Epistemic Access Research Articles

Lucky Ignorance, Modality and Lack of Knowledge

AbstractI argue against the Standard View of ignorance, according to which ignorance is defined as equivalent to lack of knowledge, that cases of environmental epistemic luck, though entailing lack of knowledge, do not necessarily entail ignorance. In support of my argument, I contend that in cases of environmental luck, an agent retains what I call epistemic access to the relevant fact by successfully exercising her epistemic agency and that ignorance and non‐ignorance, contrary to what the Standard View predicts, are not modal in the sense that knowledge is. After responding to objections, I conclude by sketching an alternative account of ignorance centered on the notions of epistemic access and epistemic agency.

Drivers and inhibitors of diversity and social justice in the South African higher education sector: Reflections on a decolonised curriculum

This article analyses factors that drive or inhibit students’ epistemic access to higher education in South Africa. The analysis is in response to a need for institutional diversity and programme differentiation in our higher education institutions. The article intends to contribute to the ongoing debates on decolonisation and the social justice agenda in South African higher education. I argue that the first point of departure should be a focus on curriculum change. To this end I raise three arguments: firstly, the agenda on the size and shape of the system is not based on the pursuit for social justice and decolonisation, but on flippant political pursuits and markets. Secondly, the principles that govern the selection, organisation and sequencing of curriculum are not based on post-structuralism, but rather on structuralism. Thirdly, historically disadvantaged students do not have epistemic access and success in higher education.

Providing Opportunities for Patients to Say More about Their Pain without Overtly Asking: A Conversation Analysis of Doctors Repeating Patient Answers in Palliative Care Pain Assessment

Abstract As the main symptom in palliative care, pain requires careful assessment. Repeating patient answers is one recommended communication technique for helping convey to patients that they have been heard, and to encourage them to say more. We examined 23 episodes where experienced doctors repeat patients' answers with mirrored rhythm and downward-final intonation, captured in pain assessments video-recorded in 37 consultations in a large UK hospice. Using conversation analysis, our aim was to determine whether or not the repeats invite additional talk, and if so, how they do so. Our findings reveal lexical and prosodic features of doctors’ repeated pain answers that signal completion of the sequence. At the same time, because the patient has greater epistemic access to their own pain, a repeat can also invite confirmation or disconfirmation. The patients in our data sometimes—but not always—respond to the repeat with confirmation or further talk. We conclude that repeating patient answers with mirrored rhythm and downward-final intonation provides a no-obligation opportunity for patient-led confirmation, disconfirmation, or expansion of pain descriptions, particularly when the pain matter is new, revised, or has been problematic to report.

The Free Energy Principle: Good Science and Questionable Philosophy in a Grand Unifying Theory.

The Free Energy Principle (FEP) is currently one of the most promising frameworks with which to address a unified explanation of life-related phenomena. With powerful formalism that embeds a small set of assumptions, it purports to deal with complex adaptive dynamics ranging from barely unicellular organisms to complex cultural manifestations. The FEP has received increased attention in disciplines that study life, including some critique regarding its overall explanatory power and its true potential as a grand unifying theory (GUT). Recently, FEP theorists presented a contribution with the main tenets of their framework, together with possible philosophical interpretations, which lean towards so-called Markovian Monism (MM). The present paper assumes some of the abovementioned critiques, rejects the arguments advanced to invalidate the FEP’s potential to be a GUT, and overcomes criticism thereof by reviewing FEP theorists’ newly minted metaphysical commitment, namely MM. Specifically, it shows that this philosophical interpretation of the FEP argues circularly and only delivers what it initially assumes, i.e., a dual information geometry that allegedly explains epistemic access to the world based on prior dual assumptions. The origin of this circularity can be traced back to a physical description contingent on relative system-environment separation. However, the FEP itself is not committed to MM, and as a scientific theory it delivers more than what it assumes, serving as a heuristic unification principle that provides epistemic advancement for the life sciences.

