Epistemic Assessment Research Articles

From certainty to uncertainty

Abstract In this article, we examine diachronically the use of two central and frequent epistemic particles, vist ‘perhaps, probably’ and kindlasti ‘definitely, certainly’, in written texts in Estonian from the 16th century to the present day. Currently, these particles convey various degrees of the speaker’s epistemic assessment: vist expresses uncertainty regarding the truthfulness of the information conveyed, while kindlasti indicates high certainty. The meaning of vist has diminished in terms of certainty to become an uncertainty marker. The meaning of the particle kindlasti has stayed the same over time, but a downtoning function has developed. Thus, we observe a weakening of epistemic functions for both particles over time within the framework of pragmaticalisation. We highlight a regularity where, during the pragmaticalisation of particles within the domain of probability, a unidirectional functional-semantic shift occurs in the chain of certainty > assumption > uncertainty.

Procedural structures: The case of sentence-initial subordinate clauses

The current paper aims to discuss the impact of pre-posing a subordinate clause (as in connective p, q) on the overall meaning of a conjunction. This issue has traditionally been explored from a functional perspective and, more specifically, in relation to ‘topic’, ‘framework’ or other related notions. The current work reveals that, among the inadequacies that a topic-based account presents, it essentially falls short of a context-sensitive and unified perspective. In response to these inadequacies, a relevance-theoretic approach is proposed on procedural grounds. More specifically, it is argued that a sentence-initial subordinate clause, or, more accurately, the entire context associated with it, serves as evidence for the delivery of procedure r, namely the inference that the main-clause-proposition that may follow will be relevant to the foregoing pre-posed context. From a communicative point of view, the procedural impact of sentence-initial subordinate clauses is justified as a useful rhetorical instrument that serves to manipulate the hearer’s epistemic assessment of the main-clause-proposition as genuinely relevant to the context associated with the (pre-posed) subordinate-clause proposition.

Smart Environments

ABSTRACT This paper proposes epistemic environmentalism as a novel framework for accounting for the contribution of the environment – broadly construed – to epistemic standings and which can be used to improve or protect epistemic environments. The contribution of the environment to epistemic standings is explained through recent developments in epistemology and cognitive science, including embodied cognition, embedded cognition, extended cognition and distributed cognition. The paper examines how these developments support epistemic environmentalism, as well as contributes theoretical resources to make epistemic assessments of dynamic environments. The epistemic environmentalist procedure from the assessment of an individual environment to changes made to that environment based on promoting the attainment of epistemic goods is also discussed.

Levels of Reality

Two fundamental aspects of conceptual and linguistic structure are examined in relation to one another: organization into strata, each a baseline giving rise to the next by elaboration; and the conceptions of reality implicated at successive levels of English clause structure. A clause profiles an occurrence (event or state) and grounds it by assessing its epistemic status (location vis-à-vis reality). Three levels are distinguished in which different notions of reality correlate with particular structural features. In baseline clauses, grounded by “tense”, the profiled occurrence belongs to baseline reality (the established history of occurrences). Basic clauses incorporate perspective (passive, progressive, and perfect), and since grounding includes the grammaticized modals as well as negation, basic reality is more elaborate. A basic clause expresses a proposition, comprising the grounded structure and the epistemic status specified by basic grounding. At higher strata, propositions are themselves subject to epistemic assessment, in which conceptualizers negotiate their validity; propositions accepted as valid constitute propositional reality. Propositions are assessed through interactive grounding, in the form of questioning and polarity focusing, and by complementation, in which the matrix clause indicates the status of the complement.

MEANS OF EXPRESSING EPISTEMIC MODALITY IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

