Epistemic Level Research Articles

El posestructuralismo en las Relaciones Internacionales: un interjuego complejo entre modelos mentales, conceptuales y discursivos para comprender el mundo global

¿Cuál ha sido la contribución de las perspectivas posestructuralistas en el campo de estudio de las Relaciones Internacionales, su avance teórico y el ámbito conceptual de su domino? Esta interrogante de partida para la reflexión, toma en cuenta tres aspectos clave: el cognitivo, el conceptual y el discursivo, que permite situar críticamente las premisas argumentativas del trabajo de investigación. El objetivo del artículo es plantear la concepción, tensiones y alcances de la mirada posestructuralista en los niveles: onto-epistémico, metodológico y discursivo de las RI frente al cambio de su objeto de estudio, asumiendo una postura complementaria a las miradas racionalistas respondiendo a los nuevos escenarios académicos y empíricos.

“Wave-Packet Reduction” and the Quantum Character of the Actualization of Potentia

Werner Heisenberg introduced the notion of quantum potentia in order to accommodate the indeterminism associated with quantum measurement. Potentia captures the capacity of the system to be found to possess a property upon a corresponding sharp measurement in which it is actualized. The specific potentiae of the individual system are represented formally by the complex amplitudes in the measurement bases of the eigenstate in which it is prepared. All predictions for future values of system properties can be made by an experimenter using the probabilities which are the squared moduli of these amplitudes that are the diagonal elements of the density matrix description of the pure ensemble to which the system, so prepared, belongs. Heisenberg considered the change of the ensemble attribution following quantum measurement to be analogous to the classical change in Gibbs’ thermodynamics when measurement of the canonical ensemble enables a microcanonical ensemble description. This analogy, presented by Heisenberg as operating at the epistemic level, is analyzed here. It has led some to claim not only that the change of the state in measurement is classical mechanical, bringing its quantum character into question, but also that Heisenberg held this to be the case. Here, these claims are shown to be incorrect, because the analogy concerns the change of ensemble attribution by the experimenter upon learning the result of the measurement, not the actualization of the potentia responsible for the change of the individual system state which—in Heisenberg’s interpretation of quantum mechanics—is objective in nature and independent of the experimenter’s knowledge.

Understanding how teachers guide evidence construction conversations

AbstractMany classroom units and lessons are now organized around engaging students in developing claims and evidence. An aspect of teachers’ work that is understudied is how teachers manage the complexity inherent in navigating between claims and empirical data. In other words, what do teachers do when students do not see what they are “supposed to” see or when they make sense of observations in unexpected ways? We contend that such complexity is inherent to the scientific endeavor, and that engaging with it is central to doing science. Therefore, the moves that science teachers make in this context have important consequences for students’ conceptual and epistemic understandings. We apply an epistemic levels coding scheme to three classroom episodes in order to better understand the complexity of classroom evidence construction and to develop a description of strategies that teachers might enact to manage this complexity. We then discuss the implications of these strategies for how students are positioned to engage in scientific knowledge construction.

‘And They Never Spoke to Each Other of It’: Contemporary Southern African Representations of Silence, Shame and Gender Violence

Literary texts open up creative spaces where authors can expose the persistence of patriarchy; simultaneously, they can resist and oppose widespread patriarchal views by positing alternative, less oppressive understandings of women and their experiences in societies. A number of Southern African women authors have produced work that is both innovative and exciting in this regard, and this article will offer a critical analysis of representations of silence, shame and gender violence in three such works. Representations of the intertwined dynamics of these issues have received scant attention from literary critics, and this also applies to the texts selected for discussion. Gender violence extends beyond physical abuse: indeed, physical gender violence is enabled by a much more pervasive problem, a kind of structural gender violence that arranges our societies at institutional, discursive and epistemic levels. The selected texts are Dark Whispers by Joanne Macgregor (2014. Pretoria: Protea Book House), What About Meera by Z. P. Dala (2015. Cape Town: Umuzi) and We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo (2014. London: Virago). The elision of women’s narratives of gender violence and shaming knows no barriers of class, race or sexual orientation, and I trace the common thread of the silencing back to gendered power structures. This common thread notwithstanding, all manifestations of gender, shame and violence are always already shaped by and embedded in very specific contexts. Without losing sight of either the mechanisms of patriarchy or the myriad forms of women’s agency within environments of gendered structural oppression, this article seeks to create a scholarly space where the uncomfortable conversations about the persistence of misogynistic constructions of gender and sexuality can take place in a way that both recognizes the differences among female characters, and identifies points of commonality as potential sources of strength and resistance.

