Epistemic Landscape Research Articles

Epistemological Chaos the Question and the New Cognitive Landscape

This study explores the concept of epistemological chaos in contemporary social sciences, particularly within the context of postmodern thought. Traditional notions of certainty are challenged in a world defined by uncertainty. We move beyond a simplistic portrayal of “anarchists” versus “strict rationalists” to examine the unconventional yet potentially transformative relationship between chaos, non-methodological approaches, and the evolving epistemic landscape. Departing from conventional methodologies, the paper investigates how embracing chaos and a certain degree of non-method can open new avenues for knowledge interpretation and production. Through a multi-faceted analysis that incorporates diverse perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches, the study sheds light on the potential for theoretical innovation. It explores how seemingly chaotic and unsystematic approaches can contribute to the formation of a more nuanced understanding of knowledge in contemporary social sciences. The knowledge society seems to be transitioning towards an era characterized by uncertainty, where traditional concepts are challenged. This coincides with a growing emphasis on human agency. There's a movement advocating for liberation from the constraints of rigid methodologies, a return to the role of imagination in scientific inquiry, and even a renewed appreciation for the role of myth and legend in shaping knowledge. The study ultimately asks: can “anarchic knowledge” (knowledge production outside established methods) be a viable alternative? Can it create a cognitive landscape that restores humanity's central role in the creative process of knowledge production?

Ideas behind transformative innovation policy: Economists confronting missions and sustainability transition in Finland

The ideas that experts share and draw on shape policies across various spatial and temporal contexts. In this study, we use document analysis and expert interviews to examine the views and beliefs of one important group of experts, economists, on mission-oriented innovation policy and sustainability transition in Finland. As a result, we outline the epistemic landscape that for its part conditions the progress of transformative innovation policy in Finland. While sustainability scholars have been intrigued by the promises of mission-oriented thinking, our findings suggest that they should acknowledge the epistemic limits of communities of economists regarding missions and transformative innovation policy as political vehicles to advance sustainability transition.

The scientific councils of natural protected areas as a window on the epistemic landscape of the conservation knowing-doing space

In environmental management, like in other applied operational domains, concrete actions are often at odds with state-of-the-art theoretical knowledge. Institutional settings organizing the way scientific knowledge is applied in environmental management practice play an active role in structuring such knowledge-action discrepancies. Scientific councils of protected areas are key institutions playing this role. Their two main missions are (1) to design, monitor, and evaluate the production of knowledge inside protected areas, and (2) to advise managers as to designing and implementing conservation actions. This article explores a database gathering information on scientific councils in France. The case of this country is exemplary because the existence of scientific councils is systematic in its protected areas, and their structure is streamlined by regulatory requirements. We use this database to investigate the publication records of the members of these scientific councils. This enables us to shed a quantitative light on the “epistemic landscape” (i.e., the kinds of knowledge and knowledge-holders that play a key role in interactions between science and practice) that scientific councils materialize. Our findings suggest that this epistemic landscape is poorly connected to the concerned protected areas. Moreover, some prominent topics in academic research (functional ecology, invasion biology and conservation planning) appear to be neglected in the recollected publication records. Such results prompt the question of whether the composition of SCs should be adjusted to reinforce the role of scientists tackling research questions applied to the PA at issue, and to better reflect scientific priorities in the conservation literature. Though results solely based on bibliometric analysis should be interpreted with due caution, they are useful to open debates on how to improve the design of institutions structuring knowing-doing spaces, beyond the specific case of French scientific councils.

Epistemic Oppression and Affective Exclusion

Epistemic oppression is the systematic exclusion of oppressed groups from knowledge-making practices. One of the goals of feminist epistemology is to understand the nature of the barriers preventing oppressed individuals from realising their epistemic agency and contributing to knowledge production. Feminist epistemologists have taken monumental strides in theorising the different forms of exclusions that constitute epistemic oppression (e.g., Fricker 2007; Dotson 2014; Bailey 2014). But more needs to be done by way of understanding what makes an oppressive epistemic landscape resilient and resistant to change. In this paper, I develop a pragmatist account of the affective mechanisms in place that protect the epistemic landscape from critical reflection and produce what I refer to as affective exclusion. I argue that, since the mechanism that protects the epistemic landscape from critical reflection is affective by nature, we cannot reason ourselves out of affective exclusion. Instead, I propose that, although they often prevent us from realising our epistemic agency, our co-occurring emotions and feelings, such as grief, anxiety, and other epistemic feelings, can be catalysts for reflection about the skewed nature of the epistemic landscape. I conclude with a discussion of the role that narrative fiction might play in helping us resist affective exclusion and ending epistemic oppression.

