Internal Others: Ethnographies of Naturalism

Ethnographies of Code workshop

This position paper seeks to outline concepts of values in design and how they may be usefully employed in everyday contexts of programming. The paper will first introduce significant contributions and works by Nissenbaum on values in design and Taylor on reverse engineering. Drawing on the peekabooty project, this paper will outline how particular values in design may be introduced and embodie...

Two Notions of Naturalism∗

What is philosophical naturalism? Most fundamentally, presumably, it is the view that natural science constrains philosophy, in the following sense. The concerns of the two disciplines are not simply disjoint, and science takes the lead where the two overlap. At the very least, then, to be a philosophical naturalist is to believe that philosophy is not simply a different enterprise from science...

“ Ethnographies of heritage and power ”

Cultural Naturalism

Culture can be viewed as the means by which a society can live in its surroundings by acquiring and consuming free energy. This naturalistic notion assumes that everything can be valued in terms of energy, hence also social changes can be described as natural processes that are influenced by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This universal law, when formulated as an equation of motion, reveals tha...

Positivism, Naturalism, and Anti- Naturalism in the Social Sciences