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Once fidelity and equivalence are abandoned, how can successful translation be understood? Risk management offers an alternative way of looking at the work of translators and their social function. It posits that the greater the cultural differences, the greater the risks of failed communication. What can be done to manage those risks? Drawing on the ways translators and interpreters handle intercultural encounters by adjusting what is said, this essay outlines a series of strategies that can be applied to all kinds of cross-cultural communication. Practical examples are drawn from a wide range of contexts, from Australian bushfires to court interpreting in Barcelona, with special regard for the new kinds of risks presented by machine translation and generative AI. The result is a critical view of the professionalization of translation, and a fresh account of democratized translation as a rich human activity in the service of cross-cultural cooperation.
Infrared spectroscopy is the study of the interaction between infrared radiation and matter. Its application to the characterization of archaeological sedimentary contexts has produced invaluable insights into the archaeological record and past human activities. This Element aims at providing a practical guide to infrared spectroscopy of archaeological sediments and their contents taken as a dynamic system, in which the different components observed today are the result of multiple formation processes that took place over long timescales. After laying out the history and fundamentals of the discipline, the author proposes a step-by-step methodological framework, both in the field and the laboratory, and guides the reader in the interpretation of infrared spectra of the main components of archaeological sediments with the aid of selected case studies. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Monotheism implies a God who is active in creation. An author writing a novel provides a better analogy for God's creative activity than an artificer constructing a mechanism. A miracle is then not an interruption of the ordinary course of nature so much as a divine decision to do something out of the ordinary, and miracle is primarily a narrative category. We perceive as miracles events that are extraordinary while also fitting our understanding of divine purpose. Many miracle accounts may remain problematic, however, since recognizing that a given story purports to narrate a miracle does not determine whether the miracle occurred. This Elementweighs competing narratives. In doing so the understanding of the normal workings of nature will carry considerable weight. Nevertheless, there can be instances where believers may, from their own faith perspective, be justified in concluding that a miracle has occurred.
The use of differential equations on graphs as a framework for the mathematical analysis of images emerged about fifteen years ago and since then it has burgeoned, and with applications also to machine learning. The authors have written a bird's eye view of theoretical developments that will enable newcomers to quickly get a flavour of key results and ideas. Additionally, they provide an substantial bibliography which will point readers to where fuller details and other directions can be explored. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Entrepreneurship has been expunged from contemporary mainstream economics despite being an important driver and cause of economic development and growth. However, whereas Evolutionary Economics recognizes value-creative entrepreneurship, its role and impact tend to still be understated and the vast implications not fully understood. This Element attempts to remedy this by theorizing on how entrepreneurship impacts and drives market economies, the implications for economic change and renewal, and how the pursuit of new value creation determines the evolution of an economy. We find that allowing for entrepreneurial new value creation – innovative entrepreneurship – produces a different and more dynamic understanding of the market as a process, the role of knowledge and uncertainty, economic evolution and progress, as well as has important implications for political economy.
The Asexual Exile trope positions asexual characters outside of society by portraying them as loners, inhuman, or adjacent to death. This research identifies trends in these portrayals by considering a corpus of 42 traditionally published novels of Young Adult fiction featuring asexual protagonists. A distant reading of this corpus finds that the Asexual Exile trope is employed in approximately two-thirds of cases. The author analyses how this trope permutates across genres, and the frequency of its endorsement and subversion by these narratives. Presenting the first extensive investigation into the Asexual Exile trope in YA fiction, this research investigates how asexual characters are Othered as not truly alive, and how these messages then rebound into necropolitical cultural understandings of asexual people as expendable. The results prompt the questions: how does the Asexual Exile trope influence Young Adult readers in the formation of their ideologies? How can publishers do better?
Authoritarian Survival and Leadership Succession in North Korea and Beyond examines how dictators manage elites to facilitate succession. Theoretically, it argues that personalistic incumbents facilitate the construction of a power base of elites from outside of their inner circle to help the successor govern once he comes to power. Then, once in office, successors consolidate power by initially relying on this power base to govern while marginalizing elites from their predecessor's inner circle before later targeting members of their own power base to further consolidate power. The Element presents evidence for these arguments from North Korea's two leadership transitions, leveraging original qualitative and quantitative evidence from inside North Korea. Comparative vignettes of succession in party-based China, Egypt's military regime, and monarchical Saudi Arabia demonstrate the theory's broader applicability. The Element contributes to research on comparative authoritarianism by highlighting how dictators use the non-institutional tool of elite management to facilitate succession.
