History Of Concept Research Articles

Trust and trustworthy artificial intelligence: A research agenda for AI in the environmental sciences.

Demands to manage the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) are growing. These demands and the government standards arising from them both call for trustworthy AI. In response, we adopt a convergent approach to review, evaluate, and synthesize research on the trust and trustworthiness of AI in the environmental sciences and propose a research agenda. Evidential and conceptual histories of research on trust and trustworthiness reveal persisting ambiguities and measurement shortcomings related to inconsistent attention to the contextual and social dependencies and dynamics of trust. Potentially underappreciated in the development of trustworthy AI for environmental sciences is the importance of engaging AI users and other stakeholders, which human-AI teaming perspectives on AI development similarly underscore. Co-development strategies may also help reconcile efforts to develop performance-based trustworthiness standards with dynamic and contextual notions of trust. We illustrate the importance of these themes with applied examples and show how insights from research on trust and the communication of risk and uncertainty can help advance the understanding of trust and trustworthiness of AI in the environmental sciences.

Nature and Culture in the Age of Environmental Crisis: Digital Analysis of a Global Debate in The UNESCO Courier, 1948-2020


 
 
 This study uses digital text analysis, focusing on LDA topic modeling, to conduct a historical investigation of the relationship between the concepts of nature and culture found in the pages of the official magazine of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, The UNESCO Courier, between 1948 and 2020. The relationship between the concepts of nature and culture has historically been at the core of concerns about the environment and sustainability; Courier offers a means of charting a global conversation on these concepts. After presenting the corpus and our methods, the paper documents three approaches to LDA topic modeling that we have tested, through which we seek to make topic modeling useful for the field of conceptual history. Our empirical findings suggest that the concepts of nature and culture have come to be increasingly close over the course of the last six decades, while the stakes of the very distinction between the concepts have changed radically. Our methodological tests support the argument that topic modeling can be a valuable tool for conceptual history, albeit one that must be handled with care.
 
 

From "self-differentiation" to organoids-the quest for the units of development.

As proposed by Wilhelm Roux in 1885, the key goal of experimental embryology ("Entwicklungsmechanik") was to elucidate whether organisms or their parts develop autonomously ("self-differentiation") or require interactions with other parts or the environment. However, experimental embryologists soon realized that concepts like "self-differentiation" only make sense when applied to particular parts or units of the developing embryo as defined both in time and space. Whereas the formation of tissues or organs may initially depend on interactions with surrounding tissues, they later become independent of such interactions or "determined." Moreover, the determination of a particular tissue or organ primordium has to be distinguished from the spatially coordinated determination of its parts-what we now refer to as "patterning." While some primordia depend on extrinsic influences (e.g., signals from adjacent tissues) for proper patterning, others rely on intrinsic mechanisms. Such intrinsically patterned units may behave as "morphogenetic fields" that can compensate for lost parts and regulate their size and proper patterning. While these insights were won by experimental embryologists more than 100 years ago, they retain their relevance today. To enable the generation of more life-like organoids in vitro for studying developmental processes and diseases in a dish, questions about the spatiotemporal units of development (when and how tissues and organs are determined and patterned) need to be increasingly considered. This review briefly sketches this conceptual history and its continued relevance by focusing on the determination and patterning of the inner ear with a specific emphasis on some studies published in this journal.

Actors, concepts, controversies: the conceptual politics of European integration

ABSTRACT The paper is a contribution to research methodology. It proposes a useful methodological import into the range of interpretative approaches in Political Science – the study of Conceptual Politics. Drawing on methodology and categories developed in Conceptual History, Conceptual Politics is understood as the political and rhetorical moves, strategies, debates and their actors, that coin, shape or reflect political concepts in both institutional and social reality and its perception, and with regard to their past and present meanings, understandings and practices. The main methodological premise and also the distinguishing trait with regard to other interpretative approaches is this analytical focus on concepts: A concept is a word or a cluster of words that functions as a nodal point in a political controversy. Concepts are socially constructed factors and indicators of the reality they describe, interpret and modify. Concepts have different layers of meaning that are studied in their temporality and historicity. The different, past and present, layers require the researcher´s prior knowledge and an interpretative approach. The article presents the theoretical and methodological backgrounds and premises of the approach of Conceptual Politics, its added value, the heuristic and analytical tools for analysing it, and the empirical application of the tools proposed. It is argued that the approach is especially beneficial in analysing European integration.

