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The normal, the natural and the good: Generics and ideology

The idea of "what's normal" has two importantly different uses. On one hand, "what's normal" is a statistical concept: what's normal is what is statistically probable. On the other hand, "what's normal," is a normative concept. What's normal is how things "ought" to be, or how things are when circumstances are favorable. The normative sense of 'normal,' can be linked to the historical concept of essence. Things manifest their nature or essence under normal conditions; in other conditions they emerge deformed: a normal pregnancy will result in a normal offspring. Moreover, the normatively normal is invoked to back social norms: women ought to stay home with their babies because it is in the nature of things, or in the nature of things when circumstances are favorable. However, what's "normal" is not always natural, and what's natural is not always best. Interestingly, the confusions just sketched are reinforced by the fact that we use generics such as 'cars have radios,' 'birds fly,' or 'boys don't cry,' to state all three sorts of claims: statistical regularities, claims about natures, and claims about norms. Scholars have suggested that the variety in different forms of generics prevents a unified account. In this essay, I offer a proposal for understanding how the many different kinds of generics can be understood as differing in their implicatures due to essentialist assumptions that are included by default in the common ground of conversation. This helps explain how essentialist ideology is expanded and sustained

Assessing Opportunities for Livelihood Enhancement and Diversification in Coastal Fishing Communities of Southern India

"The United Nations Team for Tsunami Recovery Support (UNTRS) based in Chennai,India, is facilitating the process of tsunami recovery in the region through specific interventions in strategic areas. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of United Nations (FAO) as a part of the UNTRS team aims to set clear directions to ensure sustainable livelihoods for fishers. It has a pro-poor focus. With the fisheries sector suffering from both over-capitalization and resource depletion, the livelihoods of poor fishers and fisherfolk communities have been badly hit, and the tsunami has aggravated their misery. While relief measures have helped, what's essential for the long term is to improve livelihood opportunities. They need to be enhanced and diversified. Many development interventions have been attempted. But what's needed is a viable people-centric approach that taps the strengths of coastal fisheries and draws on them. Hence this study on ""Assessing opportunities for livelihood enhancement and diversification in coastal fishing communities of southern India."" carried out by Integrated Coastal Management, Kakinada. The study covers tsunami-affected areas in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The study has analysed a number of inherent strategies of the fishers to enhance and diversify livelihoods, both past and present. It has come out with a planning framework for livelihoods enhancement and diversification. Stakeholders in fisheries can make use of the framework, validate its usefulness, and decide and further develop appropriate tool box. They may then spell out the support and co-operation necessary from other stakeholders.

What's in a crowd? Analysis of face-to-face behavioral networks

The availability of new data sources on human mobility is opening new avenues for investigating the interplay of social networks, human mobility and dynamical processes such as epidemic spreading. Here we analyze data on the time-resolved face-to-face proximity of individuals in large-scale real-world scenarios. We compare two settings with very different properties, a scientific conference and a long-running museum exhibition. We track the behavioral networks of face-to-face proximity, and characterize them from both a static and a dynamic point of view, exposing important differences as well as striking similarities. We use our data to investigate the dynamics of a susceptible-infected model for epidemic spreading that unfolds on the dynamical networks of human proximity. The spreading patterns are markedly different for the conference and the museum case, and they are strongly impacted by the causal structure of the network data. A deeper study of the spreading paths shows that the mere knowledge of static aggregated networks would lead to erroneous conclusions about the transmission paths on the dynamical networks

What's in a Chinese Room? 20th Century Chinoiserie, Modernity and Femininity

The first three decades of the twentieth century saw a resurgence in chinoiserie in the West. This chapter uses primary sources to provide an original exploration of the ways in which 'Chinese' styles of interior design, furniture and fashion were used in Britain to communicate modern feminine identities. Marked out as an indulgent, fanciful, and hence feminine and irrational style choice, early 20th century British chinoiserie drew heavily on its previous incarnations, such as 18th century wallpapers and Chippendale chinoiserie chairs, and yet fitted well with the colour and exoticism of modern art and design. Both old and new, elite yet commonplace, the fantastical but reassuringly familiar nature of 'Chinese' design made chinoiserie a potent vehicle for the expression of modern British femininities. The chapter forms the culmination of an edited collection produced as the catalogue for the exhibition 'Chinese Whispers: Chinoiserie in Britain 1650-1930', Brighton Museum and the Royal Pavilion, 3 May- 2 November 2008, of which Sarah Cheang curated the 20th century section. The exhibition received extensive and highly positive national press coverage and was awarded Best Temporary Exhibition at the Museum and Heritage Awards 2009. The catalogue was praised as ‘insightful’ and the ‘What’s in a Chinese Room’ essay was singled out as ‘excellent’ (Burlington Magazine October 2008) and widely quoted. The production of the catalogue was supported by a Paul Mellon grant

To be a realist about quantum theory

I look at the distinction between between realist and antirealist views of the quantum state. I argue that this binary classification should be reconceived as a continuum of different views about which properties of the quantum state are representationally significant. What's more, the extreme cases -- all or none --- are simply absurd, and should be rejected by all parties. In other words, no sane person should advocate extreme realism or antirealism about the quantum state. And if we focus on the reasonable views, it's no longer clear who counts as a realist, and who counts as an antirealist. Among those taking a more reasonable intermediate view, we find figures such as Bohr and Carnap -- in stark opposition to the stories we've been told

Book Review: What's in a Name?

In the spring of 1998, the U.S. government told the Internet: Govern yourself. This unfocused order - a blandishment, really, expressed as an awkward "statement of policy" by the Department of Commerce, carrying no direct force of law - came about because the management of obscure but critical centralized Internet functions was at a political crossroads. This essay reviews Milton Mueller's book Ruling the Root, and the ways in which it accounts for what happened both before and after that crossroads

The Epistemology of Disagreement: Why Not Bayesianism?

Disagreement is a ubiquitous feature of human life, and philosophers have dutifully attended to it. One important question related to disagreement is epistemological: How does a rational person change her beliefs (if at all) in light of disagreement from others? The typical methodology for answering this question is to endorse a steadfast or conciliatory disagreement norm (and not both) on a priori grounds and selected intuitive cases. In this paper, I argue that this methodology is misguided. Instead, a thoroughgoingly Bayesian strategy is what's needed. Such a strategy provides conciliatory norms in appropriate cases and steadfast norms in appropriate cases. I argue, further, that the few extant efforts to address disagreement in the Bayesian spirit are laudable but uncompelling. A modelling, rather than a functional, approach gets us the right norms and is highly general, allowing the epistemologist to deal with (1) multiple epistemic interlocutors, (2) epistemic superiors and inferiors (i.e. not just epistemic peers), and (3) dependence between interlocutors