Public health scholars classify gay men as “men who have sex with men (MSM)” in their studies and interventions. Debates have been raised about the MSM classification for decades. However, we know ...little about how people who are classified as MSM perceive and respond to this classification, particularly in the authoritarian context where the biopower interacts with the repressive state power. Drawing upon Ian Hacking's dynamic nominalism theory, this study tries to fill these gaps with interviews of 40 gay men in three Chinese cities about their interactions with public health education materials. I examined their perceptions of MSM knowledge and discourses associated with the classification, as well as their identifications to the MSM subject. I found that, on the one hand, many gay men had internalized the MSM subjectivity and considered themselves essentially at high risk of HIV infection. This compliance was constructed through various biopower techniques with the support of the state's repressive power, as the Chinese state censored almost all public representations of gay men except the HIV/AIDS subject MSM. On the other hand, some of my interviewees were resistant to be part of the MSM classification. I showed how this failure is an unintended consequence of the hegemonic MSM discourse and the authoritarian regime's institutional exclusion of the gay men's community's engagement in the expertise network that develops intervention materials and strategies. At last, I proposed to move beyond the debate around the name and representational character of the MSM by moving toward a more reflexive public health.
•Examines public health classification's symbolic violence on sexual minorities.•Argues that “MSM” is more than a linguistic representation but a biopolitical subject.•Explores subject-making mechanism that merges biopower with authoritarian repressive power.•Discovers the cracks of and resistance to the public health's symbolic violence.•Proposes more reflexivity of the production and use of public health knowledge in society.
The paper discusses some formal difficulties concerning the theory of universals of Trope-Only ontologies, from which the formal theory of predication advanced by Trope-Only theorists seems to be ...irremediably affected. It is impossible to lay out a successful defense of a Trope-Only theory without Russellian types, but such types are ontologically inconsistent with tropes’ nominalism. Historically, Tropists’ first way to avoid the problem is appealing to the supervenience claim, which however fails on its terms and, thus, fails as a ground for a solution to the higher-order or ‘type’ problem. A later solution involves the invariance of primitive equivalence relations in order to make universals ontologically innocuous. However, I argue that this latter solution fails to meet the requirements imposed on an ontologically unbiased nominalist attitude. So, this paper discusses how Trope-Only theories alter standard formal moves in Nominalism, and also is interested in clarifying further the formal assumptions for these problems.
Dispositional Essentialism, as commonly conceived, consists in the claims that at least some of the fundamental properties essentially confer certain causal-nomological roles on their bearers, and ...that these properties give rise to the natural modalities. As such, the view is generally taken to be committed to a realist conception of properties as either universals or tropes, and to be thus incompatible with nominalism as understood in the strict sense. Pace this common assumption of the ontological import of Dispositional Essentialism, the aim of this paper is to explore a nominalist version of the view, Austere Nominalist Dispositional Essentialism. The core features of the proposed account are that it eschews all kinds of properties (be they universals, tropes, or sets of particulars), takes certain predicative truths as fundamental, and employs the so-called generic notion of essence. As I will argue, the account is significantly closer to the core idea behind Dispositional Essentialism than the only nominalist account in the vicinity of Dispositional Essentialism that has been offered so far—Ann Whittle’s (2009) Causal Nominalism—and is immune to crucial problems that affect this view.
There is a longstanding alliance between rationalism and realism concerning universals. Spinoza does not disrupt that alliance. The nature of a Spinozistic substance, after all, is a universal. That ...is what I argue here. My central point is that a realist conception of universals is a key presumption behind Spinoza’s case for substance monism, a view historically recognized as a natural outgrowth of realism’s toleration of strict identity in diversity. After defending my central point (and, in addition, the secondary point that Spinoza is likely cognizant of this presumption), I respond to two concerns. First, I explain how the nature of a Spinozistic substance is a universal even though there can be only one instance of that nature. Second, I explain how Spinoza’s infamous rejection of universals does not contradict the fact that the nature of a substance is a universal.
