Epistemic Advantages Research Articles

A Hobbesian derivation of the principle of universalization

In this article, I derive a weak version of Kant’s categorical imperative within an informal game-theoretic framework. More specifically, I argue that Hobbesian agents would choose what I call the weak principle of universalization, if they had to decide on a rule of conflict resolution in an idealized but empirically defensible hypothetical decision situation. The discussion clarifies (i) the rationality requirements imposed on agents, (ii) the empirical conditions assumed to warrant the conclusion, and (iii) the political institutions that are necessary to implement the derived principle. The analysis demonstrates the moral significance of the weak principle of universalization and its epistemic advantage over the categorical imperative.

An Intersectional Approach to Early Christian Memory: The Case of the Pastoral Epistles

ABSTRACTIntersectionality has become the primary analytic tool that feminist and anti-racist scholars deploy for theorising identity and oppression. This article aims at using an intersectional approach to the Pastoral Epistles as memory of Paul in order to highlight issues of power and dominance. Instead of examining gender, race, class, age, and sexuality etc. as separate categories of difference, intersectionality explores how these categories mutually construct one another modifying and reinforcing each other. In addition, intersectionality not only helps to reveal complexities and dilemmas in what we study, but also challenge interpreters and scholars to be critical to their own positions. For intersectional theorists, marginalised subjects have an epistemic advantage. I ask: How can the Pastoral Epistles' various statements about wives, Jews or slaves be understood by help of intersectionality? And how can we as interpreters deal with the intersecting power structures constructed by these epistles?

Material Unity and Natural Organism in Locke

This paper examines one of the central complaints regarding Locke's Essay, namely, its supposed incoherence. The question is whether Locke can successfully maintain a materialistic conception of matter, while advancing a theory of knowledge that will constrain the possibilities for a cognitive access to matter from the start. In approaching this question I concentrate on Locke's account of unity. While material unity can be described in relation to Locke's account of substance, real essence, and nominal essence, a separate discussion will be called for altogether in the case of organic unity. In closing, I turn to Kant as a model for locating Locke's purported incoherence, suggesting that his skeptical idealism yields the same epistemic advantages as those won by Kant's empirical realism..

Does the Theist Have an Epistemic Advantage over the Atheist?

Recent iterations of Alvin Plantinga's argument against naturalism bear a surprising resemblance to a famous argument in Descartes's Third Meditation. Both arguments conclude that theists have an epistemic advantage over atheists/naturalists vis-a-vis the question whether or not our cognitive faculties are reliable. In this paper, I show how these arguments bear an even deeper resemblance to each other. After bringing the problem of evil to bear negatively on Descartes's argument, I argue that, given these similarities, atheists can wield a recent solution to the problem of evil against theism in much the way Plantinga wields the details of evolutionary theory against naturalism. I conclude that Plantinga and Descartes give us insufficient reason for thinking theists are in a better epistemic position than atheists and naturalists vis-a-vis the question whether or not our cognitive faculties are reliable.

Standpoint Theory as a Methodology for the Study of Power Relations

Sandra Harding's feminist standpoint theory is best known for the controver sial claim that those who are unprivileged with respect to their social positions are likely to be privileged with respect to gaining knowledge of social reality. According to Harding, unprivileged social positions are likely to generate perspectives that are partial and less distorted than perspectives generated by other social positions (Harding 1991, 121; see also pages 138 and 141). I call this claim the thesis of epistemic (see also Wylie 2004). The thesis of epistemic is often subjected to misinterpreta tions. Sometimes it is presented as if it includes the assumption of essentialism and the assumption of automatic epistemic privilege (see, for example, Landau 2008). Whereas the assumption of essentialism is that all women share the same socially grounded perspective in virtue of being women, the assumption of automatic epistemic privilege is that epistemic accrues to the subordinate automatically, just in virtue of their occupying a particular social position. As Alison Wylie argues, it is not clear that anyone who has advocated feminist standpoint theory has ever endorsed either one of these two problematic assumptions (Wylie 2004, 341; see also Crasnow 2008). Without the two assumptions, the thesis of epistemic implies that contin gently, with respect to particular epistemic projects, some social locations and standpoints confer epistemic advantage (Wylie 2004, 346; italics mine). Despite several attempts to clarify the thesis of epistemic advantage, its critics have been persistent in claiming that there is insufficient evidence in its support (see, for example, Pinnick 1994, 2005; Hekman 2000). I have argued elsewhere that the controversy about feminist standpoint theory is not only about the question of whether there is or is not sufficient evidence in support of the thesis of epistemic advantage; it is also about the question of what kind of evidence is relevant for the thesis of epistemic (Rolin 2006, 134). I have suggested that in order to answer the latter question, one needs to specify what a socially grounded perspective is and what the relevant alternatives are in a particular field of scientific inquiry. I have appealed to a case study from the

