Understanding the School Curriculum: Theory, Politics and Principles

Alex Moore’s (2015) Understanding the School Curriculum: Theory, Politics and Principles explores how the school curriculum works through its becoming as it navigates reproductive paranoia and (r)evolutionary schizophrenia. Moore suggests that the school curriculum inevitably intersects with political and socio-economic interests as well as the globalization movement. In this light, the book stimulates the reader to ponder questions such as, “Who decides what kind of knowledge we should have in this wider, ever-changing world?” and “How have issues around knowledge developed with the school curriculum?” and “What sort of future could educators imagine for alternative knowledge, educational practice and society?” Such questions haunt the book, while promoting the educator and the learner to risk weaving a creative becoming and thereby moving the realm of knowledge from the boundary of instrumental rationality to the horizon of dynamics of humanity.

On the three constraints of the development of artificial intelligence: Value, liberation, and responsibility

The socialization of technology and the technicalization of society have accelerated the speed, scope and scale of human liberation from nature. In our past technological society, “liberation” mainly referred to people's physical strength. An intelligent society, characterized by the wide application of the internet, big data, and artificial intelligence (AI), will further liberate not only people's physical strength, but also their mental power, greatly changing social forms and social operation modes, as well as people themselves. In the application of technologies and the design and manufacture of equipment on which the intelligent society depends, a new tension is formed between instrumental rationality and value rationality. While promoting the liberation of human beings, intelligent society will also cause humans to be dominated and enslaved by AI, which will lead to human alienation. Intelligent society is more in pursuit of how the invested capital and technology can multiply in the process of accumulation and circulation; meanwhile, it will ignore the moral responsibilities of relevant parties, such as researchers, manufacturers, and users. In the process of developing an intelligent society, instrumental rationality should be regulated by value rationality, thus promoting the liberation of human beings and eliminating their alienation. As capital appreciation occurs, the moral responsibilities of relevant parties should be clarified.

Accounting for Who We Are and Could Be: Inventing Taxonomies of the Self in an Age of Uncertainty

Self-trackers are confronted with economic and cultural uncertainty as two fundamental traits of late-modern capitalism. Coping with uncertainty in this context means the calculative quest for discovering the representational forms by which the plurality of individual capabilities as well as the plurality of the cultural forms of living can be inscribed into common registers of worth. Drawing on Foucault as well as the Sociology of Critique, this paper emphasizes the moral and cognitive conflicts accompanying the emergence of self-quantification and points to the contradictions and ambivalences this involves: self-inspection as a form of enabling accounting and emancipation, on the one hand, versus an extension of instrumental rationality to hitherto incommensurable and incalculable entities, on the other.

A Sociological Analysis of the Performance and Subjective Well-being of Elite Sports Players in China

We were inspired by the market transition theory to investigate the relationship between elite sports players’ performance, subjective well-being and demographic characteristics with the lens of Weberian concept of instrumental rationality (zweckrational). This cross-sectional study was recruited 144 (Mage = 18.96, sd = 3.129) professional athletes in gymnastics, combat sports (including boxing, taekwondo, weightlifting, judo and wrestling), soccer, swimming and wushu (Chinese martial arts), in a government-operated sports institution in China. A hierarchical regression analysis was implemented to observe the relationship between the following variables, the subjective well-being, instrumental factors and other demographic factors, including gender, age, educational level, number of years on professional team and injury record. The results show that the bonus incentive system is the most important predictor of the athletes’ performance. We argue that under the context of China’s market transition, the lens of instrumental rationality can shed light on how the means-end calculations of elite athletes affect their sports performance.

Konstruksi Identitas Nasionalisme Dalam Pikukuh Masyarakat Adat Baduy

<p>This research is entitled “Construction of Nationalism Identity in Baduy Society Based on Pikukuh and Buyut.” This is a library research on the philosophical life of the Baduy, a traditional community in Indonesia. Analysis was conducted using interpretation, inductive and deductive, internal coherence, and holistica approaches. This research resulted is some conclusions. First, the Baduy community was found to uphold a form of ethno-nationalism which is based on Pikukuh and Buyut with a strong focus on the meaning of leadership, communal life, and observance of laws. However, this ethno-nationalism does not conflict with the state nationalism upheld by the Indonesian government. Indeed, seba shows that there has always been good relationship between the Baduy people (which uphold ethno-nationalism) and the Indonesian government (which upholds state nationalism). Secondly, the “imagined” nationalism in the Baduy community is founded based on traditional bond, in which case nationalism is not separated from tradition. Consequently, the values are oriented towards basic rationality in order to construct an identity of nationalism unique to the Baduy community. However, at the same time, instrumental rationality and the value-oriented rationality have the same role, in that they serve to construct the meaning of nationalism in the Baduy community. All of these factors result in a harmonious relationship between ethno-nationalism upheld by the the Baduy community and state nationalism upheld by the Indonesian government.</p>

Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians

Utilitarianism says that we should maximize aggregate well-being, impartially considered. But utilitarians that try to apply this principle will encounter many psychological obstacles, ranging from selfishness to moral biases to limits to epistemic and instrumental rationality. In this chapter, we argue that utilitarians should cultivate a number of virtues that allow them to overcome the most important of these obstacles. We select virtues based on two criteria. First, the virtues should be impactful: they should greatly increase your impact (according to utilitarian standards), if you acquire them. Second, the virtues should be acquirable: they should be psychologically realistic to acquire. Using these criteria, we argue that utilitarians should prioritize six virtues: moderate altruism, moral expansiveness, effectiveness-focus, truth-seeking, collaborativeness, and determination. Finally, we discuss how our suggested list of virtues compares with standard conceptions of utilitarianism, as well as with common sense morality.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Understanding ‘alien’ thought

Initially coined by Weizenbaum in 1976, ‘alien' thought refers to the radical difference with which ‘thinking machines’ approach the process of thinking. The contemporary paradox of over-determination and indeterminacy—caused largely by algorithmic decision-making in the civic realm—makes these differences both more entangled and more difficult to navigate. In this essay, I trace over-determination to Leibniz and Turing’s axiomatic procedures and to instrumental rationality, and I trace indeterminacy to the mid-twentieth century co-development of computers and neurosciences to advance the following proposition: understanding alien thought requires understanding incomputability, temporal swarming, and inscriptive-significational errance. Understanding these phenomena in turn requires understanding thinking by doing, distributed thinking, and ontological indeterminacy. All are present in machinic operations as well as in the twentieth century experimental artistic practices of artists such as Duchamp, Cage, and Xu. These practices rely on indeterminate procedures and function as diagrammatic machines. A diagrammatic machine is neither abstract nor particular; neither an idea that is determining in the supreme instance, nor an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance, but rather instantiates a real yet to come (Deleuze and Guattari in A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia: Trans. Massumi B, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987). In this essay, indeterminate artistic practices are used as an entry into alien thought and its correlates—infinity and complexity—by way of aesthetic analogy.