Explore the vast range of titles available.

In this paper we make a case for the use of multiple theoretical perspectives—theory on boundary objects, epistemic objects, cultural historical activity theory, and objects as infrastructure—to understand the role of objects in cross-disciplinary collaboration. A pluralist approach highlights that objects perform at least three types of work in this context: they motivate collaboration, they allow participants to work across different types of boundaries, and they constitute the fundamental infrastructure of the activity. Building on the results of an empirical study, we illustrate the insights that each theoretical lens affords into practices of collaboration and develop a novel analytical framework that organizes objects according to the active work they perform. Our framework can help shed new light on the phenomenon, especially with regard to the shifting status of objects and sources of conflict (and change) in collaboration. After discussing these novel insights, we outline directions for future research stemming from a pluralist approach. We conclude by noting the managerial implications of our findings.

Natural scientists are increasingly interested in social research because they recognize that conservation problems are commonly social problems. Interpreting social research, however, requires at least a basic understanding of the philosophical principles and theoretical assumptions of the discipline, which are embedded in the design of social research. Natural scientists who engage in social science but are unfamiliar with these principles and assumptions can misinterpret their results. We developed a guide to assist natural scientists in understanding the philosophical basis of social science to support the meaningful interpretation of social research outcomes. The 3 fundamental elements of research are ontology, what exists in the human world that researchers can acquire knowledge about; epistemology, how knowledge is created; and philosophical perspective, the philosophical orientation of the researcher that guides her or his action. Many elements of the guide also apply to the natural sciences. Natural scientists can use the guide to assist them in interpreting social science research to determine how the ontological position of the researcher can influence the nature of the research; how the epistemological position can be used to support the legitimacy of different types of knowledge; and how philosophical perspective can shape the researcher's choice of methods and affect interpretation, communication, and application of results. The use of this guide can also support and promote the effective integration of the natural and social sciences to generate more insightful and relevant conservation research outcomes. Una Guía para Entender la Investigación de Ciencias Sociales para las Ciencias Naturales Katie Moon

Which is prior, the whole or its parts? The holds that the whole is prior to its parts, and thus views the cosmos as fundamental, with metaphysical explanation dangling downward from the One. The holds that the parts are prior to their whole, and thus tends to consider particles fundamental, with metaphysical explanation snaking upward from the many. There seem to be physical and modal considerations that favor the monistic view. Physically, there is good evidence that the cosmos forms an and good reason to treat entangled systems as irreducible wholes. Modally, mereology allows for the possibility of , with no ultimate parts for the pluralist to invoke as the ground of being.

Both material culture studies and ecological anthropology are concerned with the material conditions of social and cultural life. Yet despite advances in each of these fields that have eroded traditional divisions between humanistic and science-based approaches, their respective practitioners continue to talk past one another in largely incommensurate theoretical languages. This review of recent trends in the study of material culture finds the reasons for this in ( a ) a conception of the material world and the nonhuman that leaves no space for living organisms, ( b ) an emphasis on materiality that prioritizes finished artifacts over the properties of materials, and ( c ) a conflation of things with objects that stops up the flows of energy and circulations of materials on which life depends. To overcome these limitations, the review proposes an ecology of materials that focuses on their enrollment in form-making processes. It concludes with some observations on materials, mind, and time.

One of the most astonishing features of human language is its capacity to convey information efficiently in context. Many theories provide informal accounts of communicative inference, yet there have been few successes in making precise, quantitative predictions about pragmatic reasoning. We examined judgments about simple referential communication games, modeling behavior in these games by assuming that speakers attempt to be informative and that listeners use Bayesian inference to recover speakers' intended referents. Our model provides a close, parameter-free fit to human judgments, suggesting that the use of information-theoretic tools to predict pragmatic reasoning may lead to more effective formal models of communication.

This research finds that merely touching an object results in an increase in perceived ownership of that object. For nonowners, or buyers, perceived ownership can be increased with either mere touch or with imagery encouraging touch. Perceived ownership can also be increased through touch for legal owners, or sellers of an object. We also explore valuation of an object and conclude that it is jointly influenced by both perceived ownership and by the valence of the touch experience. We discuss the implications of this research for online and traditional retailers as well as for touch research and endowment effect research.

The question of mediation has become one of the central intellectual problems in the late 20th and 21st centuries, in part because of the extraordinary acceleration of technology, the rampant proliferation of digital media technologies that sometimes goes under the name of \"mediatization.\" Despite widespread theorizing about media prompted by the intense mediatization of the past several decades, mediation is a concept that has been curiously undertheorized. Taking off from William James's understanding of \"radical empiricism,\" Grusin develops the concept of \"radical mediation\" to argue that mediation functions technically, bodily, and materially to generate and modulate individual and collective affective moods or structures of feeling among assemblages of humans and nonhumans. Mediation operates physically and materially as an object, event, or process in the world, impacting humans and nonhumans alike. Radical mediation participates in recent critiques of the dualism of the Western philosophical tradition, which make up what he has elsewhere called the nonhuman turn in 21st-century studies. As he suggests in the final sections, radical mediation might also be understood as nonhuman mediation.

This paper proposes an account of scientific data that makes sense of recent debates on data-driven and ‘big data’ research, while also building on the history of data production and use particularly within biology. In this view, ‘data’ is a relational category applied to research outputs that are taken, at specific moments of inquiry, to provide evidence for knowledge claims of interest to the researchers involved. They do not have truth-value in and of themselves, nor can they be seen as straightforward representations of given phenomena. Rather, they are fungible objects defined by their portability and prospective usefulness as evidence.

This article sketches the outlines of an object-oriented literary criticism, contrasting it with several familiar critical schools. We begin with a summary of two new philosophical trends: speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. The latter approach offers new arguments for the autonomy of objects from their relations, and allows us to consider whether various approaches to literature do justice to this autonomy. The New Criticism insists on the independence of the text, but only at the price of destroying the independence of its internal elements, due to its excessively holistic vision of the textual interior. New Historicism famously embeds the text in its cultural and material surroundings, thereby over-relationizing it, which is found to be philosophically untenable. Deconstruction leads to similar difficulties through its misinterpretation of identity as a form of presence, thereby disallowing any independence of things. In closing, some suggestions are offered for new methods of criticism capable of living up to the unity and autonomy of both the text and its internal elements.

Latour comments on the issues that most critics are looking into, emphasizing the editorial in the New York Times magazine. He emancipates the public from prematurely naturalized objectified facts, for he has been accused of fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument, although he has spent time in showing the lack of scientific certainty. He also argues that if the critical mind renews itself and be relevant again, it has to be found in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude and deal the realism of matters of concern and not matters of fact.