Epistemics in post‐match interviews: A focus on questioning turn design

AbstractThis contribution reports on a study of questioning turns in German and English football post‐match interviews (PMIs). Previous research on PMIs suggests that their main aim is to provide room for a delivery of the player's perspective of the match, thereby foregrounding his expertise and experience. The study uses a conversation analytic approach to focus on how interviewers design their turns in order to achieve this foregrounding. It is shown that participants employ means to systematically maintain an epistemic balance that reflects the player's epistemic access to the match as more authoritative. Furthermore, while both German and English interviewers perform similar actions in their turns, there are significant differences in the use of overtly marked questions, revealing different overall strategies of foregrounding.

Double hiddenness: Governmentality and subjectivization in Gelug Buddhism

Tibetan Buddhism, the Gelug school specifically, promotes a deep skepticism about the ability to know others’ minds. Its scripture is rife with cautionary tales allegorizing and extolling this skepticism in adherents, while claiming a buddha, by contrast, has eradicated this skepticism with their omniscience. I describe a buddha’s purported privileged epistemic access to others’ minds as “double-hiddenness.” On this skepticism, not just what a buddha knows, but if they know it is hidden, making their authority irreputable. I use critical theory to investigate the ramifications of this double hiddenness, demonstrating that the resultant subjectivization brought about by this extreme skepticism—although the product of power—is not merely a type of subjugation, as suggested by Foucault, but also constitutes a robust agency.

A translanguage pedagogy to promote Biotechnology concept engagement and academic literacy in a linguistically-diverse university context

Following the call for transformation, higher education institutions in South Africa were required to promote and implement indigenous languages in teaching and learning. This has led to various strategies and resources being explored and implemented, multilingual glossaries among them. In science, where English remains the global means of communication, our experience has been that such interventions are often underutilized. A more inclusive, holistic pedagogy is required to adequately prepare students, especially non-English speakers, for international scientific engagement. One such pedagogy is presently proposed and tested. Its purpose is to harness the dominant language - that which is most active in the learners’ minds - to first promote epistemological access to difficult scientific concepts, and after concept acquisition, develop the required English, scientific, and academic literacy. Biotechnology undergraduate students at Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) - many of whom are international - reported enhancing their learning experience and recognised the significance of their dominant language in deep learning as a result of this translanguage pedagogy. Such a pedagogy demonstrates that multilingualism, far from being viewed as an impediment to teaching and learning, should be seen as a rich resource that needs to be harnessed to facilitate epistemic access, cognitive development, transformation, social cohesion, and respect for all languages.

Indigenizing English in the ESL Classroom:Decolonizing Knowledge for Epistemic Access in Spaces of Rurality

Indigenizing English in the ESL Classroom:Decolonizing Knowledge for Epistemic Access in Spaces of Rurality

Conversational functions of ‘I know’, ‘you know’ and ‘we know’ in collaborative writing of primary school children

ABSTRACT This paper discusses how primary school students, who are writing together in the context of inquiry learning, explicitly orient to knowing of oneself and others within the peer group. Using Conversation Analysis, we disclose the conversational functions of assertions holding ‘I know’, ‘you know’ and ‘we know’. First, students position themselves as knowledgeable, to (i) express a preannouncement of a proposal, (ii) respond to a request for information and (iii) reinforce an assertion with use of an evidential. Second, students claim equal epistemic access, as a response to an action that conveys epistemic authority of a peer. Third, students indicate shared knowledge with other participants, to (i) pursue agreement, (ii) check the epistemic status of a co-participant, (iii) reject a proposal for grounds of relevance and (iv) mark shared, newfound knowledge. The different practices are discussed in terms of epistemics in conversation and dialogic writing.

