Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Genes in development : re-reading the molecular paradigm

Introduction / Eva M. Neumann-Held and Christoph Rehmann-Sutter 1 I. Empirical Approaches 1. Genome Analysis and Developmental Biology: The Nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a Model System / Thomas R. Burglin 15 2. Genes and Form: Inherency in the Evolution of Developmental Mechanisms / Stuart A. Newman and Gerd B. Muller 38 II. Looking Back into History 3. From Genes as Determinants to DNA as Resource: Historical Notes on Development and Genetics / Sahotra Sarkar 77 III. Theorizing Genes 4. The Origin of Species: A Structuralist Approach / Gerry Webster and Brian C. Goodwin 99 5. On the Problem of the Molecular versus the Organismic Approach in Biology / Ulrich Wolf 135 6. Genes, Development, and Semiosis / Jesper Hoffmeyer 152 7. The Fearless Vampire Conservator: Philip Kitcher, Genetic Determinism, and the Informational Gene / Paul E. Griffiths 175 8. Genetics from an Evolutionary Process Perspective / James Griesemer 199 9. Genes-Causes-Codes: Deciphering DNAs Ontological Privilege / Eva M. Newmann-Held 238 10. Boundaries and (Constructive) Interaction / Susan Oyama 272 11. Beyond the Gene but Beneath the Skin / Evelyn Fox Keller 290 12. Poiesis and Praxis: Two Modes of Understanding Development / Christoph Rehmann-Sutter 313 IV. Social and Ethical Implications 13. Developmental Emergence, Genes, and Responsible Science / Brian C. Goodwin 337 14. Nothing Like a Gene / Jackie Leach Scully 349 Contributors 365 Index 369

Emergence and embodiment : new essays on second-order systems theory

Emerging in the 1940s, the first cybernetics—the study of communication and control systems—was mainstreamed under the names artificial intelligence and computer science and taken up by the social sciences, the humanities, and the creative arts. In Emergence and Embodiment , Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen focus on cybernetic developments that stem from the second-order turn in the 1970s, when the cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster catalyzed new thinking about the cognitive implications of self-referential systems. The crucial shift he inspired was from first-order cybernetics’ attention to homeostasis as a mode of autonomous self-regulation in mechanical and informatic systems, to second-order concepts of self-organization and autopoiesis in embodied and metabiotic systems. The collection opens with an interview with von Foerster and then traces the lines of neocybernetic thought that have followed from his work. In response to the apparent dissolution of boundaries at work in the contemporary technosciences of emergence, neocybernetics observes that cognitive systems are operationally bounded, semi-autonomous entities coupled with their environments and other systems. Second-order systems theory stresses the recursive complexities of observation, mediation, and communication. Focused on the neocybernetic contributions of von Foerster, Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann, this collection advances theoretical debates about the cultural, philosophical, and literary uses of their ideas. In addition to the interview with von Foerster, Emergence and Embodiment includes essays by Varela and Luhmann. It engages with Humberto Maturana’s and Varela’s creation of the concept of autopoiesis, Varela’s later work on neurophenomenology, and Luhmann’s adaptations of autopoiesis to social systems theory. Taken together, these essays illuminate the shared commitments uniting the broader discourse of neocybernetics. Contributors . Linda Brigham, Bruce Clarke, Mark B. N. Hansen, Edgar Landgraf, Ira Livingston, Niklas Luhmann, Hans-Georg Moeller, John Protevi, Michael Schiltz, Evan Thompson, Francisco J. Varela, Cary Wolfe

The Politics of Liberal Education

Controversy over what role “the great books” should play in college curricula and questions about who defines “the literary canon” are at the forefront of debates in higher education. The Politics of Liberal Education enters this discussion with a sophisticated defense of educational reform in response to attacks by academic traditionalists. The authors here—themselves distinguished scholars and educators—share the belief that American schools, colleges, and universities can do a far better job of educating the nation’s increasingly diverse population and that the liberal arts must play a central role in providing students with the resources they need to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world. Within this area of consensus, however, the contributors display a wide range of approaches, illuminating the issues from the perspectives of their particular disciplines—classics, education, English, history, and philosophy, among others—and their individual experiences as teachers. Among the topics they discuss are canon-formation in the ancient world, the idea of a “common culture,” and the educational implications of such social movements as feminism, technological changes including computers and television, and intellectual developments such as “theory.” Readers interested in the controversies over American education will find this volume an informed alternative to sensationalized treatments of these issues. Contributors. Stanley Fish, Phyllis Franklin, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Henry A. Giroux, Darryl J. Gless, Gerald Graff, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, George A. Kennedy, Bruce Kuklick, Richard A. Lanham, Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich, Alexander Nehamas, Mary Louise Pratt, Richard Rorty, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Comparative Relativism: Symposium on an Impossibility

This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Levi-Strauss’s analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison’s history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry.

Growing Explanations: Historical Perspectives on Recent Science

Introduction: dynamincs all the way up / M. Norton Wise 1 Part I Mathematics, physics, and engineering Elementary particles? 1. Mirror symmetry: persons, values, and objects / Peter Galison 23 Nonlinear dynamics and chaos 2. Chaos, disorder, and mixing: a new fin-de-siecle image of science? / Amy Dahan Dalmedico 67 3. Forms of explanation in the catastrophe theory of Rene Thjom: topology, morphogenesis, and structuralism / David Aubin 95 Coping with complexity in technology 4. From Boeing to Berkeley: civil engineers, the cold war, and the origins of finite element analysis / Ann Johnson 133 5. Fuzzyfying the world: social practices of showing the properties of fuzzy logic / Claude Rosental 159 Part II The organism, the self, and (artificial) life Self-Organization 6. Marrying the premodern to the postmodern: computers and organisms after World War II / Evelyn Fox Keller 181 Immunology 7. Immunology and the enigma of selfhood / Alfred I. Tauber 201 8. Immunology of AIDS: growning explanations and developing instruments / Ilana Lowy 222 Artificial Life 9. Artificial life support: some nodes in the Alife ribotype / Richard Doyle 251 10. The word for world is computer: simulating second natures in artificial life / Stefan Helmreich 275 11. Constructing and explaining emergence in artificial life: on paradigms, ontodefinitions, and general knowledge in biology / Claus Emmeche 301 Afterword 327 Contributors 333 Index 337

