Epistemic Agency Research Articles

Teacher Noticing for Supporting Students’ Epistemic Agency in Science Sensemaking Discussions

ABSTRACT Calls to immerse students in the sensemaking practices of science recommend that students propose ideas and work together to construct explanations as well as drive the evaluation and decision-making around classroom knowledge-building. In other words, they should be participating with epistemic agency. Part of the teaching work of supporting student sensemaking, therefore, is to intentionally open up space for student contributions and negotiations during sensemaking. The type of space that is opened up for students’ sensemaking is highly dependent on teachers’ choices and interpretations of student contributions. Accordingly, this paper leverages a teacher noticing framework to begin to characterize the teacher noticing and decision-making involved in supporting students’ epistemic agency while teaching. Using a novel point-of-view video collection methodology, we asked two teachers to identify moments while teaching in which they were making a decision about how to open up or close down space for students’ epistemic agency. We found that both teachers attended similarly to the disciplinary substance of students’ ideas; the epistemic nature of students’ ideas; students’ epistemic stance or orientation during participation; and students’ overall degree of engagement. Teachers’ responses to students varied across pedagogical phenomena, and they also varied in their effectiveness. These variations were related to each teacher’s conception of epistemic agency. We propose that attention to the epistemic nature of students’ responses and to students’ epistemic stance or orientation may be especially important foci of teacher attention for supporting students’ epistemic agency.

Rilkean Memory, Epistemic Injustice, and Epistemic Violence

Mark Rowlands develops a novel account of remembering in which episodic memories survive in a mutated form after their content has been long forgotten. He dubs this account “Rilkean memories.” I draw from this account to argue that episodic memories of past epistemic harms resulting from Miranda Fricker’s account of testimonial injustice, can persist as embodied behavioral or bodily dispositions that have negative epistemic and practical consequences long after these episodic memories have been forgotten. The way that others judge us as epistemic agents—as people with the capacity to know or the ability to contribute to the pool of knowledge—and following this judgment, treat or fail to treat us as epistemic agents can cause us to adopt attitudes or behaviors with consequences to our epistemic agency. When embodied as Rilkean memories, these attitudes or behaviors raise new difficulties and become quite difficult to eradicate.

The Epistemological Asymmetry of Framing “Woman” via US Women's Rights Pioneers

AbstractNineteenth-century US social activist contemporaries Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth are memorialized as women's rights pioneers. White activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony cemented a generational canon. Black activist Sojourner Truth anticipated the eventual crystallization of intersectionality. These figures’ historical proximity underscores the high epistemological and political stakes of claiming gendered categories, namely via “woman” as a mark of aggrievement. I link concepts of intersectionality, epistemic agency, epistemic resources, and social movement framing to examine how “woman” is asymmetrically categorized. To this end, I perform a textual analysis of memorialized documents: “Declaration of Sentiments” (1848) by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States” (1876) by Susan B. Anthony, and “Ain't I a Woman?” (1851) by Sojourner Truth. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony frame “woman” as a single-axis and vertical category, ultimately deferring to the seeming preeminence of the US nation-state. By contrast, Sojourner Truth frames “woman” as a multi-axis and horizontal category by synthesizing her feminist consciousness, lived experience of enslavement, and personal religiosity. This article revisits key memorialized events by utilizing a conceptual toolkit that interlaces feminist and social epistemology with social movement theory.

Should We Be Genealogically Anxious?

Genealogical anxiety is the worry that the origins of beliefs, once revealed to be influenced by “irrelevant” factors such as personal histories and circumstances of upbringing, will undermine or cast doubt on those beliefs. Discussions on these irrelevant influences in the epistemological literature have so far primarily focused on their contingency. But there is another issue that merits further examination: the fact that epistemic environments condition beliefs suggests that epistemic agency is significantly curtailed. I present a model of belief-forming processes that highlights how networks of attention and trust/distrust influence these processes. The model suggests that, while there is a lot happening beyond our control that shapes what we come to believe, we still retain some degree of agency to the extent that we can rewire our networks of attention and trust/distrust. I conclude that, surprisingly, genealogical anxiety may in fact increase agency insofar as it may encourage critical resistance.

