Epistemic Drift Research Articles

O TEMPO DO SONHO: POESIA CÓSMICA E METAMORFOSE NAS CULTURAS INDÍGENAS

Abstract: We present the conception, which is a hallmark of various indigenous cultures, especially the Amerindian and Australian ones, of an original Dreamtime, in which everything is possible because all forms of life flow, in the passage from the invisible to the visible, in a constant autopoietic metamorphosis. This Dreamtime, synonymous with the inexhaustible virtuality of the possible, is hidden or forgotten in the triumph of conceptual and categorical thinking, dominant in the West since the Platonic-Aristotelian and epistemic drift of philosophy, which apparently solidifies the world by enclosing the chaosmic flow in the classification of beings into species, genera and individuals, just as in the laws of apparent causality. The Dreamtime can, however, be experienced at any moment through mythicalritual performance, poetic song and the differentiated states of consciousness they induce, as in the intermediation of the shaman who, devoid of identity, moves freely between the multiple perspectives that configure the processes of the multiple beings and worlds. Resumen: Apresentamos a concepção, marcante em várias culturas indígenas, com destaque para as ameríndias e australianas, de um originário Tempo do Sonho, no qual tudo é possível pois todas as formas de vida fluem, na passagem do invisível ao visível, numa constante metamorfose autopoiética. Este Tempo do Sonho, sinónimo da inesgotável virtualidade do possível, oculta-se ou é esquecido no triunfo do pensamento conceptual e categorial, dominante no Ocidente a partir da deriva platónico-aristotélica e epistémica da filosofia. O Tempo do Sonho pode, todavia, ser a cada momento experienciado mediante o desempenho mítico-ritual, o canto poético e os estados diferenciados de consciência por eles induzidos, como na intermediação do xamã que, livre de identidade, transita livremente entre as múltiplas perspectivas configuradoras dos processos dos múltiplos seres e mundos. Abstract: We present the concept, which is marked in various indigenous cultures, especially the Amerindian and Australian ones, of an original Dreamtime, in which everything is possible because all forms of life flow, in the passage from the invisible to the visible, in a constant autopoietic metamorphosis. This Dreamtime, synonymous with the inexhaustible virtuality of the possible, is hidden or forgotten in the triumph of conceptual and categorical thinking, dominant in the West since the Platonic-Aristotelian and epistemic drift of philosophy. The Dreamtime can, however, be experienced at every moment through mythical-ritual performance, poetic song and the differentiated states of consciousness they induce, as in the intermediation of the shaman who, free of identity, moves freely between the multiple perspectives that configure the processes of multiple beings and worlds.

The mass production of learning: positive behaviour in a datafied education system

ABSTRACTSchool-wide positive behaviour support, SWPBS for short, is the collective term for whole-school intervention schemes that aim at redirecting unwelcome behaviour towards learning. SWPBS developed in response to what is thought to be a rising tide of social problems caused by youth. During the last decade, in particular, SWPBS schemes have become mainstream, also in Scandinavian countries. Using a social epistemological lens, this study critically reviews the present popularity of SWPBS in light of a contrary finding: namely, that there is no clear evidence of a reduction in youth-related social problems in SWPBS studies. Studies instead reflect significant epistemic drift in what SWPBS is thought to be an answer to, away from social problems and towards school effectiveness. The discussion highlights a general consequence to this epistemic drift. SWPBS generally commits schools to increased levels of data production and strict loyalty to intervention routines. In effect, learning drifts towards a technology. The text concludes with reflection issues that apply to a technologizing system of education.

Guest Editor's Introduction: Toward an Archaeogenealogy of Post-truth

Guest Editor's Introduction: Toward an Archaeogenealogy of Post-truth

(Re)shaping educational research through ‘programmification’: Institutional expansion, change, and translation in Norway

AbstractEducational research in Norway has experienced unprecedented structural expansion and cognitive shifts over the last two decades because of greater state investments and the strategic use of extensive and multi‐year thematic programmes to fund research projects. Using a neo‐institutionalist framework, we examine institutionalisation dynamics in cultural‐cognitive, normative and regulative dimensions by means of interviews, research programme calls, policy documents and funding data. In the cultural‐cognitive dimension, we find references to the knowledge society, the perceived importance of evidence in policymaking and ideas of quality, excellence and relevance. In the normative dimension, we find the introduction of new professional and methodological standards, reflecting broader global patterns of academic and epistemic drift. In the regulative dimension, the strengthened role of both government and the Research Council of Norway is manifest in substantial growth in both funding and large‐scale, long‐term planning, including thematic choices—evidence of ‘programmification’. The importance of external models has grown in an era of internationalisation, yet translation occurs at every level of the governance of educational research. This results in a specific Norwegian research model, guided by a mode of governance of programmes that maintains social values that are traditionally strong in Nordic societies.

