Epistemic Issues Research Articles

Translation also is a matter of style

This paper illustrates a relative unconsidered aspect of Alexander von Humboldt’s life and work: translation. Humboldt was however very aware of the importance of translation as a way to diffuse geographical knowledge. If this question concerns many actors (translators, editors especially) and draws networks around Humboldt, it is also shaped by an epistemic, heuristic and stylistic issues. This paper will precisely focus on the stylistic aspect of the translation of the Cosmos, Humboldt’s masterpiece.

Why Finance Needs Philosophy (and Vice Versa): Some Epistemic and Methodological Issues

As the world economy has for better or worse become more and more dependent on the financial markets, a rethinking of the role of finance in both theory and practice is necessary. I argue that such a rethinking requires a new look at the theories of finance that is philosophical in kind. In effect, as Martha Nussbaum claims, if the absence of philosophy in economics is arguably one of the main reasons for the flaws in certain economic theories, the absence of philosophy in finance is one the main reasons for the flaws in our theories on financial systems. In this paper I discuss the mutual relations and benefits between finance and philosophy. First, I examine the contribution that philosophy can offer to finance by analyzing a few critical issues in financial ontology (Section 2.1), financial methodology (Section 2.2) and financial mathematics (Section 2.3). I argue that philosophy is essential to enabling finance to achieve the goals for which it was designed, not only because it is a valuable external addition, but also internally, since philosophy is the proper tool for bringing about new theories and approaches. Then, I examine the contribution that finance can offer to philosophy by analyzing the relationship between theory and practice (Section 3.1), data and hypothesis (Section 3.2), and prediction, description and control (Section 3.3) in the context of financial systems. I argue that finance can help us to rethink some philosophical tenets on these issues.

Epistemic issues in computational reproducibility: software as the elephant in the room

Computational reproducibility (i.e. issues of reproducibility stemming from the computer as a scientific tool) possesses its own dynamics and narratives of crisis. Alongside the difficulties of computing as an ubiquitous yet complex scientific activity, computational reproducibility suffers from a naive expectancy of total reproducibility and a moral imperative to embrace the principles of free software as a non-negotiable epistemic virtue. We argue that the epistemic issues at stake in actual practices of computational reproducibility are best unveiled by focusing on software as a pivotal concept, one that is surprisingly often overlooked in accounts of reproducibility issues. Software is not only about designing and coding but also about maintaining, supporting, distributing, licensing, and governance; it is not only about developers but also about users. We focus on openness debates among computational chemists involved in molecular modeling software packages as empirical grounding for our argument. We then identify and analyse four epistemic characteristics (transparency, consistency, sustainability and inclusivity) as key to the role of software in computational reproducibility.

Artifacts and affordances: from designed properties to possibilities for action

In this paper I critically evaluate the value neutrality thesis regarding technology, and find it wanting. I then introduce the various ways in which artifacts can come to influence moral value, and our evaluation of moral situations and actions. Here, following van de Poel and Kroes, I introduce the idea of value sensitive design. Specifically, I show how by virtue of their designed properties, artifacts may come to embody values. Such accounts, however, have several shortcomings. In agreement with Michael Klenk, I raise epistemic and metaphysical issues with respect to designed properties embodying value. The concept of an affordance, borrowed from ecological psychology, provides a more philosophically fruitful grounding to the potential way(s) in which artifacts might embody values. This is due to the way in which it incorporates key insights from perception more generally, and how we go about determining possibilities for action in our environment specifically. The affordance account as it is presented by Klenk, however, is insufficient. I therefore argue that we understand affordances based on whether they are meaningful, and, secondly, that we grade them based on their force.

