An Alternative View on the World of Neoliberalism (January 2014)

2017 ◽  
pp. 196-200
Keyword(s):  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-782
Author(s):  
Ekaterina L. Kapustina

The article performs the current discussion of such categories as local and global in modern anthropology and suggests the option of using categories for the modern sociocultural reality of Dagestan society. The positions of leading researchers, deconstructing the concepts of “locality” and “community”, offering an alternative view of a traditional society rooted in a particular place, are demonstrated. Deterritorized societies in the face of significant social changes in the world (migration, including transnational and translocal, as well as the process of globalization) are becoming a new form of social interaction, where physical locality gives way to other categories linking people into relevant communities. In relation to the Dagestan realities, it is proposed to consider local deterritized societies through the prism of the conceptual metaphor “global village”. The factors contributing to the formation of such deterritorialized communities are shown. It is also shown the example of such a community - the village of Bezhta situated on the bordeland with the Republic of Georgia. A look at the complex of physical localities united by belonging to this mountain village (the village itself, resettlement villages on the plain of Dagestan, families located outside the republic in labor migration and living a translocal life, and also to a lesser extent the village of Chantliskuri in Georgia) as version of the "global village".


Author(s):  
Joachim K. Rennstich

The new information age has the potential not only to alter the historical path of world system development, as other socio-technological paradigmatic shifts have done, but also to transform it substantially. One school of thought argues for a complete upending of past patterns with nation states in their hierarchical alignment as the center core and periphery of power in this system. An alternative view instead argues that the regularized interaction that characterizes a world system may envisage a number of modes of production without altering its fundamental structure. The world system in this view is made up of a variety of complex intra-organizational and interorganizational networks intersecting with geographical networks structured particularly around linked clusters of socioeconomic activity. Information and carrier technologies based on new forms of information technologies and their connection to network technologies play a vital role in the long-term evolution of world system development characterized by both path-dependencies and major transformations that result from technological innovations. While digital information technologies significantly alter the processing and use of information as a central element of power and control within this network structure and therefore its network logic, they do not break the evolutionary process of world system development.


Author(s):  
Ilya T. Kasavina ◽  
◽  

In the philosophy of science and technology, scientific progress has been usually considered in a logical-methodological way, namely, from the point of view of the capacity to solve problems, the theoretical and empirical success of a certain theory or scientific research program. These are the concepts of K. Popper, I. Lakatos, and L. Laudan. They are opposed by historical and sociological ap­proaches to the development of science by T. Kuhn, S. Toulmin, and P. Feyer­abend. The article proposes a variant of the second approach – socio-epistemo­logical and, in particular, value interpretation of scientific progress shifting the focus of the discourse on scientific progress to the world-view and ideological circumstances of the development of science not only as knowledge, but as a form of culture and social institution. There is a polemic with the thesis by A.L. Nikiforov about the dominant pragmatic need for science and the primacy of its applied results, as ifthe modern achievement of which science has al­legedly fulfilled as well as the purpose prescribed to it by F. Bacon, and even ex­hausted its progressive potential. Criticism of the position by A.L. Nikiforov is based on an alternative view on science, which follows from a different interpre­tation of the New Times scientific revolution and the purpose of science in gen­eral. Scientific progress is seen in the creation by science of a new image of the world, new ways of communication, new moral guidelines, the design of new ways of social order. Such a science does not fit into the narrow, logical-method­ological criteria of scientific rationality. However, it is precisely this culture-forming, socio-cultural function of science that allows us to talk about science as an enterprise that contributes to social progress and, if progressive, it is precisely because of this circumstance.


Author(s):  
Francisco J. Varela ◽  
Evan Thompson ◽  
Eleanor Rosch

This chapter demonstrates how unique histories of structural coupling can be understood from the vantage point of evolution. To this end, it provides a critique of the adaptationist view of evolution as a process of progressive fitness, and articulates an alternative view of evolution as natural drift. These unique histories of coupling, which enact incommensurable kinds of “color space,” should not be explained as optimal adaptations to different regularities in the world. Instead, they should be explained as the result of different histories of natural drift. Moreover, since organism and environment cannot be separated but are in fact codetermined in evolution as natural drift, the environmental regularities that one associates with these various color spaces must ultimately be specified in tandem with the perceptually guided activity of the animal.


