Search results for ""Author Thomas Kelly ""

Bias seems to be everywhere. Biased media outlets decisively influence the political opinions and votes of millions of people. Discriminatory policies favor some racial groups over others. We tend to judge ourselves more favorably than our peers, and more favorably than the evidence warrants. But what is it, exactly, for a person or thing to be biased? In Bias: A Philosophical Study, Thomas Kelly explores a number of foundational questions about the nature of bias and our practices of attributing it. He develops a general framework for thinking about bias, the norm theoretic account, and shows how that framework illuminates much that we say and think about bias in both everyday life and the sciences. He argues provocatively that both morality and rationality sometimes require us to be biased; that groups of people can be biased even if none of their members are; that we are often rationally required to believe that those who disagree with us are biased, even if we know absolutely nothing about why they believe as they do or about their psychologies; and that whether someone counts as biased is often a relative matter. He defends the possibility of what he calls 'biased knowing' and argues that the phenomenon has significant implications for both philosophical methodology and scepticism. A central aim of the book is to expand the range of issues that have thus far been considered under the heading 'the philosophy of bias' by putting new theoretical questions on the table and proposing bold answers that can serve as starting points for future inquiry.

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Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written.Thomas Kelly develops a new account of the relationship between Chinese literature and material culture by examining inscribed objects from the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties. He considers how the literary qualities of inscriptions interact with the visual and physical properties of the things that bear them. Kelly argues that inscribing an object became a means for authors to grapple with the materiality and technologies of writing. Facing profound social upheavals, from volatility in the marketplace to the violence of dynastic transition, writers turned to inscriptions to reflect on their investments in and dependence on the permanence of the written word. Shedding new light on cultures of writing in early modern China, The Inscription of Things broadens understandings of the links between the literary and the material.

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Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written.Thomas Kelly develops a new account of the relationship between Chinese literature and material culture by examining inscribed objects from the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties. He considers how the literary qualities of inscriptions interact with the visual and physical properties of the things that bear them. Kelly argues that inscribing an object became a means for authors to grapple with the materiality and technologies of writing. Facing profound social upheavals, from volatility in the marketplace to the violence of dynastic transition, writers turned to inscriptions to reflect on their investments in and dependence on the permanence of the written word. Shedding new light on cultures of writing in early modern China, The Inscription of Things broadens understandings of the links between the literary and the material.

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Since the mid 1990s, theoretical and empirical research on how social capital affects well-being has blossomed in the field of economic development. Based on noted theoretical and empirical work in other social sciences, this concept is now becoming a vital new tool for economists. The chapters in this volume explore the challenges and opportunities raised by this concept for researchers, practitioners and teachers. Social Capital and Economic Development is based upon a consistent, policy-based vision of how social capital affects well-being in developing countries. The book includes a comparison of experimental and empirical evidence on social capital and a range of field-based evidence, from environmental to cultural to nation-building and on how investment in social capital can improve well-being. The contributions are from leading development economists as well as non-economic social scientists with expertise in this field.Development academics, practitioners, and environmental economists will find this coherent volume of great interest, as well as those involved in public policy in the developing world.

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