Characterizing relationships between collective enterprise and student epistemic agency in science: A comparative case study

Characterizing relationships between collective enterprise and student epistemic agency in science: A comparative case study

Self-Trust and Critical Thinking Online: A Relational Account

ABSTRACT An increasingly popular solution to the anti-scientific climate rising on social media platforms has been the appeal to more critical thinking from the user’s side. In this paper, we zoom in on the ideal of critical thinking and unpack it in order to see, specifically, whether it can provide enough epistemic agency so that users endowed with it can break free from enclosed communities on social media (so-called epistemic bubbles). We criticise some assumptions embedded in the ideal of critical thinking online and, instead, we propose that a better way to understand the virtuous behaviour at hand is as critical engagement, namely a mutual cultivation of critical skills among the members of an epistemic bubble. This mutual cultivation allows members within an epistemic bubble (in contrast, as we will show, with the authority-based models of epistemic echo chambers) to become more autonomous critical thinkers by cultivating self-trust. We use the model of relational autonomy as well as resources from work on epistemic self-trust and epistemic interdependence to develop an explanatory framework, which in turn may ground rules for identifying and creating virtuous epistemic bubbles within the environments of social media platforms.

Staff's experiences of implementing patient-initiated brief admission for adolescents from the perspective of epistemic (in)justice.

The implementation of Patient-Initiated Brief Admission (PIBA) in child and adolescent psychiatry (CAP) in Sweden is ongoing. This intervention enables adolescents between the ages of 13-17 and with complex mental health problems to initiate a short care period for relief and support rather than the care apparatus being controlling in this process. Offering it is likely to promote epistemic agency, an exchange of knowledge and recovery from mental health problems. The aim of this study was to explore staff's perspectives of PIBA for adolescents with complex mental health problems, and what facilitates or hinders its implementation. Twenty seven employees, 21 women and six men, with various professions in CAP were interviewed and the material was analyzed thematically. Two overall themes emerged: "Staff's Experiences of PIBA" and "Managing Clinical PIBA Work." The results were discussed in relation to the theoretical frameworks of epistemic injustice and Normalization Process Theory (NPT). The main findings indicate that PIBA was generally viewed in a positive way, but that obstacles arose when it was actually put into practice. Findings also point at an overall lack of agency among staff when implementing this new way of working, at the same time as the need to adapt PIBA from an adult psychiatric intervention to one for adolescents in CAP is addressed. This article offers insights into the views of psychiatric staff regarding the implementation of PIBA. If staff wish to support epistemic agency and recovery among adolescents, their agency may be an important aspect in the continued implementation. Furthermore, in order for PIBA to become normalized in a sustainable way, we suggest that the continued implementation should be characterized by a youth-friendly framework.

‘Improve the Law’ as a Judicial Duty on the Borderlines of Free Speech: Judges as Responsible Epistemic Agents

This paper discusses judicial duty of improving the law on epistemic grounds and claims in that regarding this obligation, it is possible to give a place to free speech from an epistemic point of view. As a requirement of having epistemic agency, judges like other human beings have epistemological responsibility. Different from the others’ responsibility, judges’ responsibility is connected to their duty of improving the law, which is required by their job as well as the idea of the rule of law and judicial professional principles. Judges should improve the law’s capacity to guide the conduct of its citizens, who are obligated to obey the law. Improving the law also improves the delivery of justice. The ways of legal interpretation and justification are important to improve it. While applying the law, judges can find the law unclear or they may encounter some norm conflicts. In these cases, they should resolve them to keep the law ‘legally in good shape’, which should meet epistemological requirements. When fulfilling this obligation, judicial free speech on epistemic grounds should not be limited.

