Epistemic Asymmetry Research Articles

Embodied Mapping: Negotiating Epistemic Access during Initial Place Reference

ABSTRACT This study explores the negotiation of locational epistemic access during initial reference sequences through embodied mapping, a practice in which co-participants (re)construct geographical maps by using their bodies and the space around them in concert with talk. Like a physical map, an embodied map becomes a mutually available resource that can be scrutinized or amended and therefore constitutes a resource for managing intersubjectivity and addressing epistemic asymmetry. Although embodied maps are ephemeral and physically intangible, they are treated as perceptible by co-participants and are made amenable to correction through the practices of visualization. Embodied mapping in novice second language interaction is a sophisticated, jointly accomplished resource for constructing gesture utterance packages that bolsters participants’ limited linguistic resources. The data are in English and Japanese and originate from conversations video-recorded in a paired English as a Foreign Language (EFL) test setting.

Therapist's positive evaluation of children with hearing impairment: A conversation analysis perspective

In speech-language therapy, the evaluation of children with atypical speech embodies the practical expertise of the therapist and the therapeutic goal of facilitating rehabilitation by guiding these children toward more typical speech behaviors. This study aims to provide an interactional explanation of how positive evaluations given by speech therapists are sequentially formatted, constructed, and oriented in therapy practice and what interactional consequences they have on the interpretation and learning of children with hearing impairment. Adopting conversation analysis as a methodology, this empirical study delves into naturally occurring conversations between speech therapists and children with hearing impairment within the context of Chinese speech-language therapy, focusing specifically on instances of positive evaluations in the third-turn position. The analysis reveals a prevalent occurrence of positive evaluations during therapeutic interactions, showcasing a diverse range of formats employed, spanning from explicit to implicit expressions. A fine-grained conversation analysis demonstrates the delicate and intricate nature of therapists’ positive evaluations, in terms of their indexicality (the function of being referential), and sensitivity to local contingencies. Furthermore, these positive evaluations serve as a critical site for displaying the epistemic asymmetry and its negotiation in and through therapist-client interactions. By providing an empirical demonstration of the interactional skill involved in speech-language therapy and advocating for evaluations characterized by clear indexicality and recipient-orientedness, this study contributes to enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of rehabilitation practices while shedding new light on the atypical interactions involving people with communicative impairments.

Social identity construction in expert-lay dialogue on Facebook

Abstract The paper focuses on identity construction on the Facebook profiles of medical professionals. Drawing on existing conceptualisations of identity and proximity, the study explores how five Polish medical experts construct their social identity and create affinity spaces in their interaction with an audience. The analysis shows that affinity spaces are established through the reduction of social distance and epistemic asymmetry between the professionals and their audience. Increasing emotional proximity and stressing the proximity of experience between the interlocutors also contributes to the creation of affinity. Affinity spaces are co-constructed in dialogue with the profile visitors through e.g. deictic resources indicating proximity, personal stories, recontextualisation of medical concepts, expressiveness, and the stressing of commonalities between the orthopaedic surgeons and their followers.

Negotiating epistemic asymmetries during crisis management exercises: Pre-emptive and corrective practices

Abstract This study investigates interactional practices to negotiate epistemic asymmetries in multinational crisis management training in which English is used as a lingua franca (ELF). More specifically, we focus on exercises that include patrolling as well as other activities in which the trainees move by and interact in a vehicle. These exercises can be seen as “high stakes” environments that make orientation to urgency and safety issues relevant in the coordination of social conduct. Drawing on video recordings and ethnographic field notes from two United Nations military observer courses and using conversation analysis (CA), we examine moments in the exercises where the trainees orient to knowledge-related (i.e., epistemic) asymmetries in the upcoming or ongoing task. The analysis shows how these moments emerge and become solved in the moment-by-moment organization of interaction via utilization of verbal, linguistic and multimodal resources. We illustrate how some moments in the exercises allow the implementation of pre-emptive practices, whereas others call for corrective strategies and halting the ongoing task-related activity. The study sheds light on the situated practices the trainees use to establish mutual understanding and to advance goal-oriented activities in a mobile environment, and it promotes the temporal and sequential organization of social actions as key for collaborative work in crisis management training.

