The Complexity Trap: Skepticism, Denialism and the Political Epistemology of Climate Science

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-83
Author(s):  
Franz Mauelshagen ◽  
Walter Pfeiffer
Keyword(s):  
Climate Science ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Epistemology

John Adams's Machiavellian Moment

1995 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Bradley Thompson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Epistemology

John Adams was unique among the Founding Fathers in that he actually read and took seriously Machiavelli's ideas. In his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, Adams quoted extensively from Machiavelli and he openly acknowledged an intellectual debt to the Florentine statesman. Adams praised Machiavelli for having been “the first” to have “revived the ancient politics” and he insisted that the “world” was much indebted to Machiavelli for “the revival of reason in matters of government.” What could Adams have meant by these extraordinary statements? The following article examines the Machiavellian ideas and principles Adams incorporated into his political thought as well as those that he rejected. Drawing upon evidence found in an unpublished fragment, Part one argues that the political epistemology that Adams employed in the Defence can be traced to Machiavelli's new modes and orders. Part two presents Adams's critique of Machiavelli's constitutionalism.

Adorno’s Negative Dialectics as Critical Method

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sina Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Negative Dialectics ◽  
Critical Method ◽  
Political Epistemology ◽  
Constitutive Exclusion

Chapter 4 turns to the method of critique, for the sake of the political epistemology of constitutive exclusion. If constitutive exclusion produces the terms of intelligible political agency, then those cast in the space of exclusion will still be within, but will be politically unintelligible. How do we listen for what we cannot hear? This chapter takes up Adorno’s negative dialectics as a model for method, through an analysis of “nonidentity” as quasi-transcendent. Like the constitutively excluded element, nonidentity can only be found within what has excluded it rather than absolutely beyond it. Two requirements thus emerge: first, our method must be dialectical, because dialectics respects that what exceeds the delimited terms of politics emerges from within those terms but is not captured by them. Second, our method must be negative, because this keeps us from determining the meaning of contestations of constitutive exclusion in advance.

scholarly journals Covering Copenhagen: Climate Politics in B.C. Media

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shane Gunster
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
The Political ◽  
Changement Climatique ◽  
Climate Politics ◽  
Ownership Structures ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Analyse De Discours

ABSTRACT  In December 2009, considerable media attention was devoted to climate change as global leaders gathered in Copenhagen for a two-week summit to negotiate an extension to the Kyoto Protocol. This article conducts a discourse and content analysis of how regional media in British Columbia covered the event, with a particular focus on how climate politics was framed. A wide range of sources encompassing different media and different ownership structures was analyzed. Debates about climate science played very little role in media coverage. Conversely, focus on the summit ensured that the political dimensions of climate change played a central role. Climate politics, however, was framed in very different ways by mainstream and alternative media.RÉSUMÉ  En décembre 2009, on porta une attention médiatique considérable sur le changement climatique lorsque des dirigeants mondiaux se sont rassemblés à Copenhague pour un sommet de deux semaines afin de négocier une extension du protocole de Kyoto. Cet article effectue une analyse de discours et de contenu sur la manière dont des médias régionaux en Colombie-Britannique ont couvert l’événement, en portant une attention particulière à la manière dont on présenta les politiques sur le climat. Nous avons analysé un vaste éventail de sources comprenant des médias et des structures de propriété différents. Les débats sur la science du climat ont joué un rôle étonnamment restreint dans la couverture médiatique. En revanche, l’attention portée au sommet était telle que les aspects politiques du changement climatique y ont joué un rôle central. Les médias dominants, cependant, ont présenté les politiques sur le climat très différemment par rapport aux médias alternatifs.

scholarly journals Breton’s Wall, Carrington’s Kitchen: Surrealism and the Archive

2012 ◽  
pp. 17-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Eburne
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Andre Breton ◽  
André Breton ◽  
Closed Systems ◽  
Political Epistemology ◽  
Scholarly Discourse ◽  
Archival Practices

