Epistemic Claims Research Articles

Epistemic injustice and education in the digital age

The aim of this article is to function as a starting point for combining the study of epistemic injustice in a higher education framework with that of digitalization, including recent developments such as the entrance of AI in higher education. What is identified as the main problem is the power of digital technology and how technologies shape institutional practices of teaching and learning, often in opposition to democratic education aims. The introduction of AI in higher education deepens the mediatization process of higher education, demonstrated by a mainstream oriented usage of AI. In higher education, digital technology shapes practices that are indifferent to the epistemic claims and rights of students, and quite perfectly attuned to the ‘practical needs’ of digital technology which severely challenges the concept of knowing and also critical thinking in higher education.

The Chinese change-of-state token o in responsive units

Adopting the methodology of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, this study investigates the uses of the response token o in Mandarin Chinese face-to-face conversation. The analysis of naturally occurring interactions shows that o features centrally in the practices by which speakers display a change in cognitive states, either from previously being uninformed to now being informed, or from non-understanding to understanding regarding relevant information that was just mentioned by a co-participant. It is also revealed that there is an interrelatedness between the sequential environment/turn shape of o and the epistemic claim that it conveys. That is, the o marking now-knowing typically occurs in response to informings (especially extended tellings) and it primarily plays a continuative forward-looking sequential role in freestanding form, which makes it distinct from the English oh. Furthermore, other turn-initial uses of o are routinely followed by components of repetition or assessment which are sequence-curtailing in character. Different from the o marking now-knowing, the o marking revised understanding is exclusively found in third position following the speaker’s first-position claim or question, and where that claim or question contains an incorrect assumption which has either been corrected or disconfirmed in second position.

Why Being Right Doesn’t Make You Good: The Representation of Science and Religion in South Park

Recent scholarship, particularly within the sphere of science communication, has sought to provide an empirical map of the relationship between science and religion, often seeking to explain the persistence of religious belief and practice within a technoscientific world. The framing of science and religion in this context often presumes that the social relevance of both science and religion lies primarily in the epistemic claims both make about the natural world and can be captured through explicit discussion of the relationship between the two. This article argues that other meanings of science and religion are possible by highlighting a case that appears to have little interest in questions of reality and epistemology: the animated comedy South Park. Within the show, scientific and religious discourse and imagery are frequently positioned as being enmeshed within larger social issues, gaining meaning from the ways in which the characters use knowledge for a variety of ends, usually resulting in moral failure. As a story about how to be a good American, South Park positions science and religion as sites where morality can be tested, mediated by a sense of goodness that is presented to the audience as self-evident. While the generality of this specific construction of science and religion can be challenged, the show illustrates the need for a broader or more extensive examination of the multiple meanings that science and religion might have within the public sphere and popular culture, which are far broader than a specific discussion of their epistemic relationship.

Virtual diversity: Resolving the tension between the wider culture and the institution of science.

There are widespread calls for increased demographic diversity in science, often linked to the epistemic claim that including more perspectives will improve the quality of the knowledge produced. By distinguishing between demographic and epistemic diversity, we show that this is only true some of the time. There are cases where increasing demographic diversity will not bring about the necessary epistemic diversity and cases where failing to exclude some voices reduces the quality of the scientific debate. We seek to resolve these tensions with an analysis that turns on the way the experience-based expertise of non-scientists can be absorbed into mainstream science. Mostly it has to be done via what we call 'virtual diversity', in which scientists take responsibility for acquiring interactional expertise in the non-scientific expertise-based domains which they consider provide knowledge valuable to the science. We argue that virtual diversity represents the only feasible option in most scenarios, with cases where demographic diversity or full cultural mergers provide the solution being the exception rather than the rule. This analysis is an exercise in the sociology of knowledge, which is considered as being continuous with philosophy. The paper is prescriptive as well as descriptive, and the moral, cultural, political, and educational implications of the argument are drawn out. A main conclusion is that the acquisition of virtual diversity should be a new norm for science, allowing the voices of experienced non-scientist citizens to be heard but without eroding the institution of science, which continues to be a vital foundation of truth in democracy.

