Uncertain Claims Research Articles

Negotiating Uncertain Claims

Recent developments in the relations between politicians and journalists in the US have (among other things) created a situation where journalists often have to deal with information that is very difficult, even impossible, to verify, yet which has potential societal significance that cannot be ignored. This has, we argue, affected how journalists and journalistic outlets relate to each other within what we tentatively term an inferential community. To argue this, we analyze journalistic demonstrations of authority in attempts to establish and connect “facts” related to uncertain claims in two cases of the coverage of the nascent Trump administration. This is, however, not a fully elaborated case study through which we can conclude something broader about contemporary journalism. The paper should rather be seen as a preliminary empirical probe allowing us to focus on a specific issue while proposing a tentative conceptual and analytical frame through which this may be studied in a more sustained and detailed way.

How to Shape a Better Future? Epistemic Difficulties for Ethical Assessment and Anticipatory Governance of Emerging Technologies

Empirical research into the ethics of emerging technologies, often involving foresight studies, technology assessment or application of the precautionary principle, raises significant epistemological challenges by failing to explain the relative epistemic status of contentious normative claims about future states. This weakness means that it is unclear why the conclusions reached by these approaches should be considered valid, for example in anticipatory ethical assessment or governance of emerging technologies. This paper explains and responds to this problem by proposing an account of how the epistemic status of uncertain normative claims can be established in ethical and political discourses based on Jurgen Habermas’ discourse ethics. To better understand the nature of the problem, the relationship between norms, facts and the future is explored in light of potential meta-ethical fallacies faced in the field of empirical ethics. Weaknesses of current approaches to anticipatory ethical assessment and governance are then explored, including the Precautionary Principle and Technology Assessment. We argue that the epistemic status of uncertain normative claims can be understood within Habermas’ approach to political discourse, which requires ‘translation’ of uncertain claims to be comprehensible to other stakeholders in discourse. Translation thus provides a way to allow for uncertain normative claims to be considered alongside other types of validity claims in discourse. The paper contributes a conceptual account of the epistemic status of uncertain normative claims in discourse and begins to develop a ‘methodology of translation’ which can be further developed for approaches to research and ethical assessment supporting anticipatory evidence-based policy, governance and system design.

Uprooting “Indigeneity” in South Africa's Western Cape: The Plant That Moves

ABSTRACTAmid global concerns about climate change, scientists suggest that South African rooibos tea's indigenous ecosystem may be shifting southward. By 2011, rooibos farmers were beginning to worry that the plant was abandoning its “proper” home and undermining both their livelihoods and their rooted sense of belonging. Using the framework of plant and human mobility to explore the impact of environmental changes on one farming community, I investigate how climate change unsettles not only livelihoods but also social cosmologies. If rooibos's growing range shifts, how will it affect the ways that farmers understand and claim their heritage in connection to this indigenous plant? How does the uprooting of a plant's indigeneity influence ideas about cultural indigeneity as rooted in place? What role can anthropology play in theorizing ecological mobility? In addressing these questions, I contend that understanding the effects of climate change also involves destabilizing the idea of place. By focusing on plant mobility, I articulate a theory of geographical precarity: I imply that people's uncertain claims to belonging in place merged with uncertainty of the rootedness of place itself. I conclude by examining industry efforts to delineate and control where rooibos could “legally” grow through the creation of geographical indications.

Extreme value theorems of uncertain process with application to insurance risk model

Uncertain process is a sequence of uncertain variables indexed by time. This paper presents a series of extreme value theorem of uncertain independent increment process and provides uncertainty distribution of first hitting time. This paper also proposes an insurance risk model with uncertain claims. Finally, a concept of ruin index is defined and a ruin index formula is given.

Erratum: Still No Answers for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Erratum: Still No Answers for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

ESSAYS IN CINEMA SOUND

Two volumes published in 2004 make valuable contributions to our understanding of film sound. Silent Film Sound is a thoroughgoing reassessment of sound practices during the first 20 years of American film history that corrects a myriad of erroneous received opinion. Despite the uncertain claims of its underlying critical approach, Silent Film Sound is an impressively researched work that should be an immediate standard reference for its subject. The historical essays collected in Le son en perspective: nouvelles recherches/New Perspectives in Sound Studies offer a useful European supplement to Silent Film Sound's discussion of early sound practices. In addition, several essays offer varying perspectives on current issues in the restoration and preservation of film sound.

Rhetorics of unity and disunity: The Worcester firefighters memorial service

Rhetorical criticism has generally considered the public memorial speech as a moment of re‐establishing societal equilibrium and unity after the disruption of death. In the case of the Worcester Firefighters Memorial Service in 1999, however, the unifying impulses of the speakers both create a public forum for the memorial service and prevent it from cohering. While the eulogists draw on ceremonial conventions of epideictic rhetoric, the line between epideictic and deliberative rhetoric blurs as the memorial speeches become the occasion of differing, divided, and uncertain claims about how the public is constituted and who has grounds to memorialize the dead. Accordingly, we argue that neither unity nor disunity has rhetorical priority, placing the burden instead on rhetorical analysis to account for the complex relations between unity and disunity.

Visions of Social Control: Probation Considered

The extent to which probation in California controls criminal offenders is examined. A distinction is made between the representations of social control by probation and its realities. Some writers claim that penology has developed a new language and strategy directed to the management rather than treatment of offenders, scarcely true for probation, which receives more offenders than jails and prisons. Probation may have a new language but its most significant changes have been a massive deterioration in supervision due to loss of staff and budget and a heavy increase of cases. Study of four northern California county probation departments showed that a common adaptation to the avalanche of new cases and loss of staff was bankloading of cases. Increased caseload size has meant that many active cases go without supervision. Reasons for probation's marginal position and uncertain claims on county budgets are discussed.

Indian Reservation Water Rights

Indian tribes have uncertain claims to sizable water rights in the western states. State and federal officials are seeking to convert these rights to fixed entitlements in order to make clear to other users the amount of water legally available in various water systems. Two important questions are whether the tribes can find ways to put their rights to use and whether they can sell or lease their rights for use by others.