Digital Epistemology Reconsidered

The paper explores Quine's ‘naturalized epistemology’, investigating whether its adoption would prevent the description or vindication of normative standards standardly employed in regulating beliefs and inquiries. Quine's defence of naturalized epistemology rejects traditional epistemological questions rather than using psychology to answer them. Although one could persuade those sensitive to the force of traditional epistemological problems only by employing the kind of argument whose philosophical relevance Quine is committed to denying, Quine can support his view by showing how scientific inquiry need not confront any evaluative issues which cannot be addressed in naturalistic terms. A survey of Quine's own epistemological writings supports this account of his position: naturalized epistemology, it is argued, requires acceptance of the shallowness of epistemic reflection, and traditional epistemology employs general epistemic norms and principles which Quine endeavours to show that we can do without. ...

This paper contributes to the growing literature in social epistemology of diagnosing the epistemically problematic features of fake news. I identify two novel problems: the problem of relevant alternatives; and the problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment. The former arises among individual epistemic transactions. By making salient, and thereby relevant, alternatives to knowledge claims, fake news stories threaten knowledge. The problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment arises at the level of entire epistemic communities. I introduce the notion of an epistemic environment, roughly the totality of resources and circumstances relevant to assessing the epistemically interesting statuses, such as knowledge. Fake news degrades our epistemic environment by undermining confidence in epistemic institutions and altering epistemic habits, thereby making the environment less conducive to achieving positive epistemic statuses. This is problematic even if the decrease in confidence and the altering of habits are rational. I end by considering solutions to these problems, stressing the importance of reproaching each other for proliferating fake news. I argue that we should reproach even faultless purveyors of fake news. This is because fake news typically arises in abnormal epistemic contexts, where there is widespread ignorance of, and noncompliance with, correct epistemic norms.

In this book, Andy Mueller examines the ways in which epistemic and practical rationality are intertwined. In the first part, he presents an overview of the contemporary debates about epistemic norms for practical reasoning, and defends the thesis that epistemic rationality can make one practically irrational. Mueller proposes a contextualist account of epistemic norms for practical reasoning and introduces novel epistemic norms pertaining to ends and hope. In the second part Mueller considers current approaches to pragmatic encroachment in epistemology, ultimately arguing in favor of a new principle-based argument for pragmatic encroachment. While the book defends tenets of the knowledge-first programme, one of its main conclusions is thoroughly pragmatist: in an important sense, the practical has primacy over the epistemic.

Despite its fundamental concern with knowledge acquisition and dissemination, Library and Information Science (LIS) lacks a clearly articulated epistemological foundation. This paper addresses two related questions: what kind of epistemological foundation best serves LIS, and how libraries – as a central site of LIS theory and practice – should be conceived for epistemic evaluation. In response to the first, I challenge the claim that social epistemology (SE) is unsuited to LIS because of its epistemologically prescriptive nature. Drawing on the distinction between evaluative and prescriptive normativity, I show that SE can offer evaluative standards to inform LIS without being prescriptive about adherence to those standards. In response to the second, I argue that libraries can be conceived as social epistemic systems and examine two contextual factors that explain how they function as such: their role as epistemic environments and the social practices that partially constitute them. Analysis of these practices reveals that ethical and political considerations are embedded in libraries’ epistemic functioning. These arguments reveal the limits of purist conceptions of epistemic performance and motivate an integrated approach to SE as a foundation for LIS – one that remains veritistic while also drawing on empirical insights and attending to ethico-political concerns.

This chapter motivates the need for a distinctive framework for the epistemic evaluation of salience and attention. It describes the impact that salience and attention have on our cognitive lives, and the ways in which the resources of traditional epistemology, located within a doxastic paradigm struggle to evaluate them. It sets out four core limitations on traditional epistemology which limit its ability to offer the resources to evaluate these phenomena: it is primarily oriented towards the evaluation of propositional states, and in particular towards belief and knowledge as goal states; it is oriented towards the evaluation of positive attitudes rather than the negative space of attitudes we don’t form; and it tends to overlook the content of attitudes in favour of their formal features. To epistemically evaluate salience and attention we need a framework which can overcome these limitations.