Problems with Feminist Standpoint Theory in Science Education

Feminist standpoint theory has important implications for science education. The paper focuses on difficulties in standpoint theory, mostly regarding the assumptions that different social positions produce different types of knowledge, and that epistemic advantages that women might enjoy are always effective and significant. I conclude that the difficulties in standpoint theory render it too problematic to accept. Various implications for science education are indicated: we should return to the kind of science education that instructs students to examine whether arguments, experiments, etc. are successful, rather than ask who presented them; when considering researchers and students for science education programs we should examine their scholarly achievements, rather than the group to which they belong; women should not be discouraged from engaging in “mainstream” science research and education (or other spheres of knowledge considered as “men’s topics”) and men should not be discouraged from engaging in what are considered “women’s topics” in science (or outside it); we should not assume that there are different types of science for women and for men, nor different ways for women and men to study science or conduct scientific research.

Two Sides of Any Issue

Seneca in his Moral Epistles to Lucilium ridicules Protagoras’ claim that both sides of any position can be equally well argued. Cicero, on the contrary, in the surviving fragments of his dialogue, the Republic, maintains in the person of Laelius that the thorough exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of any position pro and con is the best and often the only dialectical avenue to the discovery of difficult truths. There are therefore at least two sides to the issue of whether philosophers ought to address their arguments to the two sides of any issue. This paper examines the epistemic advantages and disadvantages of the same reasoning agent playing both roles of advocate and critic, as opposed to encouraging only distinct independently minded reasoning agents each to consider any of the opposing sides of an issue in dispute. The question in argumentation theory posed by this inquiry in simplest terms is whether a single thinker considering both sides of an issue is more able to arrive at truth, or whether, as the popular adage has it, two minds are inherently dialectically better than one. The answer proposed here is that it does not matter provided that the conflict of opposing views are in some manner resolved with the sincere intention of arriving at the truth.

Factions in Rousseau's Du Contrat Social and federal representation

Consider the following two seemingly unrelated questions. First, why does Rousseau (1993 [1762]) believe that the formation of factions or partial associations is not conducive to the general will in Du Contrat Social, II, 3? Second, why do federal assemblies typically strive for some form of degressive proportionality, i.e. a balance between equal and proportional representation, for the countries in the federation? We will show that there is a surprising connection between these questions. We turn to our first question. It is often thought that Rousseau's oppo sition to factions can be interpreted in reference to the Condorcet Jury Theorem (e.g. Grofman and Feld 1988). The Condorcet Jury Theorem states that if voters are more likely to be right on some issue than not and cast their votes independently, then the chance that the majority is correct converges to one as the number of voters goes to infinity. This interpre tation is supported by Rousseau's claim that 'If, when a sufficiently informed people deliberates, the citizens were to have no communication between themselves, the general will would always result from the large number of small differences' (II, 3, emphasis added). If voters form fac tions, then they no longer vote independently. They become subject to opinion leaders and the epistemic advantage of consulting a large number of voters is lost. Or, as Grofman and Feld (1988: 571) put it, the effective number of votes is reduced, which in turn reduces the probability that the majority is correct. This interpretation is tempting, but it is inconsistent with some crucial textual evidence. Rousseau writes, 'If there are partial societies, it is necessary to multiply their number and to prevent inequality from existing among them ... These precautions are the only good ones for ensuring that the general will is always enlightened' (II, 3). Now if Rousseau is interpreted in terms of the Condorcet Jury Theorem in the way described above, then multiplying factions only makes things worse. The effective number of votes is further reduced. Thus, even if factions form, one should retain the independence between the remaining parties as much as possible to safeguard whatever epistemic advantage the majority vote still has. An alternative interpretation of Rousseau's opposition to factions is called for. We turn to our second question. Consider a federation of countries with a decision-making assembly in which each country casts a block vote. On

Carnal Connections: On Embodiment, Apprenticeship, and Membership

This article responds to the special issue of Qualitative Sociology devoted to the author's book, Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (vol. 28, no. 3, summer 2005). Four themes are tackled: the positioning of the inquirer and the question of social acceptance and membership; the dynamics of embodiment(s) and the variable role of race as a structural, interactional, and dispositional property; the functioning of the boxing gym as miniature civilizing and masculinizing machine; apprenticeship as a mode of knowledge transmissioin and technique for social inquiry, the scope of carnal sociology, and the textual work needed to convey the full-color texture and allure of the social world. This leads to clarifying the conceptual, empirical, and rhetorical makeup of Body and Soul in relation to its triple intent: to elucidate the workings of a sociocultural competency residing in prediscursive capacities; to deploy and develop the concept of habitus as operant philosophy of action and methodological guide; and to offer a brief for a sociology not of the body (as social product) but from the body (as social spring and vector of knowledge), exemplifying a way of doing and writing ethnography that takes full epistemic advantage of the visceral nature of social life.

