Rethinking the Social Sciences
Hannibal's Pyrrhic Victories : A Heterodox Study of Hannibal's Campaign on the Italian Peninsula View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Valentine J. Belfiglio
Hannibal's victories from 216-202 BCE during the Second Punic War were Pyrrhic victories or losses that cost excessive Carthaginian casualties, given the relative manpower strength of the Roman army. The method employed in this study is historiography and conceptual analysis of ancient and modern historians. The result of Hannibal's campaign was the lack of a viable strategic objective. The Roman center of gravity-control of the western Mediterranean Sea was never challenged. This war of attrition on land led to a continual weakening of the Carthaginian army and the ultimate defeat of Hannibal at Zama in 202 BCE.
Superposition of Quantum Linguistics in Literary Criticism Observing Harold Bloom’s Misprision of Noam Chomsky’s Literature-as-genetics: “When One Speaks a Language, One Knows a Great Deal that Was Never Learned” View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Richard H Goranowski
What we consider in this paper concerns literary criticism as entanglement operation arranged in superposition, a term derived from accumulated paleontology fossils arrayed in sedimentary rock, arranged by events in time preserved in stone. Superposition in quantum mechanics succinctly statistically supplies reality to an apparent Platonic illusion of a discrete integral object occurring in numerous other places simultaneously, not as reflected Newtonian optics, but as original function. Notably, Thomas Young’s 19th Century double slit discovery alleging the 20th Century Nils Bohr identification of wave-particle mechanics contemporaneously discerns quantum duality in Friedrich von Schiller’s 1801 essays “Off/On the Sublime,” essentially predicating David Chalmers’ 1995 “hard problem” of mind differentiating sensory experience from mental operation (the Sublime). John Keats as well contemporaneously comments in an 1815 letter: “Bards of Passion and of Mirth/Ye have left your souls on earth! / Have ye souls in heaven too, / Double-lived in regions new?” {Keats, J. Ode to the Poets, London 1814} stating the simulacrum of quantum mechanical research perspective. Said literary observations must be included in scientific field endeavor as Quantum Linguistic Criticism following Ervin Schrodinger’s 1944 scientific observations ‘What is Life?’ intended for Humanists.
Epistemological Attitude in the Cognition System: Holistic Constructivist Approach View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jevgenija Sivoronova, Aleksejs Vorobjovs
Fundamental and contemporary cognition with a multi-faceted subject, complex knowledge objects, and multi-level knowledge is the authors' challenge to develop, model, describe and explain the cognition system with systemic quality such as epistemological attitude. The theoretical and methodological foundation is formed by the approach of holistic constructivism and the three-level methodology, philosophical, general scientific and specific scientific, in modelling complex systems. From a philosophical perspective defining the concept of epistemological attitude embraces three aspects. The first aspect is the quality of the cognition system, such as systemic quality. The second aspect is a mechanism of cognition that links elements of the cognition system, the main categories of cognition like subject, object, and knowledge, and develops relationships between them. The third aspect is a dynamic system and content models. The construct of the epistemological attitude and the cognition system proposes a new theoretical and methodological approach to model any of the cognition system's elements and their relations. General scientific and specific scientific methodologies potentiate developing the epistemological attitude dynamic system and content models and their research methods. Those can be used to model and analyse various social constructs of cognitive-related objects, ascertain their meanings and epistemological and socio-psychological importance, and make predictions about cognition in society, education, and science.
Law and Economics of Judicial Hierarchies : Are They Useful for the Correction of Legal Errors? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alex Atanasov
How useful is judicial hierarchy in correcting errors made by lower-level courts in their judicial decisions? This paper applies organizational knowledge to analyse judicial hierarchies by evaluating the economics of the correction of legal errors. The method used is a multidisciplinary analysis drawing upon law, economics and management. The importance—social, political and economic— of judges dispensing justice correctly is fundamental; it enhances coherence, efficiency, uniformity and foreseeability. I show that judicial hierarchies have a mixed result in correcting errors made by lower-level courts. In coming to this conclusion, this paper applies the work of Ronald Coase to judicial hierarchies to show that the current degree of knowledge resembles the fog of ignorance that surrounded the firm before 1937. I examine the following factors: the complexities of error in law, the tension between individual and social optimality, the judicial process as a quasi-market, market failures and hierarchical solutions, market failures of hierarchies, competition as an alternative method to correcting hierarchical errors. While law can show what errors are made or exist, organizationally speaking, lawyers qua lawyers cannot say how error correction can be improved. Nor can management as the judiciary is a fundamentally different type of organization. However, economics has the tools to evaluate hierarchies. I draw upon examples from the United Kingdom and France to compare the results and to provide reasons for the differences in results considering the analytical factors that we have identified.
Fighting for their Daughters’ Rights to Education: A Qualitative Study of Afghan Mother in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Neela Hassan
Historically, Afghan women have been portrayed as passive and defenseless racialized “others” in great need of liberation from the west. This hegemonic construct of the Islamic female who needs to be rescued was one of the main justifications for the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. This study examines the role of Afghan mothers with no formal education in facilitating and smoothening the way for their daughters and other young girls to be the first generation of women to attend school. The study draws on 18 in-depth qualitative interviews with uneducated mothers in Kandahar, a southern province of Afghanistan that was the battlefield for the Taliban and American forces for over twenty years. The findings illustrate that Afghan women negotiate space for the younger generation of females while being caught in the nexus between western military intervention, conservative culture, deteriorating security, and poor economy. Applying Foucault’s concept of power and Crenshaw’s framework of intersectionality in the context of Afghanistan, I argue that while Afghan women experience structural and systemic oppression at the intersection of Western imperialism and cultural barriers, contrary to the Western depiction of racialized Muslim women, Afghan women claim their rights by strategically and silently resisting the subordination and oppression that have been forced upon them for generations.
(In)visibility of Women in India: Intersectionality, Gender, and Visual Culture View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kamila Junik
This paper aims at analyzing the problem of (in)visibility of women in the public sphere. In the context of the contemporary debate on gender and social issues, I examine the position of marginalized women through readings of chosen works by women artists from India. For my analysis I have chosen a visual narration/biography by Dayanita Singh consisting of photographs (and later added text) of a charismatic hijra Mona Ahmed, a photographic story Durga by Sharmistha Dutta, who deals with widowhood and godliness, and poetry by Jyotsna Milan, one of the contemporary Hindi writers, who raises her voice against unequal gender roles in Indian society. These three examples, despite formal differences, address similar questions: of social norms and clichés, prevailing in the modern times, of tradition and subjectivity, of feminine corporality and individual needs. This study adds to the discussion on gendered exclusion in public policy and decision-making roles. Thus, it contributes to the fields of sociology, gender and women’s studies, visual culture, and culture studies.
