Search Results

The paper attempts to analyse one sort of self knowledge, that of our phenomenal states, by engaging with Crispin Wright’s approach in his Whitehead Lectures. It is argued that his distinction between phenomenal and attitudinal self knowledge is inadequately drawn but that we can pick out the phenomenal case well enough to know what we are dealing with. It is then argued that Wright’s theses which are presented by characterizing avowals are formulated at the wrong level and are also probably wrong. Further, when we formulate theses at the right level that match Wright’s claims, they seem open to similar counterexamples. It is suggested that our beliefs about our own experiences can be mistaken, and that we can be ignorant about the character of our experiences. A serious question remains about how we know about our own experiences, and something is proposed in response to that difficult question.

Chapter 6 frames translation as a process of displacement and erasure, reassembling and silencing in the process of reconfiguring individual subjectivities and identities. The Chapter considers how particular westernised translations of ‘education’ in Ladakh, Northern India, are materialised as a complex assemblage. Critically, the analysis traces the reassemblage of the social, the familial and forms of livelihoods that are often subjected to processes of displacement and erasure. A translation perspective is utilised here to open up the potential alternative translations of education by looking at how indigenous ways of knowing might become articulated in less violent ways. Themes of narrative, landscape, sculpture and Buddhism suggest that there is need to translate ‘within the silences’ that surround dominant translations of education – both in the sense that indigenous ways of knowing are typically silenced within modern education and to draw attention to the limitations of ‘wordy’ ways of knowing.

The general introduction outlines the topic of the study, experimental knowledge-making in Victorian literature and science, and the practice-based method through which it will be explored. To this end, it provides a brief exposition of relevant work in science studies, sociology and anthropology while emphasising the literary critical perspective of the book. Moreover, the introductory chapter situates Artful Experiments in the field of Victorian literature and science scholarship, showing, by means of two examples from the work of Charles Darwin and Robert Browning, how it deviates from the well established ‘two-way traffic’ approach and what it has to offer instead. The relation between experiment and writing is also introduced and clarified here.

The book concludes with a reading of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. For this work can be characterised, the chapter suggests, as a performance of, and meditation on, what the foregoing sections were meant to examine: namely the bridge-building activities or ways of knowing through which personal experiences of the material world come to be dressed in recognisable social or ideal forms. The chapter ends with an attempt to situate the practice-based approach developed in Artful Experiments within a wider theoretical debate about the relationship between literary work and scientific knowledge.

This describes the book Sexual Harassment of Working Women as a work of feminist theory, but also, fundamentally, as a work of critical theory. Legal expertise may have been required to make the arguments at the core of the book, but its reality and texture emerged from the act of translating the lived experience of working women into a form legal experts could comprehend. Its author advanced a methodology which rested on the assumption that women would determine and express their own interests, arguing that the act of doing so is self-enabling in that it frees women from specific forms of naturalized social coercion. The critical epistemology at the heart of the translative function of the book was an attack on the “ways of knowing” that were accepted indiscriminately in conventional legal discourse.