Epistemic Structure Research Articles

The Ego Conquiro as the Paradigm of Modern Imperialism and its Violence Against the Struggle for Epistemic Justice

This article begins with a discussion of the implications of Enrique Dussel’s “I conquer, therefore I am” (ego conquiro) thesis as the paradigm of modern imperialism. According to Dussel, underlying the “myth of modernity” (mito de la modernidad) is an epistemological structure of a substantive ego that naturalizes European colonial expansion. Dussel admits that the “I conquer, therefore, I am” thesis began earlier than Descartes’s account of the cogito, which was theorized after the Spanish colonization of the Americas, but the substantive “I” that constitutes the ego conquiro nonetheless represents a theory of knowledge that served and continues to serve the political domination of bodies that have been historically victimized. Couched within the epistemic structure of Descartes’s cogito is a duality between soul and matter, where the former represents an immortal substance detached from the body, taken to be the recipe for rational truth, while the latter is reduced to a quantifiable object occupying a “zero-point” geometrical space. But the cogito became the epistemological standpoint that allowed for the justification of the many hidden forms of domination around the world, because it masks the social, economic, and geopolitical contexts and their history to the modern subject. This article will investigate the ego conquiro thesis and its link to epistemic violence, namely, epistemic racism and epistemicide, and will argue as a concluding point for a method of resistance that foregrounds philosophical pluralism to disrupt the internalization of the epistemologies of the Global North as the common-sense position(s) of today.

The University As Infrastructure of Becoming: Re-Activating Academic Freedom Through Humility in Times of Radical Uncertainty

ABSTRACT Traditionally, the field of science and technology studies (STS) considered the scientific laboratory as the central site of knowledge production and technological development. While providing rich analyses of the social construction of scientific knowledge and the role of non-human actors, STS scholars have often neglected the university – the very context in which laboratories themselves are embedded – as a relevant object of research. In this paper, we argue for re-introducing the university as a relevant category and object of analysis by using the notion of epistemic virtues to link epistemic culture – traditionally the focus of STS – and epistemic structure – traditionally the focus of higher education studies. Advancing this line of argumentation, we make three analytical moves. First, we explore academic freedom as a specific version of negative liberty that extends beyond disciplinary boundaries. We suggest that academics continuously negotiate academic freedom considering culturally and socially situated epistemic virtues such as objectivity and neutrality. Second, we introduce the notion of humility to revisit scientific knowledge production more generally and academic freedom in particular. Finally, we argue that practicing humility leads to enacting the university as an infrastructure of becoming otherwise, thereby enriching our understanding of universities as distinct and highly complex social spaces with a logic of their own.

Epistemic scaffolding: understanding and designing the support for epistemic growth in science

ABSTRACT In this paper, we introduce an epistemic scaffolding framework for understanding the nature of support for epistemic growth in science. Our framework distinguishes between two patterns of epistemic scaffolding: implicit and explicit. Implicit epistemic scaffolding encompasses support integrated into contexts, activities, discourse, or tools, exerting an unconscious influence on learners’ epistemic thinking and practices. On the other hand, explicit epistemic scaffolding involves intentionally explicating the underlying epistemology of learners’ knowledge work. This can manifest in various ways, such as explicit in epistemic structure, explicit in epistemic criteria, and explicit in epistemic goals. Building on the distributed and synergistic scaffolding framework, we also propose a design model to illustrate how explicit and implicit epistemic scaffolding can work together to optimise the support for epistemic growth in science.

“;Je mehr wir die einzelnen Dinge erkennen, desto mehr erkennen wir Gott": Spinozas rationaler Mystizismus

Spinoza has been interpreted as a rationalist and a monist. This article tries to show that these views are to be specified. The intuitive knowledge of God plays a constitutive role in Spinoza's "Ethics". To reach it, one has to run through long chains of inferences. But the inferential mode of cognition will not lead to an understanding of the definition of God given in the first part of the "Ethics". This understanding can only be gained in the fifth part. Thus, there is circular epistemic structure hidden in Spinoza's opus magnum, which has not been sufficiently described in the literature yet.