Trustable News from China? How Chinese Journalists Negotiate Epistemic Authority in Transnational Digital News Production

The adoption of social media platforms by news organizations invariably coincides with transformations in the production, expression, and acceptance of news as public knowledge claims. This study explores how a special subset of Chinese journalists—the foreign-aimed journalists—negotiate their epistemic authority while producing transnational news on foreign platforms. Drawing on 26 in-depth interviews, findings reveal four major tensions as Chinese journalists strive to negotiate authority among foreign audiences: reaffirming professional boundaries; navigating the management directives; maintaining a state messaging position; and understanding digital infrastructure. This study further contextualizes how, parallel to digital transformations, cultural transformations around journalistic knowledge claims are linked to historically and socially embedded priorities and constraints. The established conceptualizations of digital journalistic authority require expansion, as China’s case illuminates the complex interplay between technology, politics, media regulation, and individual agency in shaping the epistemic landscape of contemporary journalism.

Professional doctorates reconciling academic and professional knowledge: towards a diffractive re-reading

ABSTRACT This paper explores the different epistemologies that define the Professional Doctorate, paying close attention to how Postgraduate Researchers (PGRs) doing a Professional Doctorate reconcile academic and professional knowledge. Through a narrative exploration of the literature published since the first UK Professional Doctorates were awarded in 2000, the paper situates the Professional Doctorate within the confluence of the workplace, the profession and the university. From this stance, the paper explores distinct knowledge terrains between knowledge generated by Professional Doctorates in the context of application and knowledge generated in the context of disciplinary laws applied to sites of practice. The purpose of this discussion is to understand if, how and to what extent Professional Doctorates reconcile competing knowledge terrains. This study draws towards two broad conclusions. The first conclusion suggests that in the literature identified, the distinction between academic and professional epistemologies has little resonance. Instead of the dichotomous knowledge generated in the context of practice in contrast to knowledge generated in the context of disciplinary laws, Professional Doctorates were ensconced within several competing epistemologies. The literature identified focuses on impact and identity, concepts the study employs as lenses to guide a discussion. The paper thus views the process of reconciliation first through the lens of impact and then through the lens of identity. The investigation then draws a second conclusion: The epistemic landscape occupied by the Professional Doctorate is involved in a reconciliation of more significance that the putative academic and professional binary. The paper is compelled towards a diffractive re-reading of this academic-professional knowledge tension. This new reading allows a full recognition of both difference and mutual entanglement between knowledge generated in the context of practice and knowledge generated in the context of disciplinary laws.

Social Media & Declining Trust: An Epistemic Challenge for Emerging Adults?

The rise of social media coupled with declining trust in major social institutions (e.g., business, government) has arguably intensified the challenges young people face in developing their beliefs and identity. Our exploratory study used in-depth, semi-structured interviews with nineteen young adults (14 female, 5 male, 17 aged 18–23, and 2 aged 24–30) to explore how young adults navigate the diverging viewpoints and competing truth claims encountered from friends, family, and social media. A cluster analysis of interview responses revealed three groups: Relativistic Explorers, marked by high openness to views without judging them; Differentiated Committers, who displayed strong commitments to specific views or values; and Precipitated Explorers, who shared a common history of social and/or familial rejection, and thus an involuntary launch into belief exploration. Results underscore both the developmental challenges facing young adults in our modern, media-saturated society and some of the strategies they adopt to navigate the current epistemic landscape.

Metacognitive Feelings: A Predictive-Processing Perspective.

Metacognitive feelings are affective experiences that concern the subject's mental processes and capacities. Paradigmatic examples include the feeling of familiarity, the feeling of confidence, or the tip-of-the-tongue experience. In this article, we advance an account of metacognitive feelings based on the predictive-processing framework. The core tenet of predictive processing is that the brain is a hierarchical hypothesis-testing mechanism, predicting sensory input on the basis of prior experience and updating predictions on the basis of the incoming prediction error. According to the proposed account, metacognitive feelings arise out of a process in which visceral changes serve as cues to predict the error dynamics relating to a particular mental process. The expected rate of prediction-error reduction corresponds to the valence at the core of the emerging metacognitive feeling. Metacognitive feelings use prediction dynamics to model the agent's situation in a way that is both descriptive and directive. Thus, metacognitive feelings are not only an appraisal of ongoing cognitive performance but also a set of action policies. These action policies span predictive trajectories across bodily action, mental action, and interoceptive changes, which together transform the epistemic landscape within which metacognitive feelings unfold.

