Epistemic Habits Research Articles

The “Grand Tour” of the Communist: Wilhelm Mach’s Queer Travel Writing*

The articles addresses three problems referring to Wilhelm Mach’s travelogues: first of all, the relation between the act of writing and the quest for the truth of the self; secondly, the pivotal role of intimate memory and experience in the understanding of transnational political movements and in the third place, the unique point of view of a queer person who dissent from the dominant stereotypes and epistemic habits. Mach answers to all those questions in a very specific and unique manner – he disrupts the structure of the narrative, giving way to different techniques of registration and notation. Thus he pushes his travel writing in the liminal area of creative non-fiction which is a fascinating reaction to the oppressive rules of realism posed to the artists by communist regime. Mach’s travelogues about India and Bulgaria are discussed here in particular because they are an example of the writer’s personal ‘Grand Tour’ although it is a ‘Grand Tour’ organized under the constrictions of a totalitarian regime and experienced by a Marxist. Those historical and philosophical circumstances determine the peculiar image of both India and Bulgaria created by Mach. Under the political correctness required by the Stalinist censorship Mach’s texts are subversive and non-canonical.

Queer Love, Literature and Philosophy. On Reading The Argonauts

In this article, I suggest Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts challenges “epistemic habits” in contemporary critical thought on gender, politics, sexuality, intimacy, identity, and love. In particular, I focus on how Nelson through descriptions of queer life, love, and kinship articulates moral-existential and queer-philosophical perspectives on everyday life by bringing the “I-You” relationship to the fore of feminist and queer theoretical concerns. By reading Nelson with the philosophy of Wittgenstein, I discuss how love is related to views on language and what it means to say that one can have, as well as lack a faith in words, other people and linguistic meaning. The Argonauts, I argue, shows us the importance of acknowledging moral-existential perspectives of gender and identity and their role in I-You relations. The article raises questions of how to understand the relationship between theory, philosophy, and ordinary language in relation to cultural critique and criticism (Butler 1990; Sedgwick 2003). It also discusses love as a perspective one might take and have in life and to other people in general, not exclusively as romantic love, but as a philosophical perspective in thinking about gender, identity, politics, love, and intimacy.

To Cut Down the Dreaming: Epistemic Violence, Ambivalence and the Logic of Coloniality

ABSTRACT The main argument presented here is that in cultural contact zones, such as the Australian settler state, there can emerge violent tendencies in dominant patterns of thought, as both epistemic habits and systems of value. The logic of coloniality is one of war, destruction and inequality, and this is expressed through attempted erasure and actual ambivalence towards Indigenous peoples, their lands, waters, Laws and cultures. This is supported by habits of epistemic violence and axiological retreat. This paper examines such habits, through an ethnographically informed and localised case study of the destruction of an ancestral Dreaming site on Yanyuwa country in the Gulf of Carpentaria, northern Australia. In this instance the body of Yulungurri, the ancestral Tiger Shark, manifest in a large cycad palm, was cut down. Read through the lens of axiological retreat, and coloniality’s ambivalence towards Indigenous presence, the discussion considers the dispositions which lead to and support violence in such forms and how these might become naturalised or concealed in everyday life.

Vital Philology: On How to Foil the Immanent Extinction of Critique

Using the motif of the hipster to consider the arrival of the concept “Anthropocene” into the orbit of critical theory, this essay establishes the grave existential consequences that issue from the infatuation with, and rapid, uncritical uptake and circulation of, concepts in a philosophical market overcome by neoliberal pressures. These epistemic habits align with political commitments that unwittingly controvert the original intents of critique—and this paradox requires remediation. This essay, thus, argues for a recalibration of epistemic praxis by reclaiming a retro, critical, vital form of philology—figured as both a scholarly practice and a way of life. The hope is to counter the stultifying force of the late-capitalist praxis of commodification, consumption, and hyper-production of concepts spawned by the fatal lure of progress narratives and the fetishization of innovation and originality they entail. Accordingly, we might resolve the tension between habits and politics and account for vital differences and resistances not revealed by the mutation of critique inherent in contemporary strategies. Thus, not only might epistemic politics evolve, but critical theory may also avert extinction by revitalizing it as a dynamic life practice.

