Michael Patrick Lynch
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 714088 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Michael Patrick Lynch |
| NOMBRES | Michael Patrick |
| APELLIDO | Lynch |
| FIRMA | LYNCH M P |
| AFILIACIONES | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9535-6461 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 51 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 291 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 50 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1981 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2024 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Proverbial economies of STS
This article discusses examples from an extended family of aphorisms, stories, and themes that have circulated widely in STS and remain associated with the formation and integration of the field. Drawing upon Harvey Sacks’s insightful remarks about features of everyday conversation, which he related to ancient practices in oral culture, we argue that familiar citation magnets in STS operate in many respects like proverbs, parables, and an extende…
Paper City
Paper City (2021), directed by Adrian Francis, is a documentary film that highlights the 70th anniversary of the firebombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945. The film presents three elderly survivors' oral accounts of the firebombing and observes their work as memory activists in a long campaign to compel the Japanese government to publicly memorialize the event in a way commensurate with its enormous devastation. Reflecting on issues of memory and fo…
Memes, Misinformation, and Political Meaning
Are most people sincere when they share misinformation and conspiracies online? This question, while natural and important, is difficult to answer for obvious reasons. But it also applies poorly to one of the main vehicles for misinformation—memes. And it can be ambiguous; as a result, we should be mindful of two distinctions. First, a distinction between belief and a related propositional attitude, commitment. And second, the distinction between…
Power, Bald-Faced Lies and Contempt for Truth
Bald-faced lies are on the uptick by political leaders in democracies worldwide. In the United States, for example, we are becoming numb not only to outrageous falsehoods, but to the bizarre self-assurance with which they are pronounced. We were told crowds were bigger than they were, that the sun shined when it didn’t, that Trump won in a landslide—and that was just in the first few days after his election. What has shocked so many is the fearle…
Power, Bald-Faced Lies and Contempt for Truth
Does logical pluralism imply, or suggest, truth pluralism, or vice versa
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Humility
Extended cognition is when cognitive processes extend beyond the brain and nervous system of the subject, and in the process properly include such ‘external’ devices as technology. This paper explores what relevance extended cognitive processes might have for humility, and especially for the specifically cognitive aspect of humility—viz., intellectual humility. As regards humility in general, it is argued that there are no in principle barriers t…
Conviction and humility
Can we be intellectually humble about our own convictions? Should we be? These two questions have both a personal and political relevance in our lives. This chapter examines them in light of a theory of conviction according to which our convictions are commitments that reflect our self-identity and hence are hyper-resistant to counter-evidence. Nonetheless, I argue, individuals can have conviction and humility at the same time; more importantly, …
We Have Never Been Anti-Science
This essay addresses the so-called "post-truth" era in which scientific evidence of, for example, climate change, is given little weight compared to more immediate appeals to emotion and belief, and examines the relationship of alleged anti-science and populist irrationality to left- and right-wing political alignments. It also addresses charges of anti-science that were once leveled at Science and Technology Studies (STS) itself, and particularl…
Les fake news et l’avenir de la vérité
Pourquoi la pollution de l’information se répand elle si aisément dans le media sociaux ? et pourquoi est-il si vain de recourir aux preuves et aux données pour la combattre ? Ma réponse repose sur une nouvelle hypothèse au sujet de la fonction de certains de nos actes de communication dans les media sociaux. Elle vise à comprendre le phénomène des fake news, mais aussi la communication en général
Epistemic Arrogance and the Value of Political Dissent
Lynch writes about what he calls “discursive political dissent,” that is, dissent that is voiced in the form of an argument and that aims at influencing policy or people’s beliefs about policies. This kind of dissent, Lynch argues, can be epistemically valuable when it brings about positive epistemic consequences in the right kind of circumstances. Not every case of discursive political dissent will bring about these positive consequences, especi…
It’s Important to Go to the Laboratory
Why would anyone still want to go to the laboratory in 2018? In this interview, Michael Lynch answers this and other questions, reflecting on his own journey in, through, and alongside the field of science and technology studies (STS). Starting from his days as a student of Harold Garfinkel’s at UCLA to more recent times as editor of Social Studies of Science, Lynch talks about the rise of origin stories in the field; the role of ethnomethodology…
Science and Technology Studies
Adjudication in Action
Constructing the East-West Boundary
This article presents a case study of a recent controversy over the use of computed tomography (CT) as a diagnostic technology in South Korean hospitals. The controversy occurred in the wake of a series of conflicts in the late twentieth century over the legitimate placement of healing practices, medicinal substances, and medical technologies within Korea's separate "Western Medicine" (WM) and "Korean Medicine" (KM) systems of health care and pha…