Hegel, grandfather of disjunctivism

AbstractIn this paper, I shall investigate whether Hegel can be considered as a sort of ancestor of McDowell’s disjunctivism. If this hypothesis turns out to be plausible, then the paper offers two gains. On the one hand, it offers an innovative interpretation of the way in which Hegel conceives of our sensible epistemic access to the world. On the other hand, McDowell's own claim that his own theoretical proposal has a Hegelian sound is supported by a previously unexplored argument. I organize my analysis into three parts: I sketch McDowell’s version of disjunctivism (Section 2); I analyze some passages from Hegel that I believe are important for showing some similarities between his and McDowell’s argumentative strategy (Section 3); in the conclusion (Section 4), I highlight a number of core features that Hegel seems to share with McDowell’s disjunctivism and I submit that they are sufficient to label Hegel the “grandfather” of McDowell's disjunctivism.

“Do you know banana boat?”: Occasioning overt knowledge negotiations in Japanese EFL conversation

This paper adds to a growing body of conversation analytic (CA) research that seeks to explicate how knowledge is negotiated in talk-in-interaction. It does so by documenting the specific interactional practices novice Japanese EFL learners use to claim, demonstrate, and monitor knowledge during conversation. Of particular note is one practice that speakers use to determine the extent of their recipient's epistemic access: “Do you know?” (DYK) formulations. DYK formulations are found to occur in a consistent sequential environment of initial reference sequences and to have regularly patterned, highly organized sequential trajectories. I show how both speakers and recipients display orientations to normative preferences regarding knowledge access and how knowledge check questions like DYK serve the larger role of maintaining intersubjectivity, epistemic congruence and managing topics. In particular, I argue that although morpho-syntactically “do you know?” constitutes a polar interrogative of Y/N access, sequentially it serves as a means of constraining the next relevant action to an overt claim of access or non-access that drives the ongoing interaction toward the public instantiation of intersubjectivity.

Affective Disclosure of Value: emotional experience, neo-sentimentalism and learning to value

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to motivate and solve a puzzle regarding the intuition that just as in the absence of perceptual experience we lack an important kind of understanding of sensory properties like colour, in the absence of affective experience we lack an important kind of understanding of value. The puzzle consists in understanding how can a property pertaining to the experience of the subject i.e. the affective component of emotional experience, provide us with a distinctive epistemic access to, and therefore an understanding of, properties that are instantiated by objects distinct from the experience i.e. the evaluative property of the object of experience. I argue that solving the puzzle necessitates us to commit to a metaphysical view of value according to which affective experience and evaluative properties are related by explanatory circularity. The upshot of the paper is that affective experience provides us with the sort of understanding of value that motivates the generation of evaluative concepts.

Addressing information discrepancies in conversation: bú shì…ma? interrogatives as account solicitations in Mandarin Chinese

Adopting Conversation Analysis as the research method, the present study explores the interactional work performed by bú shì…ma? (Isn't it the case that…) interrogatives in Mandarin Chinese, which are a particular type of negative polarity interrogatives that are asked from a position where the speaker has epistemic access to the certainty of the embedded fact. It is found that, when following some prior talk with these interrogatives, the speaker is marking the prior turn as being somehow discrepant with what s/he claims to have known about the issue in question, thereby soliciting an account from the prior turn speaker (also the recipient of the interrogative) for that discrepancy. The issue in question (or about which a discrepancy arises) is shown to fall simultaneously into the epistemic domains of both interlocutors, while the recipient has epistemic primacy over it. Consequently, the responsibility to account for the discrepancy is accorded to the recipient. This practice of addressing information discrepancies emergent in ongoing interaction is shown to be not only face-saving for the recipient but also less risky for the speaker and thus supportive for the social solidarity between two interlocutors.

