This article explores the life and work of Chinese American logician Hao Wang. Wang worked at a set of intersections: between Eastern Marxism and Western analytic philosophy; between mathematics and computing; between center and periphery. Though an analytic philosopher himself, Wang became dissatisfied with the field, proposing that it traffics in “fictions” and “abstractions” that neither adequately described nor practically served the realities of human life. In the 1950s, he argued against the imagined universality and rule-boundedness of human reasoning, a central “fiction” of both logic and early artificial intelligence research. Wang drew from Marxism and materialism to argue instead that each person in fact reasons differently, according to the “history of [their] mind and body.” He turned to modern digital computers in hopes that they might create new practical uses for philosophical ideas, and because he believed their difference from human minds was epistemically powerful.
{"title":"The Marxist in the Machine","authors":"Stephanie Dick","doi":"10.1086/725135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725135","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the life and work of Chinese American logician Hao Wang. Wang worked at a set of intersections: between Eastern Marxism and Western analytic philosophy; between mathematics and computing; between center and periphery. Though an analytic philosopher himself, Wang became dissatisfied with the field, proposing that it traffics in “fictions” and “abstractions” that neither adequately described nor practically served the realities of human life. In the 1950s, he argued against the imagined universality and rule-boundedness of human reasoning, a central “fiction” of both logic and early artificial intelligence research. Wang drew from Marxism and materialism to argue instead that each person in fact reasons differently, according to the “history of [their] mind and body.” He turned to modern digital computers in hopes that they might create new practical uses for philosophical ideas, and because he believed their difference from human minds was epistemically powerful.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"38 1","pages":"61 - 81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45134158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
During the Cold War bibliometrics took on a privileged role in the discourse of global scientific development. This essay locates a key condition of possibility for this development in the consolidation of the “international scientific literature” at the turn of the twentieth century through international bureaucratic projects that were fueled by European imperial anxieties. When citation analysis emerged in this political context in the 1960s and 1970s, it was commitments to largely qualitative criteria—regarding open communication, universality, and standards of peer review—that sustained their legitimacy. The conditions of possibility for what has now come to be seen as a form of epistemic injustice by algorithm has as much to do with craft as code. Attending to this historical genealogy is crucial if we wish to better understand the nature of more recent forms of algorithm discrimination.
{"title":"Provincializing Impact","authors":"A. Csiszar","doi":"10.1086/725131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725131","url":null,"abstract":"During the Cold War bibliometrics took on a privileged role in the discourse of global scientific development. This essay locates a key condition of possibility for this development in the consolidation of the “international scientific literature” at the turn of the twentieth century through international bureaucratic projects that were fueled by European imperial anxieties. When citation analysis emerged in this political context in the 1960s and 1970s, it was commitments to largely qualitative criteria—regarding open communication, universality, and standards of peer review—that sustained their legitimacy. The conditions of possibility for what has now come to be seen as a form of epistemic injustice by algorithm has as much to do with craft as code. Attending to this historical genealogy is crucial if we wish to better understand the nature of more recent forms of algorithm discrimination.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"38 1","pages":"103 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44599804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Histories of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics often overlook how physically crafted structures were crucial to the code that shaped their mutually constitutive evolution. This article explores these relationships by charting how the artificial intelligentsia at MIT and Stanford experimented with “armed algorithms”—robot arms interfaced to computers—in calibrated built environments, called microworlds, during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These manufactured spaces were designed to filter out the noise and recalcitrance of the real world that made robotic experimentation exceedingly difficult. Beyond their laboratory or scientific value, the microworlds also served as positive demonstrations of mutual orientation, which in turn recursively drove the mutual construction of the technoscientific Cold War world. To make their armed algorithms work, therefore, technologists on Route 128 and in Silicon Valley hacked not only their computers but also the physical and social world to push forward the frontiers of AI and robotics.