Social media as inadvertent educators

ABSTRACT My aim in this paper is to examine the epistemic habits that agents develop through frequent social media usage. I point out that extensive social media usage is conducive to the development of closed-mindedness and unreflective thinking and accordingly argue that social media act as inadvertent educators of epistemic vices. I contend that understanding social media as generators of epistemic dispositions is of significant import to intellectual character education. It shows the urgency of incorporating in educational curricula pedagogical methods that eliminate the bad (disvaluable) epistemic habits that agents acquire through frequent social media usage. I propose character building through problem-solving as an effective educational method for efficiently offsetting such habits. Fostering intellectual virtues through problem-solving safeguards against intellectual vices commonly developed through extensive social media usage. At the same time such an educational approach trains students’ information-seeking abilities.

From filters to fillers: an active inference approach to body image distortion in the selfie era

Advances in artificial intelligence, as well as its increased presence in everyday life, have brought the emergence of many new phenomena, including an intriguing appearance of what seems to be a variant of body dysmorphic disorder, coined “Snapchat dysmorphia”. Body dysmorphic disorder is a DSM-5 psychiatric disorder defined as a preoccupation with one or more perceived defects or flaws in physical appearance that are not observable or appear slight to others. Snapchat dysmorphia is fueled by automated selfie filters that reflect unrealistic sociocultural standard. In this paper, we discuss how body dysmorphic disorder and related body image distortions could arise, using the conceptual resources provided by the active inference framework. We suggest that these disorders involve dysfunctional self-modelling which entails maladaptive internalization of sociocultural preferences during adolescent identity formation. Identity formation is hereby described as cycles of interpersonal active inference that arbitrate between identity exploration and commitment. We propose that impaired self-modelling is unable to reduce interpersonal uncertainty during identity exploration, which, over time, degenerates into uncontrollable epistemic habits that isolate the body image from corrective sensory evidence. In light of these insights, we subsequently explore some of the consequences of image-centered social media platforms on the identity formation process. We conclude that heightened interpersonal uncertainty in this novel context could precipitate the onset of body dysmorphic disorder and related body image distortions, particularly when selfie filters are involved.

A Critique of Our Own? On Intersectionality and “Epistemic Habits” in a Study of Racialization and Homonationalism in a Nordic Context

ABSTRACT This article discusses how debates regarding intersectionality enable self-reflexitivity, positionality and critique, but also risk becoming routinized gestures in activist and academic settings. Through reflections on the notions of epistemic habits and epistemic whiteness, the article discusses key critiques of intersectional analysis, such as tendencies to re-centre whiteness, as a methodological concern. To illuminate the argument, I consider an example from a research project a colleague and I conducted on racialization and homonationalism in LGBTIQ activist work in a Finnish context, which brought up the question of whether our analysis reinforced or challenged whiteness. The aim of this article is to reflect on how intersectionality is a crucial concept for feminist knowledge production while also attending to and problematizing some presuppositions, that are routinely repeated as self-evident starting points in intersectionality research.

Fake news, relevant alternatives, and the degradation of our epistemic environment

ABSTRACTThis paper contributes to the growing literature in social epistemology of diagnosing the epistemically problematic features of fake news. I identify two novel problems: the problem of relevant alternatives; and the problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment. The former arises among individual epistemic transactions. By making salient, and thereby relevant, alternatives to knowledge claims, fake news stories threaten knowledge. The problem of the degradation of the epistemic environment arises at the level of entire epistemic communities. I introduce the notion of an epistemic environment, roughly the totality of resources and circumstances relevant to assessing the epistemically interesting statuses, such as knowledge. Fake news degrades our epistemic environment by undermining confidence in epistemic institutions and altering epistemic habits, thereby making the environment less conducive to achieving positive epistemic statuses. This is problematic even if the decrease in confidence and the altering of habits are rational. I end by considering solutions to these problems, stressing the importance of reproaching each other for proliferating fake news. I argue that we should reproach even faultless purveyors of fake news. This is because fake news typically arises in abnormal epistemic contexts, where there is widespread ignorance of, and noncompliance with, correct epistemic norms.