Two worlds of educational research? Comparing the levels, objects, disciplines, methodologies, and themes in educational research in the UK and Germany, 2005–2015

Embedded in social worlds, education systems and research reflect distinct national trajectories. We compare two contrasting traditions of educational research (ER). Whereas British ER exhibits a multidisciplinary and pragmatic character, German ER reflects pedagogy and mainly humanities-based traditions. Yet, in both countries, policymakers’ growing demand for evidence in ER resulted in increased funding, specific research programs, and mandatory large-scale assessments. These have reshaped the field, suggesting more similar ER agendas. Based on a comprehensive original dataset of basic ER projects funded by the main grant-making agencies in both countries (2005–2015), we analyze five dimensions: levels, objects, disciplines, methodologies, and themes. We find epistemic drift, with partial convergence characterized by a multi-level focus, multidisciplinary approach, strongly empirical and quantitative methodology, and a premium on teaching and learning themes. The cases remain distinct in exploring systemic questions in a wider contextual frame (UK) or concentrating more narrowly on the individual learner (Germany).

Constructive alignment: from professional teaching technique to governance of profession

The focus of this article is on changes of epistemic content in evaluating and controlling teaching at universities. Methodologically, in this study, we integrate macro-historical-political configurations with contemporary micro-social situations in contrast to a discursive-philosophical orientation. We strive for integration between historical processes and social practices. From the theoretical point of departure in the concept of epistemic drift, we want to investigate the changes and ambivalences that are the consequences when epistemic criteria developed in one social jurisdiction (research on teaching and learning in the 1970s and 1980s) are used in another social setting (teaching and learning in higher education, or TLHE, in the 2010s). The epistemic content discussed here is the qualitative turn of teaching and learning in the 1970 s and 1980s, a turn that paved the way for the conceptualization of constructive alignment (CA) later in the 1990s, the concept that is the object of analysis. As the text moves on, it will be shown how CA gradually merge with a managerial form of learning outcome, in various policy contexts on European, national (Sweden) and university levels. We describe how CA became institutionalized as the most common pedagogical model in Swedish TLHE courses. Against this background of historical processes – the theoretical pedagogical foundation of CA, Bologna policies in Europe and Swedish higher education policies and national institutionalization of CA – we illustrate ethnographically how CA is received in local, social situations.

Manufactured Scientific Consensus: A Reply to Ceccarelli

Manufactured Scientific Consensus: A Reply to Ceccarelli Steve Fuller (bio) It is with bemusement that I come to query Leah Ceccarelli’s promotion of the phrase “manufactured scientific controversy,” especially as a pejorative.1 It would seem to presume that there is something wrong when scientific controversies have not come about in some “natural” way. The phrase also invites a complementary consideration of “manufactured” and “natural” scientific consensus. The philosophical paper trail on this latter issue starts with Charles Sanders Peirce and runs through Karl Popper and eventually to Jürgen Habermas. Peirce set this inquiry on the right footing when he proposed that scientific validity is governed not by the moment-to-moment epistemic drift in scientific opinion but an envisaged agreement in the ultimate set of inquirers “at the end of time.” This normative horizon encourages us to go beyond merely extrapolating from present trends into the future—a fetishization of the current orthodoxy—to imagining that the shape of long periods of change in the past will be reproduced in the future. Such reasoning is akin to the sort of knowledge that financiers aim to have of the firms in which they might invest, and corresponds to the vision of would-be scientific revolutionaries who happily risk collective past achievements on behalf of a bolder if speculative future.2 Seen from that second-order perspective, those angling for a Peircean consensus should endorse what Hilary Putnam dubbed the “pessimistic meta-induction,” according to which, based on science’s historical track [End Page 753] record, most of what we believe now as fundamental explanatory principles—though not necessarily the evidence invoked in their support—is likely to be superseded in a century’s time.3 Here we need to take the Gestalt switch model of scientific revolution seriously: What makes a previously duck-looking figure suddenly appear rabbit-like is a change not in the figure’s details but in the overarching frame of reference used to interpret it. But if Putnam is right, why even wait a century to witness this radical change in frameworks? Why not manufacture controversies, the outcomes of which will get us nearer that ultimate consensus? This was certainly the spirit in which Popper offered falsifiability as the mark of the scientific: It was meant to expedite progress, perhaps even at a rate faster than the scientific establishment would wish, especially considering how the outcomes might affect investment and employment patterns in science. (That alone may explain why science is not Popperian in practice.) Of course, not every attempt at falsification is destined to succeed—in fact, most fail. But assuming that the results are publicly available (per Popper’s “open society” vision of science), everyone will have benefited from the lessons drawn from these tests to established thinking. My response to Leah Ceccarelli’s “Manufactured Scientific Controversy” begins on this note because there is no reason to presume either that consensus is normal in science or that whatever consensus exists in science is anything more than an institutionally sanctioned opinion about theories whose ultimate prospects are still up for grabs. If science is ultimately about following the truth wherever it may lead, then one should expect inquirers to diverge in their paths, as they extend the same knowledge base in various directions, only some of which will bear substantial fruit, sway colleagues, and have other positive outcomes. However, this inertial tendency is periodically interrupted by the perceived need for the scientific community to present a united front. The source of this need is at least threefold: resource constraint, legitimation crisis, and policy relevance. The first threatens to turn alternative research trajectories into potential competitors, the second corresponds to the self-generated “crisis” of a Kuhnian paradigm, and the third refers to the situations on which Ceccarelli focuses. In this last set of cases, there is a general expectation that “science” must speak in one voice to a pressing matter of public concern.4 Ceccarelli’s normative horizon is most clearly explained in terms of a distinctly American “liberal” sensibility that recoils at the thought of HIV-AIDS [End Page 754] denial, global warming skepticism, and antievolution.5 I say this because nothing...

