Pragmatic Version Research Articles

Pragmatism and Consequentialism

Legal Pragmatism is the view that judges should decide cases in a way that is, all things considered, in the best interests of the community. It is a forward-looking theory that rejects inviolable constraints by past judicial decisions. A pragmatist judge believes that the future should not be the slave of the past. In this paper, I argue that pragmatism is an attractive view because it is an idealized form of consequentialism: pragmatism captures the most desirable features of consequentialism while avoiding consequentialism's most powerful objections. I will also argue that rule pragmatism -- a version of pragmatism that is able to respect legal rules, just as rule consequentialism is able to respect moral rules -- is a viable theory of adjudication that is consistent with traditional legal values and the rule of law.

TheAs Ifin Cognitive Science, Neuroscience and Anthropology

In recent years, neurophysiological and psychological research has highlighted a pragmatic version of the theory of knowledge, a version in which the concept of simulation has been found to play a crucial role. In fact, research on canonical and mirror neurons has shown that an as if simulative schema is required to perceive, categorize and understand the meaning of the external world. The present study compares the cognitive paradigm of embodied cognition with Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory. Specifically, cognitive processes and cultural mechanisms are described as phenomena that emerge from the dynamic interaction that exists between people’s practical abilities and the structure of the local environment in which they act and live. A pragmatic conception of knowledge has also emerged in the field of ethnological investigation. Indeed, the concepts of resonance and empathy have proven to be essential instruments for ethnological knowledge.

Virgil and Bacon in the Schoolroom

Virgil's Georgics is an elusive text and scholars have consistently sought to gain some kind of interpretive purchase on it by driving it into the dirt. The desire to read the Georgics in this fashion—to track its hexameters towards the horizon line of the English countryside, or into the reforming programs of institutions such as the Royal Society's Georgical Committee—has dominated recent accounts of the poem's early modern legacy. This particular approach to the Georgics has yielded valuable insights concerning the transformations to which literary texts (and indeed the practice of interpretation) are susceptible. Douglas Chambers, for instance, has argued that seventeenth-century georgic is characterized by a desire to "extend the exegesis of Virgil's text into the practice of agriculture."1 We can detect in this particular act of exegetical extension a response to Virgil's self-presentation in the Georgics as poet-preceptor, and an attempt to recast conventional claims about the instrumentality of literary texts. This pragmatic version of georgic may constitute a direct response to the educational legacy of Virgil's poem. From Sir Thomas Elyot and Sir Francis Bacon to John Milton, Abraham Cowley, and a host of English schoolmasters, adventurous readers explored and codified the epistemological resources of the Georgics. These readers consistently understood the poem's formal structures and discursive logic in relation to the educational institutions that sponsored first encounters with literary texts. Their efforts suggest that we need to reassess the kind of cultural work in which Virgil's poem has been said to be engaged in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Given its relatively stable position in grammar-school curricula throughout this period, we would do well to inquire how and to what purpose the poem became enmeshed in a network of self-reflexive educational discourses, and how this pedagogical mode relates to the more familiar versions of georgic that emerge during the course of the seventeenth century.2 When Virgil's poem is reimagined by agrarian reformers and green-thumbed gentlemen, its nascent agricultural legacy is the offspring of an educational fantasy. Accordingly, the following discussion pursues the Georgics into the schoolroom rather than the fields. [End Page 161] I. "The Rurall Part of Virgil" In The Book Named the Governor (1531), Elyot praises Virgil as a poet whose variety makes his poems uniquely suited to the education of children. He anatomizes the benefits of a curriculum that includes all three of Virgil's canonical poems, but his praise for the Georgics can be read as a statement about the goals to which instruction in literary texts might aspire: In his Georgics, Lord, what pleasant variety there is; the divers grains, herbs, and flowers that be there described, that, reading therein, it seemeth to a man to be in a delectable garden or paradise. What ploughman knoweth so much of husbandry as there is expressed? Who, delighting in good horses, shall not be thereto more inflamed, reading there of the breeding, choosing, and keeping of them? In the declaration whereof Virgil leaveth far behind him all breeders, hackneymen, and skosers. Is there any astronomer that more exactly setteth out the order and course of the celestial bodies, or that more truly doth divine in his prognostications of the times of the year, in their qualities, with the future estate of all things provided by husbandry, than Virgil doth recite in that work? If the child have a delight in hunting, what pleasure shall he take of the fable of Aristeus; semblably in the hunting of Dido and Aeneas, which is described most elegantly in his book of Aeneid.3 It is difficult to account for the terms in which Elyot praises the poem (to say nothing of his odd suggestion that "the fable of Aristeus" is just the thing for the child who delights in hunting) without reference to the theory and practice of humanist pedagogy.4 Although at least one modern classicist interprets Elyot's remarks as proof of his utter...

