Institute for the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology
Annual Graduate Conference: The Written Word
May 5th – 6th, 2023
Location: Victoria College, Room 304, 91 Charles Street West, Toronto.
Conference Program & Book of Abstracts
DAY 1: Friday May 5th
Zoom link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/89997969583
Session 1: The Written Word & Identity Formation
80-minute session, 15:00-16:20
Chair: Andrew Jones
Forging Identity: The Role of Manuals and Periodicals in the Craft of Welding
Emy Kim (University of Toronto)
Communication, Ways of Being in the World and Image-text Memetics
Piers Eaton (University of Ottawa)
Stories and Identity Along the Byzantine Frontier
Zach Sykes (Queen’s University)
Toronto, n.d. – A Short Film
Corey Orszak (York University)
Session 2: Medical Knowledge
60-minute session, 16:30-17:30
Chair: Matthew McLaughlin
Science, Society, and Fiction: The Interplay of Biotechnology and Cultural Narratives
Ingrid Bachner (York University)
Medical Gaslighting in Gynecological and Obstetric Pain Management in Intrauterine Device Insertion Practices
Juliana Upchurch (University of Toronto)
Illness, Indigence, and Indigeneity: Indian Health Services on the Eve of National Medicare Maglyn Gasteiger (Wilfred Laurier University)
Session 3: Keynote Address
90-minute session, 17:45-19:15
A Nootropology: "smart drugs" and the rhetorical turning
Dr. Kate Maddalena (University of Toronto)
Dinner: 19:30
DAY 2: Saturday May 6th
Zoom link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/89997969583
Session 4: Health and Medicine
80-minute session, 9:10-10:30
Chair: Rachel Katz
The Transmission of Medicine (al-ṭibb) in Medieval Islamic Literature, The case of Ibn Taymīyah (13th-14th century)
Julio César (Islamic University of Madinah)
Tree of Philosophy, Longevity and Writing Scientific Literature in Descartes
Michael Samjetsabam (IIT Bombay)
Making Canada Great Again: Where Academics and Truckers Collide
Alexandra Calzavara (University of Toronto)
Psychiatric diagnosis, TikTok, and the new crowdsourced science of mental illness
Owen Chevalier (University of Western Ontario)
Session 5: Science, Fiction
80-minute session, 10:40-12:00
Chair: Nayani Jensen
Three Laws of Robotics and fiction
Petar Nurkić (University of Belgrade)
Three Views of Mars From Earth, ca. 1900
Ryan Snopek (University of Waterloo)
Case studies and Fictions
Joel West (University of Toronto)
How is the construction of an Extra-scientific World Possible: Meillassoux’s discussion of the problem of induction
Kexin Hu (Fudan University)
Lunch (12:00-13:00)
Session 6: Thought Experimentation & Imagination
80-minute session, 13:00-14:20
Chair: Fan Zhang
Thought-Experimentation as Make-Believe: The Methodology of Fiction in Philosophy and Science
Armin Mirsanaye (Dalhousie University)
Thought Experimentation and Generative Simulation
Jacob Green (University of Houston)
Impossibly Immoral Fictions and How to Understand Them
Pedro Rapallo Zubillaga (California State University, Long Beach)
Spinoza on Philosophical Language
Jacob Zellmer (University of California, San Diego)
Session 7: The Environment
60-minute session, 14:30-15:30
Chair: Ata Heshmati
Aesthetic Considerations in the Development of Plate Tectonics
Mariona Miyata-Sturm (University of Oxford)
The Vertical Farm and Its Techno-Tomatoes
Hayley Birss (University of Toronto)
Planting New Seeds in Agriculture Studies: How Bibliographic Approaches Reveal the Cultural Complexity of Early Canadian Agricultural Communities
Carelle Sarkis (University of Toronto)
Break (15:30-16:00)
Session 8: Technologies & The Production of the Written Word
40-minute session, 16:00-16:40
Chair: Myriam Iuorio
Responsive Polymorphism & the Text in the Digital Era
Aydin Karasapan (Carleton University)
Scientific Writing as Representational? AI Enters the Chat
Ryan Miller (University of Geneva)
Abstracts
Session 1: The Written Word & Identity Formation
“Forging Identity: The Role of Manuals and Periodicals in the Craft of Welding”
Emy Kim (University of Toronto)
My project centers on manuals and periodicals as essential modes of communication and establishing community for early North American welders (1915-1930). In the absence of a dedicated, national union, welders relied upon the written word to develop craft knowledge and bolster their recognition as a trade. This craft identity was in constant peril of being undermined by existing crafts and technological uncertainty. For instance, in their efforts to protect their own metal joining trades, blacksmiths and boilermakers deemed welding to be a tool that was best wielded by their own practitioners rather than a unique, new craft. Furthermore, failures in welds constructed in railyards and during wartime put pressure on welders to standardize training and create methods of assuring quality. These matters compelled welders to concentrate on issues of education and knowledge transmission within their craft. Through manuals and periodicals welders discussed technique, theory, and the concept of the ideal welder. I argue that not only did these texts support the flow of skills necessary to increase the reliability of welding, but they were also essential to the formation of the welders’ identity.