Better than Best: Epistemic Landscapes and Diversity of Practice in Science

Abstract When solving a complex problem in a group, should group members always choose the best available solution that they are aware of? In this paper, I build simulation models to show that, perhaps surprisingly, a group of agents who individually randomly follow a better available solution than their own can end up outperforming a group of agents who individually always follow the best available solution. This result has implications for the feminist philosophy of science and social epistemology.

The ‘where’ of EU social science collaborations: How epistemic inequalities and geopolitical power asymmetries persist in research about Europe

A growing body of work has problematised how global epistemic inequality is reproduced in contemporary university settings and epistemic cultures – thinking through the lens of Eurocentrism and utilising the language of a Global North and South. However, the extent to which a relationship between geopolitical and epistemic inequality is woven into knowledge production within Europe has received less attention. Rising EU funding opportunities have facilitated a corresponding climb in transnational European social science collaborations, in concert with an expansion of empirical locations with which these projects engage. Still, increases in member state participation do not necessarily contribute to a more balanced epistemic landscape for knowledge production. Not all countries are treated equally as cases and often, these patterns of inequality reflect what Maria do Mar Pereira calls the epistemic status of nations: the idea that certain countries and continents are considered more or less likely to produce valuable or exportable scholarly knowledge. In this article, Pereira’s theory of epistemic status is extended in its implications to study choices for the selection of countries as cases. We use both quantitative data from the EU CORDIS register and ethnographic data exploring academic and collaborative practices in transnational EU-funded projects. The article addresses the ‘where’ of collaborative research by focusing on epistemic attributes rather than participatory optics. In doing so, we reflect not only on the structures and strategies of science funding in Europe but also further unsettle discussions around global epistemic inequality within academic theory and practices.

СРАВНИТЕЛЕН АНАЛИЗ НА МЕНТАЛНИ МОДЕЛИ И ИЗКУСТВЕН ИНТЕЛЕКТ

Mental models are a representation of the external world. They are a hypothetical example of relevant elements to the knowing subject, that are configured by analogy to the world`s being. The formation of warranted beliefs can be a result of the very same reliability of this type of representation. The article argues for this position and defends the thesis that the world is epistemically insecure. This means that there is no objective reason in and of itself for certain elements to be preferred rather than other. This is a serious problem for AI researchers, who find difficulty in recreating the visual orientation ability of humans. By this analogy, mental models have high value in orienting us in the epistemic landscape. This article argues that mental models have higher epistemic value compared to AI.

Examining the role of nurse executives in homecare through the lens of the Sociology of Ignorance and Critical Management Studies.

This article presents a novel theoretical approach to explore nurse executives' paradoxical identity and agency of executive and nurse in homecare organizations. This complex phenomenon has yet to be well theorized or analyzed. Through a synthesis of literature, we demonstrate that Critical Management Studies, as informed by Foucault, and the Sociology of Ignorance, can create a different understanding of the complex interplay between knowledge and nonknowledge (ignorance) that positions nurse executives in both influential and precarious ways in homecare organizations. This theoretical framework has the potential to allow for the explicit exploration of nurse executives' strategic epistemic and discursive positioning and highlights hierarchal power structures within homecare organizations. We posit that this framework, that spans nursing, management and sociology disciplines, sets a different understanding of homecare organizations as epistemic landscapes, exposing institutional knowledge and ignorance dynamics that remain largely concealed and unchallenged, yet are integral to understanding nurse executives' epistemic agency.

Epistemic and Deontic Authority in Parent–Teacher Conference: Referring to the Expert as a Discursive Practice to (Jointly) Undermine the Teacher’s Expertise

This article investigates the interactional constitution of a phenomenon recurrently reported by teachers who complain about a loss of authority, a systematic delegitimization of their role. Adopting a conversation analysis informed approach to a single-case study from a corpus of parent–teacher conferences, we illustrate how challenging the teachers’ expertise is accomplished by participants as an outcome of some identifiable communicative practices. Particularly, we analyze the practices of “quoting” and “referring to the expert” as interactional resources differently exploited by participants: While parents challenge the teachers’ epistemic authority and lay the foundation for claiming the right to decide what do to with their son in the classroom, teachers contribute to this epistemic positioning and cede their expert knowledge-based deontic rights, that is, the right to decide the best practices to adopt in the classroom. In the discussion, we advance that the participants’ interactive competence in navigating the complex epistemic landscape of the encounter profoundly impacts on the local definition of reciprocal epistemic and deontic rights and responsibilities. Indications for teachers’ education are provided in the conclusion.

