Common Knowledge 17(1): Comparative Relativism: Symposium on an Impossibility, I-IV (2011)

A journal section based on the conference “Comparative Relativism” held in September 2009 at the IT University of Copenhagen.

The aim of this publication “is to place in unlikely conjunction the two terms ‘comparison’ and ‘relativism’. On the one hand, comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts to elucidate their similarities and differences. Comparative methods have been widely used in many social science disciplines, including history, linguistics, sociology, and anthropology. On the other hand, relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method in social anthropology, and more recently in science and technology studies (STS), usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits.”

Based on this paradoxical premise, “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; moreover, that those contexts can be compared and contrasted to good purpose…On the other hand, comparative relativism is taken by other[s] to imply and encourage a ‘comparison of comparisons’, in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for’.” (from the Introduction)

“In other words, comparative relativism can ask both what knowledge or truth is being imagined relative to and whether comparison always operates in the “same” way—or with the same grounds or purposes (e.g., shoring up the categories of culture, nature, morality) wherever we find it.” (from Helmreich 2012)

With contributions by Casper Bruun Jensen, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, G. E. R. Lloyd, Martin Holbraad, Andreas Roepstorff, Isabelle Stengers, Helen Verran, Steven D. Brown, Brit Ross Winthereik, Marilyn Strathern, Bruce Kapferer, Annemarie Mol, Morten Axel Pedersen, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Matei Candea, Debbora Battaglia, and Roy Wagner.

Publisher Duke University Press, Winter 2011
ISBN 0961-754x
165 pages

Publisher

PDF (4 MB)

See also
Casper Bruun Jensen, Bifurcations: Comparative Relativism, Conexões Parciais, 2012, 21 pp.
Stefan Helmreich, Extraterrestrial Relativism, Anthropological Quarterly, 2012, 15 pp.

Georges Canguilhem: A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings (1994)

“Georges Canguilhem is one of France’s leading philosophers and historians of science. Trained as both a medical doctor and a philosopher, Canguilhem overlapped these practices to demonstrate that there could be no epistemology without concrete study of the actual development of the sciences and no worthwhile history of science without a philosophical understanding of the conceptual basis of all knowledge.

A Vital Rationalist brings together some of Canguilhem’s most important writings, including excerpts from previously unpublished manuscripts. Organized around the major themes and problems that have preoccupied Canguilhem throughout his intellectual career, this collection allows readers both familiar and unfamiliar with Canguilhem’s work access to a vast array of conceptual and concrete meditations on epistemology, methodology, science, and history. Although Canguilhem is a demanding writer, Delaporte succeeds in identifying the main lines of his thought with unrivaled clarity and maps out the complex and crucial place this thinker holds in the history of twentieth-century French thought.”

Edited by François Delaporte
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer
Introduction by Paul Rabinow
Critical bibliography by Camille Limoges
Publisher Zone Books, New York, 1994
This edition, 2000
ISBN 9780942299731
481 pages

Reviews: Levin (The Journal of the American Medical Association, 1994), Keller (Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1996), Sutton (The British Journal for the History of Science, 1997).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (7 MB)

James J. Gibson: The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979–) [EN, RU]

“James J. Gibson (1904–1979) is one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century, best known for his work on visual perception. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and his first major work was The Perception of the Visual World (1950) in which he rejected behaviorism for a view based on his own experimental work. In his later works, including The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), Gibson became more philosophical and criticized cognitivism in the same way he had attacked behaviorism before, arguing strongly in favor of direct perception and direct realism, as opposed to cognitivist indirect realism. He termed his new approach ‘ecological psychology’.”

“He moved from thinking about what patterns could act as stimuli to rethinking the concept of the stimulus itself, ultimately rejecting “stimulus” in favor of his version of “information.” In a 1960 paper that is a classic in its own right, Gibson carefully surveyed the patch work of meanings of the term “stimulus” that could be found in the literature. He concluded that the optical (or acoustic, or haptic etc.) patterning that would best correspond to actual perceiving in the world no longer seemed like a “stimulus” at all in any proper sense. Instead, he proposed a common-sense usage of the term “information” (as opposed to the technical usage of Shannon) which was fairly well developed by that time. By information, Gibson meant structured energy that was information about environmental sources, in contrast to information as structure in an information theoretical sense which implies a sender and a receiver. Gibson’s information is specific to its environmental sources though not a replica or a copy. It certainly is not a stimulus in the sense of energy that triggers a response. Gibson’s information does not come to the animal. The animal goes to it, actively obtaining the information. Part 2 of this volume develops this concept of information and is at the heart of Gibson’s theory.” (from the Introduction)

“Gibson’s legacy is increasingly influential on many contemporary movements in psychology, particularly those considered to be post-cognitivist.”

Publisher Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1979
This edition, Psychology Press, 2014
ISBN 9781315740218
315 pages

Reviews and commentaries: E. Bruce Goldstein (Leonardo, 1981), Frederick A. Jules (1984), A. P. Costall (Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 1984), Maurizio Ferraris (1999, IT), William M. Mace (Ethics & the Environment, 2005).

Wikipedia, FR
Publisher
WorldCat

The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (English, 1979/2014, 4 MB)
Ekologicheskiy podchod k zritelnomu vospriyatiyu (Russian, trans. T.M. Sokolskoy, 1988, 11 MB)

For more on Gibson see Monoskop wiki.