From digital administration to organisational learning

PurposeTo explore whether deliberate organisational change of a public sector organisation (a local municipality) would create an avenue for organisational learning.Design/methodology/approachA case study was set up to study the means by which the organisational change towards a digital administration was to come about. The organisational change was interpreted through the optics of theories of organisational learning. A pragmatic version of these theories is presented and applied in the study in which learning is understood as being triggered by the meeting with uncertainty and the relation between the individual and the organisation (subject‐world) as transactional (a continuous mutual formation).FindingsViewed through the lenses of a pragmatic understanding of organisational learning it is possible to extend this understanding to an understanding of organisations as arenas made up by social worlds created and held together by commitments to organisational activities. Further, elaborating the idea of learning as being triggered by the meeting with uncertainty into the organisational arena, it is possible to characterise organisational tensions made up by different commitments to the organisational change and development as tensions between social worlds. It is argued that these tensions may act as closures or openings towards organisational learning understood as the continuous transformation of the organisation.Originality/valueThis paper offers an understanding of organisational learning that ties the subject‐world, the individual‐organisation, together in a way that is coherent with the learning theory. Further, it offers possibilities for working with the enhancement of organisational learning by way of paving a way for joint critical thinking or inquiry.

Lawrence Lessig's ‘Bleak House’: A Critique of “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity” or “How I learned to stop worrying and love internet law”1

The single most significant issue that intellectual property lawyers have had to deal with in recent years has been the impact of the Internet on copyright. It has raised more than mere legal queries, obliging society as a whole to reconsider the fundamental bargain of capitalism – private gain versus the public good. However, the authors progressed beyond this specific social bargain to consider the role played by commercial giants that either own or have a shared interest in the works of their creative artists, which in turn requires us to scrutinize the true purpose of copyright law – the guarantee of a social bargain or a tool for pure economic protection. In an attempt to chart a suitable path for the future development of copyright law, as applicable to commercial giants and the Internet, the authors have chosen to critique Professor Lessig's theory, namely that the Internet and intellectual property law are being used by powerful media forces as a tool for suppressing creativity in the pursuit of pure economic benefit. The bleak view adopted by Lessig of the Internet and related intellectual property law, which he perceived as impeding progress, frustrating creativity and detracting from the positive social impact the Internet can have on society, is examined and ultimately regarded as being the equivalent of Dickens' ghost of Christmas yet to come and grounded in the Chancery lawyers of Victorian England depicted in Dickens' Bleak House.3 The authors conclude that the fundamental bargain that must be honoured, no matter what the social or commercial marketplace may be, is that a creator must be afforded such legal protection as to induce him or her to create. Whilst this may eventually amount to an updated and slightly more pragmatic version of current intellectual property law, it should certainly amount to more than the Creative Commons licences that were championed by Lessig. The authors welcome comment and discussion.

Utilizing theatrical tools in consultation training. A way to facilitate students' reflection on action?

The aim was to give the individual student a group-based opportunity to reflect on possible consultation strategies as the consultation was evolving. An actress acted as patient in the consultation training for a group of 30 students. The consultation was stopped at each critical incidence, and time-out given to allow the students to reflect on possible continuation strategies, and then to carry out one of them. The project was evaluated adopting a pragmatic version of the reflective practitioner research strategy as developed by Taylor. The evaluation was based on tutor and actress's field notes, students' written free text evaluation and students' evaluation through two focus groups. The qualitative analysis resulted in the three categories: the fiction created, temporality manipulated, and students' learning through reflection. Implications for students' learning process are discussed. We conclude that our way of creating fiction and manipulating temporality in the consultation training was paralleled by most students' report on substantial learning feed-forward abilities from reflection on action.