Stable acceptance for mighty knowledge

Drawing on the puzzling behavior of ordinary knowledge ascriptions that embed an epistemic (im)possibility claim, we tentatively conclude that it is untenable to jointly endorse (i) an unfettered classical logic for epistemic language, (ii) the general veridicality of knowledge ascription, and (iii) an intuitive ‘negative transparency’ thesis that reduces knowledge of a simple negated ‘might’ claim to an epistemic claim without modal content. We motivate a strategic trade-off: preserve veridicality and (generalized) negative transparency, while abandoning the general validity of contraposition. We criticize various approaches to incorporating veridicality into domain semantics, a paradigmatic ‘information-sensitive’ framework for capturing negative transparency and, more generally, the non-classical behavior of sentences with epistemic modals. We then present a novel information-sensitive semantics that successfully executes our favored strategy: stable acceptance semantics, extending a vanilla bilateral state-based semantics for epistemic modals with a knowledge operator loosely inspired by the defeasibility theory of knowledge.

Perspectivism and Health Professions Assessment.

This article aims to outline perspectivism and perspectival thinking by drawing on established scholarship from the philosophy of science and to demonstrate its relevance to health professions education. Perspectivism embraces the notion that knowledge always inherently arises from particular perspectives. "Truth" always depends on an evaluative background. Perspectivism is a form of epistemic humility that sees epistemic claims (relating to knowledge) as fundamentally historically and contextually situated. This article contends that perspectivism is a fruitful and relevant lens to apply to health professions assessment. It is a way of thinking that is all around us, even if we do not realize it. It extends discourse around the value of subjectivity in assessment and may cut through many prevailing debates on assessment practice. Perspectivism is a sort of middle-ground that is not meant to be another idea or "-ism" to add to a list of ideas, but constitutes a shift in how philosophy can be applied by adopting a broader, more holistic perspective. Applying a perspectival lens to health professions education embraces the imperative to make interpretive processes in assessment philosophically explicit. This opens the possibility of adopting multiple philosophical stances concurrently and allows actors to appreciate different methodological viewpoints with more charity. This scholarly perspective encourages the assessment community to continue to innovate through an appreciation of the importance of a wide range of assessment perspectives by uncovering the drivers of specific commitments to philosophical positions. Although the focus is on assessment in the health professions, perspectival thinking has the potential to advance medical education discourse and practice more generally beyond assessment. The hope with this essay is that by encouraging more critical reflection, this description of perspectival thinking will further aid researchers and practitioners in health professions education to better understand what is happening philosophically with more frequency.

Cultural expertise in Sami land rights litigation: Epistemic strategies in the Girjas and Fosen cases

How do parties mobilise cultural expertise in Indigenous rights litigation in Scandinavia? Recently, Sami groups have litigated to claim Indigenous rights to land and natural resources, winning some remarkable victories in the Supreme Courts of Norway and Sweden. In this paper, we draw on socio-legal mobilisation theory to analyse the epistemic strategies of Sami litigants and their adversaries in two recent landmark Supreme Court cases on Indigenous rights to usage of land: the 2020 Girjas case in Sweden and the 2021 Fosen case in Norway. Conceptualising cultural expertise as a strategic framing contest, we analyse how the parties struggled over the epistemic basis of the respective case by legitimating their claims to cultural knowledge, drawing on academic research, and discrediting their opponents’ epistemic claims. Our findings suggest that in both cases, Sami claimants successfully established an epistemic basis where their traditional, experiential knowledge combined with independent academic expertise effectively challenged the knowledge claims of their adversaries. Yet, both cases also demonstrate how the linkage between Sami Indigeneity and reindeer husbandry in the national law of both countries excludes non-reindeer herding Sami persons from the Indigenous rights affirmed by the courts.

The Motivation Problem of Epistemic Expressivists

Many philosophers have adopted epistemic expressivism in recent years. The core commitment of epistemic expressivism is that epistemic claims express conative states. This paper assesses the plausibility of this commitment. First, we raise a new type of problem for epistemic expressivism, the epistemic motivation problem. The problem arises because epistemic expressivists must provide an account of the motivational force of epistemic judgment (the mental state expressed by an epistemic claim), yet various features of our mental economy seem to show that they can’t do so. Second, we develop what we take to be the most promising response to that problem for expressivists. We end by noting that this response faces an important challenge pertaining to the psychology of epistemic criticism and praise.