Grace in a Time of War: Herder’s ‘Das Fest der Grazien’ between Schiller and Hölderlin

This article situates Herder’s little-read essay ‘Das Fest der Grazien’ (1795) in the conceptual history of grace between Schiller and Hölderlin. All three authors champion grace as an answer to modern conflict and division. But while Schiller articulates his theory of grace on the basis of Kantian dualisms, Herder and Hölderlin both turn to ancient Greek conceptions of charis and to an emphasis on the gratuitousness of grace, or of grace as gift and as gratitude. Herder argues implicitly against Schiller’s isolated observers of grace in order to emphasize interdependence rather than autonomy, participation rather than observation, and he stages a fictionalized scene of persuasion as a strategy to help persuade us of his claims. Hölderlin presents a similar understanding of grace but avoids strategies of persuasion, replacing them with a discourse of invitation, fidelity, and hope. Thus if for Herder grace in its gift-quality is always already present and need only be recognized, for Hölderlin grace is an event that happens to us, perennially unexpected and yet also surprisingly often even in a time of conflict and war.

Re‐centring class‐making across borders at various durées: Translocational optic, coloniality of class theory and multi‐scalar capitalist dynamics

AbstractSociological research on cross‐border class‐making often centres on contemporary dynamics of social inequality in the context of migration and mobility. Relying on the cultural–sociological and processual understanding of 'class', the article integrates three bodies of literature to study complexities of global and transnational class‐making to overcome the 'presentist' bias. Building on the accounts of the Annales School, and specifically on Fernand Braudel's famous distinction between courte durée, moyenne durée and longue durée of historic time periods, the article brings together three different bodies of research: (i) transnational and intersectional approaches; (ii) conceptual history of class theory and (iii) theories of racial and multi‐scalar capitalist dynamics to develop a flexible and relational, but historic‐sensitive toolkit for the analysis of global and transnational class‐making. One of the greatest advantages of this multi‐temporal outlook is that it allows to avoid over‐generalizing accounts on the logics of class‐making and to unpick potentially heterogeneous dynamics of class (re)production.

Contradictions of Scientific Multidimensionality - a Social Epistemology Insight

The paper problematizes the issue of contradictions of scientific multidimensionality and is devised as a contribution to the topic from the perspective of social epistemology. The paper points to the fact that scientific multidimensionality and interdisciplinarity are some of the unquestionable categories in the defining of contemporary notions of knowledge and science, and that, as such, they inherently possess negative aspects, which must be taken into consideration when reflected on within the current world history. The paper in particular foregrounds the problem of the status of humanities and social sciences which are marked as redundant and practically useless, due to the objective global and political circumstances and the rearguard capitalist logic. Moreover, the paper also discusses the conceptual history and a sort of knowledge stock of the fundamental roots of the modern notion of scientific knowledge, about which we can take more clear positions to contemporary discussions on the topic.

State of the Regional Integration Within South Asian Association for Regional Organisation (SAARC): Assessment of India’s Leadership

South Asia is one of the least integrated regions in terms of trade and people-to-people contact. With the goal of promoting regionalism, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was founded in 1985 and now has eight South Asian countries as a member (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka). India alone controls more than 80% of all variables, including economy, size, and population. Thus, the entire regional integration of South Asia has been and will continue to be dependent on India’s intentions regarding SAARC. As a result of several bilateral disagreements between the organisation’s member states, the SAARC has been dubbed a dysfunctional, talk-shop, and dead organisation. Having said that, this article aims to investigate the role of India as a regional leader as well as its intention and approach towards South Asian integration. Similarly, this document also assesses the effect of India’s leadership on the regional integration of South Asia. This article is based on the qualitative method of research and thus uses discourse analysis as the main methodology. As primary sources, discourse analyses in international relations often examine official speeches, declarations, legislative debates, diplomatic documents, interviews, newspapers, and editorials. Other scholarly works, novels, and conceptual histories can be analysed in addition to these.