Changes in teachers' beliefs: A longitudinal study of science teachers engaging in storyline curriculum‐based professional development

AbstractReforms such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for substantial change in teacher practice such as instruction that is more phenomenon‐based, three‐dimensional, supportive of student epistemic agency, and coherent from the student perspective. Such change requires ongoing support in the form of aligned curricular materials and professional development (PD), but little work has been done to understand how teachers respond to PD over time in the NGSS era. Therefore, this study investigated how teachers' beliefs about science instruction and self‐efficacy in implementing a reform science curriculum changed over time. Using survey data from the field test of the OpenSciEd middle school curriculum implementation, we tracked changes in teaching beliefs and self‐efficacy beliefs in 322 teachers over 2 years, which included four rounds of PD workshops and implementation of four new curricular units. Teachers' teaching beliefs and self‐efficacy beliefs changed initially and leveled out over time, but self‐efficacy took longer to change than teaching beliefs. This suggests that teachers may require more time, iteration, or enactment to increase their confidence in implementing new instruction as compared to their beliefs in the value of the new approach. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we identified teacher characteristics associated with differences in those changes. Teachers who had more experience and found the PD more valuable were less likely to hold traditional teaching beliefs and more likely to have higher self‐efficacy. Of these variables, teachers' value of the PD is particularly interesting because it can be designed for. Based on these results, we argue that PD should be designed to build trust and to provide a rationale for PD activities for participants to help understand the value of the experiences.

Activating teachers’ epistemic agency to implement knowledge building in classroom: A case analysis of the “Classi in rete” project

In this study we examined whether a training oriented to activate Epistemic Agency (Scardamalia, 2002) of teachers can allow them to take the Knowledge Building (KB) perspective and to realise the appropriation of the use of the Knowledge Forum (KF) environment. During the project “Classi in rete”, promoted by INDIRE, 22 teachers from primary and lower secondary Abruzzi small schools participated in an online discussion in KF, focused on problems in implementing the KB model. Data has been analyzed through content analysis of the KF notes and using analytics tools of KF. Results showed the teachers’ assumption of KB perspective by the prevalent exploratory nature of the problems identified, by the focus both on technological and teaching aspects and by the work to find different solutions about a particular challenging problem. The appropriation of KF is shown by the increase, during the training, of reading and writing activity and by the correlations among reading, writing, and improving notes activity. Implications for teachers’ training are discussed.

Intellectual and Ethical Virtues in the Situation of War

Abstract The interview given by Vojko Strahovnik, Department Chair and Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Faculty of Theology, University of Ljubljana. The impact of his work ranges from insights into the nature of normativity (the role of moral principles in the formation of moral judgments, the authority of the normative domain, epistemic agency, and epistemic virtuousness) to considerations related to practical dimensions of our lives (e.g., the role of guilt and moral shame in reconciliation processes, the importance of intellectual and ethical virtues in dialogue and education, global justice, animal ethics). His recent outreach activities include being a visiting lecturer (2017) and a Templeton and Fulbright research scholar (2016; 2022) at the University of Arizona, Department of Philosophy. The central question that incites him most is the structure and phenomenology of normativity. Webpage: http://vojkostrahovnik.idh.si/papers/.

Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance and the “Critical Race Theory” Controversy

AbstractIn this article, Barbara Applebaum examines “the inability to disagree claim” as it arises in objections made by those who want to ban “critical race theory” from being taught in schools and universities. Employing insights from the recent scholarship around willful hermeneutical ignorance, she discerns the important role that marginalized conceptual resources play in conditions of just and constructive dialogue. When such resources are misinterpreted and denied uptake, the resulting harm impedes the epistemic agency of marginally situated knowers. Applebaum claims that many high‐profile anti–“critical race theory” arguments put forth by politicians, scholars, and others are a form of willful hermeneutical ignorance, and she concludes by showing how more just communications, in which disagreement is distinguishable from dismissal, can be achieved.

