Epistemic Communities Research Articles

Epistemic commitments have no “Off” button: on the embodiment of commitments by way of model formulation

AbstractThe current paper examines how a commitment to a principle, adhered to by an individual agent, becomes an accepted standard of an epistemic community. Addressing this question requires three steps: first, to define the terms used throughout the paper, and especially the characteristics of commitments to a principle. The second step is to find a mechanism through which such epistemic commitments are introduced to an epistemic community and in certain cases are adopted as the standard by the community. While there could be several such mechanisms, the current paper focuses on the practice of model formulation. The third step is to demonstrate the analytical framework developed in the first two steps in a case study. The case study chosen for this paper is the unique approach to feedback analysis adopted by the ecologist and population geneticist Richard Levins. In what follows I will show that part of the features that made Levins’ approach unique was his Marxist commitments, and his attempt to embody those commitments in feedback analysis by formally representing them as modeling assumptions.

Writing to learn: creative LD perspectives for Learning Developers and students

Academic writing is a contested area, even more so in times of large language models and artificial intelligence (AI). This writing is tricky to navigate and master especially for newcomers – staff and students. Learning Developers almost uniquely play with writing as a practice of emergence and discovery. Academic writing is a process: we write to become academic. Students write to join their epistemic communities, and Learning Developers write to give birth to an emergent field. Drawing on recent work by Syska and Buckley (2022) and Abegglen, Burns and Sinfield (2022; 2023), we argue that academic writing is an initiation into and participation in wider professional and academic discourses. We ‘write to learn’ rather than ‘learn to write’. In our practice with students, we know that we need to move beyond the ‘mechanics’ of writing and make the process meaningful, engaging, interactive, and fun. Similarly, Syska and Buckley (2022) have explored what makes Learning Developers ‘tick’ with respect to academic writing – revealing how, counterintuitively perhaps, academic writing can become an inclusive Learning Development space: our ‘happy place’. With this presentation, we opened the discussion on academic writing for building the Learning Development community.

Politinio mąstymo metmenys Immanuelio Kanto kritinėje filosofijoje

Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy revolutionised thinking and left unanswered the question of how politics as philosophy and science is possible. Hannah Arendt was right to associate politics with the reflective power of decision, but she left unanswered the questions of what conception of politics is implied by Kant’s critical system and what are the limits of political philosophy and political science. The paper argues that politics is an aesthetic idea and therefore has no objectively universal definition and remains necessarily open to interpretation by various epistemic and political communities. Aesthetic ideas also substantiate the possibility of political science as symbolic cognition and reformulate the challenge of political philosophy to confine politics solely within the judgment.

Epistemic tensions in R&D alliances and the role of inter-organizational management controls

Abstract Access to heterogeneous knowledge resources is suggested in the literature as an important explanation of firm innovation and performance. The exchange of knowledge, however, can be a complex managerial challenge, especially between different epistemic communities. Our research focuses on the concept of epistemic communities to illuminate the complexity of tensions that arise in heterogeneous knowledge exchange in alliances, thus filling a gap in the literature. Using the Straussian grounded theory case study approach, our research investigates the emergence of horizontal, vertical, and inter-organizational epistemic tensions and explores management controls as instruments to guide the knowledge exchange in intermediary-driven research and development alliances. We find that the source of multiple epistemic tensions is rooted in the natural social behaviors of epistemic community members and further shows how these behaviors influence the effective use of inter-organizational management controls in facilitating heterogeneous knowledge exchange.

The role of different types of knowledge and expertise in explaining recognition justice in flood defence and flood risk prevention

AbstractFlood risks worldwide are rising and it is increasingly recognised that the impacts of floods are not neutral. Socioeconomic and demographic characteristics determine people's capacity to deal with flood events. These differences in social vulnerability to floods need to be considered in flood risk management (FRM) to prevent the most vulnerable groups from being disproportionately impacted. However, due to a diversification of FRM strategies and the involvement of various policy domains, the experts working on FRM are no longer a homogeneous group. Where FRM was previously dominated by engineers, now various experts are involved that have different disciplinary backgrounds, knowledge bases and approaches to FRM. As a result, they also differ in their recognition of social vulnerability to floods. In this paper, we explore the different types of knowledge and expertise in FRM in three countries (England, Flanders and France), focussing on the strategies of flood defence and flood risk prevention. We characterise the epistemic communities supporting the domains and study to what extent experts differ in their recognition of social vulnerability to floods. We also dive into the mechanisms employed to stimulate integration between experts and consider the extent to which this integration can strengthen recognition justice.