Self-knowledge, Agency and Force

My aim in this paper is to articulate further what may be called an agency theory of self-knowledge. Many theorists have stressed how important agency is to self-knowledge, and much work has been done drawing connections between the two notions.2 However, it has not always been clear what epistemic advantage agency gives us in this area and why it does so. I take it as a constraint on an adequate account of how a subject knows her own mental states and acts, that it construe the known mental states and acts realistically and as independent of their self-ascription, and that it deliver genuine epistemic standing to the knower. The main task of the paper will, then, be to explore how our having rational agency with respect to our mental states may be able to secure genuine epistemic warrant for our self-ascriptions of states or acts independent of the ascriptions. This task will be carried out by focussing on the question of what account we should give of our knowledge of what I call our acts of judging. In the remainder of this section, I will do a little to clarify what is meant by that question. Section 2 will attempt to introduce us to elements of the best way to approach the question by considering some alternative strategies. Section 3 is devoted to forming some idea of what kind of warrant we are looking for when considering how agency might give us self-knowledge. Section 4 aims to present a suggestion as to how agency gives us the kind of warrant identified over our acts of judging. Section 5 deals with some objections. When we ask about our knowledge of psychological self-ascriptions of the form: I q> that P, there are three aspects of the question that our answers can

Science in a Real-World Context

The experimental method is a most powerful means of the empirical sciences that combines the theory-based asking of questions with the readiness to register surprises. From the days of Galileo (1564-1642) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626) various models have conceptualized the tension between doing something with nature and observing it, between deductive reasoning and inductive experience, between modeling artificial set-ups and being in complex environments, between control and understanding. For a long time, the philosophy of science made experimentation subservient to theory. Recent studies from history (Gooding, 1990), sociology (Pickering, 1995), and the philosophy of science (Hacking, 1983 ; Rheinberger, 1997) have strongly modified this view. It is now widely accepted that experimentation has a living space of its own with strikingly different relations to conceptual work in various fields of research. But in each case the tension that the experimental method constitutes between intervening into reality and understanding it is what makes experimentation an uniquely powerful learning strategy, even if the tension itself is still open to philosophical reflection. If it is so successful, why then is it restricted to the artificial world of the laboratory? Obviously, because the method is paved with surprises, failures, errors, and exceptions that people most likely do not want to experience in real life. The institutional set-up of the laboratory confines all outcomes to a special world, making it easy to start anew if something bad happens. If new knowledge is achieved, the costs of trial and error can quickly be forgotten. But mistakes imply no dangers for anyone in real life. No one except the "mad scientist" movie star would accept the risks associated with this kind of knowledge production. The laboratory symbolizes an exclusive social reality where these risks are welcome. For nature too, the laboratory provides a degree of control, of boundary and initial conditions, of the instrumentation of observation and measurement of effects, so that the causal analysis of surprises can be much better accounted for than those experienced in nature at large. It would be pointless to deny these social and epistemic advantages of laboratory science. But the argument can be made that these advantages are achieved by ideals of constraint, abstraction, simplicity, and purity at odds with the course of nature and society. Moreover, these ideals have given rise to a world-view that interprets the space, time, things, and people of the world as faint approximations of the abstractions that make up the laboratory world. Philosophers of science have only started to deconstruct this worldview (cf. Cartwright 1999; Frodeman, 2003). Contemporary society increasingly faces research strategies that, despite their experimental features, cannot be restricted to the special world of the laboratory. Release experiments with genetically modified organisms, which are paradoxical in character, are a good example. The question as to whether the risks of releasing GMOs are acceptable can only be answered by releasing them. Even if small scale and simulation studies serve to restrict the risks, they eventually can only serve to sharpen the hypotheses surrounding experimental action in the open field. (For an interesting example see Levidov, 2003.) An even more extreme case occurs with the analysis of high-risk technologies such as nuclear power plants. They are built and run according to carefully developed safety measures and security plans. But whether or not these cover all relevant factors of potential technological and organizational malfunctioning is an open question, to be answered only by putting the installations into operation (Krohn and Weingart, 1987; Weyer 1994). An almost opposite ensemble of cases can be made of landfills. These have been built more or less carelessly, with the only goal being to get rid of waste as cheaply as possible, only to discover that they are "wild bio-chemical reactors" (expert opinion) nobody can control. …

