch darauf gelegt, die intuitive philosophische Grundlegung klar von dem technischen Aufbau des Systems der induktiven Logik zu trennen. (shrink)