Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 307.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 07:27:45 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: living in a cyborg world
Allow me to recommend to your attention the following review article:
Donald MacKenzie, "The Imagined Market", rev of Philip Mirowski,
Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (London Review of
Books, 31 October 2002, p. 22-4). MacKenzie in support of Mirowski
presents Michel Callon's argument, in The Laws of the Market (1998),
that "economics does not describe an already existing 'economy',
but helps to bring that economy into being. Economics is not a descriptive
but a performative endeavour.... world-shaping, not just ... world-
describing". For performative economics he cites as well Francesco
Guala (Centre for the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Exeter), whose
article "Models, Simulations, and Experiments", in Model-Based Reasoning,
ed. Magnani and Nersessian (Kluwer 2002): 59-74, goes well beyond economic
theory and is one of the best pieces in that book.
What does all this have to do with us -- other than the fact that we
live in the world described by MacKenzie et al? The word "cyborg" gives it
away, I suppose: we're living in an artifically constructed, cybernetic
world. Not only that. What particularly fascinates me about the situation
which MacKenzie depicts is its deep ontological ambiguity. It reminds me
of something someone said about England, that people have been living
here for so long that the entire country is in fact a garden. (Some parts
of this garden do not particularly engender respect for the gardeners
responsible, but you get the point.)
Along with many others I have been worrying recently (and not so recently)
about how we reach the public which pays our salaries, in particular how we
do this with humanities computing. Here is an answer. If ever there was a
subject for humanities computing to use in building bridges and opening
windows, computational modeling is it. We may not be able to follow the
mathematics of the economic modellers, but we do study what they're up to.
Comments?
Yours,
WM
Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk |
w.mccarty@btinternet.com | www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
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