Contemporary thinking about archives remains bound up in the vexed relationship between the political and the knowable. This essay explores the political epistemology of archives and archival practices, seeking to dislodge the contemporary scholarly discourse on archives from its tendency to instrumentalize archivation as either a repository of knowledge or an apparatus of power. In studying the collections of two members of the surrealist movement, this essay examines the extent to which archival practices instead suspend the certainties of political desire, disclosing the persistence of discontinuity within the closed systems into which such certainties always threaten to develop. It focuses on two archival collections: the studio of André Breton at 42, rue Fontaine in Paris, and the figural “kitchen” of Leonora Carrington's paintings and writings.

Zhu Kezhen 竺可楨 (1890–1974)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iwo Amelung
Keyword(s):  
Rural Society ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Research Topics ◽  
Climate History ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Scientific Network ◽  
Political Turmoil ◽  
The 19Th Century

Zhu Kezhen (1890–1974), also known as Chu Coching, was a Harvard-educated meteorologist who worked in the field of climate sciences in China from 1918 to 1974. He was highly regarded under vastly different political regimes. His concerns regarding the development of observatory networks, educational practices, and the establishment of research topics reflect the development of the field in China, which only began at the very end of the 19th century. Zhu Kezhen was influenced by the meteorological and climate knowledge imparted to him by his academic teachers in the United States and appropriated Ellsworth Huntington’s ideas on climate determinism, which shaped some of his fundamental concerns. One of his main achievements was to make use of a wide array of observational and other data in order to contribute to the “localization” of climate science. In fact, employing data culled from traditional sources and making use of and expanding the phenological knowledge of traditional Chinese rural society allowed him to approach climate science in a way that was not easily possible in the West. Zhu’s research into historical climate change in China embodied many aspects of his approach to the localization of science in China, but changes in the international scientific network (from an American-European to a Soviet-dominated network) and the political turmoil in the People’s Republic of China greatly impaired his work. Zhu’s research remains highly influential and has exerted considerable influence on environmental and climate history.

A Question of Utter Importance: The Early History of Climate Change and Energy Policy in Sweden, 1974–1983

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristoffer Ekberg ◽  
Martin Hultman
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
High Energy ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Results

This paper studies early arguments in Sweden for combating climate change. We show how scientific results in relation to climate change entered the political sphere as part of the debate on energy in the 1970s, a process we propose to name energysation. We argue that the use of climate science by pro-nuclear political actors served as a way of maintaining a course set by a high-energy society while simultaneously trying to outmanoeuvre the growing environmental anti-nuclear and low-energy movement. When the pro-nuclear power side met with resistance, this led to a displacement of climate change knowledge away from the realm of the national political sphere and specific energy forms, a process we conceptualise as de-energysation. By highlighting conflicts and the political framings of climate change in the early years 1974–1983, we suggest that the history of these frames influences current delay in climate change mitigation and limits the range of actions and ways of addressing the ongoing climate emergency.

The Epistemic Dimension of the Political Opportunity Structure

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Hess
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
The Political ◽  
Genetically Modified Food ◽  
Political Opportunity Structure ◽  
Political Opportunity ◽  
Opportunity Structure ◽  
Colony Collapse ◽  
Epistemic Dimension ◽  
Basic Features

The concept of the political opportunity structure from social movement studies has undergone various expansions, including the development of a theory of the industry opportunity structure in social movement studies and of the intellectual opportunity structure in science and technology studies. The chapter then discusses how the theory of the political opportunity structure can be further developed through systematic consideration of its epistemic dimension. This dimension has two pairs of basic features: the level of scientization (the use of technical decision-making criteria) and the extent of public participation in the policy process, and the epistemic culture of risk evaluation (the preference of government regulators for narrow or inclusive methods) and the degree of precautionary preference when making decisions in situations of uncertain evidence. The framework is applied to cases of colony collapse disorder, the regulation of genetically modified food, nanotechnology, the smart meter movement, and climate science denialism.

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