Break Things Research Articles

The Pragmatists Re: Radical Individualism

In “The Legal Ethics of Radical Individualism,” Thomas L. Shaffer argues that legal ethics has been distorted by two doctrines in academic moral philosophy: first, the false separation of fact and value; and second, the assumption that the moral agent acts alone. To correct this distortion, and thereby “look at broken things through the lens” in such a way that makes them whole again, Shaffer suggests that the lawyer work from the competing premise: that stating facts is a moral act and that the community precedes the individual. This approach enables the lawyer to fulfill her ultimate goal of presenting “a more truthful description of reality.” (Shaffer, 978) Shaffer’s critique echoes the ideas of pragmatist philosophers who, beginning in the late 19th century, also rejected the doctrines he finds distortive. Chauncey Wright, John Henry James, John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Nicholas St. John Green, and Charles Peirce agreed that truth inheres in the process of formulating and acting upon ideas, and that society is greater than the sum of its parts. In this Paper, I will consider Shaffer’s critique of radical individualism through the pragmatists’ lens. Drawing on Louis Menand’s account of the philosophers’ interwoven lives and ideas in The Metaphysical Club, I will first identify what the philosophers have in common and how their ideas lend support to Shaffer’s critique. I will further argue that the Model Rules Shaffer criticizes as inconsistent with genuine legal ethics are in fact in harmony with the moral framework he and the pragmatists espouse. Finally, I will show that the source of this discrepancy between Shaffer and the pragmatists with respect to the Model Rules is Shaffer’s flawed characterization of the lawyer’s role as mediator and synthesizer.

The Rocky Road from Bench to Bedside

The Rocky Road from Bench to Bedside

Testing our understanding of tests

Doctors have a prime role as diagnosticians and are encouraged to practise evidence based medicine (EBM). The classic Bayesian formulation of evidence based diagnostic testing1 relies on the estimation of...

Violent Acts of a Feminist Nature: Estela Portillo Trambley's Striking Short Fiction

Where I live as woman is to men a wilderness. But to me it is a home. --Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (162) I'm Bitch. Beast. Macha. iWachale! Ping! Ping! Ping! I break things. --Sandra Cisneros, in Loose Woman (115) Near the end of Estela Portillo Trambley's 1975 short story, It Weren't for the Honeysuckle, the protagonist Beatriz prepares to bury the man she has just killed: Robles, her abusive common law husband of more than twenty-five years. She debates this drastic decision with her reluctant accomplice Sofia, who, despite being another of Robles's victimized women, remains remorseful about their act. While Beatriz sees killing Robles as necessary to protecting their bodies and home, Sofia is unable to reconcile the violent ending to Robles's cruelties with the guilt that she feels. Repeatedly, she questions Beatriz's Christian faith, wondering aloud if Beatriz believes in God at all. In responding to Sofia's challenges, Beatriz confirms a spiritual connection, but of a different kind: Oh, Sofia, look at all the gladness God made. This house, this yard, is a piece of his heaven.... I believe in the greenness of the earth.... No, Sofia, [I am] not evil. I love order around me more than anything. Yes, there's a wildness in me from all the things that happened in our lives, the sadness, the loneliness, the violences. They grow inside us--mix--and become something I cannot explain. (69) (1) Drawing on this mix by suggesting that the female body's experience of patriarchal oppressions is consistent with the kinds of exploitation suffered by the environment, Trambley explores the imposed relationship between the two in It Weren't for the Honeysuckle. Specifically, she justifies her protagonist's aberrant response to her desperate situation by manipulating the social implication that woman and nature are subordinate to the relationship that man and culture hold. In addition, Trambley addresses the unexamined violence toward women present in Chicano/Mexican culture by treating female sexuality as a central topic in her fiction. While ecofeminism and Chicana sexuality were typically not discussed together in the 1970s when Trambley was writing, It Weren't for the Honeysuckle reveals a sophisticated deconstruction of the female as nature/male as culture dualism in order to address the gender politics underpinning the Chicano/Mexican community. This essay examines the ways in which Trambley challenges the gendering of this dualism and the physical and emotional violence inherent in maintaining its boundaries. If woman is nature, argues Trambley, it is a nature that has been exploited and commodified by men and male culture, and one that ultimately has the power to overwhelm, poison, and subsume its (male) human aggressors and their attempt to impose a false and one-sided sense of order. Trambley uses the trope of woman as nature to critique the violence, inequality, and exploitation underneath patriarchal concepts of nature. At the same time, It Weren't for the Honeysuckle re-imagines the ways in which has been understood and functioned politically and artistically. In response to experiences of social and political alienation, the Chicano Movement relied on a creative rearticulation of a home both within and outside the borders of the US (e.g., Aztlan), yet it also reinscribed a certain homelessness generally imposed on women within a patriarchal culture and, more specifically, within Chicano culture. Such marginalization has left Chicanas pressed to discover their own sitio y lengua, as Emma Perez contends. Perez argues that the need for a distinct site and language of resistance arises in response to the hostile conditions that many Chicanas experience from within their community. Oppression, she asserts, gives way to an intimate place where theory is born (Sexuality and Discourse 166). …

Obsolete objects in the literary imagination: ruins, relics, rarities, rubbish, uninhabited places, and hidden treasures

Translated here into English for the first time is a monumental work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach's Mimesis. Italian critic Francesco Orlando explores Western literature's obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc.). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, Orlando traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialization, when the functional becomes the dominant value of Western culture. Roaming through every genre and much of the history of Western literature, the author identifies distinct categories into which obsolete images can be classified and provides myriad examples. The function of literature, he concludes, is to remind us of what we have lost and what we are losing as we rush toward the future.