In this article, I develop a dialectical, historical account of digital capitalism that moves beyond nominalist and structuralist approaches. I proceed in three parts. First, I provide an overview of ...the topical literature, focusing on the exemplary work of D. Schiller (1999) and C. Fuchs (2013). Second, I define capitalism in its dual capacity as an abstract system with core features and a nominal series of historical developments. Third, I reformulate the concept of digital capitalism and sketch the relation between digital media and capitalism as a point of departure for future research. I conclude with a discussion of structuralism and nominalism in contemporary media theory.
Previous research has found that interdependent self-construals are related to poorer intergroup outcomes. Here we examine interdependent self-construal specifically in relation to comfort in ...contexts in which people are a numeric minority (i.e., outgroup comfort), and also examine the moderating roles of racial nominalism and racial essentialism. Among a racially diverse sample (N = 577), interdependent self-construals were related to more outgroup comfort. Two dimensions of racial nominalism—humanist and sociopolitical—were established with exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Humanist, sociopolitical, and essentialist beliefs about race were examined as moderators of the interdependent self-construal and outgroup comfort relationship. Among participants of color with higher sociopolitical beliefs, and unexpectedly among participants with higher essentialist beliefs, interdependent self-construal was more positively related to outgroup comfort. Findings are discussed in relation to theory on self- and group-level construals, and in relation to the role of multicultural education for fostering sociopolitical beliefs about race.
Jeden z zarzutów wobec nominalizmu tropowego głosi, że tropy, wbrew deklaracjom ich zwolenników, muszą być złożone, co otwiera drogę do regresu, który da się zatrzymać, tylko przyjmując jakieś ...powszechniki. Złożoność tropów ma wynikać z tego, że relacja podobieństwa i relacja różnicy numerycznej, które zachodzą między doskonale podobnymi tropami, muszą mieć osobne fundamenty, stanowiące składniki tropów. Te fundamenty znów stoją w relacjach podobieństwa i różnicy, co generuje regres. W niniejszym artykule przyglądam się temu problemowi i próbuję odpierać argumentację przeciwników nominalizmu tropowego. Za punkt odniesienia czynię artykuł Pawła Rojka „Regresy podobieństwa. Podwójny relacyjny argument przeciw nominalizmowi tropowemu”, który w oryginalny sposób łączy ze sobą rożne zarzuty przeciw nominalizmowi tropowemu. Struktura mojego tekstu jest następująca: najpierw krótko charakteryzuję nominalizm tropowy i wskazuję, co mnie łączy z tym stanowiskiem (nie mogę bez zastrzeżeń określić siebie jako zwolennika nominalizmu tropowego). Następnie podaję charakterystykę relacji, w szczególności relacji podobieństwa, a potem przedstawiam argument Pawła Rojka. W kolejnym paragrafie staram się pokazać, że argument za złożonością tropów zakłada zasadę identyczności nieodróżnialnych, którą nominalista tropowy odrzuca. W przedostatniej sekcji wskazuję, że jednostkowość nie jest składnikiem tropu, lecz sposobem, w jaki trop konstytuuje rzeczywistość.
One of the objections against trope nominalism is that tropes, contrary to the declarations of the their proponents, must be complex, which opens the road to a regress that can only be stopped by accepting some universals. The complexity of tropes is supposed to arise from the fact that the relation of resemblance and the relation of numerical difference, which occur between perfectly resembling tropes, must have separate foundations which are components of tropes themselves. These foundations again stand in resemblance and difference relations, thus they are also complex, and so on. In this article, I discuss this problem and try to refute the arguments of the opponents of trope nominalism. As a point of reference I take Paweł Rojek’s paper „Regresy podobieństwa. Podwójny relacyjny argument przeciw nominalizmowi tropowemu” Resemblance regresses. A double argument against trope nominalism, which in an original way links together the various objections against trope nominalism. The structure of my article is as follows: first I briefly characterize trope nominalism and indicate what I have in common with this position. Then I characterize relations, in particular the resemblance relation, and then I present Rojek’s argument. Then I try to show that the argument for the complexity of tropes presupposes the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, which is rejected by nominalists. In the penultimate section, I point out that particularity is not a component of a trope, but a way in which a trope constitutes reality.
PDF