Truth and Freedom
Richard Rorty once famously remarked that, "if you take care of freedom, truth will take of itself." I take there to be something deeply right about this thought—but I also think there is something profoundly misleading about it is as well. In this essay I want to say why that is, and why truth and freedom need each other—neither can go it alone. Thanks to David Pruitt, Nate Sheff and Samuel Wheeler for comments.Notes1. David Estlund, "Beyond Fai…
Three Questions for Truth Pluralism
This chapter puts three questions to the pluralist and provide three answers. How can those properties by virtue of which propositions are true be identified? Answer: by seeing which properties play the truth-role and hence have the truish features. How are those properties related to truth? Answer: Truth as such is the property that has the truish features essentially. But truth can be immanent in distinct properties, properties that have the tr…
Ontography
In this postscript to the special issue of Social Studies of Science on the ‘turn to ontology’ in science and technology studies, I discuss a tension that runs through many of the articles in the issue. This is a tension between adopting a general philosophical ontology and pursuing empirical studies of particular historical and contemporary practices. The general ontology highlights multiplicity and difference and rejects the idea that, for exam…
Ad hoc special section on ethnomethodological studies of science, mathematics, and technical activity
After Truth Gives Way
At first glance, Mark Richard's recent book When Truth Gives Out appears, in the most commendable sense of the word, ‘old‐fashioned’. Its central thesis is that truth is sometimes the wrong standard to use when assessing the judgements we make about the world. Not all correct judgements are true, and not all incorrect ones are false. They can all be measured, but they cannot all be measured in the same way. Many of the heroes of old, ensconced in…
Truth as One and Many
How can we understand truth as both many and one? This chapter supplies an answer: truth is an immanent functional property. This is alethic functionalism. To say that truth is a functional property implies that propositions are true when they have a property that plays the truth-role. A property plays the truth-role when it has the truish features — those features described by the folk truisms discussed in Chapter 1. The property of truth itself…
Science as a Vacation
This paper half-seriously considers a negative answer to the thematic question of whether science and technology studies (STS) `means business'. The question addresses whether or not STS research can be translated, applied, or otherwise made useful. It is easy enough to affirm that such research can be translated, or as I would prefer to say accommodated, to various local organizational environments, but this begs questions about just what is tra…
A coherent moral relativism
The Skeptic Way
Chase Wrenn, The True and the Good
I.1 The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar
Ontography
In this postscript to the special issue of Social Studies of Science on the ‘turn to ontology’ in science and technology studies, I discuss a tension that runs through many of the articles in the issue. This is a tension between adopting a general philosophical ontology and pursuing empirical studies of particular historical and contemporary practices. The general ontology highlights multiplicity and difference and rejects the idea that, for exam…
Counting Things and People
Many scientific and nonscientific activities involve practices of counting. Counting is, perhaps, the most elementary of numerical practices: an ability to count is presupposed in arithmetic and other branches of mathematics, and counting also is part of innumerable everyday and specialized activities. Though it is a simple practice when considered abstractly, in specific cases counting can be quite complicated, contentious, and socially conseque…
Archives in formation
The article begins with Derrida’s etymology of the word ‘archive’: a privileged site to which records are officially consigned and in which they are guarded by legal authority. It explores contemporary variations on the theme of archive. The cases presented include efforts to construct scholarly archives that stand as personal monuments, struggles over the collection and consignment of records during official investigations of government scandals…
Perceptions of News Credibility about the War in Iraq
This study investigated cross-media credibility perception with respect to news coverage about the Iraq War. In an environment of political partisanship, perceptions of media credibility were likely affected by the audience's political position on the war. Based on hostile media effect theory, a set of hypotheses was proposed to investigate whether the minority opinion group, war opponents, evaluated the Internet as a more credible medium than di…
Minimalism and the Value of Truth
Minimalists generally see themselves as engaged in a descriptive project. They maintain that they can explain everything we want to say about truth without appealing to anything other than the T‐schema, i.e., the idea that the proposition that p is true i. p. I argue that despite recent claims to the contrary, minimalists cannot explain one important belief many people have about truth, namely, that truth is good. If that is so, then minimalism, …
The Idylls of the Academy
In contemporary social theory, foundational concepts of ideology, mentality and value have lost favour, while relativistic conceptions of texts, bodies and practices are on the rise. Those who celebrate this displacement often bill it as a radical break from 'traditional', 'conventional' or 'mainstream' academic programmes. Although such radicalism itself has become conventional in many fields, it retains a strong investment in its own novelty an…