From FAIR data to fair data use: Methodological data fairness in health-related social media research

The paper problematises the reliability and ethics of using social media data, such as sourced from Twitter or Instagram, to carry out health-related research. As in many other domains, the opportunity to mine social media for information has been hailed as transformative for research on well-being and disease. Considerations around the fairness, responsibilities and accountabilities relating to using such data have often been set aside, on the understanding that as long as data were anonymised, no real ethical or scientific issue would arise. We first counter this perception by emphasising that the use of social media data in health research can yield problematic and unethical results. We then provide a conceptualisation of methodological data fairness that can complement data management principles such as FAIR by enhancing the actionability of social media data for future research. We highlight the forms that methodological data fairness can take at different stages of the research process and identify practical steps through which researchers can ensure that their practices and outcomes are scientifically sound as well as fair to society at large. We conclude that making research data fair as well as FAIR is inextricably linked to concerns around the adequacy of data practices. The failure to act on those concerns raises serious ethical, methodological and epistemic issues with the knowledge and evidence that are being produced.

From Containing the Atom to Mitigating Residual Risk: The German Imaginary of Nuclear Emergency Preparedness

Grounded in a social scientific research approach, the present case study traces the shift in the German nuclear regulatory culture from prevention to preparedness, the latter of which builds upon decision support systems for nuclear emergency management. These systems integrate atmospheric dispersion models for tracing radioactive materials released accidentally from nuclear facilities. For atmospheric dispersion modelers and emergency managers, this article provides a critical historical perspective on the practical, epistemic, and organizational issues surrounding the use of decision support systems for nuclear emergency management. This perspective suggests that atmospheric dispersion models are embedded within an entire assemblage of institutions, technologies, and practices of preparedness, which are challenged by the uniqueness of each nuclear accident.

Integrating Philosophy of Science into Research on Ethical, Legal and Social Issues in the Life Sciences

This paper argues that research on normative issues in the life sciences will benefit from a tighter integration of philosophy of science. We examine research on ethical, legal and social issues in the life sciences (“ELSI”) and discuss three illustrative examples of normative issues that arise in different areas of the life sciences. These examples show that important normative questions are highly dependent on epistemic issues which so far have not been addressed sufficiently in ELSI, RRI and related areas of research. Accordingly, we argue for the integration of research on the epistemic aspects of the relevant areas of science into ELSI research to provide a better basis for addressing normative questions.

Potencialidades e limites político-educativos das mobilizações no Brasil

O artigo de natureza bibliográfica analisa os desafios para traduzir as potencialidades e os riscos políticos e educativos das mobilizações sociais na contemporaneidade brasileira. O desafio é como traduzir as potencialidades e os limites das mobilizações sociais, suas reivindicações, formatos e propostas políticas. O artigo faz uma reflexão sobre as novas formas de mobilização social; constrói um diagnóstico da diversidade de expressões; aprofunda questões epistêmicas, entre as quais, o conceito de tradução; e reafirma a tese de que as mobilizações de 2013 a 2016 são complexas do ponto de vista analítico, bem como das potencialidades e dos riscos políticos e educativos.

The artificial view: toward a non-anthropocentric account of moral patiency

In this paper I provide an exposition and critique of the Organic View of Ethical Status, as outlined by Torrance (2008). A key presupposition of this view is that only moral patients can be moral agents. It is claimed that because artificial agents lack sentience, they cannot be proper subjects of moral concern (i.e. moral patients). This account of moral standing in principle excludes machines from participating in our moral universe. I will argue that the Organic View operationalises anthropocentric intuitions regarding sentience ascription, and by extension how we identify moral patients. The main difference between the argument I provide here and traditional arguments surrounding moral attributability is that I do not necessarily defend the view that internal states ground our ascriptions of moral patiency. This is in contrast to views such as those defended by Singer (1975, 2011) and Torrance (2008), where concepts such as sentience play starring roles. I will raise both conceptual and epistemic issues with regards to this sense of sentience. While this does not preclude the usage of sentience outright, it suggests that we should be more careful in our usage of internal mental states to ground our moral ascriptions. Following from this I suggest other avenues for further exploration into machine moral patiency which may not have the same shortcomings as the Organic View.