What Was "Close Reading"?: A Century of Method in Literary Studies

The article is concerned with the history of “close reading,” understood as a practice crucial to the field of literary studies, vis-à-vis “distant reading,” a range of computational methods identified with the digital humanities. It looks at some early controversies regarding close reading and “the New Criticism,” the movement associated with it, and at how the practice has figured in Anglo-American literary studies over the course of the past century. It turns then to how a certain idea of “close reading” has come to figure in the discourses of the digital humanities. At the end, it offers some general reflections on methods, past and possibly future, in literary studies.

Reply to an Analytic Philosopher

Paul Boghossian stages his commentary on ‘‘Cutting-Edge Equivocation’’ (CE) as an encounter between, on one side, himself as representative of analytic philosophy and defender of classical epistemology and, on the other side, Smith as representative of ‘‘vast numbers of scholars in the humanities and social sciences’’ and defender of a set of claims that ‘‘amount to some species of relativism, a view about knowledge that we [philosophers] believe to have been discredited some time ago.’’ The outcome of the encounter, as Boghossian scripts it, is a vindication of what he acknowledges as the ‘‘deaf ear’’ that he and his colleagues turn to recent work in a number of fields concerned with cognition, knowledge, and science. Viewed from another perspective, however, his commentary could be seen as an exhibition of the remarkable array of techniques through which that self-immurement is perfected and secured. Two general features of Boghossian’s procedure may be noted at the outset. First, to make his commentary work to the ends just indicated, he must ignore the greater part of research and theory in the relevant fields of study and much

Cutting-Edge Equivocation: Conceptual Moves and Rhetorical Strategies in Contemporary Anti-Epistemology

We can derive some sense of the way intellectual life is experienced in an era from the recurrence of certain metaphors used to describe its conduct—for example, the frequency with which, in our own time, intellectual projects and achievements are described in terms of navigational finesse: the charting of passages between extremes, the steering of middle courses, the avoidance of the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis. Thus an advertisement for philosopher Susan Haack’s book, Evidence and Inquiry, features a statement by Hilary Putnam praising the author for ‘‘elaborating and persuasively defending a position . . . which adroitly steers between the Scylla of apriorism and the Charybdis of scientism.’’1 Or again, Image and Logic, by historian of science Peter Galison, is commended by its reviewer, professor of physics Michael Riordan, for ‘‘adroitly side-step[ping] one of the most contentious issues at the heart of current science wars[:] . . . whether scientific measurements stand on their own as arbiters of reality, as the positivists insist [o]r, . . . as the relativists counter, . . . predominantly reflect the biases of the culture that constructs them.’’ Riordan

SCIENTIZING THE HUMANITIES Shifts, Collisions, Negotiations

Advocates of literary Darwinism, cognitive cultural studies, neuroaesthetics, digital humanities, and other such hybrid fields now seek explicitly to make the aims and methods of one or another humanities discipline approximate more closely the aims and methods of science, and at their most visionary, they urge as well the overall integration of the humanities and natural sciences. This essay indicates some major considerations—historical, conceptual, and pragmatic—that may be useful for assessing these efforts and predicting their future. Arguments promoting integration often involve dubious teleological models of intellectual history and betray limited understandings of the distinctive epistemic orientations and cultural functions of the humanities vis-a-vis the sciences. Recurrent institutional difficulties encountered by scholars and/or scientists in hybrid fields reflect steep prestige differentials between the humanities and sciences, along with significant differences of training, experience, style, and temperament. Meanwhile, both the sciences and humanities are being shaken up by technological and related intellectual developments. Though worrisome, the new disciplinary configurations are thus likely to play out in surprising and, not inconceivably, positive ways.

The chimera of relativism: A tragicomedy

In this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Comparative Relativisim,” Smith argues that relativism is a chimera, half straw man, half red herring. Over the past century, she shows, objections to the supposed position so named have typically involved either crucially improper paraphrases of general observations of the variability and contingency of human perceptions, interpretations, and judgments or dismaying inferences gratuitously drawn from such observations. More recently, the label relativism has been elicited by the display, especially by anthropologists or historians, of attitudes of epistemic tolerance or efforts at explanatory or evaluative symmetry. Objections here commonly involve mistaken, unwarranted universalizing of those attitudes or recommendations. Purported refutations of what is identified as relativism commonly have no force for alleged relativists because relativism-refuters commonly deploy and depend on the very concepts (e.g., truth and reason ) and relations (e.g., between what are referred to as facts and evidence ) that are at issue. The result is circular argumentation, intellectual nonengagement, and perfect deadlock. Although there are signs that this tragicomic episode of intellectual history has run its course, two contemporary sites of antirelativist energy are worth noting. One is the claim that so-called cultural relativism is refuted by the existence of cognitive universals. The other is the fear that evaluative symmetry leads to ethically or politically debilitating neutrality. Consideration of the nature of cognitive universals indicates that their existence does not contradict observations of the significance of cultural variability. Consideration of anxieties about the supposed quietistic implications of commitments to epistemic tolerance or symmetry indicates that such anxieties are misplaced.