The prosody of other-repetition in British and North American English

AbstractThis study explores the link between prosody and other-repetition in a moderately large collection from everyday English talk-in-interaction (n = 200). British English and North American English cases were analysed separately in order to track possible varietal differences. Of initial interest was the question whether focal pitch accents might disambiguate among other-repetition actions, both those related to repair and those that go beyond repair. The results indicate that only two out of six possible other-repetition actions are associated with distinct focal pitch contours in the two varieties. For all other repair and beyond-repair actions speakers use many of the same pitch contours nondistinctively. Overall, falling contours appear more frequently in British other-repetitions, while rising contours are more frequent in North American other-repetitions. In conclusion, it is argued that in addition to pitch contour, prosodic features such as pitch span, loudness, and timing are crucial in distinguishing other-repetition actions, as are nonprosodic factors such as epistemic access (often reflected inoh-prefacing) and visible behavior. (Repair initiation, surprise, challenge, registering, pitch accents,oh-preface, epistemics)*

Irresolvable Disagreement, Objectivist Antirealism and Logical Revision

Meta-ethical realism faces the serious epistemological problem of how to explain our epistemic access to moral reality. In the face of this challenge many are sceptical about non-naturalist realism. Nonetheless, there is good reason to acknowledge moral objectivity: morality shows all the signs of a truth-apt discourse but doesn’t exhibit the typical relativity inducing features. This suggests a middle-ground position, a theory that embraces the virtues of realism but does avoid its vices: objectivist antirealism. In this paper, I’ll discuss, mainly following Crispin Wright’s account of moral truth as superassertibility, a promising version of objectivist antirealism and show how to cope with notorious problems, notably those arising from the thought that moral disagreement might be possible in which nobody is guilty of a cognitive shortcoming, which contradicts the antirealist claim that moral truth is not beyond our epistemic reach. The solution is to deny the possibility of cognitively faultless moral disagreement by arguing that cognitively blameless thinkers either agree or stay agnostic and, therefore, never disagree about any moral proposition. Since assuming an agnostic stance on the part of such thinkers contradicts the antirealist’s conception of truth—even within the limits of intuitionistic logic—I’ll propose an alternative logical revision for the moral discourse: a three-valued logic with epistemically construed truth-values.

Learning trouble in mentoring conversations

Mentoring interactions in higher education are intended to help students achieve their learning goals. This entails mentors taking up the epistemological responsibility of sharing what they know and facilitating effective student learning. When this goal is not achieved, the well-intended mentoring actions create trouble for both the mentor and mentee. We approach learning trouble from an interactional learning perspective where the mentee does not learn what is expected, and where the mentor is left with a need to resolve the barriers to learning. We argue that this as an interactional problem since learning trouble is contingent upon the epistemic access provided during a conversation. This conversation analysis case study formed part of analyses of mentoring conversations between university professors and senior students in the final year of a teacher education programme. Mentoring took place after school experience and the aim was for students to share their reflections on situations where they needed support from the mentor. Mentoring interactions were video-taped and transcribed, and we analysed one particular session as a case study in order to understand what is involved in learning trouble, and how it is resolved. We found that interactions around identifying and resolving trouble could reflect the status of and stance taking by the mentor and the mentee. In our case study, this often contributed to misunderstandings and delays, while illustrating the importance of understanding the lack of epistemic access experienced by the student. These drawbacks resulted in asymmetry in the mentoring relationship. However, the roles were at times temporarily reversed in that the mentor could allow epistemic access on the part of the mentee, enhancing learning at the same time. This case study highlights the importance of conversational actions in mentoring, and how participants use their turns-at-talk for the improvement of learning.

Morality and Interpretation: the Principle of Phronetic Charity

The recent discussions on the unity of virtue (or lack thereof) suffer from a lack of reference to the processes through which we interpret each other as moral agents. In the present paper it is argued that much light can be thrown on that crucial issue by appealing to a version of Donald Davidson’s Principle of Charity, which we call “Principle of Phronetic Charity”. The idea is that in order to treat somebody as a moral agent, one has first to attribute to them, at least pro tempore, a significant degree of practical wisdom (intended as ethical expertise) and, then, to assess and rationally adjust such attribution of competence via actual engagement with them – a process that may lead to different responses on the part of the interpreter (i.e., the confirmation, upgrading, or withdrawing of the preliminary interpretation). After expounding and defending the Principle of Phronetic Charity and the interpretive practices connected with it, we discuss the repercussions of our account on the issue of the epistemic access to virtue. We will show, in particular, that some important components of both disunitarianism and unitarianism have to be retained: in accordance with the former, we stress the role of concrete experience over pure speculation and, up to a point, the idea that virtues tend to form variegated ensembles; in accordance with the latter, we accept the claim that virtues are not attributed to moral agents in isolation. Ultimately, however, the account developed here rejects both the atomism of the disunitarian view and the holism of the “Unity of the Virtues”, since it is in fact a form of molecularism, according to which virtues come neither individually nor as a whole, but rather as clusters.