“Communication, Ways of Being in the World and Image-text Memetics”
Piers Eaton (University of Ottawa)
Charles Taylor’s work on Herder argues that developing new modes of expression can lead to new ways of being in the world. Herder views language as a singular kind of expression tied to a particular group (volk) but it can be useful to consider how different mediums of expression shape social organizations and identities in different ways. Prior to the printing press, most people used local vernaculars and their identities were correspondingly more localized. Benedict Anderson’s theory of print-capitalism shows how the spread of national identities was influenced by the printing press. The internet allows for new forms of communication, particularly meaning-laden images known as memes, which differ significantly from print languages and may create new identities, of which I will highlight three related features. 1) Its ephemeralness – while Anderson noted that print gives language a certain fixity, on the internet signs become dated and ‘stale’ at a breakneck speed. 2) Its specialisation – despite these image’s rapid rise and decline, once one is understood by a small group, it is presented without context in a way that is unintelligible to outsiders. 3) Its memetic modifiability – these images carry their own meaning but can be combined with words to create new interpretations of the sign, allowing people to demonstrate their familiarity with the images while simultaneously wearing out the usefulness of the sign. Together, these features create a distinct form of communication that, if Anderson and Herder’s theory is correct, can create a way of being distinct from that of print.
“Stories and Identity Along the Byzantine Frontier”
Zach Sykes (Queen’s University)
Traditionally understood as a confrontational scattering of fragmented, isolationist Orthodox Christians and Muslims, Anatolia, the frontier between the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim world in the 12th century, was in fact a ‘melting pot’ of constantly shifting borders and areas of ‘control’. In such an environment, identities were not rigid but mutable, and opportunities for change were abound, even during times of conflict. This essay will examine Byzantine and Arabic folk literature, originally oral sources that were recorded in manuscript form (such as Digenis Akritas) to explore these themes of coexistence and exchange from the point of view of a porous border and shifting frontiers. The themes of these written accounts will provide a unique perspective on the ‘historical mind’ of Byzantines and Arabs in the 10th and 11th centuries. By focusing on this period, we are afforded access to a substantial amount of primary source material, as well as many ‘avenues of change’; the crusades bring Latins into the East, changing dynamics south and east of the Anatolian border; also, we see a Muslim world in flux and a Byzantine world in (apparent) resurgence. As it is the locus of so much of this change and instability, I will be focusing on Eastern Anatolia and the frontier between the Byzantine Empire, Seljuk Turks, and other peoples in the region. Through Roman and Orthodox conceptions of the self, I display how Byzantines set themselves apart from the ‘other’ in the 12th century.
Toronto, n.d. – A Short Film
Corey Orszak (York University)
Toronto, n.d. is a short film composed of undated, digitized photographs from the Toronto Star Photograph Archive at the Toronto Public Library’s (TPL) Digital Archive. Each photograph is accompanied by the “Original Toronto Star caption” attached to its item page in the TPL’s finding aid. Historians frequently employ photographs as if they were objects without history. Nominally demonstrative images illustrate and decorate historical works, where they function as complementary metonyms. In archival terms, such images are favoured primarily — and at times, almost exclusively — for their “informational” value. That is to say, historians often use images for what they depict; context emerges through accompanying metadata, such as the date of production. What happens, then, when a photograph is undated, and its informational quality mostly suppressed in favour of the evidentiary qualities asserted by text suggestive of at least one of the image's historical functions? What were specific images used for? What can effectively orphaned images be used for now? In short: what can history communicate when, by necessity or choice, it is liberated from fixed temporal markers? Can you look at images differently?
Session 2: Medical Knowledge
“Science, Society, and Fiction: The Interplay of Biotechnology and Cultural Narratives”
Ingrid Bachner (York University)
This paper examines the role of fiction in shaping popular opinion towards technology, arguing it
serves as an effective medium for disseminating knowledge and sparking conversations. A wide
range of literary and media works, including classics like “Frankenstein” and “Brave New
World”, as well as modern shows like “Westworld,” “Black Mirror,” and “Biohackers,” warn
against the dangers of unchecked scientific ambition. These cautionary tales not only highlight
the perils of unbridled scientific progress, but also explore its broader social, ethical, and cultural
implications. Recent technological advancements in medicine (e.g., CRISPR-Cas9, a genome
editing tool) have the potential to revolutionize healthcare, yet also raise ethical concerns about
targeted genetic modification. Fictional narratives provide an engaging and memorable way to
communicate complex information about these biotechnologies to the public, facilitating
nuanced discussions about potential new dimensions of systemic inequality and violence, and the
effectiveness of bioethics as a safeguard.