Diabetes: A Transcultural History of a Disease Concept in the Late Qing and Republican China

In the past few years, the medical knowledge transfer in a West-East direction has attracted increased scholarly attention from European and American historians, whereas studies on such “knowledge travels” conducted in the East Asian context focus mainly on political and socio-cultural concepts. To provide an alternative perspective on the travel of Western medicine to Chinese soil, a case study on “diabetes” is conducted, under the theoretical framework of “transcultural conceptual history.” This article systematically analyzes the standardization, popularization, politicization, and derivatization of “diabetes,” calling for further attention to transcultural histories of medical concepts in modern China.

“Utopia shut up shop”: Hopeless Futures, Populism, and the American Dream

AbstractThis article considers the political implications of temporal orientations, building on Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual histories of “progress” and “utopia”. A computational analysis of survey data from the 2016 US election provides a snapshot of the breakdown of the American Dream for some respondents, and its continued relevance for others. Rather than progress from past to future, data shows negative perceptions of the past or present associated with negative expectations for the future, a link especially pronounced among white respondents and those who subscribe to “America first” beliefs. At the same time, to the extent that racial privilege is inversely related to expectations of future progress, the findings suggest that utopian narratives of progress can help smooth over injustice or inequality with view to a better future. Expectations of progress are thus tightly woven into perceptions of injustice or marginalization.

Even better than the real thing: a conceptual history of the “Celtic Phoenix”

ABSTRACT This article chronicles the history of the phrase “Celtic Phoenix.” It began in sincere right-wing Celtic Tiger revivalism, but was popularised instead in a satirical mode, through Paul Howard’s parodic upper-class Dublin persona “Ross O’Carroll-Kelly.” In Howard’s play Breaking Dad (2014), a fascistic character exults that “Oh, the Celtic Tiger was a wonderful thing […] But the Celtic Phoenix – well, it’s going to be even better.” The phrase was quickly rehabilitated into mainstream economic analysis, via The Economist in 2015, and grew widespread in the mid-2010s: a 2018 article even speculated whether the “Phoenix” had already “passed its peak.” Subsequently, a cynical cast returned to the phrase’s currency, with negative connotations of Celtic Tiger shortsightedness observable in its usage in late-2010s and early-2020s journalism and criticism. The shifting usage of this term reflects a country still reckoning with the Celtic Tiger and the 2008–9 financial crash. This is seen in the written literature of “Celtic Phoenix” Ireland, in work by writers including Caoilinn Hughes, Kevin Power and Sally Rooney. To these newer writers, the crash is a previous generation’s disaster: an old but healing wound capable of being explained away as “something to do with capitalism.”

Black Musicality and the Invention of Talent: The Case of Thomas Wiggins

Thomas Wiggins, a blind and cognitively disabled Black pianist and composer, was born into slavery in 1849 and died in circumstances akin to slavery in 1908. Known as “Blind Tom,” Wiggins began performing from a young age and became one of the most popular American pianists of the nineteenth century—as well as one of the most fiercely debated. He was dubbed idiotic, gifted, monstrous, mechanistic, genius, possessed, sophisticated, primitive, marvelous, magical, uncanny. This incongruous reception provides a window into shifting understandings of the relationship between Blackness and innate musicality. The discourse about Wiggins outlines a crucial phase in the conceptual history of musical talent, which solidified as a privileged social and scientific category by the early twentieth century. Onlookers’ descriptions invoke a set of recurring conceptual metaphors, characterizing talent as a discovery, as a gift, as an embodied trait, and as magic. The illogics within each of these constructions reveal how Wiggins’s performances threatened discourses of talent and their racial underpinnings, exposing chinks in the ideological apparatus that formed during the late nineteenth century and fortified the color line. Wiggins’s case demonstrates that musical ability, like music itself, is not an object or possession but a vast constellation of learned practices that shift over time and circumstance, reflecting the social conditions that cultivate them.