The Epistemic Advantage of Prediction over Accommodation

According to the thesis of Strong Predictionism, we typically have stronger evidence for a theory if it was used to predict certain data, than if it was deliberately constructed to accommodate those same data, even if we fully grasp the theory and all the evidence on which it was based. This thesis faces powerful objections and the existing arguments in support of it are seriously flawed. I offer a new defence of Strong Predictionism which overcomes the objections and provides a deeper understanding of the epistemic importance of prediction. I conclude by applying this account to strategies for defending scientific realism.

Epistemic Foundation for Teaching Critical Thinking in Group Discussion

I argue for a view of critical thinking and learning as a fallibilistic epistemic process of inquiry and evaluation, which is grounded in human fallibility. I show how this plausible view is different from other views, in that it is predicated not only on individual thinking alone but also on group thinking as it affects the individual in the context of a group discussion. The individualistic rational view of critical thinking only specifies the process or method that one may individually use to evaluate beliefs or the evidence that one brings to bear on one's doxastic attitude or judgment. This view does not specify the nature and scope of evidence that one may need to evaluate. I argue that evaluating a belief in the context of having a substantial amount of available evidence in a social group is important for determining whether one thinks critically. There is epistemic advantage in evaluating a broad scope of available evidence in a group discussion, which does not exist otherwise. I assume that group discussion is a pedagogical tool, which under the right social conditions, is likely to bring about learning and the acquisition of critical thinking abilities. The right social conditions for group discussion can optimize reasonableness by a process which involves cognitive division of labor and epistemic prudence. An individual can evaluate on his or her own only a limited amount of evidence; sometimes we may need to rely on the evidence that others have already evaluated which they may reasonably accept, given their cognitive comparative advantage. I distinguish among three plausible learning outcomes of the process of critical thinking, which indicate cognitive division of labor and comparative epistemic advantage in a group discussion.

Theories, Practices, and Pluralism

A hallmark of recent critical social science has been the commitment to methodological and theoretical pluralism. Habermas and others have argued that diverse theoretical and empirical approaches are needed to support informed social criticism. However, an unresolved tension remains in the epistemology of critical social science: the tension between the epistemic advantages of a single comprehensive theoretical framework and those of methodological and theoretical pluralism. By shifting the grounds of the debate in a way suggested by Dewey’s pragmatism, the author argues that a thoroughgoing pluralism strengthens, rather than weakens, both the social scientific and political aims of critical social science. Not only does pragmatism offer a plausible interpretation of the epistemic pluralism of the social sciences, but it also provides a way of thinking about their fundamentally practical and political character. With a better normative vocabulary with which to discuss the epistemological issues of such a pluralistic mode of inquiry, the democratic role of critical inquiry and its specifically “practical” form of verification can be clarified.

X—States of Nature, Epistemic and Political

The paper asks what is living in political state-of-nature approaches, and answers by way of considering recent epistemic uses of state-of-nature arguments. Using E. Craig's idea that a concept of knowledge can be explicated from the need for good informants, I argue that a concept of authority can be explicated from a parallel need for good practical informants. But this need not justify rule of a platonic elite. Practically relevant epistemic advantages are more likely to be secured by the political creation of institutions. In conclusion, it is suggested that this approach can explain a problem of justification which arises for J. Raz'account of authority

Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege

[T]he dominated live in a world structured by others for their purposes — purposes that at the very least are not our own and that are in various degrees inimical to our development and even existence.We are perhaps used to the idea that there are various species of oppression: political, economic, or sexual, for instance. But where there is the phenomenon that Nancy Hartsock picks out in saying that the world is “structured” by the powerful to the detriment of the powerless, there is another species of oppression at work, one that has not been registered in mainstream epistemology: epistemic oppression. The word ‘structured’ may be read materially, so as to imply that social institutions and practices favour the powerful, or ontologically, so as to imply that the powerful somehow constitute the world. But for present purposes I am interested only in an epistemological reading, which implies that the powerful have some sort of unfair advantage in “structuring” our understandings of the social world. I will try to present an account of what this initially vague idea involves. I hope thereby to explain an exact sense in which the powerful can have a kind of epistemic advantage that means the powerless are epistemically oppressed.

