Science Rhetoric And The Sociology Of Knowledge: A Critique Of Dascal’s View Of Scientific Controversies

Dascal’s position on scientific controversies is submitted to a critical examination. It is pointed out that his distinction between knowledge and understanding, between ‘hard rationality’ and ‘soft rationality’ is unlikely to survive sustained critical probing. What is egregiously missing in his approach is a recognition of the role of so-called ‘sociology of knowledge’ in the way scientific controversies play out. It is argued that, insofar as they constitute pragmatic events, scientific controversies cannot be studied properly without taking into account their inalienable sociological dimension.252433-46

Tristram Shandy and the Limits of Copyright Law; Or, is a Blank Page an Idea?

Australian copyright law does not give copyright protection to ideas. However, depending on the analysis used, certain types of creative outputs can be treated as ideas, rather than the protectable expressions that are given the status of a copyright work. Denial of the status of work will affect the economic right of the creator, and they will also be denied moral rights. This paper explores copyright law's adoption of a Lockean conception of ideas through the 18th century literary property debates, but shows that in the 18th century, the concept of ideas had not hardened into the forms used now. Instead, the law accepted and acknowledged that 'books' or 'compositions' (in their conceptual sense as well as their physical sense) and compositions were literary property. Through the agency of Lawrence Sterne's digressive comic masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, a nine-volume novel published at the height of the 18th century literary property debates, the notion of Lockean ideas, textual sparcity and the concept of the creative process is juxtaposed against the oppositional categories of idea and expression now used in copyright law. It is suggested that the adoption of a concept like 'book' or 'composition' to frame textually or visually sparse creative outputs, could provide a legal recognition for creative outputs now refused copyright protection

"Please, Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" : The Role of Argumentation in a Sociology of Academic

Academic debates are so frequent and omnipresent in most disciplines, particularly the social sciences and humanities, it seems obvious that disagreements are bound to occur. The aim of this paper is to show that whereas the agent who perceives his/her contribution as being misunderstood locates the origin of the communication problem on the side of the receiver who “misinterpret

Outside the Canon — T. F. Powys’ Short Stories and the Ordinary

La qualité fixe du canon de la nouvelle moderniste britannique est claire – l’influence de Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Lowry, et Beckett est si évidente que toute discussion de leurs contemporains amènera à convoquer les géants qu’ils sont devenus et à utiliser des commentaires qui ont été formulés à leur propos. De manière à agrandir l’image que l’on se fait de la nouvelle modernistes, cet article se propose d’étudier un auteur en marge du canon littéraire, un auteur qu’il est d’ailleurs difficile de qualifier de moderniste. En analysant les nouvelles de T. F. Powys – en particulier le traitement de l’intrigue, les personnages et le thème central que constitue l’écriture de l’ordinaire – ce travail présente un ensemble de textes brefs et introduit une alternative aux réévaluations modernistes de la nouvelle et des conventions liées au réalisme

Meaghan Morris: Cultural Historian

Meaghan Morris was celebrated at the Meaghan Morris Festival as a mentor, a cultural theorist, a much-loved colleague, a lecturer, a polemicist and a stirrer, a teacher, an internationalist, a translator and much else besides. Here, I want to add to that chorus by making a very specific case: that Meaghan Morris is the most significant and innovative living Australian cultural historian. This characterisation is, in part, rooted in my own investments in work at the intersections of cultural studies and cultural history but it is of much greater significance. An influential contemporary characterisation of cultural studies is that it was a boomer reaction to existing disciplinary constraints, a manifestation of anti-canonical impulses that choose instead to celebrate marginality while at the same time making an innovative case for the ways in which culture matters. It follows that if, today, academic disciplines in the social sciences and humanities have become highly flexible (rather than canonical) and maintained their institutional hegemony while simultaneously becoming irrelevant to much knowledge-work and that, today, margins and mainstreams seem like next-to-useless terms to describe cultural topographies or flows and that, today, culture matters nowhere so much as the rapacious industries of media cultures, then perhaps the moment of cultural studies seems of historical interest only.

The ontology of conflict

This paper aims at clarifying the ontology of conflict as a preliminary for constructing a conflict mapping guide (Wehr 1979). After recalling the main definitions elaborated in different disciplines, the meaning of conflict is elicited through semantic analysis based on corpus evidence. Two fundamental meanings emerge: conflict as an interpersonal hostility between two or more human subjects, and conflict as a propositional incompatibility. These two states of affairs are significantly related, because the latter tends to generate the former whenever the incompatible positions are embodied by as many parties who feel personally questioned. The semantic analysis allows sketching the ontology of the conflictual situation that can serve to generate a conflict mapping guide, and facing several crucial aspects that are relevant both to the study and to the management of conflicts. In the former perspective, it allows the comparison of the situation of interpersonal conflict with the seemingly similar process of controversy

When climate science became climate politics: British media representations of climate change in 1988

Climate change has become a pressing environmental concern for scientists, social commentators and politicians. Previous social science research has explored media representations of climate change in various temporal and geographical contexts. Through the lens of Social Representations Theory, this article provides a detailed qualitative thematic analysis of media representations of climate change in the 1988 British broadsheet press, given that this year constitutes an important juncture in this transition of climate change from the domain of science to that of the socio-political sphere. The following themes are outlined: (i) “Climate change: a multi-faceted threat”; (ii) “Collectivisation of threat”; (iii) “Climate change and the attribution of blame”; and (iv) “Speculative solutions to a complex socio-environmental problem.” The article provides detailed empirical insights into the “starting-point” for present-day disputes concerning climate change and lays the theoretical foundations for tracking the continuities and discontinuities characterising social representations of climate change in the future

Austrägalgerichtsbarkeit: interstate dispute settlement in a confederate arrangement, 1815 to 1866

This article analyses the interstate dispute settlement mechanisms between member states of the German Confederation (Deutscher Bund). The question as to how disputes between German sovereigns should be decided already had a long (pre-)history dating back to the Middle Ages. Article 11 IV of the German Federal Act (1815) (Bundesakte) was the basic norm of the so-called Austrägal jurisdiction enacted to resolve disputes between states of the German Confederation and stipulated the manner in which the dispute was to be brought to "court" (Austrägalinstanz). During the period of the German Confederation, 10 out of 25 German courts of third instance handled altogether 54 Austrägal cases. Whereas Austrägal jurisdiction was no longer present in the German Kaiserreich, Emperor William II and the professor of public law Paul Laband attempted to resurrect the idea, but failed due to the resistance of the other German princes

Building, Dwelling, Dying: Architecture and History in Pakistan

There is a long history of scholars finding in architecture tools for thinking, whether this is the relationship between nature and culture in Simmel’s ruins, industrial capitalism in Benjamin’s Parisian arcades, or the rhythms of the primordial in Heidegger’s Black Forest farmhouse. But what does it mean to take seriously the concepts and dispositions articulated by architects themselves? How might processes of designing and making constitute particular forms of thinking? This article considers the words and buildings of Lahore-based architect Kamil Khan Mumtaz (b.1939) as an entry-point to such questions. It outlines how professional architecture in Pakistan has grappled with the unsettled status of the past in a country forged out of two partitions (1947 and 1971). Mumtaz’s work and thought – engaging questions of tradition, authority, craft and the sacred – demonstrates how these predicaments have been productive for conceptualising time, labour and the nature of dwelling in a postcolonial world