Franz Boas and the Primacy of Form

Abstract There is systematic epistemic asymmetry between different centers of art production: we know far more about some (e.g. fifteenth-century Italian paintings) than about others (e.g. fifteenth-century Inca textiles). As long as we are focusing on the social context of the artworks or the artist’s intention, this epistemic asymmetry remains, given that we have vastly more information about the social context of the artworks or the artist’s intention when it comes to ‘Western’ art—again, because of the historically contingent differences in record-keeping and the survival rate of such records. If we want to overcome the epistemic asymmetry between ‘Western’ and ‘Non-Western’ art, we need to look elsewhere. I will argue, using Franz Boas’s work, that we should look for formal features. In order to avoid the epistemic asymmetry that follows from the historically contingent fact that we have more information about some cultures than about others, we need to start our analysis with formal categories.

Responsive advice-giving to troubles in supervision interaction

Advice-giving is not only a crucial pedagogic activity in student supervision but also responsive conduct to students’ expressions of trouble in talk in-interaction. However, we know little about how advice-giving arrives in such sequences. This study uses conversation analysis to examine supervisory advice-giving in responding turns after students express their trouble. It is demonstrated that students’ reports of trouble make supervisors’ advice-giving normatively relevant. But there may be additional work before the arrival of advice: (1) rephrasing students’ formulations of trouble, (2) using follow-up exploratory questions, and (3) sharing parallel experiences. They are considered to be moves that achieve epistemic symmetries on the advisable issues so the chance of advice resistance is minimized. When delivering the advice proper, two practices are discovered: the construction of It is not X but Y is aimed to mitigate the critical element; the just-formulation reflects supervisors’ orientation to the workability of the trouble. Overall, this set of findings provides that the elimination of epistemic asymmetry is key in the enactment of advice acceptance. The study draws on 67 episodes of responsive advice-giving sequences, found in 12 hours of video recordings of authentic supervision meetings in a UK institution.

Practice of academic and applicative archaeology in Slovenia from a social epistemological perspective

In the relatively abundant bibliography on archaeological theory and epistemology the impact of archaeological practice on archaeological epistemology has remained somehow less explored despite the fact that in the last three decades archaeology has undergone radical changes in practice. We would like to point to three interconnected trends: an exceptional increase in the amount of archaeological fieldwork, the fact that probably more than 90% of all field projects are in the domain of heritage protection, and that archaeology has become a data-driven discipline, producing new circumstances which challenge the traditional epistemological views and require social epistemological rethinking. This paper aims to explore some social epistemological aspects in current archaeological practice in Slovenia where two rather distinctive groups of archaeological researchers emerged, academic archaeologists and field professionals. The distinction between the two groups has grown since the late 1990s with the introduction of preventive archaeology, changes in legislation in heritage protection, and the development of the commercial sector in archaeology. These changes opened a series of questions on epistemic effects in new circumstances, e.g. how these two groups contribute to archaeological knowledge, how their modes of obtaining knowledge are structured and organized, what social factors condition these modes, and, least but not last, the question of forms of epistemic asymmetries.

Peer support for accepting distressing reality: Expertise and experience-sharing in psychiatric peer-to-peer group discussions.