Algorithms Don’t Have A Future: On the Relation of Judgement and Calculation

This paper is about the opposite of judgement and calculation. This opposition has been a traditional anchor of critiques concerned with the rise of AI decision making over human judgement. Contrary to these approaches, it is argued that human judgement is not and cannot be replaced by calculation, but that it is human judgement that contextualises computational structures and gives them meaning and purpose. The article focuses on the epistemic structure of algorithms and artificial neural networks to find that they always depend on human judgement to be related to real life objects or purposes. By introducing the philosophical concept of judgement, it becomes clear that the property of judgement to provide meaning and purposiveness is based on the temporality of human life and the ambiguity of language, which quantitative processes lack. A juxtaposition shows that calculations and clustering can be used and referred to in more or less prejudiced and reflecting as well as opaque and transparent ways, but thereby always depend on human judgement. The paper clearly asserts that the transparency of AI is necessary for their autonomous use. This transparency requires the explicitness of the judgements that constitute these computational structures, thereby creating an awareness of the conditionality of such epistemic entities.

Archives as forms of resistance

ABSTRACT This visual essay explores a number of artistic and curatorial practices in which the archive acts as a primary tool for rereading histories. Contemporary art reveals a growing interest in the use of archival material and in the formation of new archives inside and outside institutions. Considering the archive as a series of documented and preserved knowledge, one motivation for such attentiveness could be the merging of artistic productions with curatorial practices. Building my argument on Irit Rogoff's analysis of curatorial practice as an “epistemic structure”, I examine how archives have the potential to produce knowledge against historical forgetfulness. Furthermore, the process of sustainable changes within the museums, as discussed by Peter Osborne, is studied here as another motive for the increasing use of archives in contemporary art. This is done by focused examinations of a research-based exhibition, Karnameh: Visual Culture of Iranian Children (1950-1980); two curatorial projects (one temporary and one ongoing), respectively Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art's Poster and the Archaeology of the Final Decade (AOTFD) and lastly an installation art piece, Documentation. Through these examples, I argue how working with archives, especially in conflicted places, is crucial to help with recovering erased histories and accumulating shattered memories.

Emancipating from (Colonial) Genealogies of the Techno-social Networks or Reversing Power Relations by Turning the Predator into Prey in Jordan Peele’s Nope

The article aims to map the contemporary techno-social networks, together with delineation of the algorithmic governmentality, computational unconscious, the epistemic structure of the Eurocentric matrix of power haunted by its own repetition of the constant abyss of horrors, only to search for gestures of resistance. Gestures of resistance, contrary to the false conviction of capitalist realism, can be found everywhere, including in Jordan Peele's Nope (2022). Through a variety of motifs, themes, and cultural and cinematic references, Peele creates a resistance image, i.e., an image that resists the historical trajectory of the violence of the digital colonial matrix of knowledge. In particular with Nope, in which the history of racial violence is disentangled by evoking the relation between the entanglement of capital and epistemic violence embodied in an all-devouring predator UFO. But Nope is also about visualizing silenced histories. Indeed, to strive to capture UFO with the camera is to break away from modernity as a totalizing onto-epistemology and in this register generating a false universal subject of a Man.

An empirical study of the effects of intelligent cognitive diagnostic feedback strategy on L2 writing performance, epistemic structure, and transferability

An empirical study of the effects of intelligent cognitive diagnostic feedback strategy on L2 writing performance, epistemic structure, and transferability

The Doors of Perception: Theory and Evidence of Frame-Dependent Rationalizability

We investigate how strategic behavior is affected by the set of notions (frames) used when thinking about the game. In our games the action set consists of visual objects: each player must privately choose one, trying to match the counterpart’s choice. We propose a model where different player-types are aware of different attributes of the action set (hence, different frames). One of the novelties is an epistemic structure that allows players to think about new frames, after initial unawareness of some attributes. To test the model, our experimental design brings about multiple frames by varying subjects’ awareness of several attributes. (JEL C72, C78, C91, D83)

Exploring the Complexities of Postcolonialism and the Dynamics of Power Relations through the Critical Analysis of Ashis Nandy's The Intimate Enemy: A Study on the Resistance, Identity, and Hybridity of Postcolonial Thought

Ashis Nandy focuses on colonialism and its effects in her book The Intimate Enemy. He mentions colonisation of both the body and the intellect. Nandy questions accepted notions of colonialism and emphasises the significance of hybridity in postcolonial thought. The book does a good job of explaining the reasons behind the British Raj's protracted rule as well as the mutual effects of coloniser and colonised. Nandy asserts that there is no unbalanced connection between colonisers and colonised people. He objects to the idea that colonisers are always "victorious" and colonised people are always "victims". The Intimate Enemy is primarily a study of the epistemic structure and intellectual capacities that continue colonialism's legacy in India under British control. According to Nandy, eradicating colonialism requires starting right there in people's minds. The downtrodden of the globe are one, and those who torture others are also complicit in this practise. In this essay, I want to concentrate on how Nandy reinterprets the idea of postcolonialism to open new vistas of thinking that lead to universalism, humanism, and self-realization. He does this by attempting to undermine the theory of the connection between colonisers and colonised.