{"title":"Armed Algorithms","authors":"Salem Elzway","doi":"10.1086/725092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725092","url":null,"abstract":"Histories of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics often overlook how physically crafted structures were crucial to the code that shaped their mutually constitutive evolution. This article explores these relationships by charting how the artificial intelligentsia at MIT and Stanford experimented with “armed algorithms”—robot arms interfaced to computers—in calibrated built environments, called microworlds, during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These manufactured spaces were designed to filter out the noise and recalcitrance of the real world that made robotic experimentation exceedingly difficult. Beyond their laboratory or scientific value, the microworlds also served as positive demonstrations of mutual orientation, which in turn recursively drove the mutual construction of the technoscientific Cold War world. To make their armed algorithms work, therefore, technologists on Route 128 and in Silicon Valley hacked not only their computers but also the physical and social world to push forward the frontiers of AI and robotics.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"38 1","pages":"147 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46791264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Throughout the 1920s Congress failed to pass an apportionment bill. Among the various reasons for the failure was Congress’s inability to decide which method, or algorithm, should govern apportionment. Two competing methods, major fractions and equal proportions, rose to the top and the supporter of each claimed that his method offered the only “fair” and “unbiased” solution to the problem. Following this early debate, this chapter argues that contemporary concerns about algorithm fairness and equality do not emerge out of the nature of their complexity. Rather, they inhere in the incommensurability between mathematical and social rationales and the wide room for interpretation yawning between the two. Not only are definitions of “fairness” multiple but how algorithms are described, either through method or through principle, can lead to completely different results.
{"title":"Statecraft by Algorithms","authors":"Alma Steingart","doi":"10.1086/725134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725134","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout the 1920s Congress failed to pass an apportionment bill. Among the various reasons for the failure was Congress’s inability to decide which method, or algorithm, should govern apportionment. Two competing methods, major fractions and equal proportions, rose to the top and the supporter of each claimed that his method offered the only “fair” and “unbiased” solution to the problem. Following this early debate, this chapter argues that contemporary concerns about algorithm fairness and equality do not emerge out of the nature of their complexity. Rather, they inhere in the incommensurability between mathematical and social rationales and the wide room for interpretation yawning between the two. Not only are definitions of “fairness” multiple but how algorithms are described, either through method or through principle, can lead to completely different results.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"38 1","pages":"205 - 222"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43163396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nothing ever works quite as imagined. When algorithms and mathematical systems work, to the extent they do, imagination makes all the difference. Work, imagination, and the space between them manifest in mediated practices of conceptual figuration sustained through regimes of remediation: repair, correction, backfilling, but also (as a pun) patterns of mediation and material transmutation. Such remediation links algorithmic practice and fantasy from early modernity to the present, from the elementary to the elite. It makes whole small errors and grand systems alike. I explore these remediations and their relationship to materials, labor, and fantasy through an episodic account of sixteenth-century arithmetic, nineteenth-century blackboards, twentieth-century projects to create global infrastructures and universal foundations, and twenty-first-century tests of the promises and limits of mediated imagination in mathematics.
{"title":"On Remediation","authors":"M. Barany","doi":"10.1086/725090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725090","url":null,"abstract":"Nothing ever works quite as imagined. When algorithms and mathematical systems work, to the extent they do, imagination makes all the difference. Work, imagination, and the space between them manifest in mediated practices of conceptual figuration sustained through regimes of remediation: repair, correction, backfilling, but also (as a pun) patterns of mediation and material transmutation. Such remediation links algorithmic practice and fantasy from early modernity to the present, from the elementary to the elite. It makes whole small errors and grand systems alike. I explore these remediations and their relationship to materials, labor, and fantasy through an episodic account of sixteenth-century arithmetic, nineteenth-century blackboards, twentieth-century projects to create global infrastructures and universal foundations, and twenty-first-century tests of the promises and limits of mediated imagination in mathematics.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"38 1","pages":"40 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43828098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter articulates the binary between craft and code that animates the volume as a whole. This binary was developed in the nineteenth century (although precedents can be identified much earlier), when it became an important element in debates about factory rationality, industrialization, and empire. It was subsequently adopted by historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science, becoming a key ingredient in the “science studies” that emerged in the 1960s–1990s. Debates about “learning” cross-fertilized with work in early artificial intelligence, such that notions of craft and code helped structure the development of algorithmic culture itself. Subsequent machine learning practices further complicated this relationship. Human/AI assemblages can no longer be comprehended in terms of a binary that may have been appropriate for earlier conceptions of human reasoning and mechanistic algorithms. Transcending that binary is critical not only for understanding the current algorithmic age but also for governing its evolution.