The prevalence of obesity has increased substantially in the past 3 decades and is projected to increase further in the years ahead. It increases the risk of diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, sleep apnea, nonalcoholic hepatic steatosis, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis, and cancer. The prevention and treatment of obesity is, therefore, a leading challenge facing public health and medicine in the 21st century. Two stereotypes have dominated thinking in public health, medicine, and the media about obesity. The first stereotype is that the recent surge in prevalence of obesity reflects almost entirely environmental and psychological factors and excludes an important contribution of genetic biological factors. The second stereotype is that obesity should and can be treated primarily by diet and behavioral modification. In this review, I challenge these tenets. I summarize evidence for a strong genetic neurobiological contribution to adiposity and body weight and assert that common human obesity is, like essential hypertension, a complex multifactorial disease where genetic factors promote sensitivity or resistance to obesity in a toxic environment. This concept of a genetic resistance versus sensitivity to obesity helps explain why many people remain thin in a toxic environment whereas others develop profound obesity. I then discuss evidence that dietary therapy for obesity generally fails to achieve weight loss maintenance. There is mounting indication that the high rate of relapse from weight loss during dietary therapy occurs because of compensatory biological adaptations that promote lack of compliance and effectiveness. Relapse from weight loss during dietary therapy is not caused simply by lack of discipline and will power. Finally, I briefly discuss the alternatives to dietary and behavioral therapy, namely bariatric surgery and pharmacotherapy. As a prelude to my critique of dietary therapy, I begin with a discussion of the role of genetic neurobiological factors in obesity. The surge …

This paper argues for a redrawing of the boundaries of epistemic normativity that takes epistemic environments as their centre. The argument sets off from a case of sanctioned white ignorance (Spivak, A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present 1999, Martín, Philosophical Quarterly, 71, 2021) and builds an analogy between the epistemic and the political normative terrains. This analogy, I argue, brings to light a new dimension of epistemic normativity that concerns the organisation and management of the channels through which epistemic resources are produced and made available in a community of knowers. This is what I call the ‘environmental model’ of epistemic normativity. The environmental model is contrasted with existing ‘agential models’, which centre on the psychology or the sociality of epistemic agents. In shifting the perspective from agents to environments, the environmental model is shown to provide a broader set of normative tools compared to existing agential accounts, and offer substantive advantages when it comes to thinking epistemically about structures and about epistemic injustice more broadly. In the attempt to reframe epistemic normativity in this way a wider ambition of this paper also is brought to light—namely, to make space for an image of the epistemological domain as fundamentally political.

Epistemic Evaluation: Purposeful Evaluation By David K. Henderson and John Greco

Language practitioners such as translators need norms to a lesser or greater degree to guide their language use. The general communication norm applies, namely that speakers/writers need to express themselves in such a way that what they say/ write is identifiable and that it can be interpreted by listeners/readers. At the same time it should coincide in the highest degree with how they want themselves to be understood. Apart from this general norm, which should also guide the community translator, there are specific norms that one should abide by in order to convey themessage effectively. In this article specific norms are discussed that a community translator should adhere to. The norms are illustrated by representative (translated) text extracts.

Our beliefs and inferential transitions are subject to evaluation as rational or irrational by reference to general epistemic norms. But what could determine certain norms as the correct ones? This chapter explores and opposes the answer that certain patterns of belief formation (e.g., in arithmetic and in deductive logic) are justified by virtue of the fact that they constitute the relevant concepts or the meanings of the relevant words (e.g., ‘number’, ‘successor’, ‘every’, ‘not’, etc.). This ‘semantogenetic’ proposal goes back to Hilbert, Poincare, and the logical positivists, and was recently defended by Boghossian, Peackocke, Hale, and Wright. Among the arguments developed against it are that although it might account for the epistemic legitimacy of certain beliefs, it cannot explain why certain commitments are epistemically obligatory; and that the practices that provide words with their meanings are ‘conditionalized’ and therefore do not coincide (even approximately) with the practices recommended by our epistemic norms.

