Anu Koivunen 2003: Performative Histories, Foundational Fictions

Anu Suomalainen

Anu Suomalainen (Wartiovaara) completed her MD degree in 1991, and in 1993 defended her PhD thesis on mitochondrial DNA mutations in diseases, at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She relocated to McGill University in 1998, and returned to Finland in 2001. Her research group has been established in BiomedicumHelsinki since 2001, and belongs to the FinMIT Centre of Excellence of the Academy o...

Performative Verbs and Performative Acts

Searle (1989) posits a set of adequacy criteria for any account of the meaning and use of performative verbs, such as order or promise. Central among them are: (a) performative utterances are performances of the act named by the performative verb; (b) performative utterances are self-verifying; (c) performative utterances achieve (a) and (b) in virtue of their literal meaning. He then argues th...

Performative Framing: Dza Patrul Rinpoche’s Performative Pedagogy

This essay explores the pedagogy of Dza Patrul Rinpoche (1808–1887), a well-respected Buddhist teacher from Eastern Tibet, by considering examples where Patrul frames his teachings as oratorical performances. Patrul operates under the guiding pedagogical principle that self-promoting performance is good teaching. The term “performance” describes the competitive exchanges that appear in certain ...

Finding truth in fictions: identifying non-fictions in imaginary cracks

I critically examine some recent work on the philosophy of scientific fictions, focusing on the work of Winsberg. By considering two case studies in fracture mechanics, the strip yield model and the imaginary crack method, I argue that his reliance upon the social norms associated with an element of a model forces him to remain silent whenever those norms fail to clearly match the characteristi...

Laboratory Fictions