On Latour’s Social Theory and Theory of Society,and His Contribution to Saving the World

Latour is widely considered a critic and renewer of research in the social sciences. The ecologically minded Left has also acclaimed him as a theorist interested in bringing nature back both into sociological theory and into society and politics. To enable a more detailed discussion of Latour’s claims, I will here outline his theory and the ways in which it is related to classical theory, such as Durkheim, and the methodology of the interpretive paradigm, such as Schütz. My thesis is that Latour’s empirical studies may be read as unfolding the methodological consequences of the interpretive paradigm, and that his early work is a brilliant proof of Durkheim’s theory of the morphology of social facts. Latour has now elaborated the insights he gained from concrete laboratory studies toward a general theory of the social, of society, and of politics. These generalizations have made his theory at least partly problematic. The political implication of Latour’s theory of society is a generalization of the call for equality to encompass everything; in other words, Latour criticizes the exclusion of nonhuman entities from political representation. The paper closes by discussing the political consequences of this proposal.     

The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD)

The article presents the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD). SKAD, which has been in the process of development since the middle of the 1990s, is now a widely used framework among social scientists in discourse research in the German-speaking area. It links arguments from the social constructionist tradition, following Berger and Luckmann, with assumptions based in symbolic interactionism, hermeneutic sociology of knowledge, and the concepts of Michel Foucault. It argues thereby for a consistent theoretical and methodological grounding of a genuine social sciences perspective on discourse interested in the social production, circulation and transformation of knowledge, that is in social relations and politics of knowledge in the so-called ‘knowledge societies’. Distancing itself from Critical Discourse Analysis, Linguistics, Ethnomethodology inspired discourse analysis and the Analysis of Hegemonies, following Laclau and Mouffe, SKAD’s framework has been built up around research questions and concerns located in the social sciences, referring to public discourse and arenas as well as to more specific fields of (scientific, religious, etc.) discursive struggles and controversies around “problematizations” (Foucault).     

The Suppositional Ramsey Test and Decision-Instability

I analyse the relationship between the Ramsey Test (RT) for the acceptance of indicative conditionals and the so-called problem of decision-instability. In particular, I argue that the situations which allegedly bring about this problem are troublesome just in case the relevant conditionals are evaluated by non-suppositional versions, e.g. causal/evidential, of the test. In contrast, a suppositional RT, by highlighting the metacognitive nature of the evaluation of indicative conditionals, allows an agent to run a simulation of such evaluation, without yet committing her to the acceptance of such conditionals. I conclude that a suppositional interpretation of RT is superior to its non-suppositional counterparts and by briefly showing that a suppositional RT is compatible with a deliberational decision theory.     

Objects and Levels: Reflections on the Relation Between Time-Consciousness and Self-Consciousness

The text surveys the development of the debate between Zahavi and Brough/Sokolowski regarding Husserl’s account of inner time-consciousness. The main arguments on both sides are reconsidered, and a compromise is proposed.     

Diagnosing fatigue in gait patterns by support vector machines and self-organizing maps

The aim of the study was to train and test support vector machines (SVM) and self-organizing maps (SOM) to correctly classify gait patterns before, during and after complete leg exhaustion by isokinetic leg exercises. Ground reaction forces were derived for 18 gait cycles on 9 adult participants. Immediately before the trials 7–12, participants were required to completely exhaust their calves with the aid of additional weights (44.4 ± 8.8 kg). Data were analyzed using: (a) the time courses directly and (b) only the deviations from each individual’s calculated average gait pattern. On an inter-individual level the person recognition of the gait patterns was 100% realizable. Fatigue recognition was also highly probable at 98.1%. Additionally, applied SOMs allowed an alternative visualization of the development of fatigue in the gait patterns over the progressive fatiguing exercise regimen.     

If-Clauses and Probability Operators

Adams’ thesis is generally agreed to be linguistically compelling for simple conditionals with factual antecedent and consequent. We propose a derivation of Adams’ thesis from the Lewis-Kratzer analysis of if-clauses as domain restrictors, applied to probability operators. We argue that Lewis’s triviality result may be seen as a result of inexpressibility of the kind familiar in generalized quantifier theory. Some implications of the Lewis-Kratzer analysis are presented concerning the assignment of probabilities to compounds of conditionals.     

Kommentare zu ?Ambivalenz weiterschreiben��

The authors comment on the results of the Zürich symposium with varied weighting. Ambivalence is brought into relation with a hypothetical genesis of human thinking and understood as a reflection of the fundamental dialogical structure, which owes itself to an exchange of symbolic messages. A further consideration describes that the ??valley of the uncanny??, whose connection to death Lilly Gast has shown, could also have a fundamental connection with sexuality bared of all bonds, which releases the same fears as death. A difficulty would lie in the inflationary use of the term: every ambiguousness or diversity would sometimes generally be subsumed under ambivalence and therefore all selectivity would become lost. Also discussed is the ambivalence of the term, or the question, whether the term has not lost significance. Finally its relevance in pediatric and adolescent-specific perspectives will be examined.