“Medical Gaslighting in Gynecological and Obstetric Pain Management in Intrauterine Device Insertion Practices”
Juliana Upchurch (University of Toronto)
The dissemination of knowledge from physicians to patients has been an essential role of medical providers from the inception of healthcare. It is an especially critical aspect of obtaining biomedically ethical “informed consent” for procedures before they take place. This means that patients must be fully informed of the procedure itself and its bodily impacts prior to the provision of service. They also must give this consent free of coercion and in a sound state of mind. This paper argues that there is a historical trend of discrimination in healthcare against female patients when it comes to properly obtaining informed consent for medical procedures that continues to impact healthcare practices today. Specifically, we argue that medical providers are committing a form of gaslighting that violates biomedical ethics standards when providing Intrauterine Devices (IUDs) without proper pain education and management. By collecting oral histories from patients who have undergone IUD insertion without proper patient consent - fully informed consent - we hope to highlight the need for further research into pain management for gynecologic and obstetric procedures through the lens of patient experience.
“Illness, Indigence, and Indigeneity: Indian Health Services on the Eve of National” Medicare”
Maglyn Gasteiger (Wilfred Laurier University)
The 1960s were an important decade for healthcare in Canada as universal health insurance moved from a controversial experiment in Saskatchewan to a highly anticipated national policy. However, the massive changes that medicare brought to national healthcare and the welfare state did not impact all peoples equally. Indigenous peoples in Canada, whose health services were administered under a separate Indian Health Services department, faced a reduction in the healthcare services available to them by the same federal government that was ushering in medicare for settler Canadians. In March 1968 the federal government’s blatantly contradictory position on healthcare became the centre of controversy when the Department of National Health and Welfare declared that Indian Health Services would be reduced in the coming year. A close examination of media and government discourse around the Indian Health Services reveals how notions of government responsibility for the health and wellness of people in Canada were applied unequally to settler Canadians and Indigenous peoples.
Session 4: Health and Medicine
“The Transmission of Medicine (al-ṭibb) in Medieval Islamic Literature, The case of Ibn Taymīyah (13th-14th century)”
Julio Cesar (Islamic University of Madinah)
The paper presents 1) a historical description of medicine and 2) the role of writing in the transmission of Greek medicine to Islamic medicine from the written work of the controversial polymath Ibn Taymīyah (1263-1328 CE / 661-728 AH). In the methodology, three Arabic terms are translated and analyzed, for the first time in English: medicine (al-ṭibb), physician (ṭabib) and scripture (kitābah), in three representative works of medieval Islamic literature: 1) The theological work: “The Right Answer to Those Who Changed the Religion of the Messiah” (Al-Jaūāb al-ṣaḥīḥ li-man bad-dala dīn al-Masīh), 2) The philosophical: “The Refutation of the Contradiction between Reason and Revelation”; (Dar’ ta’arud al-‘aql wa al-naql) and 3) The legal: “The Compilation of Legal Rulings” (Majmua’ al-fatāūa). The analysis is limited to determining 1) how the transmission of Greek medical knowledge relates to the Greek sciences of philosophy (al-falsafah), logic (al-manṭiq), astronomy (al-nujūm) and arithmetic (al-ḥisāb), 2) the conditions of truth of this knowledge in Islamic epistemology, and 3) the figure of the Greek sage (ḥakim), e.g., Hippocrates (Abuqrāṭ) and Galen (Jālinūs) in comparison with the Persian physicians (aṭibā’) al-Rāzī and Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) in the proposal of the theologian and jurist Ibn Taymīyah. The results include 1) the epistemological and legal limits of medicine, 2) the medieval Islamic representation of the physician, and 3) the role of writing in the transmission of Greek medicine to the Islamic world.