The article is devoted to the analysis of the nomenclature of means of expressing epistemic modality in the English language. At the functional-semantic level, the semantics of epistemic assessment is reflected in the values of units of the morphological, lexical, and syntactic levels of language, capable of performing the following semantic functions at the level of utterance: the degree of confidence of the speaker, the degree of validity of judgment, subjectivity, and unreality. Since the combined common function of all means of expressing epistemic evaluation is to reflect the speaker’s incomplete epistemic commitment based on his insufficient epistemic guarantees, the degree of confidence and the degree of justification act as the basic semantic functions of epistemic evaluation. The first reflects the epistemic commitment that the speaker accepts, and the second — his epistemic guarantees. Depending on the quality of epistemic guarantees, the validity can be high, medium, low, or actually absent in the semantics of the indicator. Validity is related to the speaker’s knowledge about the situation and, in particular, the degree of validity directly depends on the source of information about the situation. Modal values of morphological indicators of epistemic evaluation include epistemic necessity and epistemic possibility and reflect the degree of invalidity of the proposition from the point of view of the speaker. In evaluative statements, epistemic necessity and epistemic possibility are reinterpreted as evaluative values of certainty and uncertainty, respectively; that is, the modal component of the value of such indicators is preserved, but at the communicative and pragmatic level, their modal value comes to the fore, reflecting the degree of confidence of the speaker.

Communication and deniability: Moral and epistemic reactions to denials.

People often deny having meant what the audience understood. Such denials occur in both interpersonal and institutional contexts, such as in political discourse, the interpretation of laws and the perception of lies. In practice, denials have a wide range of possible effects on the audience, such as conversational repair, reinterpretation of the original utterance, moral judgements about the speaker, and rejection of the denial. When are these different reactions triggered? What factors make denials credible? There are surprisingly few experimental studies directly targeting such questions. Here, we present two pre-registered experiments focusing on (i) the speaker's incentives to mislead their audience, and (ii) the impact of speaker denials on audiences' moral and epistemic assessments of what has been said. We find that the extent to which speakers are judged responsible for the audience's interpretations is modulated by their (the speakers') incentives to mislead, but not by denials themselves. We also find that people are more willing than we expected to revise their interpretation of the speaker's utterance when they learn that the ascribed meaning is false, regardless of whether the speaker is known to have had incentives to deceive their audience. In general, these findings are consistent with the idea that communicators are held responsible for the cognitive effects they trigger in their audience; rather than being responsible for, more narrowly, only the effects of what was "literally" said. In light of our findings, we present a new, cognitive analysis of how audiences react to denials, drawing in particular on the Relevance Theory approach to communication. We distinguish in particular: (a) the spontaneous and intuitive re-interpretation of the original utterance in light of a denial; (b) the attribution of responsibility to the speaker for the cognitive effects of what is communicated; and (c) the reflective attribution of a particular intention to the speaker, which include argumentative considerations, higher-order deniability, and reputational concerns. Existing experimental work, including our own, aims mostly at (a) and (b), and does not adequately control for (c). Deeper understanding of what can be credibly denied will be hindered unless and until this methodological problem is resolved.

Force dynamics as the path to the Spanish subjunctive

AbstractThe causative construction poses a challenge to all mainstream approaches to Spanish mood. Mejías-Bikandi, Errapel. 2014. A cognitive account of mood in complements of causative predicates in Spanish.Hispania97(4), 651–665, elaborating on his previous approach (Mejías-Bikandi, Errapel. 1998. Presupposition and old information in the use of the subjunctive mood in Spanish.Hispania81(4), 941–948), which associates the indicative to information that is pragmatically asserted (i.e., presented as both true and new), claims that the use of the subjunctive in the complements of volitive and causative verbs results from the fact that these complements are not independently grounded and so cannot be asserted. His proposal, though, raises some serious objections. In this paper, an alternative account is presented, whereby the use of the subjunctive in this context is understood as reflecting the antagonist’s viewpoint and epistemic assessment on the goal process within a force dynamics pattern.

Scaffolding knowledge

AbstractIn this article I argue that often propositional knowledge is acquired and retained by extensive reliance on physical and social scaffolds that create an environment or niche conducive to knowledge. It is incumbent on epistemologists to subject these aids to epistemic assessments. I show that several of the activities involved in the creation of niches within which inquiry can thrive are carried out by whole cultures. New generations benefit from inheriting these niches whilst being able to improve upon them to the advantage of their descendants. Finally, I highlight that the growth of human epistemic achievements is often due to increased outsourcing of cognitive effort and epistemic powers onto impersonal physical and social structures so that human beings can succeed more by contributing less to the solution of problems.