Peer-based interventions are increasingly used for delivering mental health services to help people with an illness re-examine their situation and accept their illness as part of their life story. The role of the peer supporter in these interventions, known as experts-by-experience (EbE), is situated between mutual peer support and semi-professional service delivery, and they face the challenge of balancing an asymmetric, professional relationship with a reciprocal, mutuality-based, equal relationship. This article investigates how EbEs tackle this challenge when responding to clients' stories about their personal, distressing experiences in peer-based groups in psychiatric services. The results show how the EbEs responded to their clients' experience-sharing with two types of turns of talk. In the first response type, the EbEs highlighted reciprocal experience-sharing, nudging the clients toward accepting their illness. This invoked mutual affiliation and more problem-talk from the clients. In the second response type, the EbEs compromised reciprocal experience-sharing and advised clients on how to accept their illness in their everyday lives. This was considered less affiliative in relation to the client's problem description, and the sequence was brought to a close. Both response types involved epistemic asymmetries that needed to be managed in the interaction. Based on our analysis, semi-professional, experience-based expertise involves constant epistemic tensions, as the participants struggle to retain the mutual orientation toward peer-based experience-sharing and affiliation.

Распределенное научное познание внутри академии и за ее пределами

In the article, I consider the problem of distributed scientific knowledge in two aspects: (1) from the point of view of distributed cognition as one of the ways for scientists to obtain scientific knowledge; (2) from the point of view of recruiting scientific personnel to the academy. I believe that in both the cases the problem of epistemic injustice in relation to new participants in the cognitive process remains. The concept of distributed cognition, in my opinion, is not able by itself to solve the problem of epistemic injustice and unequal access to both the results of scientific research and the status of their participants, that is, to make a transition from epistemic asymmetry to epistemic balance or parity of the parties. The most productive implication of the concept of distributed cognition is that its application to scientific practice highlights situations of epistemic injustice, each time on an ever-increasing scale. Finally, I return to the concept of science as a public good and consider some of its implications from the perspective of the classical understanding of science and the possibilities for redressing epistemic injustice.

Grounding co-writing: An analysis of the theoretical basis of a new approach in mental health care.

This contribution aims to highlight the theoretical and epistemological premises of the co-writing experience, a practice where a clinician and a patient are mutually engaged in jointly or collaboratively writing a narrative related to the patient's experience. Unlike a typical set of therapeutic techniques, co-writing is based on sharing perspectives and meanings about the experience of crisis, recovery, and the therapeutic process. The paper identifies and briefly describes four non-clinical epistemological paradigms on which it is grounded: ethnography, values-based practice, narrative care, and phenomenology. Although they differ in several ways, at the same time, they seem to share some common features that the paper investigates and comments. For clinicians, nurses, researchers and Mental Health Service managers, attention to the users and to the improvement of their active roles represents not only a strategy for the empowerment of results, but also the access door to a different perspective which relies on a renewed conceptualization of the mental disease nature that may lead to overcoming the epistemic asymmetry between the 'expert' and the 'other' in favor of intersubjective dialogue.

Introspective knowledge by acquaintance

Introspective knowledge by acquaintance is (roughly) knowledge we have by being directly aware of our phenomenally conscious states. In this paper, I argue that introspective knowledge by acquaintance is a sui generis kind of knowledge: it is irreducible to any sort of propositional knowledge and is wholly constituted (rather than merely enabled) by a relationship of introspective acquaintance. My main argument is that this is the best explanation of some epistemic facts about phenomenal consciousness and introspection. In particular, it best explains the epistemic asymmetry between a subject who has never had a certain phenomenal state and one who has. I also consider two theoretical objections to my claim: an objection from disunity and an objection from mysteriousness. I show that these objections can be answered and that introspective knowledge by acquaintance being sui generis remains a live option on the table.

Buckets of Steam and Left-handed Hammers. The Fool’s Errand as Signal of Epistemic and Coalitional Dominance

Abstract In various professional groups, experts send rookies on absurd tasks as a joke. The fool’s errand appears in factories and hospitals, in elite schools and scout camps, among soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Why are newcomers deceived and humiliated, and why are pranks relatively similar and remarkably persistent over time? I propose that the cultural success and the recurrent features of the fool’s errand are based on evolved cognitive mechanisms activated by apprenticeship as social learning and group induction. Epistemic vigilance explains how novices are reliably deceived by experts using opaque statements erroneously perceived as pedagogical. Furthermore, coalitional psychology explains why insiders use the prank as strategic signalling of hierarchies based on epistemic asymmetry. The intersection of cognitive mechanisms and patterns of professional recruitment maintains a tradition of ritualised pranking in which insiders coordinate to humiliate newcomers to assert epistemic and coalitional dominance.