Disagreeing with a Skeptic from a Contextualist Point of View

The paper focuses on the problem of how to account for the phenomena of disagreement and retraction in disputes over skepticism in a contextualist framework. I will argue that nonindexical versions of contextualism are better suited to account for those phenomena than DeRose’s indexical form of contextualism. Furthermore, I will argue against DeRose’s “single scoreboard” semantics and against his solution of ruling that in a dispute over skepticism, both parties to the conversation are expressing something truth-valueless. At the end, I will briefly address the question of whether DeRose’s contextualism combined with his double-safety account and his rule of sensitivity provide an epistemically satisfying answer to the skeptical challenge. It will be argued that by merely explaining (away) the attractiveness of skeptical arguments, DeRose’s contextualism seems to lack the resources to explain some important epistemic issues, as, for example, the question of what knowledge is and when a true belief turns into knowledge.

Preparing Pre-Service Teachers for Inquiry-Based Practical Work in Multiple-Deprived Classrooms: A Decoloniality Approach

Amidst debates on decoloniality in higher education and instructional strategies earmarked for the 21st century in science classrooms, this paper argues for the preparation of teachers who have the epistemic capability to be functional in all school contexts. The study adopts a decoloniality approach and Sen’s Capability Approach to explore the link between pre-service science teacher preparation and the practice of inquiry-based practical work (IBPW) in multiple-deprived classrooms. Inquiry-based learning is an impetus of current reforms and curriculum projects in science education. Practical work is also central to science teaching and learning. The integration of inquiry-based learning and practical work results in IBPW instructional strategies. The implementation of the strategies is filtered through school contextual settings such as material resources and teacher professional identities, which are some of the unmet needs in multiple-deprived classrooms. What is subject to debate in this paper is how teacher training programmes prepare pre-service science teachers to effectively implement IBPW under the adverse conditions of multiple-deprived classrooms. Using one university in the Free State province of South Africa as a case study, data were generated by means of two focus group interviews, each with five final-year pre-service teachers, and semi-structured interviews with two lecturers. Theorising on a decoloniality approach for pre-service teacher preparation in IBPW implementation, the study highlights some epistemic and pedagogical issues that create multiple-deprived classrooms and perpetuate non-inclusivity and injustices.

Effects of an extracurricular science intervention on elementary school children's epistemic beliefs: A randomized controlled trial.

BackgroundFurther developing students’ thinking about knowledge and knowing in science (epistemic beliefs) is considered a normative goal of science education in many countries around the world, even for elementary‐school‐aged children.AimsThe goal of the present study was to introduce and evaluate a new intervention in science education aimed at developing children's epistemic beliefs, epistemic curiosity, and investigative interests. The intervention included an inquiry‐based learning approach as well as reflections on epistemic issues because these methods are currently seen as most promising for fostering students’ epistemic beliefs.SampleData were collected from 65 elementary school children in Grades 3 and 4 (58.46% boys, age: M = 8.73, SD = 0.60) who participated in a voluntary extracurricular STEM enrichment programme in south‐west Germany.MethodsWe investigated the effectiveness of the intervention by applying a randomized block design with a treated control group and repeated measures. The effectiveness of the intervention was analysed via multiple linear regression analyses.ResultsThe results indicated that the children assigned to the intervention developed more sophisticated epistemic beliefs and a higher level of epistemic curiosity than the children assigned to the control condition. No intervention effects were found on investigative interests.ConclusionsThe results provide initial evidence for the effectiveness of the intervention and demonstrate that it is possible to improve epistemic beliefs among elementary school children in Grades 3 and 4. The study provides a starting point for understanding how young children develop epistemic beliefs.

Collaborative research for justice and multi-issue movement building: Challenging discriminatory policing, school closures, and youth unemployment