The Intellectual Crisis in Philanthropy

Defenders of modern philanthropic freedom often defend donor intent and celebrate voluntary action. Nevertheless, donor intent and voluntarism have often undermined the conditions of constitutional freedom. This paper proposes that philanthropy currently suffers an intellectual crisis very much like the intellectual crisis in public administration diagnosed by Vincent Ostrom. The Common Core State Standards initiative is a case study of the problems of epistemic drift in philanthropy and raises questions about whether merely defending donor intent and voluntary action for their own sake is sufficient. To escape philanthropy’s current intellectual crisis requires a clearer consideration of the epistemic choices that shape donor intent and voluntary action.

Intellection and Indiscipline

A discipline will usually become the object of study and its relationship to other disciplines a moment of concern when its borders are precarious and its definition in dispute. Law, ‘the oldest social science’, is arguably both prior to discipline — it emerges initially and most forcefully as a practice — and without discipline, its object being potentially all human behaviour. If law is necessarily between and among disciplines, both prone to moonlighting and everywhere homeless, it will also always be in some mode of scholarly crisis. Certain conclusions follow. Law is paradoxically dependent upon other disciplines for its access to the domains that it regulates. The greater its epistemic dependency, however, the slighter its political acknowledgment of that subordination. Which allows a positive thesis: the epistemic drift of law can carry the discipline to a frank acknowledgment of the value of indiscipline both to novelty and intellection.

Procedural Control of the Bureaucracy, Peer Review, and Epistemic Drift

Regulatory peer review—in which independent scientists comment on the technical underpinnings of proposed regulations—is a recently pursued form of political control of the bureaucracy. This article situates regulatory peer review in the context of both the history of technical advice to government and the principal-agent perspective often used to explain the presence of administrative procedures. Much of the academic discussion of attempts to influence bureaucratic decision making has utilized principal-agent theory. We introduce two novel concepts to accommodate regulatory peer review into the principal-agent framework. The first is “technocracy” where the preferences of technical experts displace public preferences. The second is “epistemic drift,” a change in embodied knowledge that contributes to departures from the policy intentions of an enacting coalition of policy makers. In addition to introducing these concepts, we argue that regulatory peer review is more complex than other administrative procedures and that its efficacy critically depends on the details of its implementation. We hypothesize that regulatory peer review will cause nongovernmental participants in regulatory conflicts to devote more effort to creating research and other epistemic resources. But we also hypothesize that, just as courts have become more politicized with their role in regulatory policy, peer review and regulatory science will become increasingly politicized as well.