Emergence of Quantum Mechanics from Theory of Random Fields

Our aim in this paper is to enlighten the possibility to treat quantum mechanics as emergent from a kind of classical physical model, in spite of recent remarkable experiments demonstrating a violation of the Bell inequality. To proceed in a rigorous way, we use the methodology of ontic–epistemic modeling of physical phenomena. This methodology is rooted in the old Bild conception about theoretical and observational models in physics. This conception was elaborated in the fundamental works of Hertz, Boltzmann, and Schrodinger. Our ontic model (generating the quantum model) is of the random field type, prequantum classical statistical field theory (PCSFT). We present a brief review of its basic features without overloading the presentation by mathematical details. Then we show that the Bell inequality can be violated not only at the epistemic level, i.e., for observed correlations, but even at the ontic level, for classical random fields. We devote the important part of the paper to an analysis of the internal energy structure of prequantum random fields and their coupling with the background field of subquantum fluctuations. Finally, we present a unified picture of the microworld based on the composition of prequantum random fields from elementary fluctuations. Since quantum systems are treated as the symbolic representation of prequantum fields, this picture leads to a unifying treatment of all quantum systems as special blocks of elementary fluctuations carrying negligibly small energies.

Chromatographs as Epistemic Things: Communities around the Extraction of Material Knowledge

Automated chromatography – gas chromatography and later high performance liquid chromatography – played an important role in the transformation of chemical analysis during the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter presents the historical narrative of the production and dissemination of chromatographic technology, and discusses the effects of the automation of separation at the social and epistemic levels. Emphasis is given to materiality, not only of chromatographic technological knowledge, but also of the knowledge produced by application of this technology in research.

Acting in Order to Know, Knowing in Order to Act: Sosa on Epistemic and Practical Deliberation

Abstract The questions ‘Do I know p?’ and ‘shall I take p as a reason to act?’ seem to belong to different domains — or so claims Ernest Sosa in his Judgment and Agency (2015), the latest version of his virtue epistemology. According to Sosa, we may formulate the first question in a purely epistemological way — a matter of knowledge “full stop” —, while the second one is necessarily intruded by pragmatic factors — a matter of “actionable knowledge”. Both should be answered, in his view, considering the reliability of my belief, but the former could be faced in total abstraction from my personal practical concerns. In this paper I dispute Sosa’s view, and claim that no purely epistemic level of knowledge “full stop” is conceivable, at least within a reliabilist framework. A case is put forward in order to show that some given belief may not be considered as reliable by itself, as a token, but always as a member of a type, belonging to some class of reference of other beliefs. And the relevant class of reference may only be chosen considering personal practical interests.

Ethics as a catalyst for change in business education?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to hypothesise that business theory and education suffer from having been systematically de-philosophised over the last 200 years. Viewed through this lens the economistic narrative can be understood and new and integrated solutions to theoretical and pedagogical problems can be debated. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is a theoretical exploration based on a literature review and philosophical analysis. Findings – Going back to a social science philosophy would fundamentally affect how management is conceptualised, done and taught. The paper focuses on outlining the impact a re-philosophisation would have on management education. Practical implications – If one agrees that philosophy plays a too small role in management, it would change how scholarship is currently defined and how management education functions. Business schools would have to fundamentally change in every respect. Originality/value – Current criticism of the management mainstream focuses on either the political/ethical or the epistemic level. The paper argues that the epistemic and the ethical are connected and by making an integrated argument the debate can be re-energised and solution strategies become obvious. I am not aware of any other contribution making this argument. Ghoshal (unwittingly) used the same reasoning but without using the clear frame of reference (philosophy) that this paper proposes.