Agent‐based models of scientific interaction

AbstractThe paper examines recent developments in agent‐based modeling of scientific inquiry with a special focus on network epistemology. It provides a survey of different types of ABMs studying network effects in scientific inquiry: ABMs based on bandit problems, ABMs based on epistemic landscapes and ABMs based on argumentative dynamics. It further presents models that study the impact of biased and deceptive researchers on the success of collective inquiry. The paper concludes with a discussion on the contribution of ABMs to the broader field of philosophy of science given their highly idealized nature.

Cooling the City? A Scientometric Study on Urban Green and Blue Infrastructure and Climate Change-Induced Public Health Effects

Climate change causes global effects on multiple levels. The anthropogenic input of greenhouse gases increases the atmospheric mean temperature. It furthermore leads to a higher probability of extreme weather events (e.g., heat waves, floods) and thus strongly impacts the habitats of humans, animals, and plants. Against this background, research and innovation activities are increasingly focusing on potential health-related aspects and feasible adaptation and mitigation strategies. Progressing urbanization and demographic change paired with the climate change-induced heat island effect exposes humans living in urban habitats to increasing health risks. By employing scientometric methods, this scoping study provides a systematic bird’s eye view on the epistemic landscapes of climate change, its health-related effects, and possible technological and nature-based interventions and strategies in order to make urban areas climate proof. Based on a literature corpus consisting of 2614 research articles collected in SCOPUS, we applied network-based analysis and visualization techniques to map the different scientific communities, discourses and their interrelations. From a public health perspective, the results demonstrate the range of either direct or indirect health effects of climate change. Furthermore, the results indicate that a public health-related scientific discourse is converging with an urban planning and building science driven discourse oriented towards urban blue and green infrastructure. We conclude that this development might mirror the socio-political demand to tackle emerging climate change-induced challenges by transgressing disciplinary boundaries.

Analysing bio-art’s epistemic landscape: from metaphoric to post-metaphoric structure

Since its emergence, bio-art has developed numerous metaphors central to the transfer of concepts of modern biology, genetics, and genomics to the public domain that reveal several cultural, ethical, and social variations in their related themes. This article assumes that a general typology of metaphors developed by practices related to bio-art can be categorised into two categories: pictorial and operational metaphors. Through these, information regarding several biological issues is transferred to the public arena. Based on the analysis, this article attempts to answer the following questions: How does bio-art develop metaphors to advance epistemic and discursive agendas that constitute public understanding of a set of deeply problematic assumptions regarding how today’s biology operates? Under the influence of today’s synthetic biology, could bio-media operationally reframe these epistemic agendas by reframing complex and multi-layered metaphors towards post-metaphoric structures? Finally, what are the scientific, cultural, and social implications of reframing?

Conspiracy Theories, Populism, and Epistemic Autonomy

AbstractQuassim Cassam has argued that psychological and epistemological analyses of conspiracy theories threaten to overlook the political nature of such theories. According to Cassam, conspiracy theories are a form of political propaganda. I develop a limited critique of Cassam's analysis.This paper advances two core theses. First, acceptance of conspiracy theories requires a rejection of epistemic authority that renders conspiracy theorists susceptible to co-option by certain political programs while insulating such programs from criticism. I argue that the contrarian nature of conspiracy theories partially accounts for the prominence of such theories in populist movements.Second, the contrarian nature of conspiracy theories partially accounts for their attractiveness, especially among those to whom populism already appeals. I argue that for those who resent what appears from their perspective as the shaping of the epistemic landscape by alien perspectives, conspiracy theorizing may facilitate the reassertion of epistemic autonomy.

Epistemic Actions, Abilities and Knowing-How: A Non-Reductive Account

ABSTRACT The aim is to provide a synoptic view of the epistemic landscape in respect of epistemic actions, abilities and knowing how. The resulting view consists of the following propositions: (1) knowledge-by-acquaintance cannot be reduced to propositional knowledge or to knowing-how or some combination of these; the same point holds for propositional knowledge in relation to knowledge-by-acquaintance and knowing-how, and to knowing-how in relation to knowledge-by-acquaintance and propositional knowledge; (2) These categories of knowledge are, nevertheless, interdependent in a number of senses; (3) Abilities are not the same thing as know-how; (4) Epistemic actions need to be distinguished from behavioral actions; (5) Judgements are epistemic actions which, if successful, result in knowledge and, therefore, the sharp contrast drawn between, on the one hand, comings to believe and, in particular, judgments and, on the other hand, actions – with respect to being freely chosen – is not sustainable; (6) Judgements manifest both abilities and know-how.