“Tree of Philosophy, Longevity and Writing Scientific Literature in Descartes”
Michael Samjetsabam (IIT Bombay)
In the preface of the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes uses the metaphor of the tree of philosophy to articulate the relationship between metaphysics, physics and practical philosophy. In this metaphor, the roots form the metaphysics, the trunk supported by the roots is the physics and the branches emerging from the trunk are grouped under three practical disciplines, mechanics, medicine and morality. According to Descartes, mechanics facilitates comfortable living through the inventions of machines, medicine increases longevity, and morality guides our actions in practical life. Using Descartes’ interpretation of the Fall of Man as related to the scientific quest for increasing human longevity in his 1648 conversation with Burman, my paper shows that Descartes has merged in his metaphor of the tree of philosophy the two biblical trees of Genesis, the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. Furthermore, I argue that the practice of writing down our scientific observations and experiments lies at the heart of Descartes’ act of merging the two biblical trees. For Descartes, lack of observation due to the brevity of life has impeded the growth of medicine, slowing the quest for longevity. And Descartes finds that communicating scientific observations and experiments faithfully and thoroughly in writing by making them available to the public for others to build on them can contribute to the quest for longevity. Lastly, he communicates scientific findings in the language of fiction in many places, such as by hypothesising a fictional man in the Treatise of Man and a fictional world in The World.
“Making Canada Great Again: Where Academics and Truckers Collide”
Alexandra Calzavara (University of Toronto)
On January 28th 2022, thousands of demonstrators––constituting the eponymic Freedom Convoy––arrived in Canada’s capital to protest against COVID-19 vaccine mandates by occupying Ottawa’s downtown core. Over the course of the occupation, over 50 articles about the Convoy were published on The Conversation, an academic publication platform whose tagline promotes “academic rigour, journalistic flair”. With themes ranging from moral crisis to the speculative rise of alt-right populism, these articles expressed consensus about the Convoy’s implications—namely, that it was a threat to social democratic order. I argue that, despite The Conversation’s appealing tagline, these publications failed to meet standards of academic rigour. In a time when improving trust in science grows increasingly imperative, scrutiny on the production of expert knowledge—particularly with regard to consensus formation—should be a principal concern among academics. Viewed through a lens of social epistemology, my research advocates for diverse expertise and discursive dissent as essential to rigorous methodology in the production of knowledge. In addition to a lack of theoretical distinctions required of the disciplines represented, my qualitative research conducted on each article in The Conversation demonstrates widespread failure to include cited research to support arguments and the advancement of personal agendas under the guise of social scientific theory. I argue that these contributions ultimately constitute misinformation—undermining the epistemic values of academia and resulting in public harm.
“Psychiatric diagnosis, TikTok, and the new crowdsourced science of mental illness”
Owen Chevalier (University of Western Ontario)
With lightning speed, TikTok emerged as one of the primary sources of information for young people. The app not only sets pop-culture trends, but has also popularized certain educational topics, especially those in health sciences broadly, and psychology more specifically . The way TikTok’s user experience operates lends itself to a specific kind of 1 scientific education: one that is democratic, personalized, and interactive. Users seeking to learn more about topics that interest them—e.g., psychiatric conditions they think they have—will find the answers that they most align with, and often have the opportunity to engage with those answers, or further the dissemination of knowledge by producing content of their own. The topic of this conference is on how the written word helps disseminate, apply, and educate on scientific knowledge; I propose that the educational videos people share on TikTok, and the stories they tell, may be making one of the largest impacts on scientific education for young people. In related work, I have argued that TikTok has facilitated a shift in certain psychiatric concepts related to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. That project motivated interviews with mental health TikTok creators who share information on ADHD with millions of users daily. In this talk, I will share some preliminary insights on these interviews: Namely that ADHD TikTok creators have formed a folk-academic community that generates new concepts, revises existing concepts, and communicates its findings. Since everything on TikTok happens quickly, established academic spaces may find it formidable to contend with.
Session 5: Science, Fiction
“Three Laws of Robotics and fiction”
Petar Nurkić (University of Belgrade)
Isak Asimov’s visionary genius and techno-futuristic predictability are not exclusively reflected in his contribution to quirky and entertaining content for sci-fi movies. Through his Three laws of robotics, Asimov demonstrates enriched philosophical erudition and refined sensitivity to seemingly unsolvable philosophical problems. This paper aims to show how each of Asimov’s laws is related to the significant ethical standpoint of the renowned philosophers. We will tie up Kant’s categorical imperative with First Law, which states that A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Second Law, which reads A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law, will be compared with the rule utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. Finally, we will look for the ancient roots of the Third Law, which dictates that A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. We will carry out this endeavor by extricating parts from Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics and Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro. In this way, we will examine what kinds of ethical theories and insights have shaped Asimov’s laws. In return, this will allow us to show how Asimov, in his own peculiar and interesting manner, solves these problems. This paper aims to show that Asimov’s pleiad of ideas, presented in the book I, Robot, contribute greatly to the history of philosophical riddles. One of the parts of the Robot Universe is the Foundation book series, where Asimov introduces us to the intelligent robot - Demerzel. Although Eto Demerzel is only a fictional character, Asimov successfully illustrates his ethical dilemmas of machine design through him. The last part of our presentation will be dedicated to fictional case studies as the most appropriate narratives for presenting philosophical problems.