Violence in Place: Reading Violence through Kincentric Ecology

This article explores violence in place, with the intent to more broadly configure the notion of violence within sociological and anthropological discourse. So too it strives to expand the field of inquiry into the effects of human-induced violence on the place world, as made up of homelands, villages, communities, and ancestral realms. Throughout the discussion links are drawn between three particular forms of violence and their harmful effects on place: the physical destruction of place, the de-signification and social disordering of place identity and character, and elemental decay as ecological decline and toxicity in place. I argue that particular epistemic habits and dispositions allow for such violence to be carried out, in the pursuit of power, authority, land, and resources. Furthermore, other epistemic habits and dispositions, namely those provided for by Indigenous epistemologies, might present pathways out from unmitigated violence and towards practices of refrain and axiological return. I propose that this is achievable through a return to kincentricity, as expressed through human responsibility over rights, and recognition of place agency and sentiency as expressed through local empiricism.

Academic Feminisms: Between Disidentification, Messy Everyday Utopianism, and Cruel Optimism

This article reviews current debates on epistemic habits of critique and affirmation, specifically focusing on approaches which combine criticality with ways to encourage unfoldings of alternative futurities, figurations and worlding practices. Embedded in a process of critical self-reflection regarding epistemic habits, the article discusses disidentification (Butler 1993, Munoz 1999), cruel optimism (Berlant 2011), and everyday utopianism (Cooper 2014) understood as examples of such habits. The article explores how feminisms, unfolding within academia, and thus institutionally embedded in the logics of global capitalism, neoliberalism and particular nation-state politics, on the one the hand, are bound to a performance of cruel optimism, glossing over dilemmas and contradictions, and, on the other hand, perhaps enabled to enact messy kinds of everyday utopianism. Finally, the article reflects upon possibilities for changing one’s epistemic habits, suggesting a couple of changes: to systematically integrate reflections on changing conditions of academic knowledge production, as well as on geopolitical grammars. These issues are addressed as being interwoven with and mixed up in the epistemic practices that are produced by messy links with both feminist activist resistance and institutionalized and professionalized academic feminisms.

Assessing Critique, Scholarly ‘Habits’, Queer Method and ‘Turns’: An Interview with Heather Love

The interview considers the role of critique and epistemic habits within the fields of feminist, gender and queer studies. It addresses the collective, scholarly, activist and personal stakes in doing critical academic work as well as the politics of knowledge production. Assessing the role that the institutions have in producing critical knowledge it also discusses questions of method, description and ‘turns’ as well as material and social conditions of academic work.

Mood, Method and Affect: Current Shifts in Feminist Theory

Epistemic habits in feminist research are constantly changing in scope and emphasis. One of the most striking ruptures that we can observe these days, at least in the humanities, is a renewed epistemic interest among feminists in the question of mood, where both positive and negative affects come into play. Mood figures in a number of theoretical traditions, ranging from the hermeneutics of Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur, as well as in phenomenology, psychoanalytic theories of affect and in Deleuzian affect theory. In the article I want to explore two different approaches to the question of mood in feminist theory. In the first part, I will investigate Rita Felski’s treatment of mood in her recent attack on ‘critique’ as well as in her proposed alternative, her ‘post-critical’ approach to reading and interpretation. In so doing, I will formulate some questions that have emerged in my attempt to grapple with Felski’s post-critical approach. In the second part of this essay, I will delve into another understanding of the concept of mood, namely Deleuzian affect, and more specifically, as it has been embraced by feminist theorists such as Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz in their respective theoretical works. In the concluding part of this article, I will discuss some of the implications of the different takes on mood for feminist epistemic habits.