Truth, Value and Epistemic Expressivism
Alethic Functionalism and Our Folk Theory of Truth
Pandora's Ballot Box
In the weeks following the 2000 US Presidential Election, it became clear to many of us that the protracted contest over the Florida electoral votes was replete with science and technology studies (S&TS) themes. Like several nationally televised political spectacles in recent years, the controversy was widely characterized as a 'civics lesson'. It also offered specific S&TS lessons that invited further exploration. The media coverage and court ca…
Constructing the East-West Boundary
This article presents a case study of a recent controversy over the use of computed tomography (CT) as a diagnostic technology in South Korean hospitals. The controversy occurred in the wake of a series of conflicts in the late twentieth century over the legitimate placement of healing practices, medicinal substances, and medical technologies within Korea's separate "Western Medicine" (WM) and "Korean Medicine" (KM) systems of health care and pha…
Proverbial economies of STS
This article discusses examples from an extended family of aphorisms, stories, and themes that have circulated widely in STS and remain associated with the formation and integration of the field. Drawing upon Harvey Sacks’s insightful remarks about features of everyday conversation, which he related to ancient practices in oral culture, we argue that familiar citation magnets in STS operate in many respects like proverbs, parables, and an extende…
Adjudication in Action
Ad hoc special section on ethnomethodological studies of science, mathematics, and technical activity
Zombies and the Case of the Phenomenal Pickpocket
Scientism and Philosophism
Gabriel Stolzenberg's (2004) review essay of Labinger and Collins (2001) raises a number of provocative points, but I will respond only to one that he makes in passing. While discussing my essay in the collection (Lynch, 2001), Stolzenberg (2004: 80) refers to a statement of Steven Weinberg's (2001: 240) with which I express agreement: 'Less thoughtfully, ... Lynch endorses Weinberg's anti-intellectual conceit that philosophers may be able to hel…
A so-called 'fraud
Physicist Alan Sokal achieved a moment of fame by announcing that he had succeeded in publishing an article in the cultural studies journal Social Text, which was 'sprinkled with nonsense' about developments in quantum gravity physics that supposedly converge with post- modernist themes. Sokal announced his hoax in an article in the liter ary magazine Lingua Franca. This touched off an intense flurry of commentary. Many commentators praised Sokal…
I.1 The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar
Contemporary Science and Natural Explanation
Shaping Technology, Building Society
Technology is everywhere, yet a theory of technology and its social dimension remains to be fully developed. Building on the influential book The Social Construction of Technological Systems, this volume carries forward the project of creating a theory of technological development and implementation that is strongly grounded in both sociology and history. The 12 essays address the central question of how technologies become stabilized, how they a…
Infants' vocalization patterns across home and laboratory environments
Differences in infants' vocalization patterns across home and laboratory recordings were examined. Audiorecordings of the infants were made in both environments during the month immediately following the observed onset of speech-like (canonical) syllables. Analyses indicated that: (a) infants produced more vocalizations per minute in the home than in the laboratory, (b) the vocalizations in the home included higher proportions of speech-like syll…
Speech-like vocalizations in infancy
This work reports longitudinal evaluation of the speech-like vocal development of infants born at risk due to prematurity or low socio-economic status (SES) and infants not subject to such risk. Twenty infants were preterm (10 of low SES) and 33 were full term (16 of low SES), and all were studied from 0;4 through 1;6. The study provides the indication that at-risk infants are not generally delayed in the ability to produce well-formed speech-lik…
Infants' vocalization patterns across home and laboratory environments
Differences in infants' vocalization patterns across home and laboratory recordings were examined. Audiorecordings of the infants were made in both environments during the month immediately following the observed onset of speech-like (canonical) syllables. Analyses indicated that: (a) infants produced more vocalizations per minute in the home than in the laboratory, (b) the vocalizations in the home included higher proportions of speech-like syll…
The Idylls of the Academy
In contemporary social theory, foundational concepts of ideology, mentality and value have lost favour, while relativistic conceptions of texts, bodies and practices are on the rise. Those who celebrate this displacement often bill it as a radical break from 'traditional', 'conventional' or 'mainstream' academic programmes. Although such radicalism itself has become conventional in many fields, it retains a strong investment in its own novelty an…
A so-called 'fraud
Physicist Alan Sokal achieved a moment of fame by announcing that he had succeeded in publishing an article in the cultural studies journal Social Text, which was 'sprinkled with nonsense' about developments in quantum gravity physics that supposedly converge with post- modernist themes. Sokal announced his hoax in an article in the liter ary magazine Lingua Franca. This touched off an intense flurry of commentary. Many commentators praised Sokal…
Minimal Realism or Realistic Minimalism
Journal Article Minimal Realism or Realistic Minimalism? Get access A Realist Conception of Truth. By William P. Alston Michael P. Lynch Michael P. Lynch University of Mississippi Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 47, Issue 189, October 1997, Pages 512–518, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9213.00076 Published: 07 January 2003