Accountability in the environmental crisis: From microsocial practices to moral orders

AbstractThe global environmental crisis is the result of a complex web of causation and distributed agency, where not even the most powerful individual actors can be considered responsible nor remedy the situation alone. This has prompted multiple calls across societies for transformative social change. What role can accountability play in this context? Starting in the theoretical traditions of microsociology and pragmatic sociology, this article elaborates the role of accountability in social interactions. To provide an account that justifies an action or inaction is here understood as a process of social ordering, where accounts are assessed as acceptable only after they have been tested against higher normative principles. Microsocial practices are, in this way, linked to macrosocial order. The following section turns to the global environmental crisis, showing that the crisis raises normative as well as epistemic challenges. The complexity of the socio‐environmental situation makes it hard to know what should be done and opens normative orders and epistemic claims to contestation. This situation provides increased opportunities for strategic maneuvering to justify actions as well as opportunities to question social practices and social order. The article concludes by discussing the role of accountability in climate change. Accountability can serve as a mechanism to attach issues to the current environmental crisis and re‐embed decisions and practice in an environmental moral order. As part of a broader palette of instruments, rules and norms, accountability has an important function to play in transforming society towards sustainability.

“I don’t Remember that”: Negotiating Memories and Epistemic Claims in Swedish High-Stake Police Interviews

This paper employs Conversation Analysis to investigate a specific interactional environment in Swedish police interviews (PIs): sequences where the interviewee asserts an inability to recollect specific events, and the police subsequently challenge this assertion. The police interview serves as a crucial setting for reconstructing past events and identifying the distribution of knowledge among participants. While previous research has delved into the cognitive mechanisms underlying memory retrieval in PIs, there exists a scarcity of empirical investigation of how memories and their associated knowledge are interactionally managed within this high-stakes activity. Prior Conversation Analytic studies exploring how epistemic dimensions shape social interaction form the theoretical basis for the current study, including research indicating how ‘forgetfulness’ can be strategically employed as an interactional resource. Only a few studies have targeted recorded high-stakes interviews in Swedish, and the lack of such is problematic since international research have highlighted the influence of cultural and social factors on conditions and outcomes. Data used for this study comprises anonymized audio recordings (N = 51) from a preliminary murder investigation, making a valuable contribution to the understanding of interactional practices in Swedish police interviews. Results indicate a discrepancy in orientation between the police and the interviewee. The former treats the memories as accessible knowables possible to retrieve, in contrast to the latter, who uses the police’s challenge as a vehicle for contesting the ‘impossible action of remembering.’

Why Being Right Doesn’t Make You Good: The Representation of Science and Religion inSouth Park

Recent scholarship, particularly within the sphere of science communication, has sought to provide an empirical map of the relationship between science and religion, often seeking to explain the persistence of religious belief and practice within a technoscientific world. The framing of science and religion in this context often presumes that the social relevance of both science and religion lies primarily in the epistemic claims both make about the natural world and can be captured through explicit discussion of the relationship between the two. This article argues that other meanings of science and religion are possible by highlighting a case that appears to have little interest in questions of reality and epistemology: the animated comedy South Park. Within the show, scientific and religious discourse and imagery are frequently positioned as being enmeshed within larger social issues, gaining meaning from the ways in which the characters use knowledge for a variety of ends, usually resulting in moral failure. As a story about how to be a good American, South Park positions science and religion as sites where morality can be tested, mediated by a sense of goodness that is presented to the audience as self-evident. While the generality of this specific construction of science and religion can be challenged, the show illustrates the need for a broader or more extensive examination of the multiple meanings that science and religion might have within the public sphere and popular culture, which are far broader than a specific discussion of their epistemic relationship.