The Diffractive Politics of Postcolonial Cyborg Translation

The Diffractive Politics of Postcolonial Cyborg Translation Chun-Mei Chuang (bio) The one who is tortured is fundamentally one who loses his or her face, entering into a becoming-animal, a becoming-molecular the ashes of which are thrown to the wind. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work. —Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto" Diffraction marks the limits of the determinacy and permanency of boundaries. —Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway Politics of Boundaries in Molecular Translation The features of a human face are a combination of biology, culture, education, personality, and spirituality. The translator is tortured between the unfathomable choices of losing one's face or stretching one's heart. No matter what choice she makes, she will never be the same. The boundaries of a person's heart are flowing on the liquid edges of the conscious and the unconscious. Being lost in translation is more than a human endeavor to understand one another from diverse cultural backgrounds; it is always already a process of self-exploration that never sees its end. The translator goes adrift in the bewilderingly flowing and rigid boundaries. As a sociologist and academic translator, I have argued that translation is an embodied molecular process, especially between theoretical texts articulated with different languages that emerged and developed in diverse, intertwined networks of historical, cultural, religious, epistemic, and ecological conditions (Chuang 2019a). I propose "molecular translation" as a keyword for Taiwan theory's ongoing construction and [End Page 47] evolution (Chuang 2019b). "Molecular translation" is not a term borrowed from molecular biology, nor is it an attempt to restore the meaning of translation to its rightful literary place. Instead, the concept of molecular translation is naturally transgressing all boundaries, including those between nature and culture. In the times of the Anthropocene and COVID-19, translation in the broad sense is part of the multiscale transcreation of matter, energy, and information, circulating among many other things. Since the emergence of quantum physics in the 1920s and the innovation of electron microscopy in the 1930s, the technoscientific molecular turn has made possible human observation of phenomena on the subatomic scale. For us living with the COVID-19 pandemic, the most significant result of the electron imaging revolution for the past century is that viruses finally show their true colors to human eyes, manifesting delicate, complex submolecular interface dynamics, even though the concept of color proves to be meaningless for entities at the viral scale. However, we do not "see" viruses; we translate in many ways their structures across multiple scales and articulate the complicated constitution of heterogeneous components. The meaning of the "original" is transmuting; so are the implications of "seeing" and "imaging" (Chuang 2020a, 2020b). In contemporary epistemic landscapes, the concept of agency overflows the humanistic frameworks and extends to the performative capacity of nonhuman agents, including infinite life-forms, artificial entities, and their assemblages (Barad 2003, 2007; Chuang 2020c). The difficulty with the "Anthropocene" is that while its conceptualization relies on centuries of capitalist overdevelopment and technoscientific advancement, oftentimes people regard it as an empty vogue or academic virus without apprehending its material conditions (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Edwards 2017). Nonetheless, the metaphor of the virus is timely. A virus is a sequence of genetic information, a fragmentary text of messages to be decoded, translated, and replicated, and is susceptible to mutation. Regardless of its degree of complexity, any life-form is a product of deep coevolution with other life-forms in their specific habitat. Likewise, academic concepts such as the Anthropocene, or the cyborg whose translation in Taiwan will be at the center of this paper, as epistemic and affective viruses, always carry historical specificities shared with their hosts, symbionts, and media. There are many aspects of definition for any theoretical concept, and every aspect involves at least some elements of translation. This situation is evident in but not limited to cross-linguistic translation. What is at stake is the politics of boundaries beyond the humanist scope. In the age of molecular and subatomic...

Multilingual Repertoires at Play: Structure and Function in Reported Speech Utterances of Alyawarr Children

While there is increasing international interest in approaching language analysis with the prism of repertoire, research on repertoire on the Australian continent is still very much in the shadow of “traditional” language-centric documentary work. This paper will explore the question of how users of Australian, English-lexified contact varieties exploit their multilingual repertoires to achieve local, conversation–organizational ends. Drawing upon a corpus of video recordings from Ipmangker, a Central Australian Aboriginal community, and using the analytical methods of interactional and comparative variationist linguistics, I examine the production of reported speech by four 6- to 7-year-old Alyawarr children in a play session at home. A set of prosodic, phonological, morphological and discourse-pragmatic features are shown to form a coherent set of linguistic elements with which these multilingual children can contrast reported speech from the surrounding talk. Moreover, the use of reported speech in play not only allows the children to organize their interaction, but responds to and constructs the epistemic landscape of play.