Investigating Desires, Political Projects and Epistemic Habits in Academic Feminism: A Conversation with Robyn Wiegman

The interview discusses the stakes in current debates regarding critique and addresses the challenges and the impasses that characterise our political present. The interview also explores questions concerning queer method, critical reading practices and the desires and political projects that have motivated feminist academic work.

Religion, Intersectionality, and Epistemic Habits of Academic Feminism. Perspectives from Global Feminist Theology

This article pays critical attention to the ways in which academic feminism has regarded religion. Issues related to religion and gender have by and large either been ignored or treated quite stereotypically. I have called this phenomenon a simultaneous under- and overestimation of religion. The phenomenon is not global. Feminists of the global south tend to pay much more and more multi-faceted attention to religion than scholars from the global north. I will illustrate this problem through a close reading of intersectionality in feminist research in religion, especially feminist theology. My argument – which can be supported by evidence from historical records – is that what has been called intersectionality since Kimberle Crenshaw, has in fact been explicitly present in early feminist theology (1970s-). The reason why feminist liberation theologians stressed the interstructuring of gender, class, and race/ethnicity lies in their practical and theoretical cooperation with liberation and feminist theologians from the global south, for example through the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT). My article is a critical re-reading of the history of feminist theorizing from the perspective of religious feminists, academic feminist theologians and liberation theologians from both the global north and south (including black and womanist theologians from the USA, Latin America and Africa). My aim is to correct a long-held understanding of the history of feminist theorizing as purely “secular”.

Counting Zero: Rethinking Feminist Epistemologies

This article concerns feminist engagements with epistemologies. Feminist epistemologies have revealed and challenged the exclusions and denigrations at work in knowledge production processes. And yet, the emphasis on the partiality of knowledge and the non-innocence of any subject position also cast doubt on the possibility of feminist political communities. In view of this, it has been argued that the very parameter of epistemology poses limitations for feminism, for it leads to either political paralysis or prescriptive politics that in fact undoes the political of politics. From a different perspective, decolonial feminists argue for radical epistemic disobedience and delinking the move beyond the confines of Western systems of knowledge and its extractive knowledge economy. Nevertheless, the oppositional logic informs both feminist epistemologies and its critiques, which I argue is symptomatic of the epistemic habits of academic feminism. This article ends with a preliminary reconsideration of the question of origin through the figure of zero. It asks whether it might be possible to conceive of feminist epistemologies as performing the task of counting zero – accounting for origin, wholeness, and universality – that takes into account specificities without forfeiting coalition and claims to knowledge.

Other People’s Problems: Student Distancing, Epistemic Responsibility, and Injustice

In classes that examine entrenched injustices like sexism or racism, students sometimes use “distancing strategies” to dissociate themselves from the injustice being studied. Education researchers argue that distancing is a mechanism through which students, especially students of apparent privilege, deny their complicity in systemic injustice. While I am sympathetic to this analysis, I argue that there is much at stake in student distancing that the current literature fails to recognize. On my view, distancing perpetuates socially sanctioned forms of ignorance and unknowing, through which students misrecognize not only their complicity in injustice, but also the ways that injustice shapes the world, their lives, and their knowledge. Thus, distancing is pedagogically problematic because it prevents students from understanding important social facts, and because it prevents them from engaging with perspectives, analyses, and testimonies that might beneficially challenge their settled views and epistemic habits. To substantiate this new analysis, I draw on recent work on epistemologies of ignorance, especially Jose Medina’s account of “active ignorance.” In order to respond to student distancing, I argue, it is not sufficient for teachers to make students aware of injustice, or of their potential complicity in it. Beyond this, teachers should cultivate epistemic virtue in the classroom and encourage students to take responsibility for better ways of knowing. The article ends by outlining several classroom practices for beginning this work.

Epistemic habits: primary school teachers’ development of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in a design-based research project

Generalist primary school teachers often have little or no training in school subjects such as science and technology. Not surprisingly, several studies show that they often experience difficulties ...