{"title":"The Craft and Code Binary","authors":"J. Evans, Tyler Reigeluth, A. Johns","doi":"10.1086/725089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725089","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter articulates the binary between craft and code that animates the volume as a whole. This binary was developed in the nineteenth century (although precedents can be identified much earlier), when it became an important element in debates about factory rationality, industrialization, and empire. It was subsequently adopted by historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science, becoming a key ingredient in the “science studies” that emerged in the 1960s–1990s. Debates about “learning” cross-fertilized with work in early artificial intelligence, such that notions of craft and code helped structure the development of algorithmic culture itself. Subsequent machine learning practices further complicated this relationship. Human/AI assemblages can no longer be comprehended in terms of a binary that may have been appropriate for earlier conceptions of human reasoning and mechanistic algorithms. Transcending that binary is critical not only for understanding the current algorithmic age but also for governing its evolution.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"38 1","pages":"19 - 39"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43986583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This story, which begins from the widely deplored look of the graphing in Microsoft’s spreadsheet program, Excel, and extends back some seventy-five years, is about code that enables users to create visualizations without enough craft—at least in the eyes of their critics. It investigates two facets of data visualization since World War II: iterative analysis through graphical means and the making of business charts concerning numerical data. These two efforts automate some human skills. Both are seen as aberrant, dangerous, and in bad taste when they become too automatic, as users fail to reflect upon defaults. Both activities challenge the binary division between a “nonalgorithmic” culture of human judgments and a contemporary world subjected to hard, unaccountable logics. Telling a story of everyday cultures deemed to have gone bad, this article offers a history of envisioned users shaped through tools that could amplify virtues—and also vices—in thinking, depicting, and acting.
{"title":"Users Gone Astray","authors":"Matthew L. Jones","doi":"10.1086/725133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725133","url":null,"abstract":"This story, which begins from the widely deplored look of the graphing in Microsoft’s spreadsheet program, Excel, and extends back some seventy-five years, is about code that enables users to create visualizations without enough craft—at least in the eyes of their critics. It investigates two facets of data visualization since World War II: iterative analysis through graphical means and the making of business charts concerning numerical data. These two efforts automate some human skills. Both are seen as aberrant, dangerous, and in bad taste when they become too automatic, as users fail to reflect upon defaults. Both activities challenge the binary division between a “nonalgorithmic” culture of human judgments and a contemporary world subjected to hard, unaccountable logics. Telling a story of everyday cultures deemed to have gone bad, this article offers a history of envisioned users shaped through tools that could amplify virtues—and also vices—in thinking, depicting, and acting.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"38 1","pages":"185 - 204"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48493725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This introduction summarizes the themes, purposes, and objectives of the volume. Its thesis is that the prevailing mode of discussing the nature and impact of algorithmic culture in modern society evolved from existing trends in labor history and the history of science, one distinctive element of which is a sharp interpretative binary between “craft” (soft, human judgment) and “code” (hard, mechanistic logic). The volume suggests that this binary is no longer adequate. It suggests forging a new vocabulary of algorithmic and human diversity in the code-craft space—one better equipped to guide historical investigation, allow us to grapple with algorithmic governance, and even improve our understanding of forces underlying algorithmic advancement.