Idealistic and Pragmatic Versions of the Discourse of Partnership

Although the term ‘partnership’ is increasingly widely applied to a range of inter-organizational engagements within diverse international settings, its meaning is very unclear. This paper analyses how actors involved in implementing partnership working constructed its meaning. It draws on a case study from within the refugee resettlement field to reveal two contrasting versions of the discourse of partnership: a more ‘idealistic’ version of partnership as a ‘good thing’, and a more ‘pragmatic’ version that represented partnership largely in terms of the instrumentality of stakeholders. The tensions between trust and power within inter-organizational relationships are reflected in the uneasy relationship between these versions, and the effects of this tension on the enactment of partnership in the case study project are discussed. The paper considers the implications of these findings for researching and implementing partnership working more widely.

De 'missing link' tussen theorie en praktijk. Het cultuurprofiel als instrument

Peirce often claimed that his version of pragmatism differed from its rivals because it could be proved. His first attempt to prove pragmatism appeared in 1878, and the search for the proof was central to his work after 1900. The paper describes and compares three different strategies that he employed in looking for a proof. One strategy defends pragmatism by showing that it clarifies the contents of beliefs and assertions; a second claims that it offers all the clarification needed for using propositions in inference and inquiry; and the third claims that pragmatist clarification provides a special 'ultimate logical' interpretant of the sign.

James, Royce, and Logic

James, Royce, and Logic Harvey Cormier It seems easy enough to understand the pragmatic philosophical position of William James. A struggle has persisted through philosophical history between realists, who think that there is a real world outside of the conscious mind, and idealists, who think there is not any such world. James is clearly on the idealists' side, since he says flat out in many places that the world we think and talk about is made of "experiences." But James is also clearly a realist, since he says in no uncertain terms that the objects of our knowledge transcend and are independent of us experiencing subjects. And, moreover, James also clearly offers neither realism nor idealism but a Kantian middle path between the two, since he says that the human serpent of perception and desire is all over everything, and this plainly entails that there is a something-or-other that the human serpent is all over. All of which means, in short, that understanding James may not be as easy as it seems. It helps to think about the views of James's friend, colleague, and committed philosophical opponent Josiah Royce. At the time of his disputes with James over truth, Royce called himself both an idealist and a pragmatist. James wanted very much to distinguish his own version of pragmatism from Royce's idealist and absolutist version, and many tricky passages in James's writing, especially passages concerning truth and its relationship to the things of the world, were intended as criticisms of Royce. In this paper I shall consider the way Royce used logic to try to establish "pragmatically" the existence of an absolute truth and reality, and I'll try to show how James responded by renouncing this kind of logical theorizing. Along the way we shall see just what kind of world—real, ideal, or otherwise—James was committed to by his pragmatism. I A number of writers have argued that the difference between Royce's and James's views is overrated. Royce's career is often described as having three periods, [End Page 201] and in at least the first and the last of these he seemed to avoid the kind of absolutism that would have put him clearly at odds with James concerning the nature of truth and reality.1 Moreover, in all his work, Royce was in important ways a follower of Kant, and many people think that James was, too. Royce departed from some of Kant's ideas, but like Hegel, another critic of Kant, Royce saw himself as completing Kant's project of connecting the free and self-conscious subject with the objects of knowledge.2 Interpreters such as Murray Murphey, Bruce Kuklick, and, lately, Michael Forest have argued that "the Cambridge pragmatists" constituted a New England school of neo-Kantian philosophy that included not only Royce but Peirce and James as well.3 These figures all seemed to adopt something like transcendental idealism, Kant's way of closing the transcendental gap between subject and object. That is, they seemed to adopt some version of the idea that the world of known objects was at least in part a product of spontaneous human mental activity. Moreover, like Kant, they all seemed committed in some way or other to some kind of unity of reason and primacy of the practical. Royce's own development as a Kantian pragmatist went as follows: First, his 1878 Johns Hopkins doctoral dissertation made the Kantian argument that though our judgments are relativistically made true by momentary contents of individual human consciousnesses, we creatively postulate "Ideas in themselves" that transcend individual minds. These capital-I Ideas have to exist if we individuals are to have genuine agreements and disagreements even with ourselves from moment to moment, let alone with each other. Still, though we want to have these agreements and disagreements, we have no justification in the world outside our minds and wills for supposing that we really can have them. Thus, our justification for postulating or demanding "Ideas in themselves" is purely pragmatic, purely a matter of what we happen to want.4 Next, Royce left this "pure pragmatism" behind. By 1885, in his first...