Keywords: Three laws of robotics, categorical imperative, rule utilitarianism, Nicomachean ethics, Euthyphro.
“Three Views of Mars From Earth, ca. 1900”
Ryan Snopek (University of Waterloo)
This presentation will examine three novels about Mars from 1897-1908: Kurd Lasswitz’ Two Planets (1897), Louis Pope Gratacap’s The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars (1903), and Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908). All three of these novels approach the idea of life on Mars in unique ways: Lasswitz portrays an invasion by advanced Martians, Gratacap writes about human reincarnation on Mars, and Bogdanov offers a socialist utopia as a model for Earth. All three writers were deeply influenced by the contemporary work of astronomers Camille Flammarion and Percival Lowell, who popularised the theory that Mars is the home of an advanced civilisation that has built massive canals. The presentation will compare how these writers discussed Mars in the context of Flammarion and Lowell’s theory, and will argue that Mars offered both a space for serious scientific thought about outer space and social critique of life on Earth: the Mars of turn of the century fiction was simultaneously real – a present physical place – and ideal – a future social state.
“Case studies and Fiction”
Joel West (University of Toronto)
One use of case studies is that we use them as evidence to warrant philosophical claims. For example, the case of luminiferous ether and the rupture which Michelson and Morley caused by their inability to locate it, can be used to warrant the reality of science over a rupture in theory. This evidential function is impeded by the fact that case studies, by their nature, are also theory laden, so that really case studies are not as effective as they might be, since they are biased information (Kinzel, 2014). The fact is that there is a disjunctive relationship between evidence, its meaning, and the idea it warrants, where we cherry pick the evidence that we use. To demonstrate this idea, I explore the nature of the case study through the lens of narratology. The relationship between scientific evidence, what it means, and Scientific Realism is then briefly explored, briefly to demonstrate that while the phenomena of science are real, the way that these phenomena signify may change diachronically.
“How is the construction of an Extra-scientific World Possible: Meillassoux’s discussion of the problem of induction”
Kexin Hu (Fudan University)
Background: In Science fiction and extro-science fiction, in order to penetrate the intertwined
horizons of science and metaphysics, the French philosopher, Quentin Meillassoux, poses the
question concerning the construction of an extra-scientific world: “what should a world resemble, so that it is in principle inaccessible to a scientific knowledge?”
Main arguments: By looking at the differences in the approaches of Hume and Popper and others in studying the criteria of scientific doctrine, Meillassoux tries to point out that Popper’s reading thinks within the laws of science, while Hume’s question is essentially a question of the extra-scientific world. Furthermore, Meillassoux attempts to dismantle the division between scientific-reality and nonscientific-fiction in a system compatible with scientific and extra-scientific laws by further examining the types of extra-scientific worlds. And in his analysis, the World-2 type intermediates between the absolute dominance of the scientific order and sheer disorder of chaos, offering the possibility of such a construction with the inevitability of the law of contingency. Besides, contemporary philosophers such as Malabou’s notion of “plasticity” and Haraway’s extension of the concept SF (formerly science fiction) offer alternative approaches to the construction of extra-scientific worlds. By investigating these paths for exploring the relationship between philosophy, literature and science, we could glimpse the overall trends in the development of new realism theory in recent years, and explores the role that fiction writing plays in constructing possible worlds.
Session 6: Thought Experimentation & Imagination
“Thought-Experimentation as Make-Believe: The Methodology of Fiction in Philosophy and Science”
Armin Mirsanaye (Dalhousie University)
Thought-experimentation is a commonplace methodology in philosophy and science. Yet, interestingly, there is no consensus on how thought-experiments work and how they should be used. In this paper, I take it for granted that thought-experiments can be epistemically helpful and develop a simple framework for understanding them. Thought-experiments vary wildly based on the theoretical commitments motivating them and the fields of study employing them. However, they all rely on the power of imagination. Following the lead of Letitia Meynell, I look at thought-experiments as fictional devices with content that serves an epistemic purpose (2014). This view is based on Kendall Walton’s account of representational objects, described in Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990). Thought-experiments provide props for imagining fictional scenarios. Rather than mental objects that are accessible only subjectively, the content of thought-experiments are taken to be objective (such as facts within a novel) and accessible intersubjectively. The Waltonian lens examines thought-experiments at key points by providing an approachable and advantageous conceptual framework, avoiding unnecessary metaphysical speculation. The world of make-believe has considerable wiggle room and is incomplete, requiring participation to determine results. So, Waltonian Fictionalism views thought- experiments as fictional narratives that depend on the facts known about the world, as well as the commitments of particular communities of belief.