Procedural Control of the Bureaucracy, Peer Review, and Epistemic Drift

Regulatory peer review - in which independent scientists comment on the technical underpinnings of proposed regulations - is a recently pursued form of political control of the bureaucracy. This paper situates regulatory peer review in the context of both the history of technical advice to government and the principal-agent perspective often used to explain the presence of administrative procedures. We introduce two novel concepts to accommodate regulatory peer review: Technocracy, a consequence of information asymmetries, is a form of bureaucratic drift in which the preferences of technical experts displace public preferences. Epistemic drift, an explanatory category akin to bureaucratic or coalitional drift, is a change in embodied knowledge that contributes to departures from the policy intentions of an enacting coalition. In addition to introducing these concepts, we argue that regulatory peer review is more complex than other administrative procedures, and that its efficacy critically depends on the details of its implementation. We hypothesize that regulatory peer review will cause non-governmental participants in regulatory conflicts to devote more effort to creating research and other epistemic resources. But we also hypothesize that, just as courts have become more politicized with their role in regulatory policy, peer review and regulatory science will become increasingly politicized as well.

Learning from Lomborg: or where do anti‐environmentalists come from?

Whether we think of it as a new mode of knowledge production or as a more general condition of ‘epistemic drift’, there has been a rather significant change in the social relations of science over ...

Research for Sale: moral market or moral maze?

AbstractThis article considers some of the moral and social issues which are raised as the funding and character of university research in education shifts increasingly in the direction of ‘contract research’ and as those purchasing such research claim increasing ownership and control over its conduct and its publication. The article formulates these proprietorial rights as a set of propositions and then seeks to challenge them. It advances, first, an epistemological challenge based on considerations of ‘epistemic drift’; second, a moral argument against restrictive ownership of educational knowledge and then a political case based on the principles of liberal democracy. However, the article acknowledges that there are moral complexities which disturb an oversimple conclusion to the debate. It offers the reader alternative pathways to a conclusion which can be read as ending either on the resounding note struck by Roszack's defence of ‘the delinquent academy’ or on a more ambivalent note of moral complexity.

The science-society contract in historical transformation: with special reference to “epistemic drift”

This paper locates the discussion around the finalization thesis in a broader science policy context, linking it to the recent discourse on a changing science-society contract. It is argued that the broadening of the Kuhnian concept of the paradigm, making it amenable to science policy studies, was an important move. Further development of this notion, however, standed on the prongs of critique coming from both the worlds of politics and science. At the same time, advances in the cognitive sociology of science undermined the internalist/externalist distinction. Today, with certain changes in the conditions of research due to the introduction of the concept of “strategic research”, politicians are more apt to accept certain points of the thesis; scientific communities, on the other hand, perceive new threats to their autonomy. This paper tries to make sense of this new situation by translating the question of interplay between internal and external dynamics of research into one involving boundary management and epistemic criteria. The notion of “epistemic drift” is introduced and the internalist/externalist distinction refurbished in neo-institutionalist terms, making use of the concept of interfoliating credibility cycles.

Large-scale military funding induces culture clash

Mission-oriented research shifts the assessment of research products and potential from scientists to external factors. This is the point of mission funding, but it introduces what the author calls ‘epistemic drift’, which is part of a more general clash between different value systems and cultures. The culture clash between the military and industry has led to a shift in debate from spin-off to dual-use technologies. Similar conflicts and tensions are introduced into the university research system by large-scale mission funding such as that of SDI, and it is imperative that universities establish a strong civilian base for fundamental research funding instead of lobbying for military support.

Strategic Defense Initiative Research A Gray Area for Ethics

SUMMARYThe arguments concerning the militarization of research fifteen years ago in connection with the war in Vietnam had to do with more manifest indicators of a military link. Then it was a question often of applied research, and the physical or institutional control over such research. Today we are dealing with new technologies and their basic research underpinnings. Because of the character of these new military technologies, we are facing extensive gray areas. It is no longer possible to so clearly discern boundary lines. Thus it becomes more difficult also to clearly determine when one should hold off from a certain type of research for ethical reasons. Such boundaries also blur.As research and development has become increasingly target or mission oriented, externalist assessments relating to social and political problem definitions have taken on greater prominence in defining what is important. An epistemic drift has been noted, a shift whereby assessments of quality or utility by outsiders and nonscientists have become more common. A corollary to this epistemic drift is the erosion of the meaning of basic research in the direction of practice‐relevance, a problem that concerns laser physicists as well as social scientists in newly emerging disciplines.37At a very general level, we might speak of a change in the social paradigm of science, a change that has become more obvious in the last couple of decades as the role of the state has expanded.Finally it is clear that the concept of epistemic drift has to be divested of ideological overtones, particularly those that would equate it with a purist assumption of autonomy and disembodied science. Science as a whole is founded as a social mandate, and autonomy is always relative. What is at issue here is rather the integrity and meaning of scientific enterprise.