Leveraging organizational learning for knowledge and performance

This article examines the alignment and fit between knowledge management and organizational learning to determine the potential feasibility of integrating the two approaches. The philosophical roots of both disciplines are traced to common ground in a philosophy known as “pragmatism”. Early generation forms of knowledge management are critiqued and a new more pragmatic version is proposed – one that is compatible with organizational learning. A new form of alignment between organizational learning and knowledge management is proposed.

Richard Posner's Democratic Pragmatism

Judge Richard Posner's recent book, Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy, is a major contribution to the ongoing debate over the best conception of democracy and the role of judicial review within it. Posner urges that political and legal decision-makers should be guided by what he calls everyday pragmatism rather than worry about abstract moral considerations (chs. 1-2). He links this conception of pragmatic government to an unromantic theory of democracy that rejects more demanding and idealistic views currently embraced by many political theorists and legal scholars. In contrast to deliberative democracy and other theories that require a high level of disinterested political involvement on the part of citizens, Posner follows Joseph Schumpeter in defending a theory of democracy limited to a competitive power struggle among members of a political elite for the electoral support of the masses. He further argues that judicial review should be based on a combination of pragmatism and adherence to his limited conception of democracy, rather than sticking closely to formalist theories of adjudication, which demand strict adherence to the text of the Constitution, legal precedent, or the original intent of the framers (chs. 6-10). Judge Posner makes a large number of powerful points and his critiques of opposing views are often devastating. Unfortunately, he is less persuasive in defending the central theses of this book: his theories of pragmatism, democracy, and judicial review. Posner's version of pragmatism is both too narrow and too broad. Its excessive narrowness resides in Posner's failure to come to grips with the fact that the pragmatic soundness of an action cannot be assessed without a prior determination of whether the results it accomplishes are normatively desirable. This latter judgment cannot itself be a purely pragmatic one, but requires some sort of normative theory of ends. On the other hand, Posnerian pragmatism is also too broad because it is not clear what if any considerations can be excluded from its scope. A theory that incorporates everything ultimately proves nothing. Posner's model of democracy likewise suffers from important deficiencies. While he is surely correct in claiming that Schumpeterian democracy is a superior alternative to the unrealistic visions of deliberative democrats, he is too quick to conclude that it is the best currently available version. Posner's defense of Schumpeter does not sufficiently consider the shortcomings exposed in recent scholarship in political science and economics. As a result, Posner fails to adequately refute the possibility that Schumpeterian democracy might function better if the powers of democratic legislatures were much more severely restricted than he considers desirable. Finally, Posner's argument that judicial decision-making should be based on his theories of pragmatism and democracy suffers from the limitations of those theories themselves. It also has additional shortcomings of its own, including the likely inability of judges to implement those theories. As Posner himself partially acknowledges, judges may often serve democracy better by staying within the bounds of formalism.

Rorty's Nietzschean Pragmatism: A Jamesian Response

Richard Rorty makes the case that Friedrich Nietzsche shared a common pragmatism with William James in order to incorporate certain Nietzschean themes into neo-pragmatism and to give his philosophy stronger pragmatic credentials. In making this connection, he establishes a version of pragmatism that rejects both epistemology and metaphysics, reduces the pragmatic theory of truth to “truth is what works,” places the Darwinian account of man at the center of the human narrative, and makes Nietzschean “self-creation” the chief end of a postmodern, post-religious liberal society. But if one reads James more faithfully (a task that Rorty rejects), it is clear that James does not succumb to the nihilism, perspectivalism, and atheism characteristic of Rorty's Nietzschean pragmatism. A more comprehensive reading of James's philosophy brings together James's pragmatism, his pluralism, and his radical empiricism. And this more complete interpretation of James's pragmatism offers a pluralistic and hopeful approach to politics that does not suffer from Nietzsche's and Rorty's nihilistic, relativistic, and antipolitical tendencies.

"Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used to Be": White Identity in a Changing South Africa

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY Melissa Steyn. Whiteness just Isn't What It Used to Be: White Identity in a Changing South Africa. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. xxxix + 228 pp. References. Indexes. No price reported. Paper. Melissa Steyn's Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used to Be is an interpretation of white South Africans' narratives of their whiteness. It is based on the analysis of a questionnaire pertaining to the implications of being white. In comparison to the situation in Europe or North America, whiteness in South Africa no longer carries social privilege. With black political leadership and increasing African social and cultural assertiveness, white identity is challenged to adapt to new circumstances. Steyn identifies five narratives that try to come to terms with these new conditions. The first two are based on the Eurocentric belief in white superiority and never question the existence of a white identity that is in a dichotomous relationship with a denigrated blackness. The first narrative is unapologetic about the superiority of white culture and identifies with the paternalist task of furthering the progress of humankind (67) in South Africa; the second bemoans the injustice of the new social order and looks upon whites as the victims of a reversal of fortunes. The remaining narratives accept to varying degrees that white identity may change. Still projecting a strong affiliation with white identity, the third narrative concerns the possibility of using qualities supposedly inherent in white culture to succeed in the new South Africa. The more pragmatic version, which is based on liberal humanism with its trust in the individual and the belief in racial equality and democratic pluralism, seeks common ground with the black leadership. White guilt is acknowledged by way of critical self-observation, and such introspection has the potential to envision possibilities of new forms of subjectivity within more inclusive structures (99). The fourth narrative denies that whiteness has any implications in relation to people of color. Instead, an unproblematic white African or a South African identity is asserted. A lifelong commitment to racial equality culminates in the claim that color blindness has been achieved. Authors of this narrative are those who supported the struggle and in some way or another resisted apartheid. It is understandable that they find it particularly difficult to review their attitude to whiteness since they, after all, lived with the ideal of nonracialism. …

The architecture is not exactly parallel: Some modules are more equal than others

Despite its computational elegancy, Jackendoff's proposal to reconcile competing approaches by postulating a parallel architecture for phonological, syntactic, and semantic modules is disappointing. We argue that it is a pragmatic version of the leading module which Jackendoff would probably prefer, but which he does not explicitly acknowledge. This internal conflict leads to several shortcomings and even distortions of information presented in the book.

In response

Barnes-Holmes (2000) discussed certain issues regarding philosophy, pragmatism, and behavior analysis, and offered a "behavioral pragmatism" based on or derived from behavior-analytic perspectives. In a comparison of certain philosophical views, Quine's concept of observation sentences was employed for representing pragmatism, but this concept is not sufficiently representative of the literature of philosophical pragmatism to warrant the broad conclusions drawn by Barnes-Holmes. Further, although the extensive and diverse literature of philosophical pragmatism has been shown by a number of writers to have various themes and perspectives in common with Skinner's radical behaviorism, it is unnecessary to extract a limited, generic version of pragmatism because (a) the latter cannot match the range and depth of the various extant versions and (b) the problems raised by Barnes-Holmes in justification for the new version yield readily to the current versions in philosophy. A set of philosophical views may provide additional verbal support for a given system of science, and the science of behavior analysis may eventually contribute to philosophical discourse. The latter, however, will not be achieved by proposing new versions of old philosophy, but rather by approaching established philosophical issues in new ways.

Embracing the impossible profession.

In a foreword to August Aichhorn’s book, Wayward Youth (1925), Freud characterized psychoanalysis as an “impossible profession,” a bon mot popularized by Janet Malcolm (1983) in a book of the same name. Malcolm glamorized Freudian orthodoxy (and slammed its critics) in ways that do her no credit, but the phrase itself is apt in more ways than one. Psychoanalysis is an “impossible” profession from several points of view. To begin with, there is constant debate between the natural science–based and hermeneutic and/or humanistic versions of psychoanalysis. Though it was not apparent at the outset, perhaps, this tension is now integral to, if not in some sense constitutive of the whole Freudian field, with the result that its epistemic foundations are shaky, if not downright suspect—and not only to outsiders, either. Another feature of the analytic field that causes interminable debate concerns the therapeutic, rather than the theoretical side of things. Leaving issues of “technique” to one side, what are the actual goals of analytic therapy? After all, technique is merely a means to an end, and unless we are clear on the ultimate objective that informs a specific procedure, we may waste our ingenuity splitting hairs, losing the proverbial forest for the trees. Though seldom addressed by practitioners, at least to my knowledge, there is a profound tension between what I term the “philosophic” and the “instrumental” (or pragmatic) versions of psychoanalytic therapy. The philosophic view stresses the “disillusioning” function of the analytic dialogue. According to this view, only when the person relinquishes his (or her) most cherished illusions is deeper self-knowledge possible. Self-knowledge, by this account, is valuable for its own sake, irrespective of the