Keywords: Kendall Walton, Fictionalism, Thought-Experiments, Methodology, Epistemology
“Thought Experimentation and Generative Simulation”
Jacob Green (University of Houston)
In this paper I concern myself with a topic that intersects metaphilosophy and philosophy of science, viz., thought experimentation. Thought experiments face several challenges if they are to be rendered acceptable for use by naturalists. Primary among these is the worry that trusting the results of thought-experimentation commits one to some magical source of philosophical truths, accessible to reason alone. This worry results from a peculiar feature of thought experiments: their ability to produce novel results from the armchair. Given this (apparent) ability, Thomas Kuhn asks, “How…relying on familiar data, can a thought experiment lead to new knowledge or to new understanding of nature?” (1978, p. 241). Mach (1973) developed an account of thought experiments designed to circumvent such worries. The heart of the view is the claim that thought experimentation is continuous with physical experimentation and that, by mentally recreating experiments, the general information afforded by accumulated experience can be mined for insights (Mach, 1973; Sorensen, 1992, pp. 3-4). A story remains to be told, though, about the nature of the “mining” process. How is it that philosophical and scientific insight can lie dormant in familiar experience and how, furthermore, can imagining a situation or series of events give this tacit insight intelligible form? It is my hope that we can look to some recent advances in artificial intelligence to begin filling-out a picture of the workings of the cognitive abilities necessary for the felicity of thought-experimentation. In particular, generative adversarial neural networks (‘GANs’) have exhibited a surprising capacity for producing novel (i.e., non-actual) exemplars which nonetheless are realistically plausible. These systems can offer insight into the imaginative abilities necessary for a Machian account of thought-experimentation to be explanatorily satisfactory.
“Impossibly Immoral Fictions and How to Understand Them”
Pedro Rapallo Zubillaga
The moral dimension of the problem of imaginative resistance can be posed in the following manner: Why do we resist imagining certain morally charged fictions when the most implausible fictional scenarios give no problem? There are two sides to this issue. One concerns resistance to imagine and the other concerns inability to do so. In trying to answer to the problem, the literature has often compounded the two sides, ignored one of them, or tried to reduce one to the other. I aim to show that both sides of the problem present legitimate philosophical problems in the philosophy of fiction that require separate attention. I do this by distinguishing weak and strong failures of the imagination. The former is characterized by our unwillingness to imagine certain fictions, and the latter are characterized by our inability to imagine certain fictions. I accept the solution that has been presented by the literature to the former problem and so, I focus my efforts to show how the latter may be resolved. I contend that our imagination is limited by the bounds of intelligibility. That is, we cannot imagine what we cannot understand. Applied to moral scenarios, I contend that moral facts are grounded by nonmoral facts, and these metaphysical relations hold as ways to intelligibly deal with morality. Thus, for a fiction to be sensical, the moral facts of the fiction need to be grounded by the nonmoral facts. This carries the consequence that in order to manipulate the moral facts, the author needs to manipulate the nonmoral ones first. Otherwise, the fiction is rendered unintelligible, and we lose the ability to track what is true in it; we no longer have the ability to know what is happening in the fiction. This prompts strong imaginative failure.
“Spinoza on Philosophical Language”
Jacob Zellmer (University of California, San Diego)
Interpreters have taken Spinoza to either be skeptical about language’s ability to convey “adequate” (i.e., true) ideas (e.g., Savan 1958) or optimistic that a geometric language can (e.g., Laerke 2014). This paper examines Spinoza’s account of semantic meaning and how philosophical language is successful. I argue that words come to signify ideas through three relations for Spinoza: (1) words as extended modes impress on the human body and produce corporeal images in the brain, (2) parallelism between corporeal images and mental images, and (3) the association of ideas in the mind. Building off this general account, I show how philosophical language is successful for Spinoza. I take seriously Spinoza’s repeated claims that words and language are not the sort of medium that can teach adequate ideas.1 Language does not directly convey or transfer adequate ideas from a speaker or writer to an audience. Yet my reading does not make Spinoza a complete skeptic about language’s ability to communicate truth. Rather, language consists of modes of extension—written or spoken words—that function as imaginative stimuli by which an audience is guided to recall or uncover adequate ideas through their own mental activity. Thus, words in themselves cannot directly cause adequate ideas in the minds of an audience, but language is philosophically successful when it guides the minds of an audience to uncover truths for themselves.