Truth in Context
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 1999 Academic debates about pluralism and truth have become increasingly polarized in recent years. One side embraces extreme relativism, deeming any talk of objective truth as philosophically naïve. The opposition, frequently arguing that any sort of relativism leads to nihilism, insists on an objective notion of truth according to which there is only one true story of the world. Both sides agree that ther…
Introduction
Archives in formation
The article begins with Derrida’s etymology of the word ‘archive’: a privileged site to which records are officially consigned and in which they are guarded by legal authority. It explores contemporary variations on the theme of archive. The cases presented include efforts to construct scholarly archives that stand as personal monuments, struggles over the collection and consignment of records during official investigations of government scandals…
The Reality of Law
Part I Theory and method in the sociology of law: introduction to part I the problem of the missing what in contemporary research and theorising on law and legal phenomena ethnomethodology and legal work. Part II Pursuing the animal - the case of a firm of criminal defence lawyers: introduction to part II the phenomena of a firm of radical lawyers the work of a criminal practice persuading a client to plead guilty preparing a crown court trial co…
Beyond the Walls of Reason
Journal Article Beyond the Walls of Reason Get access The Last Word. By Thomas Nagel. ( Oxford UP, 1997. Pp. viii + 147. Price $19.95.) Michael P. Lynch Michael P. Lynch University of Mississippi Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 49, Issue 197, October 1999, Pages 529–536, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9213.00159 Published: 07 January 2003
Pandora's Ballot Box
In the weeks following the 2000 US Presidential Election, it became clear to many of us that the protracted contest over the Florida electoral votes was replete with science and technology studies (S&TS) themes. Like several nationally televised political spectacles in recent years, the controversy was widely characterized as a 'civics lesson'. It also offered specific S&TS lessons that invited further exploration. The media coverage and court ca…
Truth in Context
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 1999 Academic debates about pluralism and truth have become increasingly polarized in recent years. One side embraces extreme relativism, deeming any talk of objective truth as philosophically naive. The opposition, frequently arguing that any sort of relativism leads to nihilism, insists on an objective notion of truth according to which there is only one true story of the world. Both sides agree that ther…
Lynch's Metaphysical Pluralism
Scientism and Philosophism
Gabriel Stolzenberg's (2004) review essay of Labinger and Collins (2001) raises a number of provocative points, but I will respond only to one that he makes in passing. While discussing my essay in the collection (Lynch, 2001), Stolzenberg (2004: 80) refers to a statement of Steven Weinberg's (2001: 240) with which I express agreement: 'Less thoughtfully, ... Lynch endorses Weinberg's anti-intellectual conceit that philosophers may be able to hel…
Minimalism and the Value of Truth
Minimalists generally see themselves as engaged in a descriptive project. They maintain that they can explain everything we want to say about truth without appealing to anything other than the T‐schema, i.e., the idea that the proposition that p is true i. p. I argue that despite recent claims to the contrary, minimalists cannot explain one important belief many people have about truth, namely, that truth is good. If that is so, then minimalism, …
Sex Crime
Terry Thomas Devon, Willan Publishing, 2005, pp. 214, ISBN 1 84392 105 7, £17.99 Thomas’s latest offering looks at the discourse and debate that the first edition helped to formulate and inform. Thomas begins with a three-part question that looks to how do we identify the sex offender, what do we do with him when we get him and how do we monitor him if he is re-integrated back into society? These questions are the backbone of the book that weaves…
Alethic Functionalism and Our Folk Theory of Truth
ReWrighting Pluralism
Journal Article ReWrighting Pluralism Get access Michael P. Lynch Michael P. Lynch University of Connecticut [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar The Monist, Volume 89, Issue 1, 1 January 2006, Pages 63–84, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist200689134 Published: 15 November 2014
Perceptions of News Credibility about the War in Iraq
This study investigated cross-media credibility perception with respect to news coverage about the Iraq War. In an environment of political partisanship, perceptions of media credibility were likely affected by the audience's political position on the war. Based on hostile media effect theory, a set of hypotheses was proposed to investigate whether the minority opinion group, war opponents, evaluated the Internet as a more credible medium than di…
Zombies and the Case of the Phenomenal Pickpocket
Truth as One and Many
How can we understand truth as both many and one? This chapter supplies an answer: truth is an immanent functional property. This is alethic functionalism. To say that truth is a functional property implies that propositions are true when they have a property that plays the truth-role. A property plays the truth-role when it has the truish features — those features described by the folk truisms discussed in Chapter 1. The property of truth itself…
Philosophy (33 obras) · Epistemology (29 obras) · Sociology (24 obras) · Political science (20 obras) · Computer Science (17 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (11 obras) · Psychology (10 obras) · Linguistics (9 obras) · Philosophy (9 obras)