An overlooked argument for epistemic conservatism

The weak form of epistemic (or methodological) conservatism that I defend is that believing that p is a reason for belief or continued belief that p. The principle will not seem weak, if we read 'reason' as 'ground' or 'evidence'. (Indeed, such a principle is dismissed out of hand in the best known, if circumspect, defence of conservatism Sklar 1975: 377). But I will argue against that interpretation. The defence involves a comparison with practical reasoning, and it has two parts. First, the defence simply brings together a dominant view of the epistemics of belief, as a decision to accept, with a particular analysis of decision. Second, I try to diagnosis and undermine the intuitive force of a main anti-conservatism argument, drawing on the levels of justification distinction central to rule-utilitarianism. The following is a widely accepted position in epistemology and the philosophy of science: The justification for moving from partial (or degrees of) belief to full belief or acceptance involves a decision and an action. It is the decision to cease inquiry into a hypothesis, and the act of accepting it as true. (See, for a recent example, Harman 1986: Chapters 3 and 5). But what force does the decision to, and act of, acceptance, have distinct from the assignment of probability or support (each on the same evidence)? If we understand decision according to analyses in the study of practical reasoning, then there is force just in conceiving of acceptance as a decision. On these analyses a decision, like an intention, supplies an additional (second-order) reason to act (Raz 1990). Joining these two assumptions unargued for here, but defended elsewhere on independent grounds together, we derive the form of epistemic conservatism stated above. The decision to accept p as true, which represents one's coming to fully believe it, provides a reason in itself to believe (or continue to believe) that p, and so, to extend the point, an epistemic advantage over an otherwise equally warranted hypothesis q. (Comparison of theoretical and practical reasoning is limited. The relation of reasons to belief is more intimate than reasons to actions. Arguably, to recognize reasons as establishing a statement as true is to believe it; while, if weakness of will is possible, recognizing a reason to act does not entail the intention to perform an act, let alone being identical to it.) The analysis of decision and its relevance to the problem of conservatism is illustrated by the following example. Jane shops intensely for a car, and after a careful investigation opts for the Dodge Intrepid. She decides

Conservatism and Tacit Confirmation

i. Methodological conservativism holds that believing a statement is a reason to continue to believe it. It also favours hypotheses that are introduced earlier than competitors. Other conservative theses have been defended, but these two already contain enough to motivate the main objection to conservatism. Since neither being believed nor the time of introduction are relevant to showing greater approximation to the truth, conservatism amounts to a prejudice, it is alleged, creating fundamental epistemic differences on non-epistemic grounds. Nevertheless, I want to defend conservatism. In part I, I argue that a statement's being believed or introduced earlier provides good reasons to expect it to have traditional epistemic advantages over some competitors, equally compatible with the data. Part II takes up the objection that because of underdetermination many hypotheses will elude the above defence. Against this objection I argue that if one accepts the underdetermination thesis as raising a serious methodological problem, then we should distinguish knowing that there are equally good competing hypotheses from actually producing them. Underdetermination does not itself guarantee the latter, and that is what counts. Standard objections to conservatism appeal to intuitions, and conceptions of justification, which are responsive solely to an interest in truth or correspondence with reality. The difficulty in defending conservatism is that it must concede its failure on these counts. In Part III it is argued that this failure does not fall on it differentially. Conservatism's claim to our allegiance shifts then to showing that, for all its defects, it remains the best policy we know.

Effects of Knowledge of Results, Feedback in Relation to Standards, and Goals on Reaction-Time Performance

In several recent studies by McCormack and others, the visual reaction times (RTs) of Ss given no of their scores (NoKR) have been compared with those of Ss given dichotomous feedback (KR).1 Feedback was administered by flashing a green light whenever S's RT was faster than a designated standard (e.g. faster than S's immediately previous score) and a red light whenever S's RT was slower than this standard. In these studies, KR Ss showed significantly faster RTs than NoKR Ss. These findings have been interpreted by their authors as demonstrating that knowledge of results enhances reaction-time performance. This interpretation implies that the performance-differences were adequately accounted for by differences in the amount of received by the various experimental groups. The present paper argues that this conclusion is not fully warranted by the actual findings of the studies. An interpretation in terms of differences in amount or specificity of suggests that the dichotomous KR somehow enabled the KR Ss to 'learn' how to perform the task better. But it is difficult to see what epistemic advantage the kind of KR given in these studies could provide. Presumably the typical college student already knows how to press a reaction key when he comes to such an experiment. While specific KR might inform S of the relative effectiveness of various self-induced 'sets' (e.g. motor vs. stimulus), no evidence for this was offered in any of the above articles.