The Middle East has traditionally been understood as a world region by policy, political science, and the public. Its borders are highly ambiguous, however, and rarely explicitly justified or theorized. This Element examines how the current conception of the Middle East emerged from colonialism and the Cold War, placing it within both global politics and trends within American higher education. It demonstrates the strategic stakes of different possible definitions of the Middle East, as well as the internal political struggles to define and shape the identity of the region. It shows how unexamined assumptions about the region as a coherent and unified entity have distorted political science research by arbitrarily limiting the comparative universe of cases and foreclosing underlying politics. It argues for expanding our concept of the Middle East to better incorporate transregional connections within a broader appeal for comparative area studies.
Through an in-depth study of the electoral process, the aim of this Element is to analyse the political transformations that occurred in Italy from 1919 to 1924. After the takeover of the low chamber by the mass integration parties in 1919 - Popular and Socialist - concerns grew within the liberal camp. The argument of this Element is that the conservatives failed to adapt and remain competitive in a system characterised by universal suffrage, thereby paving the way for the rise of the fascists. The electoral path to power begins with the political elections of 1921, continues through the renewal of the municipal councils in 1922–23, and concludes with the elections of 1924 when Mussolini managed to take control of the low chamber. The Duce assumed the role of head of the nation, presenting a list of candidates-the Listone-that included members of the Fascist Party and the former politica elite.
Over the past decades, archaeological exploration of southern China has shattered the image of primitive indigenous people and their pristine environments. It is known, for example, that East Asia's largest settlements and hydraulic infrastructures in the third millennium BCE were located in the Yangzi valley, as were some of the most sophisticated metallurgical centers of the following millennium. If southern East Asia was not a backward periphery of the Central Plains, then what created the power asymmetry that made possible 'China's march toward the Tropics'? What did becoming 'Chinese' practically mean for the local populations south of the Yangzi? Why did some of them decide to do so, and what were the alternatives? This Element focuses on the specific ways people in southern East Asia mastered their environment through two forms of cooperation: centralized and intensive, ultimately represented by the states, and decentralized and extensive, exemplified by interaction networks.
Causation in Physics demonstrates the importance of causation in the physical world. It details why causal mastery of natural phenomena is an important part of the effective strategies of experimental physicists. It develops three novel arguments for the viewpoint that causation is indispensable to the ontology of some of our best physical theories. All three arguments make much of the successes of experimental physics. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The view of dynamic capabilities in evolutionary economics as being based on capabilities comprised of routines has so far precluded their integration in evolutionary economics. This Element contributes to such integration by introducing the dynamic metacapabilities framework. Borrowing from quantum mechanics, dynamic metacapabilities assume that resources and capabilities, rather than being created ex-nihilo, result from bundles of information 'decohering ' to bundles of resources and capabilities as new information becomes available to the firm. Operationalized by a management paradigm we call 'quantum management, ' dynamic metacapabilities contribute to integrating dynamic capabilities in evolutionary economics and to resolving the ongoing debate on what dynamic capabilities are by postulating an informational view of the firm according to which firms 'evolve ' with strategy throughout a lifecycle governing the transition from dynamic 'metacapabilities ' to dynamic capabilities and onto ordinary capabilities.
During the past one hundred or so years, urbanists have composed grand narratives regarding the development of urban design and the international dissemination of planning models. Yet, building upon this historiography, whilst the transnational dimension of modern city planning has centred itself upon the diffusion of the British garden city, far less attention has been put upon the global reach of the American City Beautiful. Owing to the ethnocentricity of American planning history literature, thus, the chronicle of the City Beautiful has anchored itself, literally and figuratively, to the North American continent. Yet, in truth, grand American-inspired plans were implemented throughout the world; indeed, they were carried out long after the City Beautiful's popularity had waned in North America, and they were executed under a variety of cultural and political conditions.
This Element is broadly about the geometrization of physics, but mostly it is about gauge theories. Gauge theories lie at the heart of modern physics: in particular, they constitute the Standard Model of particle physics. At its simplest, the idea of gauge is that nature is best described using a descriptively redundant language; the different descriptions are said to be related by a gauge symmetry. The over-arching question this Element aims to answer is: why is descriptive redundancy fruitful for physics? I will provide three inter-related answers to the question: ``Why gauge theory?'', that is: why introduce redundancies in our models of nature in the first place? The first is pragmatic, or methodological; the second is based on geometrical considerations, and the third is broadly relational.