Local ontology for a dual-rail qubit

We show that quantum predictions for the dual-rail realisation of a qubit can be faithfully simulated with classical stochastic gates and particles which interact entirely in a local manner. In the presented model 'non-locality' appears only on the epistemic level of description.

Transdisciplinary Research on Cancer-Healing Systems Between Biomedicine and the Maya of Guatemala: A Tool for Reciprocal Reflexivity in a Multi-Epistemological Setting.

Transdisciplinarity (TD) is a participatory research approach in which actors from science and society work closely together. It offers means for promoting knowledge integration and finding solutions to complex societal problems, and can be applied within a multiplicity of epistemic systems. We conducted a TD process from 2011 to 2014 between indigenous Mayan medical specialists from Guatemala and Western biomedical physicians and scientists to study cancer. Given the immense cultural gap between the partners, it was necessary to develop new methods to overcome biases induced by ethnocentric behaviors and power differentials. This article describes this intercultural cooperation and presents a method of reciprocal reflexivity (Bidirectional Emic-Etic tool) developed to overcome them. As a result of application, researchers observed successful knowledge integration at the epistemic level, the social-organizational level, and the communicative level throughout the study. This approach may prove beneficial to others engaged in facilitating participatory health research in complex intercultural settings.

Local model of a qubit in the interferometric setup

We consider a typical realization of a qubit as a single particle in two-path interferometric circuits built from phase shifters, beam splitters and detectors. This framework is often taken as a standard example illustrating various paradoxes and quantum effects, including non-locality. In this paper we show that it is possible to simulate the behaviour of such circuits in a classical manner using stochastic gates and two kinds of particles, real ones and ghosts, which interact only locally. The model has built-in limited information gain and state disturbance in measurements which are blind to ghosts. We demonstrate that predictions of the model are operationally indistinguishable from the quantum case of a qubit, and allegedly ‘non-local’ effects arise only on the epistemic level of description by the agent whose knowledge is incomplete due to the restricted means of investigating the system.

EDUCATIONAL WORK AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE CONFEDERATION OF EDUCATION WORKERS OF ARGENTINA

This article is an effort to think about the idea of “systematization of educational work”, which proposes to limit reductionist perspectives that see the teacher as the executer and producer of knowledge. Hence, educational work must be understood as a problematization of the work of teachers itself, while their identity and position as social subjects are resignified. These events make them protagonists of an emancipatory and decolonial pedagogy. To this effect,the article develops the following expository moments: a) systematization of educational work: approaches and perspectives, b) “educational work” as an object of study: reflections on a social practice, c) who is the subject who constructs the object-problem... who problematizes?, d) why to systematize “educational work” in the current historical context? These sections seek to present a debate in the epistemic, conceptual, methodological, and practical levels, which allow a critical understanding of the conditions for the fulfillment of educational work, as well as its ruptures and continuities, from the perspective of an emancipatory pedagogy.

The Risk Conflicts Perspective

Starting from a perspective of democratic politics, this essay argues that the problem lies not in any “unjustified” politicization of risk controversies; quite to the contrary, it lies in their depoliticization or their capture in a postpolitical consensus. To this end, the prevailing storylines in public discourse on risk controversies are shown to be based on invalid assumptions regarding nature and science and on exclusionary mechanisms. In response, the risk conflicts perspective is put forward as an analytical framework, which allows us to evaluate mediated public discourse on the extent to which democratic debate and citizenship are facilitated. For the fields of science and environment communication, this entails a shift in emphasis from a focus on the epistemic level to the level of the political. We conclude by discussing the potential transformative impacts of this perspective for academic research, public discourse, as well as the directly involved social actors, in relation to the controversies in question.

