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Todd Suomela's Library tagged draft →  View Popular, Search in Google

Dec
1
2011

"The “performativity thesis” is the claim that parts of contemporary economics and finance, when carried out into the world by professionals and popularizers, reformat and reorganize the phenomena they purport to describe, in ways that bring the world into line with theory. Practical technologies, calculative devices and portable algorithms give actors tools to implement particular models of action. I argue that social network analysis is performative in the same sense as the cases studied in this literature. Social network analysis and finance theory are similar in key aspects of their development and effects. For the case of economics, evidence for weaker versions of the performativity thesis in quite good, and the strong formulation is circumstantially supported. Network theory easily meets the evidential threshold for the weaker versions; I offer empirical examples that support the strong (or “Barnesian”) formulation. Whether these parallels are a mark in favor of the thesis or a strike against it is an open question. I argue that the social network technologies and models now being “performed” build out systems of generalized reciprocity, connectivity, and commons-based production. This is in contrast both to an earlier network imagery that emphasized self-interest and entrepreneurial exploitation of structural opportunities, and to the model of action typically considered to be performed by economic technologies."

kieranhealy.org/...e-performativity-of-networks-2
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network-analysis networks performativity metaphor research draft

Feb
9
2009

  • First-person data have been both condemned and hailed because of their alleged privacy.  Critics argue that science must be based on public evidence:  since first-person data are private, they should be banned from science.  Apologists reply that first-person data are necessary for understanding the mind:  since first-person data are private, scientists must be allowed to use private evidence.  I argue that both views rest on a false premise.  In psychology and neuroscience, the subjects issuing first-person reports and other first-person data play the epistemic role of a (self-) measuring instrument.  Data from measuring instruments are public and can be validated by public methods.  Therefore, first-person data are as public as any other scientific data:  their use in science is legitimate, in accordance with standard scientific methodology.
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