Works cited:
Laerke, Mogens. 2014. “Spinoza’s Language,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 52(3). 519-
548.
Savan, David. 1958. “Spinoza and Language,” Philosophical Review 67(2). 212-225.
Spinoza. 1985-2016. The Collected Works of Spinoza Vol. I and II. Transl. and ed. by Edwin Curley.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Session 7: The Environment
“Aesthetic Considerations in the Development of Plate Tectonics”
Mariona Miyata-Sturm (University of Oxford)
This talk shows that aesthetic considerations played a substantial role in the development and acceptance of plate tectonics (PT), the highly successful, unifying theory of the earth sciences. After giving a brief overview of the history of PT I discuss the way that aesthetic factors influenced its development from continental drift (CD) to the theory as we know it today. Many of the key scientists involved in the development of CD and PT showed a clear preference for explanations that are simple, elegant, and unifying, and such broadly aesthetic considerations acted as important restrictions on potential explanations and guided the theoretical development. For example, Wegener, the developer of CD, said that his theory was “producing simplification and coordination in the place of previous complexity and contradiction” and the geologist Argand said that “the elegance with which drift theory explains these significant facts ... is certainly a strong point in its favour”. Many of the scientists stuck with an aesthetically satisfying explanation in the face of apparently contradicting evidence (e.g., concerning heat flow values on the ocean floor and geomagnetic reversals), thinking it more likely that there was something wrong with the observations or how they were interpreted than with the explanation. Far from disrupting research or acting merely as a tiebreaker between empirically equivalent hypotheses, aesthetic satisfaction acted as an important and useful restriction on theory development, showing that aesthetic considerations have an important part to play in scientific research also outside highly abstract fields like mathematics or theoretical physics.
“The Vertical Farm and Its Techno-Tomatoes”
Hayley Birss (University of Toronto)
Amidst climate change, there is an urgent need to interrogate the ‘green’ technologies marketed as solutions to the crisis. The output of vertical farming technologies (varieties of herbs, lettuces, and base crops such as tomatoes) are grown to help mitigate the climate crisis. There are multiple words used to describe these outputs: tomato, specimen, cash-crop, unit, back-stock, shrinkage. These words can be used to evaluate the ontological politics of the vertical farm’s produce. Drawing on feminist science and technology studies (STS)––specifically, Annemarie Mol’s politics of ontological multiplicity, Foucault’s biopolitics, and Donna Haraway’s practice of embodied objectivity––this piece reveals that the outputs of ‘green’ vertical farms are ontologically overdetermined by technoscience and political economy. To demonstrate this effect, I explore how technoscience bolsters a modern and calculative human relationship to nature that promotes an epistemology of valuation and extraction. I inventory the words used by large vertical farming companies––Infarm, AeroFarms, Bowery, and Gotham Greens––to describe their produce on public platforms. Critically rooted in feminist STS, this piece also leans on the embodied-objective experience of the author and mines the personal bank of words used to describe ‘green’ produce while employed by a vertical farming company. This move acts as a new method of evaluating ‘green’ technologies and their role in climate change mitigation by offering an alternative to the modernist and technoscientific objectivity that supports an extractive relationship to nature. Ultimately, by taking stock of the multiple names-for and therefore multiple ontologies of a vertical farm’s tomatoes politics of the organisms grown in the belly of vertical farms are exposed as overdetermined by political economy and extractive logics––a folly that puts ‘green’ technological initiatives in jeopardy.
Keywords: feminist STS | technoscience | ontological multiplicity | embodied objectivity
“Planting New Seeds in Agriculture Studies: How Bibliographic Approaches Reveal the Cultural Complexity of Early Canadian Agricultural Communities”
Carelle Sarkis (University of Toronto)
In my presentation, I will discuss the forgotten importance of the book and the significance of written texts for the spread of information and reinforcement of values held by Christian farmers in Canada during the nineteenth century. I will explore the textual importance of the mass-produced Farmer’s Almanacs in circulation during the nineteenth century as the industrial revolution continues to foster change and these Almanacs reveal the efforts made to preserve cultural values, specifically the Upper Canada Farmers’ & Mechanics’ Almanac for the Year of Our Lord, 1840. In this talk, I will argue that a study of a textual artifact should focus on both the written text and the material characteristics of the text because both the content and the form reveal something about the intended use and audience. By observing the physical features of the books, an understanding of how readers interacted with these texts can be reached and conclusions about the literary culture can be drawn by observing the size and construction of the texts. The physicality of the book as well as its contents can reveal how the book was meant to be received by the reader and the intended uses as well as give us cultural insights to the agriculture community in the nineteenth century.
