• Title/Summary/Keyword: critical instrumentalism

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A Comparative Study on the Various Perspectives on the Nature of Science through Textbook Analysis Centering on the Consensus View, Features of Science, and Family Resemblance Approach (교과서 분석을 통한 과학의 본성에 대한 여러 관점의 비교 -전통적 접근, 과학의 특성, 가족 유사성 관점을 중심으로-)

  • Jho, Hunkoog
    • Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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    • v.39 no.5
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    • pp.681-694
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    • 2019
  • This study intends to delineate the characteristics of various perspectives on the nature of science (NOS) through the textbook analysis. Thus, centering on a science textbook called Science Laboratory Experiments, this study analyzes the elements of the NOS from three different perspectives: the consensus view, features of science (FOS), and family resemblance approach (FRA). While the consensus view highlights the similar elements of the NOS across the topics, the FOS is concerned about empirical ways for doing science. The FRA rather focuses on socio-cultural aspects of science activities. While the consensus view is useful to reify the features of the NOS, the FRA helps to understand science from various viewpoints. Regarding the philosophical account for three perspectives, all of them are ambiguous to some extent. The consensus view holds contradictory dispositions e.g., relativism vs. (post-)positivism, and critical realism and instrumentalism. The FOS supports empirical tradition but cannot effectively cope with the anomalous situation. The FRA is useful to show up the ways of science in both microscopic (personal) and macroscopic (social) viewpoints. However, the broader concept about science may mislead understanding of the NOS. Consequently, this study provides some implication for improving the framework of the NOS and teaching the NOS in the classroom.

Does IT ODA Promote Democracy in Developing Countries? : A challenge to optimistic technological determinism (IT ODA, 개발도상국의 민주주의 발전을 가져오는가? - 낙관적 기술결정론에 대한 도전 -)

  • Song, Hyojin
    • Informatization Policy
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    • v.22 no.1
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    • pp.73-95
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    • 2015
  • This research has a purpose to verify whether the Internet diffusion through the Official Development Assistance (ODA) can bring about democratic changes in authoritarian political system of developing countries. This research has found out that IT ODA has 'positive(+)' effect on the Internet diffusion in recipient countries. It seems to support the expectation of donor countries that they can lead the political democratization by constructing infrastructure and promoting the use of the Internet. However, as the impact of IT ODA on the Internet diffusion is not considerable as well as the Internet diffusion has no strong influence on the development of democracy in developing countries, and also each of these aspects of countries looks different, it is hard to see that the democratization hypothesis based on the optimistic technological determinism is reasonable. Therefore, this paper argues that IT ODA must be based on not blind optimism that IT transfer will lead to the political democratization in developing countries, but the social structuralism which is based on distinctiveness and uniqueness of countries. and suggests that the discuss of the effect of IT ODA proceed with the constructive way.

A Study of the Continuity Between the American Romance Novel and American Pragmatism: A Reading of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (미국의 로맨스 소설과 프래그머티즘 철학과의 연속성에 관한 고찰-허먼 멜빌의 『모비딕』을 중심으로)

  • Hwang, Jaekwang
    • Journal of English Language & Literature
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    • v.58 no.2
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    • pp.217-247
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    • 2012
  • This essay attempts to read Melville's Moby-Dick as a prefiguration of American pragmatism, especially Jamesian version of it. Underlying this project is the assumption that the American Romance and James's pragmatism partake in the enduring tradition of American thoughts and imagination. Despite the commonality in their roots, the continuity between these two products of American culture has received few critical assessments. The American Romance has rarely been discussed in terms of American pragmatism in part because critics have tended to narrowly define the latter as a kind of relativistic philosophy equivalent to practical instrumentalism, political realism and romantic utilitarianism. Consequently, they have favored literary works in the realistic tradition for their textual analyses, while eschewing a more imaginative genre like the American Romance. My contention is that James's version of pragmatism is a future oriented pluralism which is unable to dispense with the power of imagination and the talent for seeing unforeseen possibilities inherent in nature and culture. James's pragmatism is in tune with the American Romance in that it savours the attractions of alternative possibilities created by the genre in which the imaginary world is imbued with the actual one. The pragmatic impulse in Moby-Dick finds its finest expression in the words and acts of Ishmael. Through this protean narrator, Melville renders the text of Moby-Dick symbolic, fragmentary and thereby pluralistic in its meaning. With his rhetoric of incompletion and by refraining from totalizing what he experiences, Ishmael shuns finality in truth and entices the reader to join his intellectual journey with a non-foundational notion of truth and meaning in view. Ishmael also envisages pragmatists' beliefs that experience is fluid in nature and the universe is in a constant state of becoming. Yet Ishmael as the narrator of Moby-Dick is more functional than foundational.

A Study on Cinematic Representations of Posthuman Girls in South Korea-Focused on The Silenced and The Witch: Part 1. The Subversion (한국 영화에 나타난 포스트휴먼 소녀의 재현 양상 연구 -<경성학교: 사라진 소녀들>, <마녀>를 중심으로)