Reasoning from inconclusive evidence, or 'induction', is central to science and any applications we make of it. For that reason alone it demands the attention of philosophers of science. This element explores the prospects of using probability theory to provide an inductive logic: a framework for representing evidential support. Constraints on the ideal evaluation of hypotheses suggest that the overall standing of a hypothesis is represented by its probability in light of the total evidence, and incremental support, or confirmation, indicated by the hypothesis having a higher probability conditional on some evidence than it does unconditionally. This proposal is shown to have the capacity to reconstruct many canons of the scientific method and inductive inference. Along the way, significant objections are discussed, such as the challenge of inductive scepticism, and the objection that the probabilistic approach makes evidential support arbitrary.
This Element examines evolving methods of cultivating the embodied self, including healing diseases and creating a superior person, in late Warring States and early imperial East Asia. It analyses many topics, including the textualization of bodily regimens and therapies, their systematization, their dissemination among different (and sometimes rival) social groups, and the diversity of traditions – religious, pharmacological, nourishing of life – that contested and combined to form a hegemonic medical practice. These topics in turn feature several issues: models of the body, regimens of cultivating and extending vitality, models of disease, and therapies for these ailments. All these ideas will be refined and extended through comparison with early Western medical traditions.
Guestworker migration has become an increasingly prominent feature within the economic landscape of the Asia-Pacific. Longstanding regional disparities have underscored the emergence of fragile remittance economies where a structural reliance on labour-export has offered an unsustainable 'fix' for stubborn developmental challenges. Combining political-economic and Foucauldian frames of analysis, this Element reconciles the macroeconomic contradictions of remittance economies with the political logics bound up in emigration policymaking, contending that new modalities of governance have emerged in the transition from developmental to emigration states. Comparing the policy histories of four diverse remittance economies in the region – Myanmar, the Philippines, Samoa, and Sri Lanka – it frames emigration policies as complex, inward-facing interventions that simultaneously promote and constrain mobility to address counterpoised economic and political pressures. Important variations are explored though the example of gendered migration bans, whereby emigration states have situated women's bodies as sites for resolving contextually specific social tensions accompanying labour-export.
Historiographic reasoning from evidentiary inputs is sui generis. Historiography is neither empirical, nor self-knowledge, nor a genre of fiction or ideology. Historiographic reasoning is irreducible to general scientific or social science reasoning. The book applies Bayesian insights to explicate historiographic reasoning as probable. It distinguishes epistemic transmission of knowledge from evidence from the generation of detailed historiographic knowledge from multiple coherent and independent evidentiary inputs in three modular stages. A history of historiographic reasoning since the late 18th century demonstrates that there was a historiographic scientific revolution across the historical sciences in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The underdetermination of historiography by the evidence, counterfactual historiographic reasoning, and false reasoning and other fallacies are further explained and discussed in terms of the probabilistic relations between the evidence and historiography.
Disagreement is a common feature of a social world. For various reasons, however, we sometimes need to resolve a disagreement into a single set of opinions. This can be achieved by pooling the opinions of individuals that make up the group. In this Element, we provide an opinionated survey on some ways of pooling opinions: linear pooling, multiplicative pooling (including geometric), and pooling through imprecise probabilities. While we give significant attention to the axiomatic approach in evaluating pooling strategies, we also evaluate them in terms of the epistemic and practical goals they might meet. In doing so, we connect opinion pooling to some philosophical problems in social epistemology and the philosophy of action, illuminating different perspectives one might take when figuring out how to pool opinions for a given purpose. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element lays the foundation, introduces a framework, and sketches the program for a systematic study of mathematical notations. It is written for everyone who is curious about the world of symbols that surrounds us, in particular researchers and students in philosophy, history, cognitive science, and mathematics education. The main characteristics of mathematical notations are introduced and discussed in relation to the intended subject matter, the language in which the notations are verbalized, the cognitive resources needed for learning and understanding them, the tasks that they are used for, their material basis, and the historical context in which they are situated. Specific criteria for the design and assessment of notations are discussed, as well as ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions that arise from the study of mathematical notations and of their use in mathematical practice.