Session 8: Technologies & The Production of the Written Word
“Lost and Found in Translation Technology”
Sam Russell (Queen’s University)
The written word is a powerful tool for communication and connection, and like any tool, it evolves through stages of innovation. One promising development for the written word has
the rise of machine translation technologies. With the help of applications like Google Translate, technology seems to offer an exciting opportunity to close the linguistic gaps in a culturally divided world. However, one must wonder about the extent of machine translation. More specifically, how does artificial intelligence interpret the “literary translation” process? Is there any insight to be gained from considering the aesthetic properties of language and examining how computers can render the creativity of the written word? These questions traverse the boundaries of science, art, and philosophy, which can quickly become quite daunting. Thankfully, there is a long history of scholarship exploring the literary translation process which can provide valuable insight for the innovations of today. For this conference, I draw upon my ongoing research into the thinking of Vladimir Nabokov, a prominent translator, author, critic, and scholar who developed important theories for literary translation. The focal point of my analysis is to consider the theories of Nabokov, amongst other literary theorists, in conjunction with more recent scholarship regarding translation studies and machine translation technologies. While the bulk of my MA thesis is yet to be written, my preliminary argument is that while the automation of literary translation provides exciting opportunities for human connection across cultures, it also holds existential implications for human creativity which must be considered.
“Responsive Polymorphism & the Text in the Digital Era”
Aydin Karasapan (Carleton University)
My work explores how knowledge dissemination has been transformed in the digital age, focusing on the concept of responsive polymorphic texts. The Socrates of Plato’s Phaedrus criticized written texts for their inability to adapt or respond to the particular standpoint and level of understanding of students. However, interactive digital media technology has allowed for the creation of increasingly responsive texts that can adjust their content and how that content is presented to suit the needs and preferences of individual readers, a technology I call the responsive polymorphic text. For example, when students use web-indexing search engines like Google to supplement academic texts they are provided personalized results based on data and inferences the platform has access to about said reader’s preferences to maximize not necessarily the credibility of those sources, but the reader’s engagement on that platform. Undergraduate students are increasingly relying on search engines as a source of supplementary information in their education (Selwyn et al., 8-9), more so than library resources, and second only to library resources for post-graduate students (Salehi et al., 3-5). Thus, the question for academia is not whether to integrate this new technology into their curriculum but on whose terms to do so. Academics and educators ought, then, to engage with the mechanisms underlying contemporary digital text platforms to ensure they respect critical disciplinary norms and select for the educational value of supplementary materials. This research involves the topic of the written word in the history of technology by exploring innovations that are changing the means of textual knowledge dissemination and challenging traditional conceptions of text and reader. The advent of the responsive polymorphic text brings with it potential risks and benefits for education and scholarship in the digital age, which I argue creates a need for critical engagement with the evolving landscape of knowledge dissemination.
Works Cited:
Salehi, Sara, Du Jia, and Helen Ashman. “Use of Web Search Engines and Personalisation
in Information Searching for Educational Purposes.” Information Research 23, no. 2
(2018): 788.
Selwyn, Neil, and Stephen Gorard. “Students’ Use of Wikipedia as an Academic Resource
— Patterns of Use and Perceptions of Usefulness.” The Internet and Higher Education 28
(2016): 28–34.
“Scientific Writing as Representational? AI Enters the Chat”
Ryan Miller (University of Geneva)
Textual communication is oft-viewed as crucial to the rise of modern science (Tinniswood, 2019), and even strongly revisionist histories of the scientific revolution emphasize the central role of the written word (Atkinson, 1998; Johns, 2003). Such scientific communications even frequently have an important narrative structure (Morgan et al., 2022). Nonetheless, scientific writing is generally taken to have a representational character, where the sentences convey propositions or models, which in turn represent the world (Suárez, 2010; Contessa, 2011). Scientists therefore see writing as reliant on theories and models of the world: the writing is successful when it communicates the theory or model held by the scientist (Prain, 2015; Moon et al., 2018). Generative artificial intelligence challenges this assumption, however. Computer-generated papers have been slipping past reviewers for a long time (Cabanac & Labbé, 2021), but the output of recent large language models fools even some dedicated readers and offers serious promise in the generation of scientific writing (Kutela et al., 2023; Chen, forthcoming). Yet generative large language models work merely by next token prediction alone—in some sense by modeling the narrative patterns of language— without any model of non-linguistic reality (Floridi, 2023). They “hallucinate” facts only from the reader’s perspective (Alkaissi & McFarlane, forthcoming). Does that mean AI is definitionally not a scientific author (Thorp, 2023), or has AI challenged the representational nature of scientific writing?