Employee rewards are crucial for motivating and recognizing organizational contributions. However, organizations frequently overlook the elements (financial and non-financial rewards) that motivate employees. Most organizations lack tools and tactics to motivate employees, and the worst part is that a toxic work environment demotivates employees. This study aimed to investigate and understand how employee rewards affect motivation in a toxic environment as a moderating variable. Exploratory research was conducted for this review. Information was gathered from online publications, dissertations, online databases, and books relevant to the topic. Financial benefits are the most effective motivator for most employees; however, selected individuals are driven by intrinsic rewards. Money alone is not always sufficient to motivate employees. Regardless of these benefits, a hostile work environment motivates employees. To foster a healthy work environment, organizations must train managers and staff in professionalism, fairness, positivism, and workplace culture. Employees or managers acting toxically toward other staff members should be addressed immediately. This study emphasizes the value of reward systems in a nontoxic workplace. Organizations can promote greater job satisfaction, which in turn lowers absenteeism and increases employee motivation levels, ultimately boosting total economic production by eliminating the toxic aspects that may impair motivation.

The author argues by means of—what he coins—conceptual excavation that debunking arguments tacitly rely on certain basic norms of epistemic rationality that are prima facie theoretically indispensable for any rational argument. The author explains what he means by theoretical indispensability and argues that theoretical indispensability makes for a stronger indispensability argument than both the Quine-Putnam scientific indispensability argument for mathematical entities and David Enoch’s practical indispensability argument for moral facts. He then briefly argues that basic epistemic rationality norms are irreducible to descriptive-natural norms (social, biological, and psychological) in virtue of an epistemic version of Hume’s law. The author concludes that debunking arguments go too far when they imply (or even explicitly deny) that we have good reason to debunk basic epistemic rationality norms.

In the guidance of conceptual of resource environment al bearing capacity (REBC), evaluation index system was constructed from 4 aspects including resource subsystem, environment subsystem, adjustment subsystem and social-economic subsystem. Set pair analysis based on entropy-AHP method was used to assess the index system of Daqing City, Results indicated that bearing capacity index in status quo showed Zhaozhou and Zhaoyuan, county of Daqing were in the poor state, and should be fallen into the focus area of resource environmental protection. Although the whole bearing situation improved from 1980s to the present, environment subsystem was deteriorating, environmental protection should be paid particular attentions. The improved measures of regional REBC were presented based on analysis of extent of opposition and homology.

Many authors have argued that epistemic rationality sometimes comes into conflict with our relationships. Although Sarah Stroud and Simon Keller argue that friendships sometimes require bad epistemic agency, their proposals do not go far enough. I argue here for a more radical claim—romantic love sometimes requires we form beliefs that are false. Lovers stand in a special position with one another; they owe things to one another that they do not owe to others. Such demands hold for beliefs as well. Two facets of love ground what I call the false belief requirement , or the demand to form false beliefs when it is for the good of the beloved: the demand to love for the right reasons and the demand to refrain from doxastic wronging. Since truth is indispensable to epistemic rationality, the requirement to believe falsely, consequently, undermines truth norms. I demonstrate that, when the false belief requirement obtains, there is an irreconcilable conflict between love and truth norms of epistemic rationality: we must forsake one, at least at the time, for the other.

An objection to the reason-responsive consequentialist view is that it answers the wrong question: the view is an account of rationality simpliciter, not epistemic rationality. In this chapter, I argue that the same grounds which led us to posit a distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic norms of belief should make us skeptical of the existence of a distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic norms of inquiry. In the case of belief, we may have good grounds to hold that all reasons for belief are epistemic; that ordinary language tracks a distinct type of epistemic rationality; or that the notion of epistemic rationality is needed to play key theoretical roles associated with the concept of rationality. But none of these arguments generalize to motivate the existence of a distinctively epistemic type of rational inquiry, and in fact, I argue, several of these arguments tell against the existence of epistemic norms governing inquiry. I conclude by sketching an alternative Gibbardian picture of inquiry on which rational inquiry is an all-things-considered affair.