Curriculating from the Black Archive – Marginality as novelty

The Black Archive is constitutive of works of literato such as JT Jabavu, Nontsizi Mgqwetho, the artist Gerard Bhengu, and musicians like Busi Mhlongo. This collective resource, which should play a crucial role in curriculating, compels us to consider two questions when rethinking Philosophy curricula: First, pedagogically, how does the epistemic access that the Black Archive affords our context facilitate justice? Second, and importantly, how does it help up in achieving justice? I, here, answer these questions in three moves. First, I consider certain key propositions; namely that decolonisation facilitates epistemic access, and that epistemic access in turn facilitates justice (historical, epistemic, and social). Second, I demonstrate how these propositions require the Black Archive (in South Africa) in order to be held as valid. I demonstrate this claim in Philosophy using Dumile Feni’s African Guernica, and in Curriculum Studies, through analysing W. W. Gqoba’s Ingxoxo Enkulu Ngemfundo. I conclude by prescriptively outlining uses for/of the Black Archive, guarding against misappropriations that derail justice as I treat it, safeguarding this corpus from epistemic arrogance that maintains that knowledge is valid only insofar as it is developed by white scholars.

The efficacy of translanguaging as pedagogic practice in selected Namibian multilingual primary classrooms

This article aims to explore the initial literacy and epistemic benefits of translanguaging as a pedagogic practice in multilingual Namibia. Using notions of recontextualization and translanguaging and classroom observation and data from documents, the article shows how pre-primary teachers and learners draw on heteroglossic repertoires for literacy development and epistemic access. It is argued that this reframes the classroom, not as a site of monolingual epistemic violence, but as a democratic space for initial literacy and epistemic development. The article concludes with an argument for the legitimization of heteroglossic practices in multilingual Namibian classrooms if effective teaching and learning of initial literacy is the goal of basic education.

The emergence of an education policy dispositif in South Africa: An analysis of educational discourses associated with the fourth industrial revolution

The notion of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) has recently entered the public and policy domain in South Africa. It has rapidly found resonance in policy discourse and the popular media. It has also entered the language of educational policy and institutions. The impact of 4IR on educational thinking and practice has hitherto not featured in academic discussion on education in South Africa except for a keynote plenary session at the annual conference of the South African Education Research Association (SAERA) in Durban (October 2019). The South African Education Deans Forum recently published a call for the submission of chapters for a book on teacher education, 4IR, and decolonisation. In this article, I develop an address that I delivered at the SAERA 2019 conference as part of the plenary panel. The article consists of four sections. The first offers a consideration of the entry of 4IR discourse into the educational imaginary. I suggest in this section that 4IR discourse has installed a socio-technical imaginary in South Africa's unequal educational dispensation. The second section concentrates on the construction of educational governance. Based on research on 4IR-related policy making, I discuss the policy directions taken by the Department of Higher Education and Training and the Department of Basic Education in giving effect to ways of engaging with 4IR in each of their domains. The third section features a discussion of the impact of technological disruption on society, the economy and education. The final section presents a discussion of the emerging educational architectures in the 4IR and a critical consideration of the curriculum and pedagogical dimensions of 4IR, which, I argue, are informed by an orientation that prioritises the acquisition of generic skills. Sidelining knowledge and concepts as central to the structuring of the curriculum, a generic skills approach succumbs to what might be called a knowledge blindness that holds pernicious consequences for epistemic access in South Africa.