Policing futures: transforming the evidence-based policing paradigm through interdisciplinarity and epistemological anarchism

ABSTRACT Evidence-based policing (EBP) has gained prominence in jurisdictions across the core anglosphere. Its paradigmatic approach to knowledge production, and the assessment and validation criteria for research designs and their outputs remains in contention. Concurrently, interdisciplinarity (ID) has proliferated in other areas of research and practice, yet EBP remains untouched by these global developments and it appears a neglected area of academic debate. In combination with limited uptake at institutional and practice levels, a troubled landscape, and predictions of an uncertain and extraordinarily complex future operating environment (FOE): the question arises whether the present EBP paradigm is sufficient to meet the challenges and implications for policing and police research. This conceptual paper makes an epistemic assessment of the paradigm and drawing on ID and epistemological anarchism (EA) it contributes a perspective on its theoretical and methodological innovation as a futures-focused endeavour. It concludes that if EBP is to be maximised as a knowledge enterprise in support of policing in the FOE, a broader epistemology is necessary, that embraces methodological pluralism, eschews epistemic monolithism and proactively applies ID and EA to research, policy and practice.

Hope from Despair*

Hope from Despair^*

The Aesthetics of Science: Beauty, Imagination and Understanding

The publication of The Aesthetics of Science invites us to reflect, beyond the range of individual arguments advanced in it, on the general aims that motivate the production of an edited volume like this. There seems to be a spectrum of possible commitments when one addresses the role of aesthetic values in science. At one extreme, the spheres of the aesthetic and the epistemic are completely separated from one another, with no meaningful interaction between them. So if allusions to the beauty of a theory are to be found in science, these should be understood as merely subjective, emotional responses of scientists in the context of discovery, without standing on the epistemic justification of the theory. At the other extreme, aesthetic and epistemic values belong to the same kind; they are indistinguishable from each other in practice. In this view, references to the beauty of a scientific theory are understood as entailing an epistemic assessment—that is, they are taken as appraisals of the good performance or empirical adequacy of the theory. These two extreme views have something important in common: they render the project of further examining the role of aesthetics in scientific practice a futile task. As one disregards aesthetic considerations and the other translates them into epistemic assessments, they fail to recognize as a genuine philosophical problem the fact that, throughout the history of science, model evaluation and theory choice have been persistently formulated in terms of elegance, harmony, beauty or the capacity to inspire awe.

Inexplicit reported speakers in hard news : text, discourse and genre perspective

This paper investigates forms of presentation with inexplicit, i.e. covert or formally unexpressed, reported speakers in hard news discourse in British broadsheets. The research develops the discussion presented, for instance, in Ljung (1998), Marín-Arrese (2002a), Semino and Short (2004), Martínez-Caro (2006) and Stenvall (2008a, 2014) in three perspectives. The textual perspective concerns (potential) co-reference between an inexplicit reported speaker and external voices present explicitly in the text. The discourse perspective compares agent obfuscation in two different contexts – the context of epistemic assessment and the context of negative evaluation (Bednarek 2006a; Bednarek and Caple 2012). The research shows that the functional distinction between epistemic and negative evaluation manifests itself in the differences in lexico-grammatical choices, the type of forms of presentation, the linguistic cues that signal the presence of voice and the potentiality of blending of the internal and external voice. The genre perspective discusses the influence of generic conventions on the distribution of inexplicit voices across the generic structure of hard news (van Dijk 1988; Feez et al. 2008; Urbanová 2013a).

Simulation models and probabilities: a Bayesian defense of the value-free ideal

Some philosophers of science have recently argued that the epistemic assessment of complex simulation models, such as climate models, cannot be free of the influence of social values. In their view, the assignment of probabilities to the different hypotheses or predictions that result from simulations presupposes some methodological decisions that rest on value judgments. In this article, I criticize this claim and put forward a Bayesian response to the arguments from inductive risk according to which the influence of social values on the calculation of probabilities is negligible. I conclude that the epistemic opacity of complex simulations, such as climate models, does not preclude the application of Bayesian methods.