Believing in the Powers of Mindfulness: A Thematic Narrative Approach and the Development of a New Scale

ObjectivesThe beliefs and expectations people bring into mindfulness practice can affect the measurement outcomes of interventions. The aim of this mixed-method study was to examine the key beliefs in the powers of mindfulness—understood as non-judgmental awareness of the present moment—to transform the individual and the society, and to develop and validate the Belief in the Powers of Mindfulness Scale (BPMS).MethodIn-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with mindfulness meditators (n = 32), including follow-up interviews (n = 22). Qualitative data were analysed through a thematic narrative approach. Participants (n = 458) completed a questionnaire that included the new scale.ResultsParticipants’ key beliefs were thematically analysed in three transformation themes: interpersonal relationships and compassion, peace and violence, and the inner world—themes were encapsulated in the BPMS. Ideas presented in each theme were undergirded by a host of ideologies, epistemic claims, and metaphysical assumptions about the nature of mind, self, and reality—which are predicated by broader cultural trends such as expressive individualism, perennial philosophy, and New Age sentiments and ideals. The BPMS showed strong internal consistency and convergent validity, and individuals who were older and more spiritual practised mindfulness more often and for longer, and self-reported greater mindfulness skills, and scored higher on the BPMS.ConclusionsFindings illustrate the persisting importance of attending to people’s beliefs and expectations in mindfulness interventions and further the call for a contextual approach that accounts for cultural factors. The newly developed BPMS may assist with the measuring of peoples’ beliefs and expectations.

Truth, Moral Rightness, and Justification: A Habermasian Perspective on Decolonizing the University

AbstractIn this paper, Anniina Leiviskä examines the moral, political, and epistemic claims of the social justice movement known as “decolonizing the university” from the perspective of Jürgen Habermas's distinction between objective and normative validity and the respective notions of truth and moral rightness. Leiviskä challenges the view, held by some representatives of decolonization, that the normative and epistemic claims of the movement are inseparable from each other and suggests that evaluating the justification of the movement requires holding these claims at least analytically distinguishable. She argues that while the moral and political claims of “decolonizing the university” find strong justification through Habermas's discourse morality, its epistemic claims, especially the rejection of shared standards of knowledge, might have epistemically problematic consequences. Accordingly, Leiviskä suggests here that the epistemic justification of decolonization is conditional on the acceptance of shared epistemic standards — the pragmatic truth concept and the criterion of impartiality — which she develops in the paper on the basis of Habermas's pragmatic theory of truth and rational discourse as a model of justification. Finally, she proposes that the implications of these criteria for practices of higher education and the curriculum should be determined through an open and unconstrained discussion by the members of an inclusive university community.

Subjects, disciplines, and practices

Abstract This article attempts to show how Hirst’s earlier work on forms of knowledge, and his later work on education as an inculcation into practices, have close connections, closer than those made explicit in his own writings. In fact, it can be argued that, in some sense, the idea of a practice is fundamental to understanding the ways in which knowledge is organized, and thus to the epistemic claim that knowledge is organized differently according to the various ways in which it is acquired and evaluated. This approach allows us to make a distinction between disciplines and subjects that in turn allow us to distinguish knowledge-seeking from knowledge-transmitting activities, particularly in the context of school subjects and thus to bring out more clearly the relationship between the practical side of knowledge acquisition and evaluation, on the one hand, and the structure of the knowledge thus acquired, on the other. By doing this, we can see an underlying unity in Hirst’s concerns that is not so obvious at first sight.

Indigenous, feminine and technologist relational philosophies in the time of machine learning

ABSTRACT Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are for many the defining features of the early twenty-first century. With such a provocation, this essay considers how one might understand the relational philosophies articulated by Indigenous learning scientists, Indigenous technologists and feminine philosophers of education as co-constitutive of an ensemble mediating or regulating an educative philosophy interfacing with ML/AI. In these mediations, differing vocabularies – kin, the one caring, cooperative – are recognized for their ethical commitments, yet challenging epistemic claims in the contexts of ML. Similarly, ML poses some questions to claims made about relational and Indigenous epistemologies, where the latter is perceived as separated from and unaffected by computation specifically or algorithmic societies generally. This essay seeks to gain several vantage points to explore and complicate how diverse relational philosophies can address ML and perhaps reconsider their own critical practices.

A Photograph as Evidence of Itself: Representation, Reflexivity, and Tautology in Light-Based Art

What habit of perception—of description—gives human viewers of photographs the confidence to regard them as evidence? In this comparative study of work by John Opera (b. 1975) and Jill Freedman (1939–2019), light-based art is subject to an analytic pressure that may undermine epistemic claims about what it is photographs can be said to contain. What constitutes a photograph in nonhuman terms is different from what we say, or want to say, it represents. Physics, philosophy, and the history of photography intersect at the point where we leap from image to meaning.