Peer involvement in dealing with teacher's insufficient response to student initiatives

In this study, we examine instances of peer involvement in L2 classroom interaction when student initiatives receive an observably insufficient teacher response. The data for this study consists of video-recordings of an EFL classroom in higher education. Using Conversation Analysis (CA), this study shows that peers get involved in and extend student-initiated sequences (1) to provide a response to student initiatives that receive the teacher’s display of lack of knowledge and (2) to offer support in challenging a teacher response to student initiatives. In this way, peers contribute to resolving emergent knowledge-related troubles in teacher responses. Such peer involvement is found to create learning opportunities not only for the students but also for the teacher by changing the epistemic asymmetry and participation framework in the classroom. The analysis reflects the dynamics of classroom interaction and provides implications for our understanding of peer roles in whole-class interactions.

Liberal Democracy: Between Epistemic Autonomy and Dependence

Understanding the relationship between experts and laypeople is crucial for under-standing today’s world of post-truth and the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy. The emergence of post-truth has been linked to various phenomena such as a flawed social and mass media ecosystem, poor citizen education, and the manipulation tactics of powerful interest groups. The paper argues that the problem is, however, more profound. The underlying issue is laypeople’s inevitable epistemic dependence on experts. The latter is part and parcel of the “risk society” in which people question the scientific consensus and thus are able to manipulate the facts. It is a powerful weapon in the hands of illiberal democrats, though liberal democrats can make no use of it. The latter downplay the problem of citizens’ epistemic deficits and of the epistemic asymmetries be-tween them. The third and fourth generations of deliberative democrats are a perfect example. The paper argues that the concepts of interactional expertise and epistemic dependence explain why understanding between experts and laypeople is impossible. The said phenomena undermine liberalism’s unrealistic assumptions concerning citi-zens’ decision-making competence.

Realizing Who I Am

In this paper, the old view of self-knowledge as a practical achievement is vindicated. Constitutivism, the view that connects self-knowledge to the rational agency, thus taking a step towards this practical dimension, is discussed first. But their assumption of an epistemic asymmetry that privileges self-knowledge is found mistaken. The practical dimension of self-knowledge, its potential transformative power, is accounted in terms of the interiorization of the concepts acquired in intersubjective interaction.

Warning, or Manipulating in Pandemic Times? A Critical and Contrastive Analysis of Official Discourse Through the English and Spanish News

Focusing on media discourse and adopting a Critical Discourse Analysis—linguistic and rhetorical—perspective, this paper explores the role of the media in influencing citizens’ behaviour towards the COVID-19 crisis. The paper evaluates the set of potentially persuasive lexical items and emotional implicatures used by two quality newspapers, i.e. The Guardian (UK edition) and El País (Spain edition), to report on the pandemic during the three waves—the periods between the onset and trough of virus contamination—that occurred until March 2021. A representative, ad-hoc, comparable corpus (COVIDWave_EN and COVIDWave_ES) was compiled in English and Spanish comprising the news on the pandemic that appeared in the aforementioned newspapers during the three established time periods. The corpora were uploaded to Sketch Engine, which was used to first detect and analyse different categories (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) of word frequency, and then assign negative or positive polarity. Lexical keyness was secondly analysed to categorize emotional implicatures of control, metaphors, signals of epistemic asymmetry and positive implicatures in order to discern how they become weapons of negative or positive persuasion. The ultimate end of the study was to critically analyse and contrast the lexicon and rhetoric used by these two newspapers during this time period so as to unveil the stance taken by governments and health institutions—voices of authority—to disseminate words of control and persuasion with the aim of exerting influence on the behaviour of citizens in UK and Spain.