Discourse genres and children agency in everyday family science engagement

Accumulating evidence underscores the imperative role of family discourse in supporting children's engagement with science and, in turn, children's science learning. However, little research explores children's roles and agency in everyday family discourse in various unstructured settings. This study explores discourse genres , which are routine ways of using language for particular purposes. I examined what discourse genres one family employed to engage with science and how these genres supported or hindered the children's agentic engagement. By analyzing audio recordings obtained over a year of self-ethnography and employing linguistics ethnography methods, I characterized seven discourse genres: (1) scientific exploration; (2) classroom; (3) ask-the-expert; (4) wildlife viewing; (5) guided reading; (6) sports broadcasting; and (7) magic trick. The analysis demonstrates how the enactment of genres allowed family members to recruit resources from science and other domains to support science engagement for themselves and others. The findings illustrate how children exercised epistemic agency by introducing certain genres, taking agentic roles within genres (navigating the inquiry process, regulating the focus of conversation, creating shared object of attention), and undermining genres parents introduce. The study suggests more attention should be paid to genres in everyday family science discourse and children's roles and agency in them.

Democracy, epistemic agency, and AI: political epistemology in times of artificial intelligence

Democratic theories assume that citizens have some form of political knowledge in order to vote for representatives or to directly engage in democratic deliberation and participation. However, apart from widespread attention to the phenomenon of fake news and misinformation, less attention has been paid to how they are supposed to acquire that knowledge in contexts shaped by artificial intelligence and related digital technologies. While this topic can also be approached from an empirical angle, this paper contributes to supporting concerns about AI and democracy by looking at the issue through the lens of political epistemology, in particular using the concept of epistemic agency. It argues that artificial intelligence (AI) endangers democracy since it risks to diminish the epistemic agency of citizens and thereby undermine the relevant kind of political agency in democracy. It shows that next to fake news and manipulation by means of AI analysis of big data, epistemic bubbles and the defaulting of statistical knowledge endanger the epistemic agency of citizens when they form and wish to revise their political beliefs. AI risks to undermine trust in one’s own epistemic capacities and hinder the exercise of those capacities. If we want to protect the knowledge basis of our democracies, we must address these problems in education and technology policy.

The person’s position-taking in the shaping of schizophrenic phenomena

ABSTRACT Traditional psychopathological approaches to modelling the evolution of mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, often rest on the assumption that symptoms are the passive expression of an underlying disease process. In contrast, phenomenological approaches have highlighted the role that the person, as a meaning-making agent undergoing basic anomalous experiences, plays in the construction of their worlds – thus partly shaping the manifestation and course of illness. However, it remains to be explored how specific patterns of interaction between the person and his/her basic anomalous experiences unfold and play out. We appeal to the Husserlian notion of “position-taking” (Stellungnahme) to provide a framework for the investigation of the person’s attempts at healing as a fundamental component of the dialectics of symptom formation in the psychoses. Within this framework, psychotic symptoms are understood as the expression of the person’s efforts at making sense of, and adapting to, the existential challenges associated with the onset of anomalous self- and world-experiences. We draw on selected case studies and the testimony of one of the authors, to illustrate the potential clinical applications of this model. Finally, we outline some advantages of this approach, including its potential to address oft-neglected troubling experiences without threatening the person’s epistemic agency.

Democracy in a deluge: Epistemic agency of marginalized voices in Oaxaca's storm governance

Despite repeated calls for grassroots participation in climate policy making, the epistemic agency of marginalized voices remains little understood. While local knowledge is increasingly regarded as an antidote to top-down climate expertise, it is often not heard, or ends up reinforcing dominant framings of risk. The concept of civic epistemologies (CEs), often understood as the sociocultural norms by which societies authorize knowledge claims, can provide insights into the epistemic agency of marginalized actors in climate governance, but has rarely been applied to such concerns. At the same time, such questions affect how scholars conceptualize CEs, which have seldom been examined where civics are fragmented or marginalized. In this article, I argue that understanding CEs as “expectations of democracy” can indicate how they authorize climate expertise in such settings. I illustrate this argument by examining hurricane governance in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, where vulnerable fishers constitute a sociopolitically and economically excluded part of a fragmented civic that shapes the production of risk expertise. Here, fisher expectations that the government will behave corruptly, and government expectations that fishers prefer to remain socioeconomically separate from the state reify biophysical approaches to risk. This analysis contributes to understanding why many attempts to include marginalized voices in climate policy fail to achieve their anticipated outcomes, expanding understanding of how CEs mediate epistemic agency in contested political contexts. Furthermore, examining CEs as expectations of democracy can inform upon conditions under which political-epistemic orders change, revealing opportunities for intervention in climate risk governance.