How #Trad Catholics Challenge Current Constructions of Christian Nationalism: Counterknowledge, Masculinity, and Elite Aesthetics on Instagram

ABSTRACT I analyze traditionalist Catholic (or Trad) content on Instagram to add digital hyperconnectivity to current conversations about Christian nationalism in the United States. Building on studies of both epistemological and affective shifts in the age of digital hyperconnectivity, I argue that some pockets of right-wing Christian content are not anti-intellectual, but rather construct alternative knowledge bases to challenge mainstream authorities. This populist strategy of counterknowledge is mediatized in Trad Instagram, creating an epistemic community to counter those of the mainstream. The affordances of Instagram as a platform, characterized by its emphasis on visual content, brevity, and rapid consumption, have resulted in the decontextualized presentation of fragmented elements of Catholic philosophy and social teaching. This reconfiguration not only reshapes the public perception of Catholic thought but also fundamentally alters the grammar of public discourse. I draw on studies of affective polarization to argue that counterknowledge is not primarily about building a substantive alternative knowledge base, but rather about constructing an identity around the media image of an epistemic community under threat. The Trad aesthetic representation of intellectualism is distinctly gendered, presenting intellectual pursuit and reason as masculine virtues. I conclude by explaining how Trad Instagram contributes to and challenges current discourses on Christian nationalism by centering digital hyperconnectivity instead of a rationalist analysis of motivating beliefs, providing insights not only about shifts in authority and populism, but also moving beyond ideology to highlight aesthetic, affect, and the algorithmic curation of knowledge.

Contamination of Perfluoroalkyl Substances and Environmental Fight for Safe and Health: The MammeNoPfas Movement as Epistemic Community

Contamination of Perfluoroalkyl Substances and Environmental Fight for Safe and Health: The MammeNoPfas Movement as Epistemic Community

Freedom of thought

AbstractThis paper develops a novel conception of freedom of thought as the right to epistemic self‐realization. The recognition of this right is characterized here as a modally robust normative status that I think one has as a potential knower in an epistemic community. It is a status that one cannot enjoy without a specific form of institutionalized intellectual respect and support. To explain and defend this conception of freedom of thought, it is contrasted here with more traditionally “negative” conceptions of freedom of thought, in terms of not being interfered with. It is also contrasted here with a “positive” conception of freedom of thought derived from a recently prominent account of doxastic agency as grounded in the rational capacity to self‐determine one's own response to reasons. In both cases, the crux of the argument in this paper is that a conception of freedom of thought as a right to epistemic self‐realization makes better sense of why we fear the counter‐liberatory forces of propaganda and regulated thinking, and also why we hold out hope for the liberating potential of education and critical engagement with expertise in the public sphere.

The Faces of the Capitalist Modernization of Fishing in the Far South of Brazil from a Perspective of Socioenvironmental Oceanography (1940s to 1990s)

The goal of this article is to analyze the effects of capitalist modernization on the fishing industry located in Brazil’s far south from a perspective of socioenvironmental oceanography. Socioenvironmental oceanography builds on the contributions of historical materialism that prioritizes the study of the material foundations that support the process of capitalist accumulation. Within this perspective, the object of analysis shifts to one that is centered around the production of (ethno)oceanographic spaces. We argue that the production of these spaces result in the creation of public policies, which are geared towards mobilizing material and non-material resources for an epistemic community. This community was promoted to being a center of calculation whose supposed goal was to find ways to improve the bioeconomic “sustainability” of fishery resources. This process destroys fishing resources, as well as traditional/artisanal fishing systems and territories. In addition, it sets the stage for material and non-material precedents based around the spatial planning of marine areas that goes back to the foundations of the blue economy.

Extended peer communities: Creating good and fair knowledges

This conceptual paper reconstructs an implicit ethical claim of post-normal science, namely that knowledge produced in extended peer communities (EPCs) is both epistemically better and fairer. Post-normal science introduced EPCs to operationalise better quality knowledge for decision-making in conditions when facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent. In such contexts, traditional forms of quality assurance in science are bound to fail and even risk becoming the source of harm to people, their social and natural environment. Consequently, the community of peers assessing the quality of knowledge needs to be broadened to include a plurality of perspectives and epistemic communities. To date, post-normal scholarship has focused primarily on the epistemological side of EPCs. Building on this, this paper addresses the ethical side of EPCs. In doing so, it aims to make explicit a claim that has always been at the heart of post-normal scholarship, namely that the knowledge produced in EPCs is also more just. In doing so, the paper builds on the literature on epistemic (in)justice and in particular on work done by Kristie Dotson.