How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method, by Brian McCuskey

Reviewed by: How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method by Brian McCuskey Jonathan Cranfield (bio) How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method, by Brian McCuskey; pp. 195. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021, $34.95. Academics who have worked on Arthur Conan Doyle will recognize two types of articles that they are frequently asked to review: the first identifies an obscure topic from the Sherlock Holmes stories and pursues it in excruciating detail (imagine an article titled “Alpinestocks vs Alpine-Stocks: The Case of the Vanishing Hyphen”); the second operates in an entirely different discipline but uses the figure of Holmes to structure its argument (perhaps “‘Some Ecstatic Dream’: Sherlock Holmes and REM Sleep Cycles”). The former usually totters along the ill-defined border between Holmesiana (the half-satirical, half-earnest pursuit of canonical truths within the Holmes stories) and conventional literary criticism. The latter, an easy desk reject for scientific journals without the Holmesian framing, can be sanguinely passed on to a humanities scholar to fire the necessary bolt to the temple. The proliferation of both types illustrates the wide variety of truth-claims for which Holmes’s testimony can be summoned. Brian McCuskey’s How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method identifies and analyzes a series of public debates and controversies (political, religious, and academic) where Sherlock Holmes or the vaunted Holmesian method was generally invoked by all sides as a guarantor of their correctness. The examples are mostly drawn from the career and afterlife of Conan Doyle himself. McCuskey explores Holmes’s method in some detail, mostly offering a useful summary of work on the subject by the likes of Stephen Knight, Ronald R. Thomas, Thomas Sebeok, and Michael Saler. He argues, in broad terms, that the central “paradox” identified in Conan Doyle’s life by many writers and biographers—how could he create the great rationalist detective and also believe in spiritualism and fairies?—is a false dichotomy (46). While Holmes avowedly excluded the supernatural from his worldview, his mode of reasoning was entirely specious, unfalsifiable, and purposefully riddled with gaps that could be supplemented with leaps of faith, so-called common sense, nonsense, errata, confirmation bias, or ordinary prejudice. In short: you can find a Holmes quote to support any imaginable proposition whether profound, trivial, or unhinged. [End Page 687] Yet, since Holmes’s first appearance in A Study in Scarlet (1887), he has been deployed in a bewildering array of debates. McCuskey’s chapters, though they do add up to an overarching argument, read more naturally as a series of smaller case studies. Chapter 1 examines a snapshot of religious debates around eyewitness testimony, textual reliability, and the limits of infallibility in 1887. Did the Reverend Malcolm MacColl really see the corpse of an impaled Christian martyr on the banks of the Sava River or was it a “large bundle of drying haricot beans” (15)? The terms of this debate, christened “What the Canons Saw” in The Times (1788–present), “seemed almost to summon” Holmes into being according to McCuskey (16, 17). This tendentious phraseology captures the book’s limitations but also some of its self-aware charm. McCuskey has written a book-length deconstruction of a purely fictional mode of reasoning that was never intended to be externally consistent. He occasionally chastises himself for this foolishness, belatedly and playfully pulling his own methodology into his critique. Other chapters examine the genesis and epistemic structure of Conan Doyle’s spiritualist beliefs, his career as a proselytizer and public debater, the growth of Sherlock Holmes fandom, the constructivist theory wars of the 1980s, and the character’s role in online conspiracy theories pertaining to 9/11 and post-Trump American politics. So how did Sherlock pull the trick and convince generations of readers that his method of crime solving was replicable in their everyday lives? How could the same character’s words be used in self-justification by 9/11 truthers and newspaper fact-checkers, QAnon devotees and august professors, evolutionary biologists and the Intelligent Design movement? The answer, of course, is that there is no Holmesian method, just a series of pleasingly-phrased, quotable...