When cognition turns vicious: Heuristics and biases in light of virtue epistemology

In this paper, we explore the literature on cognitive heuristics and biases in light of virtue epistemology, specifically highlighting the two major positions—agent-reliabilism and agent-responsibilism (or neo-Aristotelianism)—as they apply to dual systems theories of cognition and the role of motivation in biases. We investigate under which conditions heuristics and biases might be characterized as vicious and conclude that a certain kind of intellectual arrogance can be attributed to an inappropriate reliance on Type 1, or the improper function of Type 2, cognitive processes. By the same token, the proper intervention of Type 2 processes results in the virtuous functioning of our cognitive systems (agent-reliabilism). Moreover, the role of motivation in attenuating cognitive biases and the cultivation of certain epistemic habits (a search for accuracy, being accountable for one's judgments, the use of rules of analysis, and exposure to differing perspectives) points to the tenets of agent-responsibilism in epistemic virtue. We identify the proper use of Type 2 cognitive processes and the habits of mind that attenuate biases as demonstrations of the virtue of intellectual humility. We briefly explore the nature of these habits and the contribution of personality traits, situational pressures, and training in their cultivation.

Combating Racialized and Gendered Ignorance: Theorizing a Transactional Pedagogy of Friendship

The article explores the problem of epistemological ignorance. Drawing on the literature of feminist epistemology, in particular the epistemologies of ignorance, it theorizes white ignorance and male ignorance and how it is possible to gain consciousness about one's ignorance, as well as how to be responsible for what one does not know. The article explores ignorance as unconscious habits that inform our mental schemas, our social interactions, and our physicality. It identifies and analyzes these habits of ignorance, drawing on our experiences as team teachers (one a philosophy professor, and the other a professor of women's studies and literary studies) who co-taught an interdisciplinary doctoral seminar in feminist epistemology. It describes and illustrates the pedagogical and scholarly processes that led us to view epistemology as a practice of inquiry that combats ignorance by demanding an inclusive partnership across traditional and counterhegemonic approaches to knowledge. The article claims that a transactional pedagogy of friendship makes possible the disruption and rehabituation of epistemic habits of ignorance, moving inquirers in the direction of more inclusive, reliable, and responsible knowledge.

Reading Order and Sentiment in Colonial ArchivesAlong the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Ann Laura Stoler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

In Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Ann Laura Stoler examines the apprehensions, epistemic uncertainties, and sentiments that shaped colonial policy in the Dutch Indies. The author presents a nuanced and meticulous reading of official nineteenthand twentiethcentury Dutch colonial archives and decenters how postcolonial scholars, feminist scholars, and historians have characteristically approached colonial texts. The aim of many postcolonial scholars is to recuperate and reintroduce the voices and agency of colonized or subaltern individuals. In contrast, Stoler seeks to elucidate the epistemologies and sentiments of colonial administrators, teachers, doctors, and orphanage directors by reading Dutch colonial archives “along the grain.” She views colonial archives as fleeting configurations of epistemological and political anxieties rather than sites of pure erasure or misrepresentation. Treating archives as ethnographic data in this way illuminates the aspirations, dissentions, epistemic anxieties, and sentiments of colonial officials and draws attention to the “fault lines and ragged edges of colonialism’s archival genres” (p. 53). In discerning the ruptures and inconsistencies within colonial common sense, Stoler explores how colonial administrators sought to assess and identify politically versus privately motivated sentiments and to classify racial and social boundaries. In pursuing this task, Stoler develops the central theoretical argument that political rationalities of administrative authorities were as equally founded in managing affective states and sentiments as they were in the mastery of specific principles of reason and rationality. Systems of scientific knowledge and reasoned management may have been the foundations of colonial authority but only insofar as they were grounded in the simultaneous governance of affections and sentiments. The establishment of a “colonial order of things,” through which colonial policies arose, was founded on a European common sense, or specific epistemic habits,