Reviews for Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations

The average rating for Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-12-16 00:00:00 Karla Schools I give 5 stars to Smith's concept of SNAF - Standard North American Family - the standard, the norm, the concept of family that organizes how we measure all other family configurations. A heterosexual couple, with a male who works outside of the home and the female who attends to all matters domestic, including child care. SNAF isn't really the norm, though, and when we assume SNAF, we miss and ignore - in fact, consider deviant - any other family configurations. Smith's writing here can be difficult - this book is a collection of her essays. She is a feminist sociologist and some of the language she uses is very specialized jargon - discourse, T-discourse, text.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-04-30 00:00:00 Rosaire Martin I love the idea of scientists displacing "public intellectuals", though I think Brockman's idea is strained. What does language being an instinct (Steven Pinker) have to do with the earth being an integrated living system (Lynn Margulus) have to do with machine intelligence (Marvin Minsky)? The difficulty is having this constellation of edge-of-science ideas organized into a coherent theme, while saying something more than just "yay science!" To me the most amazing (though thoroughly unsupported by scientific evidence) theory encountered in this book is that natural selection operates not just on life forms, but universes. If (if!!!) black holes generate universes which generate black holes which generate universes, perhaps there is selective pressure for universe to be born when produce the maximum number of black holes. The the most schadenfreudely satisfying experience was seeing Roger Penrose's theory on consciousness followed by an avalanche of criticism. Penrose thinks the brain is non-computational because hey Godel, and because quantum mechanics. I was glad to see me sea-sicknesses echoed by others.