  • Kim, Eun Joung
    • Journal of Popular Narrative
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    • v.27 no.3
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    • pp.95-124
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    • 2021
  • As the symbolic images of girls besides its definition have varied according to the age and society, a posthuman girl character recently appears in the digital cinema. This study aims to analyze its cinematic representations and the social contexts in which they are created. For this purpose, the study focuses on what extent the society allows its imagined figurations as a future female body and the meanings revolving around the image of 'technologically body-enhanced female fighter'. Current digital visualization technology has developed to the extent any imaged future humans can be represented, but posthuman girls' representations have its limitation that only a human-like figuration can be allowed in accord with the traditionally idolized image of girls. It is because of the representation logic in which digital cinema is visualized based on perceptual realism that values audiences' experiences. Despite such less critical figuration which does not dare to cross the boundary between the image of human and inhuman, the posthuman girl characters create a new category of the 'dangerous girls' who are both void of sexual femininity and independent of motherhood and heterosexual romance narrative. Of course, they support the modern human-centered belief that humans can take entire control of technology with their moral behaviors and dispel the fear about the negative impact the nature of technology may have on society at large by showing their child-like figuration protecting ethical values. However, the new character of 'unruly girl' exerts her subversive act that seeks to fight against the human-centered liberal humanistic values and melancholic feeling and vulnerability that the neoliberalism and technocracy enforce. When posthuman girl characters are considered to be a marker through which we can see how different social forces are intervening and competing each other in the upcoming posthuman age, the limited figuration of the posthuman girl characters in South Korean movies illustrates the opinionated thoughts toward the instrumentalism in technology but their bloodshed struggles reveal how the corporate or state-governed techno-biopower has oppressively treated and appropriated the human body as the technology-object and also provide a meaningful opportunity to rethink its unethical violence.

New horizon of geographical method (인문지리학 방법론의 새로운 지평)

  • ;Choi, Byung-Doo
    • Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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    • v.38
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    • pp.15-36
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    • 1988
  • In this paper, I consider the development of methods in contemporary human geography in terms of a dialectical relation of action and structure, and try to draw a new horizon of method toward which geographical research and spatial theory would develop. The positivist geography which was dominent during 1960s has been faced both with serious internal reflections and strong external criticisms in the 1970s. The internal reflections that pointed out its ignorance of spatial behavior of decision-makers and its simplication of complex spatial relations have developed behavioural geography and systems-theoretical approach. Yet this kinds of alternatives have still standed on the positivist, geography, even though they have seemed to be more real and complicate than the previous one, The external criticisms that have argued against the positivist method as phenomenalism and instrumentalism suggest some alternatives: humanistic geography which emphasizes intention and action of human subject and meaning-understanding, and structuralist geography which stresses on social structure as a totality which would produce spatial phenomena, and a theoretical formulation. Human geography today can be characterized by a strain and conflict between these methods, and hence rezuires a synthetic integration between them. Philosophy and social theory in general are in the same in which theories of action and structural analysis have been complementary or conflict with each other. Human geography has fallen into a further problematic with the introduction of a method based on so-called political ecnomy. This method has been suggested not merely as analternative to the positivist geography, but also as a theoretical foundation for critical analysis of space. The political economy of space with has analyzed the capitalist space and tried to theorize its transformation may be seen either as following humanistic(or Hegelian) Marxism, such as represented in Lefebvre's work, or as following structuralist Marxism, such as developed in Castelles's or Harvey's work. The spatial theory following humanistic Marxism has argued for a dialectic relation between 'the spatial' and 'the social', and given more attention to practicing human agents than to explaining social structures. on the contray, that based on structuralist Marxism has argued for social structures producing spatial phenomena, and focused on theorising the totality of structures, Even though these two perspectives tend more recently to be convergent in a way that structuralist-Marxist. geographers relate the domain of economic and political structures with that of action in their studies of urban culture and experience under capitalism, the political ecnomy of space needs an integrated method with which one can overcome difficulties of orthhodox Marxism. Some novel works in philosophy and social theory have been developed since the end of 1970s which have oriented towards an integrated method relating a series of concepts of action and structure, and reconstructing historical materialism. They include Giddens's theory of structuration, foucault's geneological analysis of power-knowledge, and Habermas's theory of communicative action. Ther are, of course, some fundamental differences between these works. Giddens develops a theory which relates explicitly the domain of action and that of structure in terms of what he calls the 'duality of structure', and wants to bring time-space relations into the core of social theory. Foucault writes a history in which strategically intentional but nonsubjective power relations have emerged and operated by virtue of multiple forms of constrainst wihthin specific spaces, while refusing to elaborate any theory which would underlie a political rationalization. Habermas analyzes how the Western rationalization of ecnomic and political systems has colonized the lifeworld in which we communicate each other, and wants to formulate a new normative foundation for critical theory of society which highlights communicatie reason (without any consideration of spatial concepts). On the basis of the above consideration, this paper draws a new norizon of method in human geography and spatial theory, some essential ideas of which can be summarized as follows: (1) the concept of space especially in terms of its relation to sociery. Space is not an ontological entity whch is independent of society and has its own laws of constitution and transformation, but it can be produced and reproduced only by virtue of its relation to society. Yet space is not merlely a material product of society, but also a place and medium in and through which socety can be maintained or transformed.(2) the constitution of space in terms of the relation between action and structure. Spatial actors who are always knowledgeable under conditions of socio-spatial structure produce and reproduce their context of action, that is, structure; and spatial structures as results of human action enable as well as constrain it. Spatial actions can be distinguished between instrumental-strategicaction oriented to success and communicative action oriented to understanding, which (re)produce respectively two different spheres of spatial structure in different ways: the material structure of economic and political systems-space in an unknowledged and unitended way, and the symbolic structure of social and cultural life-space in an acknowledged and intended way. (3) the capitalist space in terms of its rationalization. The ideal development of space would balance the rationalizations of system space and life-space in a way that system space providers material conditions for the maintainance of the life-space, and the life-space for its further development. But the development of capitalist space in reality is paradoxical and hence crisis-ridden. The economic and poltical system-space, propelled with the steering media like money, and power, has outstriped the significance of communicative action, and colonized the life-space. That is, we no longer live in a space mediated communicative action, but one created for and by money and power. But no matter how seriously our everyday life-space has been monetalrized and bureaucratised, here lies nevertheless the practical potential which would rehabilitate the meaning of space, the meaning of our life on the Earth.

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