‘Ghastly marionettes’ and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and the origins of totalitarianism

Carr, Danielle Judith Zola

doi:10.1177/0952695119874009

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…For operations research, see Thomas ( 2015 ), Erikson et al ( 2013 ), and Mirowski ( 2002 ). For cybernetics, see Carr ( 2020 ), Peters ( 2016 ), Kline ( 2015 ), Medina ( 2011 ), Pickering ( 2010 ), and Galison ( 1994 ). For cognitive science, see Boden ( 2006 ).…”

Section: Epilogues Epistemic Impotence and Rearguing The Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mechanized Significance and Machine Learning: Why It Became Thinkable and Preferable to Teach Machines to Judge the World

Mendon-Plasek

2020

The Cultural Life of Machine Learning

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The slow and uneven forging of a novel constellation of practices, concerns, and values that became machine learning occurred in 1950s and 1960s pattern recognition research through attempts to mechanize contextual significance that involved building “learning machines” that imitated human judgment by learning from examples. By the 1960s two crises emerged: the first was an inability to evaluate, compare, and judge different pattern recognition systems; the second was an inability to articulate what made pattern recognition constitute a distinct discipline. The resolution of both crises through the problem-framing strategies of supervised and unsupervised learning and the incorporation of statistical decision theory changed what it meant to provide an adequate description of the world even as it caused researchers to reimagine their own scientific self-identities.

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Section: Epilogues Epistemic Impotence and Rearguing The Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mechanized Significance and Machine Learning: Why It Became Thinkable and Preferable to Teach Machines to Judge the World

Mendon-Plasek

2020

The Cultural Life of Machine Learning

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“…Thirdly, Tolman's close engagement with Freudian metapsychology adds further evidence of the surprising and complex importance of psychoanalysis to early architects, like Jerome Bruner and Aaron Beck, of cognitive frameworks that eventually came to prevail in both experimental and clinical contexts (Pettit, 2020: 255–6; Rosner, 2014). Finally, that a Quaker-raised pacifist who found himself red-baited out of Berkeley in the 1950s had such faith in behaviorism as a tool for emancipation forces us to reconsider the rather dark received image of its authoritarian dreams of ‘social engineering’ and ‘behavior control’ painted by many historians of midcentury psychology (Herman, 1996; Lemov, 2005) – a modified caricature, one should add, that they have inherited from its Cold War liberal critics (Carr, 2020). No doubt there were behaviorist ideas and individuals who fit this description, but Tolman's case is a reminder that the commitment to an intrinsically plastic conception of human nature could be interpreted in politically heterogenous ways.…”

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confidence: 99%

Maps of desire: Edward Tolman's drive theory of wants

Torracinta

2022

History of the Human Sciences

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Wants and desires are central to ordinary experience and to aesthetic, philosophical, and theological thought. Yet despite a burgeoning interest in the history of emotions research, their history as objects of scientific study has received little attention. This historiographical neglect mirrors a real one, with the retreat of introspection in the positivist human sciences of the early 20th century culminating in the relative marginalization of questions of psychic interiority. This article therefore seeks to explain an apparent paradox: the attempt to develop a comprehensive theory of ‘why … we want what we want’ in the 1940s by esteemed American ‘neo-behaviorist’ psychologist Edward Tolman – a proponent of a methodology famous for its prohibition on appeals to unobservable mental phenomena. Though chiefly known today for his theory of ‘cognitive maps’, Tolman also sought to map the contours of desire as such, integrating Freudian and behaviorist models of the ‘drives’ to develop a complex iconography of the universal structures of motivation. Close attention to Tolman's striking maps offers a compelling limit case for what could and could not be captured within an anti-mentalist framework, and illuminates an important precursor to theories of motivational ‘affect’ in the postwar cognitive and neurosciences. His work upsets a standard chronology that centers on the ‘cognitive revolution’ of the 1960s, and points to the significance of psychoanalysis to an earlier turn to cognitivism. Tolman concluded his theory pointed ‘in the direction of more socialism’ – a reminder of the politically labile anti-essentialism of behaviorism's commitment to mental plasticity.

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Blagoustroistvo: Infrastructure, Determinism, (Re-)coloniality, and Social Engineering in Moscow, 1917–2022

Lähteenmäki

Murawski

2023

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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Blagoustroistvo is an archaic Russian word used today primarily to refer to urban public works. This article, a collaboration between an anthropologist and a historian, focuses on aesthetics, rhetorics, and concrete practices of blagoustroistvo in Moscow during two temporal junctures: the first decade following the October Revolution (ca. 1917–1930), and the decade of Sergey Sobyanin’s Moscow Mayoralty (2010–). Our juxtaposition reveals striking continuities and contrasts. Both in the 1920s and 2010s, we show, blagoustroistvo was characterized by a semiotically-intense presence in the city; associated with an emphasis on deterministic socio-psychological “engineering”; ideologically framed by a “vernacularized” form of Marxism-Leninism; and invested with a powerful role in reconfiguring society’s spatial hierarchies, political geometry, and class consciousness. In the former period, social transformation referred to the inversion of class hierarchies and a partly illusory reconfiguration of power between center and periphery. In the 2010s, however, blagoustroistvo became a project that sought a reversion to class categories and the re-colonial reconstitution of the center’s coercive domination of the fringes. Our analysis proffers blagoustroistvo—a high-modernist, deterministic “infrastructural ideology” that has endured into and flourished in the twenty-first century—as a uniquely illustrative concept for understanding the shifting ideologies of Soviet and post-Soviet infrastructural modernity and its winding but stubborn colonial logics. Moreover, our explication of blagoustroistvo’s trans-epochal meanderings brings comparative nuance to current global debates around the alleged “return” of “social engineering” to urban governance and design in the guise of artificial intelligence, big data, smart cities, and “surveillance capitalism.”

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‘Ghastly marionettes’ and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and the origins of totalitarianism

Cited by 6 publications

References 60 publications

Mechanized Significance and Machine Learning: Why It Became Thinkable and Preferable to Teach Machines to Judge the World

Mechanized Significance and Machine Learning: Why It Became Thinkable and Preferable to Teach Machines to Judge the World

Maps of desire: Edward Tolman's drive theory of wants

Blagoustroistvo: Infrastructure, Determinism, (Re-)coloniality, and Social Engineering in Moscow, 1917–2022

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