Profiling, Neutrality, and Social Equality

ABSTRACT I argue that traditional views on which beliefs are subject only to purely epistemic assessment can reject demographic profiling, even when based on seemingly robust evidence. This is because the moral failures involved in demographic profiling can be located in the decision not to suspend judgment, rather than supposing that beliefs themselves are a locus of moral evaluation. A key moral reason to suspend judgment when faced with adverse demographic evidence is to promote social equality—this explains why positive profiling is dubious, along with more familiar cases of negative profiling, and why profiling is suspect even when no particular action is at stake. My suspension-based view, while compatible with revisionary normative positions, does not presuppose them. Philosophers of all stripes can reject demographic profiling both in thought and deed.

Normative Expectations in Epistemology

There are all sorts of normative expectations in epistemology—expectations about the epistemic condition of other subjects—that would appear to be relevant to epistemic assessment in ways that do not conform to epistemic standards as traditionally understood. The expectations in question include expectations of inquiries pursued or completed, expectations of certain competences, professional expectations, expectations of having consulted with experts, institutional expectations, moral expectations, expectations of friends, and so forth. My goals in this paper are two. First, I aim to highlight the prevalence of such expectations, and the range of distinct types of circumstance in which they arise. Second, I assess several responses to the allegation that normative epistemic expectations are relevant to epistemic assessment. These range from “explaining away” the appearances to trying to offer one or another positive account of their significance. The former sort of reaction comes at a greater cost than many appear to appreciate, given the prevalence of these expectations and the range of circumstances in which they arise. The latter sort of reaction comes at the cost of having to revise our account of epistemic assessment itself. My own favored view does so in terms of the doctrine of normative defeat; I present my reasons for preferring this view, though I cannot claim in this paper to vindicate it.

Epistemic responsibility - Labored, loosened, and lost: Staging Alzheimer's disease

Interlocutors hold one another accountable for knowing certain information about themselves (their roles, activities, and memories) and for keeping track of information in the current conversational exchange. When speakers have trouble with this expectation, they themselves work to repair the breach, often doing a memory search, or when unsuccessful they provide an account (e.g. “I don't remember”). Memory searches (like word searches) are observable, interactional accomplishments. Speakers disengage with their interlocutors (look away), produce hesitation markers, take repeated pauses, engage in pre-positioned and post-positioned repairs, make epistemic assessments, and on finding an answer, re-engage with their interlocutors (look back). For their part, interlocutors comply with the search by not interrupting and continuing to yield the floor. At progressively severe stages of Alzheimer's disease, individuals exhibit increasingly labored memory searches that often trail off into non-answers, until at the latest stages, they eschew the search and (almost smoothly) provide either grammatically appropriate but wrong and improbable answers or give answers to previous questions on now closed topics. With data from the clinical administration of a disease staging instrument (Clinical Dementia Rating) this article examines the inexorable loss of epistemic responsibility as a key discursive dynamic in the progression of the disease.

Necessity of Restructuring the China-Africa Education Cooperation to Leverage the Fastest-Growing Economic Ties

Study Focus: This article put forward the necessity of rebalancing the China-Africa Fastest-Growing Economic Ties with a Leveraged Education Cooperation as well as the necessity of restructuring the actual patterns of China-Africa Education Cooperation. Methodology: The content of this paper relies on written documents (including books, scientific journals, articles, and official reports) from primary and secondary sources most of which are available online as well as on the author’s teaching experience in Chinese and African Universities. Findings: 1) “Business” but not "Education” remains the top driver of the China-Africa cooperation. Therefore, it is noteworthy questioning the share of fundamental areas of cooperation such as Education and Culture that should pioneer and propel sustainable partnerships. 2) African countries seem disadvantaged in the actual patterns of China-Africa Education Cooperation. There is a need to restructure the cooperation on education and improve the overall image of China and Africa Cooperation. 3) The Chinese Study of Africa and the African Study of China are not contemporary stories, but a continuous course of very old history that can be traced back before the Christian era and should be further promoted in today’s modern academia. 4) From a theoretical basis to a scientific methodology, from institutionalized frameworks to government policies, an epistemic assessment of China by the African academic circles is of urgent need. The African scholarship should have its de-westernized appraisal of China and vice-versa. 5) Up to now, there is no genuine African Sinology in African academic curriculums. A sort of Africa-centered study of China that fulfills traditional discipline criteria must be put in place in today's African Academia. Conclusion & Suggestions: In brief, there is a real necessity of rebalancing the China-Africa fastest-growing economic ties with leveraged education cooperation and reforms. It is for Chinese and African scholars a sole duty to brainstorm new patterns of cooperation, and so paves new ways for an in-depth study and understanding of China and Africa. Moreover, a genuine African Sinology that uses a socio-scientific methodology to critically examine and investigate China, understands the Chinese spirit by all means and draw the benefits for the interests of African people must take place in African education curriculums. For that purpose, the present article proposes the terminology “Afrisinology” as a new paradigm to approach the African Study of China in African academia. Keywords: African Studies, Sinology, “Afrisinology”, China-Africa Education Cooperation. DOI: 10.7176/JAAS/62-03 Publication date: March 31 st 2020

