Economizing as Exploring Valuations

This study deals with the building of a specific set of economic valuations throughout the work of French telephone engineers between 1880 and 1938. In so doing, it contributes to our understanding of the complex interplay between economization and valuation. Tracing the changing practices that facilitated a shift from valuation aimed at minimizing force losses to valuation aimed at assessing and enhancing subjective utility, economizing is considered as an epistemic process, through which managers, engineers and workers are exploring, representing and transforming the world. From saving work and minimizing losses to creating value, engineers went from evaluating (telling what is worth, within an economy of force, optimizing the ratio of losses over total work) to valorizing (framing value as possibly produced and not only saved, the production of utility). This new concern for valorization points to the development of new ideas on what could create economic value. In this process, the very acts of measuring, optimizing and calculating, appeared as both “subversive” and “subverted”.

THE NONRANDOM WALK OF KNOWLEDGE

A person’s epistemic goals sometimes clash with pragmatic ones. At times, rational agents will degrade the quality of their epistemic process in order to satisfy a goal that is knowledge-independent (for example, to gain status or at least keep the peace with friends.) This is particularly so when the epistemic quest concerns an abstract political or economic theory, where evidence is likely to be softer and open to interpretation. Before wide-scale adoption of the Internet, people sought out or stumbled upon evidence related to a proposition in a more random way. And it was difficult to aggregate the evidence of friends and other similar people to the exclusion of others, even if one had wanted to. Today, by contrast, the searchable Internet allows people to simultaneously pursue social and epistemic goals.This essay shows that the selection effect caused by a merging of social and epistemic activities will cause both polarization in beliefs and devaluation of expert testimony. This will occur even if agents are rational Bayesians and have moderate credences before talking to their peers. What appears to be rampant dogmatism could be just as well explained by the nonrandom walk in evidence-gathering. This explanation better matches the empirical evidence on how people behave on social media platforms. It also helps clarify why media outlets (not just the Internet platforms) might have their own pragmatic reasons to compromise their epistemic goals in today’s competitive and polarized information market. Yet, it also makes policy intervention much more difficult, since we are unlikely to neatly separate individuals’ epistemic goals from their social ones.

DISCOURSE ON FAILURE OF INTELLIGENCE: A THEORY OF MIND PERSPECTIVE

This article aims at explicating that can we usefully talk about a failure of intelligence and deliberating the perspective of mind theory into it. Failures of intelligence are useful insofar as they can be evaluated so as to improve analysis. In this process, it is important that one considers the psychological processes that underpin analytical failures. It is especially important to consider how failures of intelligence are governed by an insufficient ability to understand the perspectives of others. This ability to determine others mental states is known as the theory of mind. This paper further argues that discourse on the failure of intelligence is increased because of a flaw in the epistemic process among intelligence operators and consumers.

The Interactional Foundations of Economic Forecasting

How do economic forecasters produce legitimate and credible predictions of the economic future, despite most of the economy being transmutable and indeterminate? Using data from a case study of economic forecasting institutes in Germany, this chapter argues that the production of credible economic futures depends on an epistemic process embedded in various forms of interaction. This interactional foundation—through ‘foretalk’ and ‘epistemic participation’ in networks of internal and external interlocutors—sharpens economic forecasts in three ways. First, it brings to light new imaginaries of the economic future, allowing forecasters to spot emerging developments they would otherwise have missed. Second, it ensures the forecasts’ social legitimacy. And finally, it increases the forecasts’ epistemic quality by providing decentralized information about the intentions and assumptions of key economic and political actors.

The Architecture of Ethnographic Knowledge: Narrowing Down Data and Contexts in Search of Sociological Cases

Building ethnographic knowledge is a tacit epistemic process involving two steps: narrowing down the framework through which ethnographers hold constant empirical units as social relationships of the same kind, and paring down the boundaries of time and space to contextualize the data as levels of analysis. This article explicates the workings of and relationships between these hermeneutic and phenomenological processes as the underlying architecture of ethnographic knowledge. It shows that narrowing down data and contexts is fundamental to moving beyond the substantive contribution to the development of sociological cases. In this regard, case development is paradoxical: Narrowing down is necessary for generalizing up.

Epagōgē, Nous and Phantasia in Aristotle’s Logical System

In this paper, I try to show how epagōgē is related to the actions of nous, and furthermore to the kind of calculative (λογιστικὴ) or deliberative (βουλευτικὴ) phantasia analysed by Aristotle in De Anima. By examining the role, whichAristotle attaches to the epagōgē, nous and phantasia, I conclude that the Stagerite philosopher didn’t mean to identify epagōgē merely to a process of systematic correlation of the empirical facts. Experience finds its deserved place inAristotle’s epistemological system, but it is the mind’s actions that lead us to discover the new and the novel. Among them phantasia has a distinguished constructive role. Aristotle in his logical treatises describes the classic theory of syllogismōs and the less systematic theory of epagōgē. Transcribing, however, the argument from the field of logic to one of the epistemic process within Aristotle’s philosophy, I argue that in the light of De Anima, and specifically at those points where the philosopher mentions the power of the mind to imagine and infer, Aristotle’s model of knowledge is better explained, and the epistemic character that the philosopher attributed to the meaning of epagōgē, nous and phantasia is demonstrated in a more complete way.

Taking the Rules of Interpretation Seriously, but Not Literally? A Theoretical Reconstruction of Orthodox Dogma

For international lawyers, the Vienna Convention rules of treaty interpretation are ‘the only game in town’; they have had the whip-hand for several decades now. Yet is this belief in the power(s) of the Vienna rules justified? Behind the claim that they are the law lies a theoretically much more interesting, yet fundamentally unsustainable second argument. It is that rules of interpretation are somehow independent of – and replace – the legal epistemic process, the ascertainment of the law’s meaning-content. These rules are seen as serving a different function, i.e. to regulate the process of the applicative construction of meaning by the organs of international law. They are doctrine’s attempt to control how treaties are construed by tribunals. However, as a matter of legal theory there are severe limits to what such rules can do. Given these limits, we will reconstruct the possible meanings and uses of the Vienna Convention rules.