Do Czech Women Need ‘Gender’?: A Conceptual History of ‘Gender’ in Czechia

In recent years, there has been a growing anti-feminist, conservative movement across many parts of the world known as the anti-gender movement. This movement has been especially strong in Central Eastern Europe, where anti-gender actors have framed ‘gender’ as a static, foreign concept imported from ‘the West’ and destructive to ‘traditional’ societies. Utilising a postcolonial feminist approach, I examine the concept of ‘gender’ in Czechia, drawing attention to the role played by Czech academics, activists and policymakers in negotiating the use of the term ‘gender’. This article traces the history of the term from the 1990s when ‘gender’ was first introduced to a Czech academic audience, through public seminars and lectures hosted by the Prague Gender Studies Centre, to the present-day inclusion of gender mainstreaming discourse in Czech policy documents. I reveal that ‘gender’ is not a timeless, clearly defined, fixed term wholly imported from ‘the West’ but rather a concept with a variable and complicated history. Thus, this crucial term, first developed in Anglo-academia, is not uncontested or uncritically accepted, contrary to the claims made by anti-gender actors. The findings presented in this article hold implications critical to transnational feminist dialogue and activism during the current period of growing global anti-feminist sentiment.

Towards a Conceptual-Historical Critique of the Essentialist and Teleological Interpretations of Russian History. Part 1

The author discusses some of the dominant assertions in the literature on Russian history. One of them is the disqualification of the myth of the benevolent tsar as “false”. This disqualification is accompanied by the formulas “naïve or popular monarchism”, which designate the “pre-scientific illusions” that would have guided the collective movements of resistance to autocracy. Given the importance of collective representations of the tsar and power in Russian history, the theoretical premises on which the above-mentioned disqualifications are based affect the general interpretation of this history, for example the conception of the Russian people as “passive”. The author proposes to abandon this positivist scaffolding and approach the sources from other theoretical perspectives, in particular conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), to pose a radically different question: what truth is contained in the myth of the benevolent tsar and to reconstruct, against the essentialist and teleological vision, the historicity of the collective resistance to power in Russia. The first part studies the genealogy of the expression samozvan/ets/stvo (self-appointment), its original meaning – individual initiative against divine appointment – and its functions in the autocratic political paradigm. The lack of heuristic value of the formulas of “popular, or naïve monarchism,” the logic of which is to deprive the most oppressed segments of the population of their culture and language, is emphasized.

The costs of recognition: global politics, religion, and the colonial history of South Asia

AbstractIn this article I consider religion in international political scholarship and suggest a study of its epistemological politics and conceptual history. I argue that scholarship which strives to ‘engage’ or ‘recognize’ religion in global politics remain ignorant of the costs involved. Building on this argument, I ask if the troubles with recognizing religion reflect more basic qualities of recognition scholarship. Following the work by Jacques Rancière, Patchen Markell, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Jens Bartelson I argue that recognition has two faces and that along with its frequently acknowledged empowering aspect, it also comes with costs. In order to assess the costs of recognition I propose a study of its conditions of possibility, that is, a study of the ways in which the subjects of recognition become recognizable as such. In the final section of the paper, I apply this to the example of religion in global politics and the formation of the Muslim subject in the lead-up to the partition of British India and the founding of Pakistan.

Towards a global security studies: what can looking at China tell us about the concept of security?

