On Fragments and Geometry: The International Legal Order as Metaphor and How it Matters

This article engages the narrative of fragmentation in international law by asserting that legal academics and professionals have failed to probe more deeply into ‘fragmentation’ as a concept and, more specifically, as a spatial metaphor. The contention here is that however central fragmentation has been to analyses of contemporary international law, this notion has been conceptually assumed, ahistorically accepted and philosophically under-examined. The ‘fragment’ metaphor is tied historically to a cartographic rationality – and thus ‘reality’ – of all social space being reducible to a geometric object and, correspondingly, a planimetric map. The purpose of this article is to generate an appreciation among international lawyers that the problem of ‘fragmentation’ is more deeply rooted in epistemology and conceptual history. This requires an explanation of how the conflation of social space with planimetric reduction came to be constructed historically and used politically, and how that model informs representations of legal practices and perceptions of ‘international legal order’ as an inherently absolute and geometric. This implies the need to dig up and expose background assumptions that have been working to precondition a ‘fragmented’ characterization of worldly space. With the metaphor of ‘digging’ in mind, I draw upon Michel Foucault’s ‘archaeology of knowledge’ and, specifically, his assertion that epochal ideas are grounded by layers of ‘obscure knowledge’ that initially seem unrelated to a discourse. In the case of the fragmentation narrative, I argue obscure but key layers can be found in the Cartesian paradigm of space as a geometric object and the modern States’ imperative to assert (geographic) jurisdiction. To support this claim, I attempt to excavate the fragment metaphor by discussing key developments that led to the production and projection of geometric and planimetric reality since the 16th century

A new social physic: The sociology of Gabriel Tarde and its legacy

This article aims to present a reconstruction of Gabriel Tarde’s micro-sociology in order to highlight its current relevance. The author of the article attempts to show that its distinction lies in taking the immense diversity of small social interactions as a starting point for the analysis of both face-to-face situations and large-scale institutions and social processes. Here the social field is described as made up of multiple propagations of desires and beliefs that spread from one individual to other, taking countless directions, interfering with each other, forming networks, and escaping them in search of new connections. The author attempts to show, also, that this point of view doesn’t deny the existence of social systems but understands them as open ensembles of immanent and partial relationships of collective beliefs and desires. This is why Tarde may be considered the founder of a molecular or micro-physical sociolog

A new social physic: The sociology of Gabriel Tarde and its legacy

This article aims to present a reconstruction of Gabriel Tarde’s micro-sociology in order to highlight its current relevance. The author of the article attempts to show that its distinction lies in taking the immense diversity of small social interactions as a starting point for the analysis of both face-to-face situations and large-scale institutions and social processes. Here the social field is described as made up of multiple propagations of desires and beliefs that spread from one individual to other, taking countless directions, interfering with each other, forming networks, and escaping them in search of new connections. The author attempts to show, also, that this point of view doesn’t deny the existence of social systems but understands them as open ensembles of immanent and partial relationships of collective beliefs and desires. This is why Tarde may be considered the founder of a molecular or micro-physical sociolog

Teleological Essentialism: Generalized

Natural/social kind essentialism is the view that natural kind categories, both living and non-living natural kinds, as well as social kinds (e.g., race, gender), are essentialized. On this view, artifactual kinds are not essentialized. Our view—teleological essentialism—is that a broad range of categories are essentialized in terms of teleology, including artifacts. Utilizing the same kinds of experiments typically used to provide evidence of essentialist thinking—involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2) and inferences about offspring (study 3)—we find support for the view that a broad range of categories—living natural kinds, non-living natural kinds and artifactual kinds—are essentialized in terms of teleology. Study 4 tests a unique prediction of teleological essentialism and also provides evidence that people make inferences about purposes which in turn guide categorization judgments

Internal Perspectivalism: The Solution to Generality Problems About Proper Function and Natural Norms

In this paper, I argue that what counts as the proper function of a trait is a matter of the de facto perspective that the biological system, itself, possesses on what counts as proper functioning for that trait. Unlike non-perspectival accounts, internal perspectivalism does not succumb to generality problems. But unlike external perspectivalism, internal perspectivalism can provide a fully naturalistic, mind-independent grounding of proper function and natural norms. The attribution of perspectives to biological systems is intended to be neither metaphorical nor anthropomorphic: I do not mean to imply that such systems thereby must possess agency, cognition, intentions, concepts, or mental or psychological states. Instead, such systems provide the grounding for norms of performance when they internally enforce their own standard of (i.e., their own perspective on) what constitutes proper functioning or malfunctioning. By operating with a fixed, determinate level of generality, such systems provide the basis for an account of proper function that is immune to generality problems

Mentalizing Objects

We have a mentalistic view of objects. This is due to the interdependence of folk psychology and folk physics, where these are interconnected by what I call Teleological Commingling. When considering events that don’t involve agents, we naturally default to tracking intentions, goal-directed processes, despite the fact that agents aren’t involved. We have a deep-seated intentionality bias which is the result of the pervasive detection of agency cues, such as order or non-randomness. And this gives rise to the Agentive Worldview: we view nature as a whole as being infused with agency and purpose. Teleological Commingling and the Agentive Worldview it gives rise to are at the core of our conception of objects. I maintain that the ordinary view of material objects is rooted in an implicit, false theory. It should be given no weight in metaphysical debates about the nature of material objects. And this problematizes the central methodological assumption that metaphysical theories of material objects should be beholden to common sense

The case against the democratic influence of the internet on journalism

Book synopsis: Web Journalism: A New Form of Citizenship provides a much-needed analytical account of the implications of interactive participation in the construction of media content. Although web journalism is a fast-changing technology this book will have sustained appeal to an international readership by seeking to critically assess Internet news production. … With the rise of blogging and citizen journalism, it is a commonplace to observe that interactive participatory media are transforming the relationship between the traditional professional media and their audience. A current, popular, assumption is that the traditional flow of information from media to citizen is being reformed into a democratic dialogue between members of a community. The editors and contributors analyse and debate this assumption through international case studies that include the United Kingdom and United States. … While the text has been written and designed for undergraduate and postgraduate use, Web Journalism: A New Form of Citizenship? will be of use and of interest to all those engaged in the debate over Web reporting and citizen journalism

The challenges of purely mechanistic models in biology and the minimum need for a 'mechanism-plus-X' framework

Ever since the advent of molecular biology in the 1970s, mechanical models have become the dogma in the field, where a "true" understanding of any subject is equated to a mechanistic description. This has been to the detriment of the biomedical sciences, where, barring some exceptions, notable new feats of understanding have arguably not been achieved in normal and disease biology, including neurodegenerative disease and cancer pathobiology. I argue for a "mechanism-plus-X" paradigm, where mainstay elements of mechanistic models such as hierarchy and correlation are combined with nomological principles such as general operative rules and generative principles. Depending on the question at hand and the nature of the inquiry, X could range from proven physical laws to speculative biological generalizations, such as the notional principle of cellular synchrony. I argue that the "mechanism-plus-X" approach should ultimately aim to move biological inquiries out of the deadlock of oft-encountered mechanistic pitfalls and reposition biology to its former capacity of illuminating fundamental truths about the world