The Shape of Bigfoot: Transmuting Absences into Credible Knowledge Claims

Bigfoot exists. If not as a biological creature, then as a cultural object about which people know with a high degree of stability. It also exists as an object which some people organise their lives around. Those who collect evidence of Bigfoot’s existence as a biological creature are known as Bigfooters. Among the most persuasive forms of evidence that they collect are witness accounts of encounters with Bigfoot. Since the 1960s, there have been organised efforts to collect and sort these accounts; for example, thousands are now available online through the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO). Notably, many Bigfooters report that it was an encounter of their own which was the catalyst for them to get actively involved in this research. The article is part of a larger project examining the epistemic community of Bigfooting, which has involved 166 semi-structured interviews with people involved in Bigfooting and the subject of Bigfoot. These interviews explore the way in which Bigfooters make and contest knowledge, and during these interviews scores of participants shared personal tales of their own close encounters. We add to the work in the sociology of mystery by exploring the ways in which these stories are used to make knowledge claims. We argue that these stories ‘make room’ for Bigfoot by constructing an absence which can then be filled by what we know to be the ‘shape’ of Bigfoot, literally and figuratively. We also show how our interviewees present themselves as legitimate interpreters of these absences; when making an incredible claim in a field known for hoaxes, there is an imperative to be seen as credible and not credulous.

QAnon and the Epistemic Communities of the Unreal: A Conceptual Toolkit for a Sociology of Grassroots Conspiracism

The messy politics of combating the COVID-19 pandemic, compounded by the confusion caused by the global (dis)infodemic, have propelled conspiracism from the fringes of society into the public mainstream. Despite the growing political impact of digitally enabled conspiracy theories, they are predominantly delegitimized on three fronts – as psychopathology, pseudoscience, and/or parapolitics. In contrast, this article employs three non-pathologizing conceptual counteroffers borrowed from critical theory, deconstructionist historiography, and citizenship studies – namely, cognitive mapping, narrative emplotment, and performative citizenship – to politicize conspiracy theorizing ‘from below’. Using QAnon as a case-in-point, the article introduces two novel concepts that invite a sociological approach to conspiracism: first, the epistemic communities of the unreal, which designates the participatory, interactive, and decentralized nature of collaboratively creating unreal explanations of the real world; and second, grassroots conspiracism, which denotes the ways in which these bottom-up, horizontal, and collective meaning-making practices and knowledge-production processes are expanding spaces of and for politics.

Epistemic Communities, Between Science and Power in International Domains: A Systematic Literature Review

Epistemic communities were emphasized in constructivism discourse as powerful emerging non-state actors that can drive policies in international domains. The rise of scientific consortiums in policymaking has driven policy directions by using scientific standards. Other realms in international relations also recognize the roles of scientific communities other than creating standards to fix global challenges, such as to serve states’ interests and cooperation tools. This study aims to investigate which realm of epistemic communities are more prevalent. The tools and conditions for influential epistemic communities were also not sufficiently investigated. By using a systematic literature review (SLR) that is overlooked in international relations studies, this paper organized previous databases that use primary data on epistemic communities. The result of this paper shows epistemic communities are the most prevalent in creating scientific standards to address global challenges. Some tools that used were knowledge transfers, training, research collaborations, and networking funding. However, other studies also found that scientific consortiums may be used to legitimize the status quo. In sensitive issues like transboundary pollution, more distrust was found. This study eventually draws some limitations and agenda for future studies.

How conspiratorial beliefs spread, and how real conspiracies are covered up

ABSTRACT Recent research on conspiracy theories (in philosophy and elsewhere) has tended to focus on beliefs that seem (from a ‘mainstream’ perspective) outlandish and patently false: QAnon, Covid-19 vaccines containing traceable microchips, 9/11 as an ‘inside job’. What is arguably conspicuously absent in much of this literature is a parallel reflection on the existence of real conspiracies. To fill this lacuna, I adopt an environmental epistemic perspective – where agents are considered in the broader context of epistemic environments and where attentional networks and perceptions of trustworthiness significantly influence the uptake of beliefs in an epistemic community – to explain both how conspiratorial beliefs spread and how real conspiracies can be hidden from the public. I argue that these two kinds of processes are each other’s counterparts, structurally having much in common. In both cases, epistemic environments can be ‘engineered’ so as to foster the spread of certain beliefs (regardless of their truth or plausibility), or alternatively so as to hide certain facts that conspirators do not want to become widely known. A pessimistic implication of my analysis seems to be that we are simply not well-equipped to distinguish, on principled grounds, conspiratorial beliefs that merit further investigation from those that do not.

“The value-free ideal, the autonomy thesis, and cognitive diversity”

Some debates about the role of non-epistemic values in science discuss the so-called Value-Free Ideal together with the autonomy thesis, to the point that they may be assumed to be intertwined. As I will argue in this article, the two are independent from one another, are supported by different arguments, and ought to be disentangled. I will also show that the arguments against value-freedom and supporting a value-laden conception of science, are different from the arguments against autonomy, which support democratized science. Moreover, while some of the arguments against autonomy and for democratized science may actually be consistent with value-freedom, they conflict with some philosophical views about the internal diversity of well-designed epistemic communities. This article distinguishes the Value-Free Ideal and the autonomy thesis, as well as their antitheses, and investigates their relations to some of the socio-epistemological models of the social organization of scientific research. Its aim is to make explicit some incompatibilities between different normative frameworks developed in philosophy of science.

