Epistemic Assumptions Research Articles

‘To make more room for 21st century themes’: the secular dynamics and demise of Quebec’s ‘Ethics and Religious Culture’ curriculum

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine the secular dynamics of Quebec’s controversial and ultimately short-lived Ethics and Religious Culture curriculum (ERC). I argue that the conflicting criticisms the ERC attracted over the course of its brief existence emerged from the tensions inherent in its conceptualisations of religion, learning, and knowledge. These tensions were themselves rooted in the constitutive concepts and epistemic assumptions of Quebec’s broader socio-spiritual context of political secularism. In this way, my analysis makes a broader argument about the dynamics and viability of religious education programming in secular societies, especially those programmes aimed at fostering ‘religious literacy’.

Epistemic problems in Hayek’s defence of free markets

Abstract Friedrich von Hayek’s classical liberalism argued that free markets allow individuals the greatest opportunity to achieve their ends. This paper develops an internal critique of this claim. It argues that once externalities are introduced, the forms of economic knowledge Hayek thought to undermine government action and orthodox utilitarianism also rule out relative welfarist assessments of more or less regulated markets. Given the pervasiveness of externalities in modern economies, Hayek will frequently be unable to make comparative welfarist claims, or he must relax his epistemic assumptions and allow for greater government action than his classical liberalism would wish to accept.

Testimonial injustice: exploring ‘credibility’ as a barrier to justice for people with learning disabilities/autism who report sexual violence

Rape/sexual assault cases have high levels of attrition, with reports of sexual violence from people with learning disabilities/autism disproportionately represented. This paper presents the results of a small qualitative study in the UK which focuses on how the criminal justice system is experienced by people with learning disabilities/autism who report sexual offences. An adversarial criminal justice system is reliant on normative social constructions of credibility and the embodiment of (ideal) victimhood through testimony. Adopting Fricker’s framework of testimonial injustice (2009) we explore how epistemic assumptions around credibility create a barrier to justice and facilitate case attrition for victim/survivors with learning disabilities/autism. The paper highlights how criminal justice interpretations of behaviour, communication and third-party disclosure limit access to justice for individuals with learning disabilities/autism, rendering the criminal justice process inherently discriminatory to those with atypical frames of reference.

Evidencia que cuenta. Injusticias epistémicas en la agenda de la salud mental global

Biomedicine constitutes an expert system that has garnered important attention regarding the epistemic injustices that it spawns. A considerable amount of literature has been produced, which analyzes both medical knowledge and practice, and the perpetration of epistemic injustices of different classes. This article tackles a particular case in this realm: Global Mental Health, a multilateral and interinstitutional enterprise whose main goal is to scale mental health attention, so it reaches vulnerable populations of all regions. The analysis targets the epistemic assumptions that underlie the expert knowledges which coalesced in the construction of this agenda, the concepts of health-sickness processes that they generate, and a discussion of why said concepts are epistemically unjust.

Microteoria de enfermagem na prevenção do delirium em pessoas idosas na unidade de terapia intensiva

Objective: to describe a microtheory for nursing care in the prevention of delirium in older adult in the intensive care unit. Method: prescriptive theoretical research, based on substruction. Roy’s Adaptation Model constructs were deduced and data from the phenomenon of nursing care in the prevention of delirium in older adult in intensive care were induced, based on an integrative literature review. Results: the microtheory has a theoretical and operational system and a model of care. In the theoretical system, Roy’s focal and contextual stimulus constructs were used. From them, the concepts of focal and contextual care and the variable adaptive response to prevention were elaborated. From the relational statements, four axioms, two postulates, eight propositions and an epistemic assumption were elaborated. Two empirical indicators were established in the operating system: the Confusion Assessment Method for Intensive Care Units and the demographic/clinical history of the older adult. Subsequently, two transformational statements, four hypotheses and the model of care represented in figure were produced. Conclusion: the microtheory produced prescribes care in the prevention of delirium in older adult in intensive care, through a construct of interest to nursing, and allows interceptions for the development of instruments that guide nursing activities.

Cautious belief and iterated admissibility

We define notions of cautiousness and cautious belief to provide epistemic conditions for iterated admissibility in finite games. We show that iterated admissibility characterizes the behavioral implications of “cautious rationality and common cautious belief in cautious rationality” in a terminal lexicographic type structure. For arbitrary type structures, the behavioral implications of these epistemic assumptions are characterized by the solution concept of self-admissible set (Brandenburger et al., 2008). We also show that analogous results hold under alternative epistemic assumptions, in particular if cautiousness is “transparent” to the players.