John Dewey’s Pragmatism and Moral Education

Dewey’s views on education follow from his version of pragmatism. In this essay I shall argue that Dewey’s pragmatism did not allow him to develop a coherent theory of moral education. Dewey’s rhetoric suggests that his position on moral education can be associated with virtue ethics, yet, although he used conspicuously “moral” terms such as “virtues” and “habits” throughout his writings, this did not amount to a workable theory of moral education. For Dewey, virtue amounted to the cultivation of correct habits, which he deemed to be of primary concern to education. His views on habits (and consequently on virtues), however, are inconsistent. I shall show that the discrepancies in Dewey’s views on “virtues” are not due to a mere sloppiness in writing but rather due to Dewey’s pragmatism.

Freestanding pragmatism in law and bioethics.

This paper represents the first installment of a larger project devoted to the relevance of pragmatism for bioethics. One self-consciously pragmatist move would be to return to the classical pragmatist canon of Peirce, James and Dewey in search of substantive doctrines or methodological approaches that might be applied to current bioethical controversies. Another pragmatist (or neopragmatist) move would be to subject the regnant principlist paradigm to Richard Rorty's subversive assaults on foundationalism in epistemology and ethics. A third pragmatist method, dubbed "freestanding pragmatism" by its proponents, embraces a "pragmatist" approach to practical reasoning without discernable moorings either to the classical canon or to Rorty's neopragmatism. This third pragmatist approach to method in practical ethics is the subject of this article. I begin with an examination of freestanding pragmatism in the theory of judicial decision making. I argue that this version of legal pragmatism--so described on account of its commitments to contextualism, instrumentalism, eclecticism, and freedom from grand theory--bears a striking resemblance to much self-described pragmatist work in bioethics today. I further argue that if this is what we mean by "pragmatism," then in a certain sense "we are all pragmatists now."

The pragmatic educational administrator: 'local theory', schooling, and postmodernism reviled

This paper questions the plausibility of using the ‘high theory’ of postmodern thought to construct a complete and lucid theory of educational administration. It is argued that problems with postmodernism's concept of power, its abandonment of the possibility of ‘truth’, the manner in which it erases the distinction between subject and author, fact and fiction, and its objection to the role of the expert in the conduct of any cultural event make the theory a doubtful candidate for the role of protagonist or hero in educational administration's various theoretical and practical dramas. In addition the paper describes a pragmatic version of administrative theory that is quite adequate for the demands of both theory and practice, and suggests that there is no reason to conclude that technical versions of administrative theory must be socially and culturally unconscious in a way that ‘high theory’ is not. An account is given also of ‘local theory’, which is characterized as an assemblage of templates and recipes that can be made useful for the various purposes of educational administration.

Getting to where? On Peace Making and Law Teaching at Harvard Law School: (or, Some Private Hope and Public Irony)

The paper offers a critical reading of the intellectual conditions and educational message offered at Harvard Law School. It is argued that despite the apparent opposition of critical and practical forms of the curriculum, both positions are founded upon versions of pragmatism. On the one hand stands the ironic detached intellectual, who, in Pierre Schlag’s words has “nowhere to go.” Against (or beside) him/her, stands the practical peacemaker-businessman, who offers utopically friendly, “popular” ideas about ‘Getting to Yes’ and ‘win-win.’ While the “intellectual” character operates in a diverse and politicized domain of discourse, the negotiation scholar inhabits a unitary and a-historical discourse. The opposing genres of discourse they produce is critically analysed through a reading of texts by Ronald Dworkin, the writer of the mythical script of the jurist intellectual, Roger Fisher and Robert Mnookin, current negotiation prophets. The pragmatics of this couple is posited as capturing the educational message of the school, also as a cultural icon.