{"title":"Introduction","authors":"J. Evans, A. Johns","doi":"10.1086/725077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725077","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction summarizes the themes, purposes, and objectives of the volume. Its thesis is that the prevailing mode of discussing the nature and impact of algorithmic culture in modern society evolved from existing trends in labor history and the history of science, one distinctive element of which is a sharp interpretative binary between “craft” (soft, human judgment) and “code” (hard, mechanistic logic). The volume suggests that this binary is no longer adequate. It suggests forging a new vocabulary of algorithmic and human diversity in the code-craft space—one better equipped to guide historical investigation, allow us to grapple with algorithmic governance, and even improve our understanding of forces underlying algorithmic advancement.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"38 1","pages":"1 - 15"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43501692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Centered on the life story of the Tallamy family's copy of John French's The Art of Distillation (London, 1651), this article explores translation, print, and medical reading in early modern England. It traces the adaptation and reuse of textual and practical knowledge across linguistic, geographical, gender, and spatial boundaries and shines light on the scientific labor of translators, technicians, and householders, historical actors who are so often hidden by structures of the archival record. By historically situating translation, reading, and writing practices, it joins recent calls to view each translation as an independent text shaped by new contextual settings. It concludes by offering the concept of "knowledge itineraries" as a framework for analyzing long-view connected histories of knowledge transfer across time and space.
{"title":"When the Tallamys Met John French: Translating, Printing, and Reading <i>The Art of Distillation</i>.","authors":"Elaine Leong","doi":"10.1086/719222","DOIUrl":"10.1086/719222","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Centered on the life story of the Tallamy family's copy of John French's <i>The Art of Distillation</i> (London, 1651), this article explores translation, print, and medical reading in early modern England. It traces the adaptation and reuse of textual and practical knowledge across linguistic, geographical, gender, and spatial boundaries and shines light on the scientific labor of translators, technicians, and householders, historical actors who are so often hidden by structures of the archival record. By historically situating translation, reading, and writing practices, it joins recent calls to view each translation as an independent text shaped by new contextual settings. It concludes by offering the concept of \"knowledge itineraries\" as a framework for analyzing long-view connected histories of knowledge transfer across time and space.</p>","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"37 ","pages":"89-112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7613619/pdf/EMS150035.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"33478235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article addresses the entangled histories of translation and gendered medical authority in medieval Western Europe, exploring the vernacularization of medicine from the perspective of Catalan literature. Instead of focusing on authorship or on the authenticity of the medieval attributions, it explores how women were recognized as a source of medical knowledge and how female personal names were employed as a means of conveying notions of authority on women’s health. Latin medicine created its own celebrity around the acclaimed healer Trota of Salerno, although her original name was almost written out of the historical record in favor of Trotula and the label Trotula that flourished after her name. I study a wealth of traces showing that late medieval Catalan medicine retained a notion of female authority on women’s health through the use of her name and that both Trota and Trotula came to authorize a significant part of medieval women’s medicine in Catalan.
{"title":"Female Authority in Translation","authors":"Montserrat Cabré","doi":"10.1086/719227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719227","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses the entangled histories of translation and gendered medical authority in medieval Western Europe, exploring the vernacularization of medicine from the perspective of Catalan literature. Instead of focusing on authorship or on the authenticity of the medieval attributions, it explores how women were recognized as a source of medical knowledge and how female personal names were employed as a means of conveying notions of authority on women’s health. Latin medicine created its own celebrity around the acclaimed healer Trota of Salerno, although her original name was almost written out of the historical record in favor of Trotula and the label Trotula that flourished after her name. I study a wealth of traces showing that late medieval Catalan medicine retained a notion of female authority on women’s health through the use of her name and that both Trota and Trotula came to authorize a significant part of medieval women’s medicine in Catalan.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"37 1","pages":"213 - 232"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49609014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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