A critical accounting project for Latin America? Objects of knowledge or ways of knowing

This article explores the basis of a critical accounting project in Latin America and suggests a critique inspired by the decolonial project to reinvigorate critical accounting. The paper draws on Santos’ (2009) sociology of absences to explore the epistemic assumptions present in interpretive and critical accounting studies focusing on Latin America to achieve these aims. The analysis reveals that the critical accounting studies analyzed often mobilize Anglo-Euro-Centric logics that limit the ability of Latin America to think itself and impede the dialogue on equal terms between contemporaries, as suggested by the decolonial project. The paper presents avenues for critical accounting research in Latin America, assessing the effects of the Anglo-European institutionalization of modes of doing research for Latin America and calling for authenticity, more attention to the existence of alternative ways of knowing in the global South and for the creation of protected spaces that care for those alternatives and grant an equal exchange of ideas.

Об истоках множественности логик

The article presents a brief analysis of how the existence of various logics became possi­ble. This is shown on the example of such well-known logical theories as syllogistics, temporal, multivalued, intuitionistic, paraconsistent and quantum logics. Each of them arose not on someone’s whim, but to solve specific problems. They are based on the most general ontological assumptions about the subject area under study. In formal logic onto­logical assumptions are refined in the concept of a model structure. Since it is impossible to talk about logic in isolation from the language used, the most general epistemic as­sumptions about the nature of the relationship of linguistic expressions to those objects of extralinguistic reality that they represent are also accepted. One of the most important of these relationships is the concept of the truth of sentences, which was first formulated by Plato and Aristotle. Taking certain ontological and epistemic assumptions depending on the problem being solved, we obtain different logics. Process logic is primarily char­acterized by special ontological assumptions that are fundamentally different from the as­sumptions of other currently existing logics. The ontology of processes is an ontology of developing processes, not things. Historically, it was most vividly described in the writings of Heraclitus. In the overwhelming majority of modern approaches to the de­scription of processes, we see attempts to reduce them to sequences of states, which de­values the very concept of a process, just as a cinematic picture of the flow of time deval­ues the concept of time. Since logics are built on the basis of various ontological and epistemic assumptions, they are inherently theories of these accepted assumptions, and not universal reasoning tools that don’t depend on the characteristics of the study area and the categories of linguistic expressions. Universal logic is possible if one rises from the level of specific languages to a higher level of sign theory.

Advancing Publicly Engaged Sociology1

This article is a version of Professor Smith's Presidential Address as delivered at the annual meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society in Boston, March 2022. Most sociologists go into the field hoping our work will help address the inequalities or injustices we study, but academic institutions and careers strongly guide most of our work away from the engagement needed to have such impacts. With others, I argue for changes in academic careers and institutions to better recognize, promote, and reward publicly engaged sociology, which would help academia honor its social contract. I briefly engage Burawoy's concept of public sociology, then propose types of publicly engaged sociology that align with how many sociologists do such work: Reframing/Debunking Sociology, Institutionally Engaged Sociology, and Community Engaged Sociology. Next, I analyze several obstacles to publicly engaged—and especially community engaged—sociology, including epistemic assumptions and evaluative practices stemming from instrumental positivism, belief in a canonical Hawthorne effect as a clean experimental finding, and a bias against research that helps research participants or partners. Finally, I offer advice and strategies to younger sociologists wishing to do such work and recommend ways academic institutions and practices could better support publicly engaged sociology, including by training students and faculty in how to do it, creating a Journal of Publicly Engaged Sociology, and amending ASA's Code of Ethics.

Legal Pluralism and the Struggle for Customary Law in the Vietnamese Highlands

Abstract For centuries, diverse groups of people living in the highlands of Southeast Asia have resisted lowland empires in China, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. The interaction between lowlanders and highlanders has been described as “internal colonization”—a process involving the absorption or displacement of highland communities and customary law. This Article draws on an empirical study to explore whether the Vietnamese Government’s new “village covenant” (Hương ước) program is continuing internal colonization by transforming and displacing customary law in the Vietnamese Central Highlands. It uses a novel analytical framework—synthetized from legal pluralism and systems theory—to argue the state legal system and highland communities lack a shared conceptual grammar in which to identify common ground, reconcile differences, and converge. The Article closes with the conclusion that, although highland communities are resisting internal colonization, the forces of modernity are slowly changing the deeply held epistemic assumptions underlying customary law.