This special issue engages ethical, epistemic, political, and institutional issues in projects of collaborative research for justice that were designed with movements contesting policing, school closures, and youth disinvestment and unemployment. Three of the articles were collaboratively written by activists and scholars who drew from movements that deployed research for community-driven progressive change. The movements and the research are thus situated at the intersection of struggles against a resurgent anti-immigrant white supremacy, gentrification, a punitive carceral state, low pay and lack of meaningful employment opportunities, and the privatization of the public sector. These articles build upon and are in conversation with a set of related articles published in the spring 2018 special issue of Urban Education(Warren et al, 2018) that also addressed ethical, epistemic, political, and institutional tensions in collaborative research for justice. This EPAA special issue aims to advance the discussion through deep reflection within the context of focal ‘cases’ and within efforts to open space within universities for modes of engaged scholarship that can respond to the challenges of the current moment, as described in the articles that bookend the cases. Taken all together, this special issue demonstrates how scholars, educators, teachers, activists, community leaders, and policy makers can use the production and mobilization of knowledge as a force for building, supporting, sustaining, and advancing multi-issue movements for justice not just in schools and the academy but also in communities of color and others aggrieved by current inequities.

Epistemic issues in classroom mathematical activity: There is more to students’ conversations than meets the teacher’s ear

We report on a comparative investigation of student mathematical activity in two settings of a secondary mathematics classroom: peer interaction in small group and group interaction with the teacher. Our framework draws on the understanding of school mathematics as activity in between the historicity of knowledge and the situatedness of norms. We propose the term epistemic issue to refer to instances of knowledge about the construction and justification of school mathematics knowledge whose use is traceable in student activity. A major finding points to the presence of a number of epistemic issues during peer work and their omission in the communication of this work to the teacher; a phenomenon we call epistemic shift. To illustrate this finding and the methods of analysis, we take data from a group of students during a lesson of probability and the lesson-based video stimulated recall interview. We finish by discussing some implications for the development of the mathematical culture of the classroom.

Teaching aspects of the interrelationship between science and technology: a research report on the design, enactment and evaluation of a teaching proposal

ABSTRACTBackground: Helping upper elementary and lower secondary school students develop an awareness of various aspects of the nature of science (NOS) and nature of technology (NOT) is a widely recognized goal of science teaching. In this study, we focus on the connections between science and technology (S&T).Purpose: We report on the design, development, enactment and evaluation of a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) that combines hands-on activities in geometrical optics with explicit epistemological discourse for reflection purposes. The design of the TLS draws on perspectives from the inquiry-oriented and design-based teaching and learning frameworks.Sample: The enactment of the TLS involved a class of 17 sixth-grade students, aged 10–11 years old, of a public elementary school in Cyprus.Design and methods: We present findings from written responses to both closed and open-ended tasks as well as follow-up semi-structured interviews that probed students’ understanding of the difference between the main goals of S&T.Results: The results illustrate elementary students’ readiness to engage with epistemic issues and demonstrate the potential of prompting young learners’ ability to develop informed awareness of the NOS and NOT. The results also provided feedback for the revision of the TLS so as to further enhance its effectiveness in achieving the stated learning objectives.Conclusion: We discuss the implications of our findings for the teaching of the NOS and NOT and for the design and validation of TLSs. It is possible for students of this age group to develop an awareness of issues related to the NOS and NOT. TLSs can be improved through design-based research approaches to serve as productive tools to this end.

CSR - the Cuckoo’s Egg in the Business Ethics Nest

Corporate/collective moral responsibility is a thorny topic in business ethics and this paper argues that this is due a number of unacknowledged and connected epistemic issues. Firstly, CSR, Corporate Citizenship and many other research streams that are based on the assumption of collective and/or corporate moral responsibility are not compatible with Kantian ethics, consequentialism, or virtue ethics because corporate/collective responsibility violates the axioms and central hypotheses of these research programmes. Secondly, in the absence of a sound theoretical moral philosophical foundation, business ethicists have based their ideas on legal and political epistemologies, yet still claim to be ethics-based. Thirdly, research is often driven by an intention to prove that a specific social goal is right, not by open and critical inquiry. Finally, today, corporate/collective moral responsibility is widely accepted as the Truth as most researchers are unaware of any issues because they are untrained in philosophy. The paper identifies the confusion about the epistemic basis as a major impediment for delivering a thick concept of the role of corporations as moral agents. Thus, the paper does not argue against corporate or collective agency as such, but points out an obvious but forgotten paradox: corporate and collective personhood cannot, at the moment at least, be epistemologically grounded in the field in which business ethics claims to operate: moral philosophy.