On the cusp of a validation wall

Traditionally, universities teach how to make or build things but not so much how to break things or find, patch, or prevent breaks. However, much of industry validation hinges on the latter skills. Validation is something that does not get noticed when done well, but everyone notices when something goes wrong - such as the infamous Pentium floating-point division bug. Major semiconductor companies experience postsilicon validation turning into a very expensive, time-consuming proposition, yet very few college graduates are formally trained in the area. Validation is the activity of ensuring a product satisfies its reference specifications, runs with relevant software and hardware, and meets user expectations. Here, I discuss some of the key challenges to successful validation and show why a radical transformation is necessary if validation is to be effective in the near future.

Assent, and: Bodies

Assent Wind wraps around the fingered branches like trapped fish line. The same old clumsy mistake, jerking response. [End Page 56] If we were counting on wisdom or competence or maturity to save us we had best remember how to pray – and not forget when prayer begins to save, and claim its wisdom as our own again, plunge again into the same old passionate play. God I love this song, the part where the singer admits drink has cost his wife and car but finds this more reason to drink. We've invented reason and drink because being is harder, naked, fouled thread-of-ourselves on a wind-wound branch with its crimson bud that may yet blossom. No reason not to blossom except we choke off what starts to happen of its own. It calls only for our assent, the simplest, most elusive prayer. We hoard this secret ingredient [End Page 57] beauty lacks. Sap oozes from the sliced branch, hooked worm dangles its damned entreaty with the clumsiness and failure of a bad country song. The sun's chorus is blue, blue stained glass behind the tangled cames of branches. Higher branches bloom for birds and caterpillars, and for this brief passage we're open, neither wise nor competent, but held simply, one among many precious, not quite so broken things. [End Page 58] Bodies Take my eyes, bark of pine, sway of needles, slight cloud beyond this tall, straight trunk. I would hear the sound of living things again. Insect, osprey. Carpet of fallen needles, soften my walk – thick, new socks on a stainless rug, stained body crossing, re-crossing carefully until this too is soiled, taken for granted. I would bring this brokenness among living bodies, reach for the soft flesh folds that untie, a bathrobe slipped. We walk into each other, like multiplying like to its proper strangeness.

The Effects of Technology on Our Humanity

am tired and sick of War. Its Glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have never fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is Hell! William T. Sherman (1) ... and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. -- Isaiah 2:4 The of a reference our physical training regimen, was all that defined the e-mail message I had just received from my boss, the commanding officer of an infantry battalion which I had been assigned as Chaplain. There was no other text, but a video clip was attached. Opening the attachment, I saw what appeared be an aerial view of an enemy bunker; the video obviously was from the nose cone of a quickly descending smart (2) targeted on the bunker. Suddenly a door of the bunker opened and out ran a soldier, sprinting for all he was worth toward the edge of the screen. Just as he reached the far corner of the view, the screen went blank, indicating the bomb had hit the target. I watched the clip a few times, laughed at the commander's comment on PT, and forwarded the e-mail some colleagues. Only later did some troublesome little questions start nag at me: Did the soldier make it safety? Were others caught unaware in the bunker? What human tragedies or sorrows, if any, fol lowed that blank screen? This article will explore the increase of technology's influence in the military and the correlating effects that influence has on those who make war and those who fight in war. It will suggest the reason behind my finding humor in the video clip and my concurrent failure consider from the start the human questions. That reason is subsumed in technology. In conclusion, the article will propose responses the harmful influences of technology and explore their potential for countering or ameliorating those negative influences. Devices and Disengagement The concept of how technology can lead disengagement may be most clearly delineated by Albert Borgmann's device paradigm. (3) While application of Borgmann's device paradigm technology in a military setting is at first glance a strange prospect, it may be helpful in understanding how the most harmful aspect of technology, that of disengagement, comes about. In Borgmann's paradigm, he uses the concept of the stove or hearth as compared the furnace. (4) The hearth, according Borgmann, was more than just a source of heat; though it was that, it also had a culture of its own. It possessed the characteristics of a thing. These characteristics were embedded because the fireplace required engagement. (5) It informed and engaged the user as a furnace never could. The user of the fireplace was required participate in its use. Chopping wood, keeping embers going, cleaning out old ashes--all were part of the experience. The hearth was also less efficient than a furnace, and so often families would gather there for evening activities. According Borgmann, technology transforms things (the hearth) into (the furnace) by splitting means and ends. (6) In that transformation the means are provided by machines. The ends are split from the means and adopt the status of a commodity. The goal of technology in this splitting of means and ends is make the c ommodity more available. As a result of this pushing of the importance of availability, devices take on important characteristics; they are safe, easy, instantaneous, and ubiquitous. (7) Safe and Easy Warfare Applying warfare Borgmann's device paradigm provides some interesting insights. Often we hear soldiers crudely refer the Army's mission as to kill people and break things. While the true mission is much more involved than that description suggests, the description itself is helpful in applying the device paradigm. …

Profiles in computing: Allan L. Scherr

"Most of the work I've done has been done to break things into existence that didn't exist before. . . . In a sense, my whole career's been about building organizations that didn't exist before, creating processes to do things that have never been done before, and solving technical problems that hadn't been solved before. The work I did at MIT was that way as well. There was no real foundation to build on, and I had to make it up as I went along. That's characterized, if not my whole career, at least the parts of my career that I consider the most rewarding." "Pioneers are also the people that get arrows shot through them. That's the downside, and I've had my share of arrows pulled out of my hide."