A politically less contested and financially more calculable urban future: Density techniques and heightened land commodification in Taiwan

This article examines and makes explicit the co-constitutive relationship between density techniques, their depoliticization effects, and heightened land commodification in Taiwan's acceleration to a real estate–oriented economy. TDR (transfer of development rights) and density bonusing are two almost omnipresent practices in urban land development in Taiwan. We ask how their technocratic approach—using predetermined formulas to bracket density use while almost entirely foreclosing community negotiation—has played a formative role in accelerating land commodification. Using mixed research methods, the case study of Central North in New Taipei City helps lay bare how formulaic density rules enable planners to embed their epistemic assumptions about what constitutes a good city within intensified property development. Mimicking the calculative practices performed by the real estate sector, we use residual valuation methods to estimate the maximum price-lifting effects of 18 real estate development projects. We show that formulaic rules allow density to enter cost–benefit analysis spreadsheets as a profit booster in advance of actual granting of extra density, emboldening aggressive land brokering, buying, and selling, which churn up land prices. We argue that the technical depoliticization generated by TDR and density bonusing has become the most effective catalyst in creating a politically less contested and financially more calculable urban world in which capital's acquisitive appetite for land's monetary value is intensified. We conclude by discussing the implications for how to move density from a domain of technical rules and real estate finance to a politics of land.

Broadening Ontological and Epistemological Possibilities within Early Childhood Teacher Education for Sustainability

The dominant sustainability ethos and discourse within early childhood education pursue a normative ontological and epistemological direction aimed at empowering children’s agency and thus, building certain predefined moral values, knowledge, and skills. Likewise, mainstream early childhood teacher education programmes strive to build early childhood pre-service teachers’ sustainability knowledge and skills, especially to enhance their capacity to be transformative agents and motivators for change to engage children with sustainability challenges. In this conceptual article, drawing on posthuman concepts, I highlight the limits of such orthodox assumptions in early childhood education for sustainability (ECEfS) teacher education and invite broader ontological and epistemic possibilities. I interrogate the human-centric assumptions that unintentionally perpetuate the deep-rooted binary thinking that separates humans from non-humans and other species. In doing so, I offer an expanded understanding of the underlying ontological and epistemic assumptions within teacher education for ECEfS. I conclude by indicating how posthuman theories serve as an impetus for epistemological and ontological multiplicities in early childhood teacher education for sustainability.

Avatars of colonial and liberal violences: the revelatory character of COVID-19 governance in Colombia

This article analyses the institutionalised injustices faced by Indigenous populations and other ‘others’ in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that the government’s responses are rooted in a liberal philosophy that has historically sustained biases and inequalities through an exclusionary definition of citizenship. To analyse these issues, the article first concentrates on the broader epistemic assumptions of liberal citizenship and the ways in which they are connected to historical legacies in Colombia. Despite liberal claims of equality for all, the biases that emerge from these notions of citizenship lead towards political disempowerment, silencing, erasure and abandonment. Consequently, Indigenous peoples in Colombia have experienced institutionalised biases such as the prioritisation of particular forms of participation, the exclusion of populations from rights, and the elevation of plans of development that aim to erase other ways of being. These biases were further reinforced by the governmental responses to the pandemic. Hence, the article analyses the inequalities that have been exacerbated as a result of COVID-19 policies, showing their scope and depth, and establishing a discussion about injustices that might affect populations beyond the current context of Colombia.

Fitting and Fudging: On the Folly of Trying to Define Post-truth

AbstractI propose that the ‘post-truth condition’, i.e., the vulnerability of our institutions for establishing and negotiating what is true and worth knowing, is not primarily a pathology, a susceptibility to external manipulation or coercion, as tends to be stressed in the literature, but has first and foremost to do with the unraveling of certain epistemic assumptions. In analogy with T.S. Eliot’s modernist notion that the attempt to capture and concretize an experience or a state of mind requires ‘objective correlatives’ which it conveys, I argue that the trope of post-truth to express the embattled status of expertise can be understood in terms of failed symbolization. In the second section, I spell out what this means in terms of Donald Davidson’s discussion of the problem of defining truth. In the last section, I propose a ‘poetics of political theory’ for understanding the post-truth condition.

Interpreting Patient-Reported Outcome Measures

Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are valued in healthcare evaluation for bringing patient perspectives forward, and enabling patient-centered care. The range of evidence permitted by PROMs to measure patients’ quality of life narrowly denies subjective experience. This neglect is rooted in the epistemic assumptions that ground PROMs, and the tension between the standardization (the task of measurement) and the individual and unique circumstances of patients. To counter the resulting methodological shortcomings, this article proposes a hermeutical approach and interpretive phenomenology instead of generic qualitative research methods.