Author(s):  
Dominik Giese ◽  
Jonathan Joseph

This chapter evaluates critical realism, a term which refers to a philosophy of science connected to the broader approach of scientific realism. In contrast to other philosophies of science, such as positivism and post-positivism, critical realism presents an alternative view on the questions of what is ‘real’ and how one can generate scientific knowledge of the ‘real’. How one answers these questions has implications for how one studies science and society. The critical realist answer starts by prioritizing the ontological question over the epistemological one, by asking: What must the world be like for science to be possible? Critical realism holds the key ontological belief of scientific realism that there is a reality which exists independent of our knowledge and experience of it. Critical realists posit that reality is more complex, and made up of more than the directly observable. More specifically, critical realism understands reality as ‘stratified’ and composed of three ontological domains: the empirical, the actual, and the real. Here lies the basis for causation.


Author(s):  
Bradford Skow

The common view about background conditions is that the difference between causes and background conditions is pragmatic, drawn in language not the world. This chapter defends an alternative view, on which the difference is metaphysical, drawn in the world not in language. This alternative says that something is a background condition to C’s causing E iff it is a state (rather than an event) that is a reason why C caused E. This theory is used to answer the question of what it is to manifest a disposition; briefly, something manifests a disposition to M in C if its having that disposition is a background condition to the Cing causing the Ming.


1976 ◽  
Vol 54 (20) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
ALBERT F. PLANT
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-443
Author(s):  
ASYA PASSINSKY

AbstractThere is a widespread sentiment that social objects such as nation-states, borders, and pieces of money are just figments of our collective imagination and not really ‘out there’ in the world. Call this the ‘antirealist intuition’. Eliminativist, reductive materialist, and immaterialist views of social objects can all make sense of the antirealist intuition, in one way or another. But these views face serious difficulties. A promising alternative view is nonreductive materialism. Yet it is unclear whether and how nonreductive materialists can make sense of the antirealist intuition. I develop a version of nonreductive materialism that is able to meet this explanatory demand. The central idea is that social objects are materially constituted, response-dependent objects. I go on to offer an independent argument in favor of this response-dependent view of social objects. I then suggest that a proponent of this view can appeal to the response-dependent nature of social objects to explain, or explain away, the antirealist intuition.


1991 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Goldie

In the eighteenth century, most Scottish Protestants took it for granted that Roman Catholicism was antithetical to the spirit of “this enlightened age.” Amid the several polarities that framed their social theory—barbarism and politeness, superstition and rational enquiry, feudal and commercial, Highland and Lowland—popery in every case stood with the first term and Protestantism with the second. Sir Walter Scott's Redgauntlet, set in the 1760s, is redolent of these contrarieties. He draws a stark contrast between the world of Darsie Latimer, the cosmopolitan, bourgeois, and Presbyterian world of an Edinburgh attorney, and the world of Hugh Redgauntlet, rugged and rude, clannish and popish. When the Stuart Pretender appears on the scene he is disguised as a prelate, his odor more of sinister hegemony than of pious sanctimony. Scott's tableau captured the Enlightenment commonplace that the purblind faith of popery was a spiritual halter by which the credulous were led into political despotism. Catholicism, by its treasonable Jacobitism and its mendacious superstition, seemed self-exiled from the royal road of Scottish civil and intellectual improvement.It is not too harsh to suggest that modern scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has implicitly endorsed this view, for next to nothing has been written about the intellectual history of Scottish Catholicism, let alone anything comparable with the two full-scale studies now available on the English Catholic Enlightenment. One historian has suggested an alternative view, by suggesting that, in the emergence of the Scottish Enlightenment, it was Catholics and Episcopalians who, as alienated outsiders, helped loosen the straitjacket of Calvinist orthodoxy.


Author(s):  
Gilda A. Morelli ◽  
Nandita Chaudhary ◽  
Alma Gottlieb ◽  
Heidi Keller ◽  
Marjorie Murray ◽  
...  

This chapter presents an alternative view to classic attachment theory and research, arguing for systematic, ethnographically informed, approaches to the study of child development. It begins with the observation that the attachment relationships children develop are locally determined and insists that these features of attachment can only be captured through observing, talking with, and listening to local people as they go about living their lives, including caring for children. It reviews the profound ways in which child care around the world differs from the Western model, upon which attachment theory was founded and myriad recommendations have been derived. This worldwide account perspective of child care is profusely illustrated with ethnographic examples. Network theory is then discussed: from the full range of social networks to relational ones (i.e., smaller sets of individuals to whom children may become attached). The chapter considers attachment theorists’ resistance to the idea of multiple attachments, historically and still today. Discussion closes with a summary of the implications of our theoretical rethinking and the questions that remain.


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