Seeing the point from which you see what you see: An essay on epistemic reflexivity in language research

This essay deals with epistemic issues in language research, focusing particularly onthe field of language planning and policy (LPP). It outlines Pierre Bourdieu’s principleof epistemic reflexivity as a device for understanding what the view of the researchobject owes to the researcher’s past and present position in social space. I hold thatdeveloping such an understanding is particularly vital for LPP scholars, by virtueof the ways in which the objects investigated here tend to linger in the borderlandsbetween science and politics. Accordingly, the essay unearths the philosophical rootsof epistemic reflexivity and highlights some of its implications in the research practicewith examples from Swedish LPP research. It also examines the value of a reflexivestance in interviews as a way of pinpointing the relevance of epistemic reflexivity inevery moment of the scholarly investigation. In conclusion, the argument is that sinceepistemic reflexivity is a useful device for any critical researcher who wishes to grasp theknowledge he or she produces, it is so also for language researchers, and particularlyso in relation to the ideologically normative practices of LPP scholarship. Therefore, areflexive gaze is a pivotal driver for yielding better language research.

Reflections on engaging with an advisory network in the context of a ‘sensitive’ research study

ABSTRACTThis article surfaces issues about the often-used but widely under-reported practice of working with advisory fora. We critically reflect on our experiences working with an advisory network when co-designing a research study about a ‘sensitive’ subject. We discuss the following: 1) How the network evolved as a matter of ethical and pragmatic choices; 2) Potential issues when discussing sensitive issues ‘outside’ of the participatory or participant context; and 3) Practical and epistemic issues involved in (not) ‘taking’ advice. We suggest that although sensitive research is more conventionally aligned with more ‘radical’ forms of participatory practice, advisory networks can present a useful and sometimes more appropriate form of inclusion and engagement for some advisors and for some types of research study. The article should, therefore, be of interest to a wide range of academic and practice-based health and social care staff and, in particular, those who plan to use advisory fora in their work.

An ethical framework for the creation, governance and evaluation of accelerated access programs

There are increasing demands on regulators and insurers internationally to provide access to medicines more quickly, and often on the basis of less robust evidence of safety, efficacy or cost-effectiveness than have traditionally been required. These demands arise from a number of sources, including those advocating for access to medicines for patients with life-threatening diseases, rare diseases, or subsets of common diseases and where entire populations are threatened in the context of public health emergencies. In response to these demands, policymakers have instituted a number of initiatives aimed at speeding up access to medicines, which we refer to collectively as “accelerated access” programs. While there are strong arguments for accelerated access programs, these programs also raise a number of socio-political, epistemic and moral issues. Some of these issues are common to all types of accelerated access programs, while others are specific to particular types of accelerated access. Here, we offer a conceptual framework that highlights ethically relevant similarities and differences among different kinds of accelerated access processes for the purpose of enabling ethically and politically-informed policy making.

Is an indistinct picture "exactly what we need"? Objectivity, accuracy, and harm in imaging for cancer.

Assumptions about the epistemic ideal of objectivity, closely related to ontological assumptions about the nature of disease as pathophysiological abnormality, lead us into oversimplified ways of thinking about medical imaging. This is illustrated by current controversies in the early detection of cancer. Improvements in the technical quality of imaging failed to address the problem of overdiagnosis in breast cancer screening and exacerbate the problem in thyroid cancer diagnosis. Drawing on Douglas and on Daston and Galison, I distinguish 3 dimensions of objectivity (accuracy, reliability, and precision) and demonstrate ways they may be at odds, as illustrated in the early detection of cancer. Guidelines for evaluating the efficacy of diagnostic imaging are insufficiently sensitive to this complexity. Improving imaging quality may raise epistemic issues, place disease definitions in question, and lead to overall harm or to changes in the distribution of harms and benefits among population subgroups. With a nod to Wittgenstein, I argue that we cannot take for granted that "an indistinct picture" is not "exactly what we need."