Interpreting Patient-Reported Outcome Measures

Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are valued in healthcare evaluation for bringing patient perspectives forward, and enabling patient-centered care. The range of evidence permitted by PROMs to measure patients’ quality of life narrowly denies subjective experience. This neglect is rooted in the epistemic assumptions that ground PROMs, and the tension between the standardization (the task of measurement) and the individual and unique circumstances of patients. To counter the resulting methodological shortcomings, this article proposes a hermeutical approach and interpretive phenomenology instead of generic qualitative research methods.

Using the Reflective Judgment Model to Understand and Appraise Effective Reasoning by Social Work Students

ABSTRACT Research suggests that most college and beginning graduate students lack the cognitive complexity required to engage in effective practical and ethical reasoning. Studies on cognitive development support the view that how people approach complex problems varies significantly depending on the underlying epistemic assumptions they use to guide their problem-solving strategies and justify their decisions. We recommend King and Kitchener’s Reflective Judgment Model (RJM), a cognitive-developmental framework based on epistemology, as a model for assessing students’ current approaches to resolving real-world problems and fostering the skills and dispositions necessary to engage in effective decision making. We discuss strategies for using the RJM to assess students’ current epistemic assumptions and to design learning experiences that encourage increased sophistication in ethical problem solving.

The concept of representation in the philosophies of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze

Despite important methodological differences, French neo-structuralist thinkers, such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, have two points in common: they offer a systematic interpretation of the philosophical concept of representation, and they elaborate a sub-representational philosophical thinking beyond the validity of self-identical terms. This paper will investigate the relationship between both of these aspects of their philosophies. The aim is to understand how, under the umbrella term of “representation”, French thinkers put into question very basic epistemic assumptions, such as identity, simplicity, unity, subjectivity, objectivity, etc. This paper seeks to understand to which extent the critique of representation leads to a fundamental investigation of the epistemological assumptions of Western thought.

What do you mean by values? Integration of social with biophysical knowledge in the development of a landscape decision support system

Environmental decision-making is recognised as requiring integration of biophysical and social knowledge, but integration of knowledges based in different epistemic assumptions is challenging. We used an action research approach to observe integration in the development of a landscape decision support system (DSS) for forest and fire management in Victoria, Australia. We found two different knowledge integration processes, conceptually-driven to shape the structure of the DSS and technically-driven through modelling. Project framing dominated by biophysical sciences and technically-driven integration presented a barrier to many potential social science contributions that could connect a DSS with the surrounding social and decision contexts. Nonetheless, some conceptually-driven integration occurred when social researchers contributed their analysis of values of the public to the DSS design. The need for this integration emerged through initial conflict over disciplinary understandings of ‘value’. While initially uncomfortable, this opened the way to differentiate knowledge related to the term and to negotiate some conceptual synthesis and an agreed multidisciplinary list of values to structure the DSS. Technically-driven integration occurred through incorporation of social and biophysical metrics in model software. Our research highlights that bridging concepts such as values and related frameworks act as boundary objects that help in overcoming barriers to integration between social and biophysical knowledge. Integration is itself a potential boundary object and early discussions to differentiate and clarify how the term is understood can help in designing interdisciplinary processes. Critically, projects need adequate time for interdisciplinary differentiation, tolerance amongst the team for uncomfortable conversations, and leadership that fosters interdisciplinary interactions to achieve a high degree of knowledge integration.

Teacher views of experimentation in ecosystem science

ABSTRACT Education reform calls for portraying science as a process of inquiry and argumentation grounded in the epistemic traditions of a domain. While experimentation is a core scientific investigation strategy, diverse approaches are represented across different domains of science. Ecosystem scientists use experiments as a core part of their investigations, yet also acknowledge limits to its applicability. They describe experimentation as one approach among investigative strategies – combining these into a ‘body of evidence’ (BOE) approach that triangulates sources of evidence to support causal claims. A study was conducted to explore how these epistemic assumptions in ecosystems science are understood by K-12 teachers. Ten teachers from across the United States were interviewed. The teachers expressed understandings of experimentation that did not fully align with a BOE approach but displayed knowledge of some approaches used by ecosystem scientists. This knowledge was less apparent in their descriptions of their ecosystems science unit pedagogy and curricula and teachers cited a number of obstacles to incorporating it. The results suggest that if a BOE approach were to be introduced in K-12 ecosystems science, teachers would need a fuller understanding of this perspective and support in overcoming obstacles to employing it in the classroom.