Respecting all the evidence

Plausibly, you should believe what your total evidence supports. But cases of misleading higher-order evidence—evidence about what your evidence supports—present a challenge to this thought. In such cases, taking both first-order and higher-order evidence at face value leads to a seemingly irrational incoherence between one’s first-order and higher-order attitudes: you will believe P, but also believe that your evidence doesn’t support P. To avoid sanctioning tension between epistemic levels, some authors have abandoned the thought that both first-order and higher-order evidence have rational bearing. This sacrifice is both costly and unnecessary. We propose a principle, Evidential Calibration, which requires rational agents to accommodate first-order evidence correctly, while allowing rational uncertainty about what to believe. At the same time, it rules out irrational tensions between epistemic levels. We show that while there are serious problems for some views on which we can rationally believe, “P, but my evidence doesn’t support P”, Evidential Calibration avoids these problems. An important upshot of our discussion is a new way to think about the relationship between epistemic levels: why first-order and higher-order attitudes should generally be aligned, and why it is sometimes—though not always—problematic when they diverge.

Thinking multicultural education ‘otherwise’ – from a secularist construction towards a plurality of epistemologies and worldviews

This article examines educational, political and philosophical perspectives on the concepts of worldview and religion in the context of multicultural education. Using a postcolonial and post-structural approach combined with theories that analyse the politics of secularism, we attempt to pinpoint key perspectives in the recognition of worldviews in the current discourse on liberal multiculturalism. We suggest that the liberal-secular foundation of multicultural education is blind to practices, which, while supposedly based on political neutrality, are discriminating and ‘Othering’ towards religions and non-Western worldviews. Through theoretical and contextual analysis, we aim to deconstruct the ‘Otherness’ of religious worldviews at the epistemic level.

Certainty and Sensitive Knowledge


 
 
 In‘Is Locke’s Theory o fKnowledge Inconsistent?’ and‘Locke’s ‘Sensitive Knowledge’: Knowledge or Assurance’ Samuel Rickless has reopened the issue of whether Locke believes that what he calls sensitive knowledge really counts as knowledge. Rickless maintains that, having argued that knowledge requires certainty and having admitted that our awareness of objects external to the mind falls short of the certainty of intuition and demonstration, Locke is forced to concede that beliefs about the existence of objects external to the mind do not satisfy his criterion of knowledge; while some such beliefs reach such a high level of probability that we may be assured of them and they may be allowed to ‘pass under’ the name of knowledge, such beliefs are not really knowledge. In this case, calling such beliefs sensitive knowledge is to use ‘knowledge’ as an honorific; even though they fall short of the criterion of knowledge, for all practical purposes, we will let them pass as knowledge. Rickless adduces three considerations in support of this interpretation: first, certainty does not admit of degrees so, in conceding that beliefs about the existence of extra-mental objects fall short of the certainty of intuition and demonstration, Locke is conceding that such beliefs literally do not constitute knowledge; second, Locke tends to speak of our assurance of the existence of extra-mental objects and ‘assurance’ is a technical term indicating an epistemic level somewhat less than certainty; third, to say that something ‘passes under’ the name of a sort is to indicate that it is not really of that sort but that the name of the sort will be applied to it for practical purposes.
 
 

EMANCIPATION IN THE INDUSTRIAL AGE: TECHNOLOGY, RATIONALITY, AND THE COLD WAR IN HABERMAS’S EARLY EPISTEMOLOGY AND SOCIAL THEORY