Beliefs, Values, and Practices in Development Studies

This article uses a survey of Development Studies (DS) professors and students in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom to answer three questions about academic DS. DS is defined in part by a commitment to improve the world, and the first questions ask if the respondents believe that DS lives up to this defining criteria. The second group of questions asks about the ethical commitments of DS academics and how these commitments inform our research and teaching. Finally, I explore cross-national variation in how we practice DS. I ask about the methods, training, and disciplinary norms of DS academics across the three countries. In asking about beliefs, values, and practices and in exploring cross-national variation in our answers, I seek to both build self-knowledge about DS academics as a cross-national epistemic community and also to encourage self-reflection about how we can harmonise our empirical beliefs, ethical commitments, and professional practices.

The International Institute of the Middle Classes in the Early Twentieth Century: Economic Policies, Theoretical Models, and Action Plans

In the context of the recent debate on the role played by economists, international organisations, and epistemic communities in the development of new theoretical models and international economic policies, this paper aims to explore the contribution made by the International Institute of the Middle Classes. Such an organisation identified economic policy and analysis as the key to dealing with the social conflict that arose in Europe in the 1800s and 1900s. In addition to confirming the importance played by cooperation in the building of a new European order that could prevent social conflict, the exchange of ideas that occurred during the Congresses held by the Institute in different European cities in the early 1900s brought attention to the issue of social policies aimed at the middle classes. This would become crucial in the logic underlying the Italian welfare state, with the Bismarckian model providing the perfect liberal solution.

Approaches to policy framing: deepening a conversation across perspectives

Since Rein and Schön developed their approach to policy framing analysis in the1990s, a range of approaches to policy framing have emerged to inform our understanding of policy processes. Prior attempts to illuminate the diversity of approaches to framing in public policy have largely “stayed in their lane,” making distinctions in approaches within shared epistemic communities. The aim in this paper is to map different approaches to framing used in policy sciences journals, to articulate what each contributes to the understanding of the policy process, and to provide a heuristic to aid in deciding how to use the diverse approaches in framing analysis and to further the dialogue across different approaches. To develop the heuristic, we manually coded and analyzed 68 articles published between 1997 and 2018 using “frame” or “framing” in their title or abstract from four policy journals: Critical Policy Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, Policy Sciences, and Policy Studies Journal. We identified five approaches, which we label: sensemaking, discourse, contestation, explanatory and institutional. We have found that these approaches do not align with a simple binary between interpretive and positivist but show variation, particularly along the lines of aims, methodology and methods. In the discussion, we suggest that these five approaches raise four key questions that animate framing studies in policy analysis: (1) Do frames influence policies or are policies manifestations of framing? (2) What is the role of frame contestation in policy conflict? (3) How can the study of frames or framing reveal unheard voices? And (4) how do certain frames/framings become dominant? By introducing these questions, we offer a fresh way scholars might discuss frames and framing in the policy sciences across approaches, to highlight the distinct yet complementary ways they illuminate policy processes.

Arguing across spaces in an online epistemic community

Abstract Wikipedia is the most consulted source of information on the web, on a global level. The collective writing of articles, open to the participation of all, can give rise to major conflicts between contributors, in texts and debates, given the high stakes involved in achieving agreement on a public presentation of controversial topics. We present analyses of how disagreements are managed across socio-technical and dialogical spaces in French Wikipedia, with respect to two case studies, on Freud and the Turin Shroud. We adopt a mixed methods approach, combining results of analyses of interviews with moderators in these articles and argumentative discussions underlying them, within a broadly pragma-dialectical framework. We show, on one hand, that moderators’ attempts to resolve disagreements by requiring participants to cite sources simply displace conflicts to the nature of those sources, their validity, their authors and the good faith of their proponents. Debates concerning sources themselves draw on social actors’ perspectives in dialogical spaces, beyond the discussion itself. Disagreements are managed rather than resolved dialectically by displacing them to alternative socio-technical spaces, such as different sections of the text itself, or participants’ personal pages.

International knowledge connectivity and the increasing concentration of innovation in major global cities

Abstract We argue that trans-local knowledge connections positively impact local epistemic inventor communities in global cities, using patent citations as an indicator of global knowledge connectivity. Patented inventions have become more concentrated in the most internationally connected global cities, increasing inter-regional inequality. We identify two dimensions of knowledge connectivity: the compatibility of connections between similar profiles of technological knowledge, and the geographical diversity of knowledge connections between differently specialized global cities. We suggest that interaction between local and international inventor epistemic communities is now a vital driver of local innovation in global cities, and interregional inequality between these and other cities.