XV. Biology and the Rise of the Social Sciences

Modern science, it has been said, has undergone three revolutions: the Copernican, the Newtonian, and the Darwinian. This oversimplification is valid if our standard of judgment is social impact. The Newtonian synthesis, which absorbed the Copernican, had convinced men that the physical universe behaved in accordance with inviolable natural laws and that these laws could be expressed mathematically. With the confidence inspired by this world picture, science sought to find those natural laws under which the animate and inanimate aspects of the world operated. Equally influential was the tradition which cherished the ideal of the conquest of nature through the utilization of scientific knowledge. The many discoveries and inventions of the eighteenth century lent assurance and optimism to the prevailing attitude. The present chapter relates some of the divergent influences which merged into the Darwinian synthesis: biological evolution. [excerpt

KNOWLEDGE VERSUS PERCEPTION: SOCIAL WORKERS\u27 VIEW OF SEX OFFENDERS

Social workers comprise one of the leading professions who interact with sex offenders through means of treatment, as well as unexpected life events. The purpose of this study is to evaluate social workers’ knowledge of sex offender laws and how their knowledge impacts their thoughts and feelings about working with sex offenders. Through a survey, social workers registered with the National Association of Social Work (NASW) in Southern California were asked to complete a questionnaire, in which addressed laws and thoughts in regards to sex offenders. One hundred surveys at random were evaluated. The study findings show a relationship between greater knowledge about the sex offender population and lower levels of apprehension a social worker has when working with a sex offender

Manipulationism, Ceteris Paribus Laws, and the Bugbear of Background Knowledge

According to manipulationist accounts of causal explanation, to explain an event is to show how it could be changed by intervening on its cause. The relevant change must be a ‘serious possibility’ claims Woodward 2003, distinct from mere logical or physical possibility—approximating something I call ‘scientific possibility’. This idea creates significant difficulties: background knowledge is necessary for judgments of possibili-ty. Yet the primary vehicles of explanation in manipulationism are ‘invariant’ generali-sations, and these are not well adapted to encoding such knowledge, especially in the social sciences, as some of it is non-causal. Ceteris paribus (CP) laws or generalisa-tions labour under no such difficulty. A survey of research methods such as case and comparative studies, randomised control trials, ethnography, and structural equation modeling, suggests that it would be more difficult and in some instances impossible to try to represent the output of each method in invariant generalisations; and that this is because in each method causal and non-causal background knowledge mesh in a way that cannot easily be accounted for in manipulationist terms. Ceteris paribus-generalisations being superior in this regard, a theory of explanation based on the latter is a better fit for social science

Knowledge & Attitudes of Mental Health Professionals on Issues & Laws Regarding Involuntary Hospitalization in Kentucky

Involuntary psychiatric hospitalization in the Commonwealth of Kentucky has become a salient issue based, in part, on two recent court rulings and a call for legislative reform of the laws governing this procedure. The role cc the mental health professional, who may be directly or indirectly involved in the hospitalization process, requires knowledge and sensitivity of these laws and related legal issues. One hundred and five Kentucky mental health professionals, including physicians, psychologists, and social workers, responded to a questionnaire designed to assess their knowledge and attitudes on seven selected laws and legal issues regarding involuntary hospitalization in Kentucky. The professional groups differed significantly in their knowledge of only one of the seven knowledge items. Neither profession nor any one of seven other demographic and background variables were related to overall knowledge of the laws and issues surveyed, both within and across professional groups. Analysis of the attitude items revealed a significant difference between professional groups on three particular issues. A significant difference between professional groups was also found in their overall attitudes toward due process rights for individuals involved in cases of involuntary hospitalization with social workers exhibiting most concern for these rights followed by Physicians and psychologists. Across professional groups, no other demographic variables were found to be related to overall attitudes. Within professional groups, psychologists who had been in their profession longer and psychologists whose training had not covered the legal rights of mental patients and the legal procedures of involuntary hospitalization exhibited more concern for due process rights. Although the results indicated that respondents had little knowledge of tne laws and issues surveyed, mental health professionals seemed to have a concern for these issues. It was recommended that the educational preparation of mental health professionals should include more comprehensive coverage of the laws and issues regarding involuntary hospitalization. Further, the state should require a demonstration of this knowledge either as a part of certification and licensure examinations or as a separate examination for mental health professionals who plan to practice or work in Kentucky

Interests Diffusion in Social Networks

Understanding cultural phenomena on Social Networks (SNs) and exploiting the implicit knowledge about their members is attracting the interest of different research communities both from the academic and the business side. The community of complexity science is devoting significant efforts to define laws, models, and theories, which, based on acquired knowledge, are able to predict future observations (e.g. success of a product). In the mean time, the semantic web community aims at engineering a new generation of advanced services by defining constructs, models and methods, adding a semantic layer to SNs. In this context, a leapfrog is expected to come from a hybrid approach merging the disciplines above. Along this line, this work focuses on the propagation of individual interests in social networks. The proposed framework consists of the following main components: a method to gather information about the members of the social networks; methods to perform some semantic analysis of the Domain of Interest; a procedure to infer members' interests; and an interests evolution theory to predict how the interests propagate in the network. As a result, one achieves an analytic tool to measure individual features, such as members' susceptibilities and authorities. Although the approach applies to any type of social network, here it is has been tested against the computer science research community. The DBLP (Digital Bibliography and Library Project) database has been elected as test-case since it provides the most comprehensive list of scientific production in this field.Comment: 30 pages 13 figs 4 table