Existing scholarship has demonstrated that theorising about security is Eurocentric. This leaves us with a partial account of the concept of security, which is presented as universal. This in turn generates explanatory problems because we are only seeing part of the picture. Yet there have been few attempts to move beyond critiques of Eurocentrism to examine the concept of security ‘elsewhere’. This paper takes China as its starting point, asking: what can looking at China tell us about security? In answering this question, the paper makes two contributions. First, it presents new empirical findings, building a conceptual history of security in China. Drawing on 140 key texts dating 1926–2022, the paper traces the emergence of the concept of security in China and its evolution through three explicit security concepts. Drawing on postcolonial insights it demonstrates that these concepts are hybrid, evolving out of multiple domestic and international influences. They have similarities as well as differences with the Eurocentric concept that dominates International Security Studies (ISS) and produce a discrete approach towards security that has been overlooked in a discipline that uses ‘Europe to explain Asia’. Second, considering these insights, the paper demonstrates that the universal concept of security that underpins theorising in ISS is partial and misleading. Differences in security concepts matter for theorising security and for understanding security policy. Consequently, I argue that we need to provincialize the concept of security: a truly global security studies is of necessity a provincial one attuned to difference and similarity.

Poverty and wealth in East Africa: A conceptual history By RhiannonStephens, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. pp. 312. 9 figs. ISBN 9781478018827. Pbk $27.95

The Economic History ReviewEarly View BOOK REVIEW Poverty and wealth in East Africa: A conceptual history By Rhiannon Stephens, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. pp. 312. 9 figs. ISBN 9781478018827. Pbk $27.95 Rebecca Simson, Corresponding Author Rebecca Simson [email protected] Wadham College, Oxford Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Rebecca Simson, Corresponding Author Rebecca Simson [email protected] Wadham College, Oxford Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 02 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13265Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Quantitative Conceptual History

Abstract With the emergence of large digitized collections of historical texts, scholarship in the humanities has increasingly turned to studying texts as data. This article argues that seeing text as data is particularly apt for the study of conceptual history. The quantitative perspective allows for rethinking the analytical terminology used to study the transformation of political and social terminology. Further, quantitative conceptual history requires re-evaluation on four levels. First, it forces scholars of conceptual history to reconsider the role of reception in the spread and lexicalization of linguistic innovations. Second, it forces them to assess how to interpret quantitative analyses of linguistic change. Third, the use of quantitative methods calls for clarity in describing what is being measured and what is being interpreted based on quantitative analyses. Fourth, the use of machine-learning methods for conceptual history should remain careful. They can be very useful for exploration, but should be combined with count-based methods to provide concrete proof.

In the Conceptual Twilight Zone: Federation, Empire, and the Description of Large-Scale Orders

Both empire and federation are deeply contested concepts. The difficulties surrounding the competing notions of “empire” or “federation” can be rooted in their respective heuristic strengths and weaknesses, but also in their political uses. In analyzing these concepts, recent scholarship has mostly neglected the relationship between empire and federation. Should the two be used as compatible concepts, as complementary categories, or as fundamentally competing frameworks? What implications do these conceptual options have for the larger endeavor of a description of transnational politics? This article systematically addresses this tension through an argument on how intellectual and conceptual histories can contribute to approaching this complicated relationship. As the article argues, overlaps and hybridities between empire and federation can be grasped plausibly by analyzing these polities not only through their institutional features but also as discursive constellations. Through such a lens, it becomes clear why modern politics is populated by numerous political orders both federal and imperial.

Theory of History, Epistemic Transformations, and Presentism

This remarkable book is an outcome of many years of reflection on conceptual history by one of its leading exponents, who through the magnificent Iberconceptos project has explored the scope for thinking about the life of ideas ‘beyond Bielefeld (Koselleck) and Cambridge (Skinner)’. Fernández Sebastián here offers a master class in what conceptual history can be in the hands of a seasoned practitioner who is both rigorous and imaginative, not to mention formidably well read in the historiographies of Iberian America, Europe, and the United States. Many historians would have been content with that, but Fernández Sebastián's ambitions go a great deal further. His work on the conceptual history of the Iberian independence revolutions leads him to urge historians to take seriously the theorizing of history, not of History in a Hegelian sense, but as an intellectual discipline. This would require scrutiny of historical practice beyond discussions of method (which, he suggests, all too easily reduces to technique) to a far deeper level of reflexivity about historical consciousness. The author engagingly reveals, tucked away in a footnote, his hope that the book might persuade readers who think they are not interested in theory of history to think again.