Objectivity in Social Inquiry

Otto Neurath and John Dewey share the understanding that science must have a prominent role in democratic social reform. This is a common aim that brought logical empiricism and pragmatism together in the first half of the 20th century, but there are differences between the two stances. On the one hand, Neurath sees a limitation of scientific knowledge, considering that it cannot determine decisions to be taken in the course of social reform. Such decisions, in the logical empiricist view, are a matter of politics. On the other hand, Dewey sees a continuity among all forms of inquiry and, therefore, the conclusions of valuational inquiry are analogous in their epistemic claims to the conclusions in factual (natural or social inquiry). This paper investigates the divergence and concludes that pragmatist continuity of inquiry is set in a psychological context that disregards a difference in objectivity between factual and valuational inquiry.

The Football Stadium in Morocco and the Dynamic of Struggle Over the Truth System, the Ultras Against the State

The football stadium has increasingly transformed from being a site of sport and football-supporting teams into a site of expressing social frustration. This transformation has been noticeable in Morocco since 2010, where the stadiums have become a remarkable space to criticize the political performance and policies of certain political institutions. Consequently, several clashes occurred between the ultras and the state, which endlessly looking for strategies to stop the ultras from gaining social ground. On the other hand, the new actors (ultra) seem to create a new aesthetic sense with their depicted non-usual political signs. In this regard, we argue that the limited space for participation (stadiums) defines two conflicting dynamics over the system of truth. In the same vein, the aesthetic practices in the stadiums are combating the dominant systems of truth by generating a "new distribution of the sense" which the ultras strongly believe in. To make this epistemic claim, we based our analysis on the theoretical contributions of the French philosopher Jacques Ranciére, which were deeply discussed and analyzed in his book "The politics of aesthetics: the distribution of the sensible.

Curating the digital space: Structural gate-keeping and boundary work in maternity care

Digital health occupies an increasingly important role within the context of managing risk and safety in pregnancy. Women routinely use websites, mobile phone apps and social media platforms to learn about ‘normal’ pregnancy related changes and potential signs of a complication. This paper shifts attention from women's digital experiences to explore staff responsibilities in relation to women's online practices during pregnancy. We draw on Thomas Gieryn's work as an interpretive aid to enable us to understand how staff protect the boundaries of science in the face of circulating competing epistemic claims within the digital maternal health space. We focus on interview data from midwives and obstetricians exploring technology-in-use, drawn from a mixed methods study conducted in 2019, across three UK NHS Trusts. We found that online health information supplemented ‘the clinic’, providing an additional layer of support to professionalised, bounded forms of care. However, staff drew on relational and material aspects of being with women to legitimate and distinguish in-person from digital forms of care. Digital resources represented different forms of knowledge and communities. Staff were aware of associated credibility claims linked to these resources and expressed concerns that signposting women to online resources legitimised particular forms of authority and expertise implicit within these networks and tools. Staff were also drawn into reassurance practices and digital caregiving as part of uncertainty absorption. This paper offers nuanced understanding of the implicit boundary work associated with digitally mediated care, and how this links to discourses around ‘being with women’, responsibility and blame.

Examining students’ collaborative epistemic actions in a MOOC learning environment

Human intellectual development is grounded in dialogue and collaboration. This study examined how students' collaborative epistemic actions and activities evolve and expand in interactive online learning meetings and how digital technology affords coordinated epistemic actions, enhancing students' agency in learning in an institutional massive open online course (MOOC). As data, recordings of students' online video meetings were analyzed using interaction analysis and interpreted using the cultural-historical theory of learning. The findings revealed that students engaged in four epistemic actions and several epistemic activities: (a) co-orientation (epistemic positioning and planning rules of engagement), (b) presentation (sharing ideas explicitly), (c) assessment (questioning, clarifying, and feedback giving), and (d) reflection (concluding and outlining further actions). These collaborative epistemic actions evolved when the students presented, explained, claimed, and vetted their epistemic claims related to creating the examination assignment in the online collaborative learning meetings. Digital technology can effectively mediate students' coordinated epistemic activities. Online interactive sessions will establish the relational zone of belonging, and foster students' emotional, cognitive, or intellectual becoming, enhancing their agency in online learning.