Cognitive polyphasia in the reception of legal innovations for biodiversity conservation

Cognitive polyphasia has mainly been used to address encounters between innovative scientific knowledge and local, traditional knowledge. Yet, change and innovation occur in many spheres of life, not just in the scientific one. In this paper we examine the encounter between new laws – or legal innovations – and local knowledge, and discuss how the normative force of new laws shapes communication and cognitive polyphasia. We specifically focus on the Generalisation phase of legal innovation, when new laws are translated into concrete practices, the social debate is more intense, and cognitive polyphasia is more likely to occur. We present empirical data from focus groups and interviews to illustrate how this happens for the specific case of the reception of new biodiversity conservation laws affecting communities living in protected sites. We also examine the positions of professionals from local mediating systems, illustrating how they manage the dilemmas linked to the introduction of new laws. The results illustrate the contexts of use of non-polyphasic and polyphasic interventions; they also show how polyphasia is expressed by two divergent argumentative formats (thematisation and conventionalisation), whose conjugation is indispensable for trying to contest the law while still respecting the normative meta-system. The findings are discussed taking into account the macro-societal consequences of cognitive polyphasia, trying to show how, at the societal level, it may contribute to slowing down social change. We also discuss how this is related to the enablement of emancipated representations, those where uncertainty and ambivalence more clearly emerge and sustain the negotiation of meaning

Human Rights and the Forgotten Acts of Meaning in the Social Conventions of Conceptual Jurisprudence

This essay claims that a rupture between two languages permeates human rights discourse in contemporary Anglo-American legal thought. Human rights law is no exception. The one language is written in the sense that a signifying relation inscribed by institutional authors represents concepts. Theories of law have shared such a preoccupation with concepts. Legal rules, doctrines, principles, rights and duties exemplify legal concepts. One is mindful of the dominant tradition of Anglo-American conceptual jurisprudence in this regard. Words have been thought to copy ready-made concepts. Acts of intellectualisation and the accompanying analytic technique have excluded a consideration of a very different sense of legal language. The second sense of a language concentrates upon unwritten acts of meaning which lack a discrete and assignable author. This essay aims to unconceal the importance of an unauthored language. Drawing from Edmund Husserl’s early writings, particularly his Logical Investigations, I shall argue that an unwritten language embodies the written language with acts of meaning. An act of meaning confers one’s experiential body into the content of a concept signified in a written language. In order to understand the importance of such pre-legal acts of meaning in human rights laws, I begin by outlining how universal human rights have been signified as universal by virtue of their content-independence. I then raise the problem of the exclusion of social-cultural phenomena as elements of human rights laws. The clue to this exclusionary character of human rights law rests in the analytic leap from an unwritten to a written legal language. The essay then addresses the effort to link legality with the social world: namely, the effort of grounding legality in a social convention. I examine how a social convention itself is conceptualized, leaving the remainder of acts of meaning. This failure of social conventions to access social-cultural phenomena encourages me to turn to acts of meaning as such acts were understood by Edmund Husserl in his earlier works. Meaning-constituting acts exist prior to intuitions and prior to social conventions. This priority exists analytically as well as phenomenologically. In order to exemplify this prior character of acts of meaning, I retrieve Antigone’s experiential knowledge in Sophocles’ Antigone. Antigone’s unwritten laws are characterized by an absence of mediating concepts. I then identify several elements of an act of meaning in an unwritten language: the experiential body as the source of the acts of meaning, praeiudicia (prejudgements), collective memories, the act character of meaning, and the act of interpretation of social behaviour. My final section raises the prospect of whether human rights can be considered universal if acts of meaning are that important in the identity of a law

Intellectual Property Today: Of Myths and Paradoxes

It is often claimed or assumed that intellectual property laws are necessary to encourage individual creativity and inventiveness and that society would be worse off without such laws. This article suggests that, in the field of copyrights and patents at least, such claims rest on myth and paradox rather than proof, and should be viewed sceptically. With its minimal standards for eligibility, copyright today seems less concerned with authors, art and literature than with protecting the distributors of standardized industrial products, and sometimes is even used to prevent the dissemination of knowledge by becoming a tool of censorship. Patent law too requires major rethinking if its promise of bettering mankind by encouraging socially useful discoveries and inventions and the dissemination of knowledge is to be realized. The article concludes that intellectual property laws should no longer be analyzed in terms of outmoded notions of property: more particularistic inquiries are needed to ensure that these laws adequately serve valid social ends