The Transfer of Knowledge in a Trustworthy Doctor-Patient Interaction: A Philosophical Problem

"The effectiveness of medical evidence is largely dependent on the ability to communicate that evidence to the science-users, mostly patients. Like in many fields of science, also in medicine trust is one of the most important components of doctor-patient interaction. Cultivation of patient trust is, in turn, primarily a linguistic activity, subject to linguistic norms and conventions. Doctor-patient interaction has been at the core of a growing discussion during the past few years, especially in the context of innovations in evidence-based methods and related to the applicability of clinical guidelines derived from those methods. In Italy, this debate resulted in a recent law (n.219/2017), which declares that “the care and trusting relationship between doctor and patient which is based on the informed consent is promoted and enhanced” (art.1) and that “the time of the communication between doctor and patient is a time of care” (art.8). This new kind of perspective on communication between physicians and patients has led to several questions, above all (i) what is the best definition of trust? and (ii) how achieve a trusting relationship? According to a strictly philosophical point of view, it implies how to successfully communicate imperfect evidence and risk to patients who are in a position of epistemic asymmetry with respect to the doctors; it is problematic because it involves a transfer of complex knowledge of risks and uncertainties from experts to laypeople. The paper investigates the difficulties in communicating medical evidence associated with risk and uncertainties of diagnosis and treatment. "

Challenging the Carceral Imaginary in a Digital Age: Epistemic Asymmetries and the Right to Be Forgotten

This paper argues that debates regarding legal protections to preserve the privacy of data subjects, such as those involving the European Union’s right to be forgotten, have tended to overlook group-level forms of epistemic asymmetry and their impact on members of historically oppressed groups. In response, I develop what I consider an abolitionist approach to issues of digital justice. I begin by exploring international debates regarding digital privacy and the right to be forgotten. Then, I turn to the long history of informational asymmetries impacting racialized populations in the United States. Such asymmetries, I argue, comprise epistemic injustices that are also implicated within the patterns of racialized incarceration in the United States. The final section brings together questions regarding the impact of such epistemic injustices on incarcerated peoples and focuses specifically on the public availability of criminal histories in online search databases as a fundamental issue within conversations regarding digital justice. I thus conclude by building from the work of contemporary abolitionist writers to argue that the underlying concerns of an individualized right to be forgotten should be transformed into a collective effort to undermine societal carceral imaginaries.

Kinship, seniority, and rights to know in Datooga children's everyday interaction

This paper explores the epistemics of social relations among Datooga-speaking children of rural Tanzania. It describes two linguistic resources for epistemic management in the Datooga language, namely, questions and an epistemic particle néadá. The paper then investigates children's use of these two resources in a 3.5 h sample of children's spontaneous interaction, taken from a video corpus. Questions often establish epistemic asymmetries by positioning addressees as more knowledgeable, while use of the particle néadá projects speech participants' equal rights to know, typically in emphatic contrast to the epistemic implications of an earlier turn. Of special interest is how children's negotiation of rights to know reveals sensitivity to social relations, particularly those defined by kinship and age. Though by no means ever-present, concepts of kinship and seniority are made relevant in these children's interactions. Children oriented to kinship relations when deferring to other people's rights to know about their own kin, and they positioned speech participants in junior–senior relationships when requesting generalizable knowledge. The paper contributes to empirical research on children's everyday language use with insights from a rural African community.

Applying Moral Caution in the Face of Disagreement

In this paper I explore an epistemic asymmetry that sometimes occurs regarding the moral status of alternative actions. I argue that this asymmetry is significant and has ramifications for what it is morally permissible to do. I then show how this asymmetry often obtains regarding three moral issues: vegetarianism, abortion, and charitable giving. In doing so, I rely on the epistemic significance of disagreement and the existence of moral controversy about these issues.