An Inductive Risk Account of the Ethics of Belief

From what norms does the ethics of belief derive its virtues and vices, its permissions and censures? Since pragmatists understand epistemology as the theory of inquiry, the paper will try to explain what the aims and tasks are for an ethics of belief, or project of guidance, which best fits with this understanding of epistemology. It will support it with the work of William James and several contemporary pragmatists. This paper approaches the ethics of belief from a focus on responsible risk management, where doxastic responsibility is understood in terms of the degree of riskiness of agents’ doxastic strategies, which is in turn most objectively measured through accordance or violation of inductive norms. Doxastic responsibility is attributable to agents on the basis of how epistemically risky was the process or strategies of inquiry salient in the etiology of their belief or in their maintenance of a belief already held. Treating the “doxastic strategies” of individual and collective agents as central to the projects of epistemic assessment results in a significantly different account than either the standard epistemological externalists focus on “processes” in the objectively reliable etiology of belief, or than the standard evidentialist focus on an agent’s reflectively available “reasons” which lend the agent a certain kind of personal or subjective justification for her belief.

Hands and faces: The expression of modality in ZEI, Iranian Sign Language

AbstractThis paper presents a study of modality in Iranian Sign Language (ZEI) from a cognitive perspective, aimed at analyzing two linguistic channels: facial and manual. While facial markers and their grammatical functions have been studied in some sign languages, we have few detailed analyses of the facial channel in comparison with the manual channel in conveying modal concepts. This study focuses on the interaction between manual and facial markers. A description of manual modal signs is offered. Three facial markers and their modality values are also examined: squinted eyes, brow furrow, and downward movement of lip corners (horseshoe mouth). In addition to offering this first descriptive analysis of modality in ZEI, this paper also applies the Cognitive Grammar model of modality, the Control Cycle, and the Reality Model, classifying modals into two kinds, effective and epistemic. It is suggested that effective control, including effective modality, tends to be expressed on the hands, while facial markers play an important role in marking epistemic assessment, one manifestation of which is epistemic modality. ZEI, like some other sign languages, exhibits an asymmetry between the number of manual signs and facial markers expressing epistemic modality: while the face can be active in the expression of effective modality, it is commonly the only means of expressing epistemic modality. By positing an epistemic core in effective modality, Cognitive Grammar provides a theoretical basis for these findings.

Disciplinary differences in the use of evaluative that: Expression of stance via that-clauses in business and medicine

A growing body of literature recognizes the importance of interaction between writers and readers in disciplinary academic texts. An effective way for authors to evaluate their or others' findings, methods, and theories is to package propositional information in evaluative ‘that’ patterns (e.g. ‘the author believes that … ‘). These provide various options for evaluating propositions and thematizing the evaluation by signaling either epistemic or attitudinal stance towards the propositional content. While disciplinary differences in the use of this feature have been attested in the literature, there is still a need to confirm the nature of such differences across contrasting disciplines. Adopting a corpus-based approach, we investigate expressions of evaluation and stance signaled via that-complement clauses in published research articles across business and medicine disciplines, drawing on Hyland and Tse's (2005) model of evaluative that-clauses. Evaluative that-clauses were primarily used by authors in both disciplines to comment on their own and previous findings, largely controlled by verbal predicates expressing epistemic assessment towards the evaluated entity. Certain disciplinary conventions were embedded in the use of evaluative that-clauses, indicating how discoursal practices of evaluation and interaction as achieved through such clauses are constructed according to the communicative purposes of texts and disciplinary norms and values.