In his 1968 essay “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’,” Jürgen Habermas deals more explicitly than in other works with phenomena related to modern technology and science.1He is well known for his social theory, legal theory, and theories of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and has been a major figure in the intellectual history of modern Europe due to the twin role he has played as both a voice and a representative of the political and philosophical movements of postwar and post-Holocaust West Germany. Exploring the role of technology in his thinking brings into focus technology's ambiguous status in critical social theory as well as the general relationship between intellectual history and the history of technology. The disturbingly open-ended question whether technology is modernity's blessing or its curse has mobilized critics and commentators at least since the Industrial Revolution and has divided them at political, epistemic, and moral levels. Habermas's project sits in the middle of such traditions, and his 1968 essay “updates” long-standing concerns about industrial modernity for the specific technological, philosophical, and political conditions of the early Cold War. Intersections between technology and his signature fields—intersections that he has both forged and contributed to—are found in political theories of technology and democracy (in the forms, for example, of technocracy and technological determinism), epistemologies of scientific knowledge and their relevance for theories of the reasonable subject and of knowledge communities, and theories of secularization and modern state-building.2

Epistemic inclination and factualization: a synchronic and diachronic study on the semantic gradience of factuality

abstractThis paper proposes a gradient redefinition of the notion of factuality, here intended as a dynamic continuum unfolding through several epistemic levels. In this respect, the speaker/writer’s increasing certainty upon the realization of an event or situation is here as factualization. Factualization is a conceptual phenomenon determined by an embodied mechanism (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Lakoff, 1987, 2003; Grush, 2004; Gallese & Lakoff, 2005) of cyclic acquisition and control with respect to a new proposition P. Being a form of subjectification (Traugott, 1989, 1995, 2003, 2010, 2012; Traugott & Dasher, 2002), factualization occurs as the semasiological reanalysis of an epistemic construction. Drawing on Langacker’s (1991, 2008, 2009) notion of the ‘epistemic control cycle’ (see also Kan, Teubner-Rhodes, Drummey, Nutile, Krupa, & Novick, 2013, on cognitive control), I claim and demonstrate that epistemic predicates originally conveying weak certainty towards a proposition P diachronically develop an increasingly factual meaning conveying more and more frequently a subjected form of certainty. This phenomenon is first shown through a qualitative and quantitative corpus analysis from the BNC,1which provides a measurable account of the various degrees of polysemy of the three epistemic predicatesI think,I believe, andI reckon. In addition, I discuss the results of a diachronic corpus survey from the diaCoris on the factualization process of(Io) penso‘I think’ in Modern Italian during the last 150 years, showing how the contemporary usage of(Io) pensois notably more oriented towards absolute factuality than it was 150 years earlier.

‘Black letters’: problems and issues in the research, dissemination and reception of literature by Afro-Argentines and on Afro-Argentines

Afro-Argentines of colonial descent constitute one of the lesser known minority groups in the country. While scholarly research on this particular group is still scarce, recent studies account for the diversity of its past and current cultural practices. Aside from some exceptions, Afro-Argentine literature is virtually unknown to academia and, as it is usually the case regarding Minor Literatures, it has been excluded from the national literary canon. Towards the end of the twentieth century there was a resurgence not only of studies on Afro-Argentine literature, but also of the presence of Afro-Argentines themselves in fictional writing. This paper will chart the process of retrieval, analysis and dissemination of Afro-Argentine literature, examining some of the issues that arise both at the epistemic and editorial policy levels. We will account for the revival of a literature on Afro-Argentines, in order to explore whether they reproduce a ‘master narrative’ that, through the historical novel, relegates Afro-Argentines into oblivion and/or reduces the group to its stereotypes; or if, on the other hand, these voices can subvert Argentine historiography by positioning this group in a leading role that mirrors the vitality of their present-day social movements.

Understanding Legal Languages - Linguistic Concerns of the Comparative Lawyer

This paper argues that there are different layers in legal language, and that the epistemic level of legal language is more relevant than the surface level of legal texts (statutes, judgments, decisions of public authorities, private documents) as linguistic end-products. The underlying assumption is that legal language is a complicated phenomenon and understanding different legal languages contains specific problems which are caused by the multiplicity of legal language itself which is duplicated when there is more than one language. Legal language contains not only different functions but also different levels of comprehension. Two examples are analysed in the paper: 1) language of ius commune and 2) language of English common law. Conclusions concern legal translation in a multi-lingual environment.