Responsive instructional design for students' epistemic agency: Documenting episodes of principled improvisation in storyline enactment

AbstractRecent reforms in K‐12 science education call for curricular materials that are designed to be “coherent for students.” This form of coherence arises when the classroom community sees their science work as addressing their questions and problems. In enactment, the teacher sometimes has to improvise from the planned trajectory of the storyline to follow students' emergent science work. In this single instrumental case study, I used interaction analysis to identify and describe episodes of whole group storyline discussion where one expert middle school science teacher worked with his students as their science work diverged from the storyline. The descriptive account for each episode documents how the teacher attended to the conceptual, epistemic, and/or interactive facets in the substance of students’ talk. It also traces how collective knowledge objects (i.e., consensus model, driving questions board, and experimental graph) were developed through this attentional work in each episode. The results suggest that the teacher facilitated episodes of principled improvisation (PI) related to the students’ interactive role in the discussion, the science ideas they raised for a consensus model, and the measurement errors they experienced in an investigation. These episodes were principled because the teacher foregrounded particular trajectories in the storyline to mediate and add rigor to the students’ divergent lines of science work. They were improvisational because the teacher backgrounded other storyline trajectories to more effectively address and work with students’ emergent ideas. In each PI, the teacher shared epistemic agency with students to co‐develop each collective knowledge object. These findings show the analytical and practical value in conceptualizing epistemic agency and teachers’ instructional design work in relation to students’ convergent and divergent science work in the curriculum.

Group agential epistemic injustice: Epistemic disempowerment and critical defanging of group epistemic agency1

AbstractExpanding Miranda Fricker's (2007) concept of epistemic injustice, recent accounts of agential epistemic injustice (Lackey, 2020; Medina, 2021; Pohlhaus, 2020) have focused on cases in which the epistemic agency of individuals or groups is unfairly blocked, constrained, or subverted. In this article I argue that agential epistemic injustice is perpetrated against marginalized groups not only when their group epistemic agency is excluded, but also when it is included but receives defective uptake that neutralizes their capacity to resist epistemic oppression. I identify two harms that such injustice inflicts on marginalized groups: epistemic disempowerment and critical defanging of resistant epistemic group agency. My analysis shows how the harms of agential epistemic injustice can occur through unfair epistemic exclusions in group dynamics, but also through forms of inclusion in group dynamics that distort or coopt the epistemic agency of the group. Following Emmalon Davis (2018) and her analysis of epistemic appropriation, I argue that the harms of agential epistemic injustice can occur when the resistant epistemic resources of a marginalized group are appropriated in a way that disempowers them and critically defangs their resistant epistemic agency. I use Taylor Rogers’ (2021) analysis of the epistemic appropriation of “#MeToo” and “intersectionality” to show how epistemic disempowerment and critical defanging work in unjust epistemic group dynamics. The article offers a diagnosis of the failures of epistemic responsibility involved in agential epistemic injustice, and some suggestions for resisting those failures and working toward more responsible and just epistemic group dynamics.

Using computational essays to foster disciplinary epistemic agency in undergraduate science

AbstractThis article reports on a study investigating how computational essays can be used to help students in higher education STEM take up disciplinary epistemic agency—cognitive control and responsibility over one's own learning within the scientific disciplines. Computational essays are a genre of scientific writing that combine live, executable computer code with narrative text to present a computational model or analysis. The study took place across two contrasting university contexts: an interdisciplinary data science and modeling course at a large research university in the Midwestern United States, and a third‐semester physics course at a large research university in Scandinavia. Over the course of a semester, computational essays were simultaneously and independently used in both courses, and comparable datasets of student artifacts and retrospective interviews were collected from both student populations. These data were analyzed using a framework that operationalized the construct of disciplinary epistemic agency across the dimensions of programming, inquiry, data analysis and modeling, and communication. Based on this analysis, we argue that computational essays can be a useful tool for fostering disciplinary epistemic agency within higher education science due to their combination of adaptability and disciplinary authenticity. However, we also argue that educational contexts, scaffolding, expectations, and student backgrounds can constrain and influence the ways in which students choose to take up epistemic agency.

Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Pyrrhonizers by Brian C. Ribeiro

Reviewed by: Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Pyrrhonizers by Brian C. Ribeiro Jerry Green RIBEIRO, Brian C. Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Pyrrhonizers. Leiden: Brill, 2021. ix + 165 pp. Cloth, $145.00; eBook, $149.00 As the title suggests, this short, engaging work explores a continuity between three major thinkers in the Western skeptical tradition. The label "Pyrrhonizers" is well chosen: What draws Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne, and Hume together is a set of attitudes about the limits of reason and the value of constant inquiry. These thinkers are united not by commitment to a set of propositions that would group them together in some kind of static philosophical school but, rather, by a kind of pessimism about rationality's power. Ribeiro uses these figures to prompt a thought-provoking inversion of a traditional challenge to skepticism: Not only is it possible for a skeptic to live his skepticism, it is also unexpectedly easy to do so, because rationality has a surprisingly weak hold on us. This means that we can continue to be skeptics even when we cannot bring ourselves to believe or reject dogmatic claims, so long as we continue to pyrrhonize. Chapter 1 is a defense of the psychological reality of epistemic akrasia, a phenomenon by which an epistemic agent fails to form beliefs governed by the evidence she takes herself to have (analogous to the more familiar weakness of will in moral psychology). In particular, Ribeiro focuses on skeptical cases where one takes oneself to have sufficient reason to suspend judgment regarding p but nevertheless persists in believing that p. This chapter engages with contemporary literature in epistemology that [End Page 158] denies the possibility of epistemic akrasia; Ribeiro points to real cases of the phenomenon to show that it is an actual occurrence in human psychology. Chapter 2 surveys the three eponymous subjects of the book, arguing that Sextus, Montaigne, and Hume are engaged in a single, historically continuous project regarding epistemic agency and human reason-responsiveness. Whatever differences these three figures may have, each is interested in probing the boundaries of belief, looking for the borders of rationality where our beliefs persist even in the face of evidence or arguments against them. Chapter 3 looks more closely at the version of Pyrrhonian skepticism found in Sextus Empiricus. Ribeiro argues that Sextus saw global suspension of belief as an ethical ideal conducive to tranquility and hence eudaimonia. Comparable to the Stoic moral sage, this ideal may not be fully realizable in actual life, but one can nevertheless make progress toward this ideal. Crucially, this progress is compatible with intractable beliefs about which suspension of judgment is difficult or fleeting: Even if one cannot globally suspend judgment about all matters at once, one can still become increasingly more tranquil as one develops the ability to suspend judgment more successfully over time. Chapter 4 transitions to Montaigne's Essays. Ribeiro devotes the bulk of the chapter to showing that Montaigne was explicitly influenced by ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism (via both Sextus and Cicero). The most important point, however, is that Montaigne exemplifies the Pyrrhonian project in his constant revisions to his Essays throughout his life, modeling the zetetic approach of perpetual investigation. Montaigne's chief contribution to this project is to redirect it away from the dogmatic disputes over unclear matters that we see among the ancient skeptics, and toward continual autobiographical self-reflection. Chapter 5 pauses the historical focus of the previous chapters, to return to the topic of human rationality. This chapter uses a Humean observation of the power of custom or habit compared to reason to argue that human rational self-control is surprisingly weak. Similar to the worry about epistemic akrasia discussed in chapter 1, here Ribeiro uses the plausibility of certain skeptical arguments to suggest that we may lack the ability to form beliefs even when we take the arguments supporting those beliefs to be persuasive. Chapters 6 and 7 return to a historical focus, this time concentrating on Hume. Drawing on the work of Karánn Durland, chapter 6 argues that there is an irresolvable tension across Hume's works: In some places Hume endorses naturalism, in others skepticism. Ribeiro takes this to be further evidence for...