The relationship between normative and empirical elements in bioethical reasoning

The article examines the internal structure of bioethics in terms of the relationship between its normative and empirical elements. It is shown that bioethical research is subject to the epistemological specificity that is characteristic of applied ethics in general: there is a certain difficulty in the theoretical representation of the transition from the analysis of empirical data to normative conclusions. It is suggested that W.R. Potter's initial characterisation of bioethics as a "bridge" between facts and values needs to be clarified and supplemented with information about the logical and epistemological mechanisms that enable the transition from facts to values, from empirical data to normative findings, and from the real to the proper. The key objective of the research presented in this article is to identify (changing at different stages of bioethics development) the relationship between normative and empirical elements of bioethical knowledge by analysing the structure of bioethical reasoning. Both "principled" and "empirically oriented" models of bioethical reasoning (including precedent conclusions, conclusions by analogy, etc.) are analysed. The significance of the phenomenon of the "empirical turn" in bioethics for the development and transformation of its epistemic structure and changes in the standards for evaluating the results of reasoning is comprehended. The interrelation of the specifics of transitions between empirical and normative contexts of bioethical knowledge and the interdisciplinary nature of bioethical research is highlighted. It demonstrates the importance of addressing the issue of the relationship between normative and empirical elements of bioethical knowledge for the justification of bioethics and the formation of ideas about its position in the system of knowledge.

The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography, by Mark Evan Bonds

<i>The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography</i>, by Mark Evan Bonds

Developing teacher curriculum design expertise: using the CDC Model in the music classroom

AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to discuss the impact of the Curriculum Design Coherence Model (CDC Model – Rata, 2019) on the design practice of two music teachers in a middle school music class in New Zealand. The CDC Model proposes that deep learning first requires deep design coherence. This coherence is generated by three interrelated design dimensions: (i) the ‘surfacing’ of epistemic structure, (ii) the use of subject concepts and (iii) the interrelationship between ‘knowledge-that’ (knowledge of something) and ‘know-how-to’ (knowing how to do something with that knowledge of something). We discuss how the model has been put to use in the design of a song writing unit of work for students aged 10–12 years in a general music class and note the impact of the model on the developing design expertise of the two music teachers involved in a wider research project.

Updating false beliefs: The role of misplaced vs. well-placed certainty.

People can update their misconceptions or false beliefs by learning from corrective sources. However, research has shown that people vary drastically in the extent to which they learn from feedback and update their false beliefs accordingly. That past work drew attention to cognitive and motivational factors such as cognitive rigidity and closed-mindedness as inhibitors of belief updating. Here we examined a novel epistemic structure, misplaced certainty, a subjective sense of certainty while recognizing uncertainty in oneself or most people (e.g., I feel certain although I recognize X is technically uncertain or it is technically uncertain according to most people), as a unique predictor of lower belief updating. In a preregistered study, we hypothesized that those with high chronic misplaced certainty would be less likely to learn from feedback and revise their misconceptions in a feedback-learning task. In our analyses, we controlled for well-placed certainty-certainty while recognizing no doubt in oneself or most others. We also controlled for variables associated with closed-minded cognition. Consistent with our predictions, those with high misplaced certainty were less likely to revise their false beliefs in response to corrective feedback. In contrast, those with high well-placed certainty were more likely to learn from corrective feedback and revise their false beliefs. By shedding light on the nuances of different forms of subjective certainty, the present work aims to pave the way for further research on epistemic factors in the perseverance and correction of false beliefs.

On the Nature of Information: How FAIR Digital Objects are Building-up Semantic Space

On the Nature of Information: How FAIR Digital Objects are Building-up Semantic Space

Epistemic Structure in Non-Summative Social Knowledge

ABSTRACT How a group G can know that p has been the subject of much investigation in social epistemology in recent years. This paper clarifies and defends a form of non-supervenient, non-summative group knowledge: G can know that p even if none of the members of G knows that p, and whether or not G knows that p does not locally supervene on the mental states of the members of G. Instead, we argue that what is central to G knowing that p is whether G has an epistemic structure that is functioning appropriately in accord with the action-related purposes of the group, and this structure may include non-agential elements such as devices that retain or process information. We argue that recent objections to non-summative group knowledge given by Jennifer Lackey do not in fact succeed in undermining the view, but do help to clarify the nature of non-summative group knowledge. The main upshot of our response to Lackey’s objections is that groups put their knowledge into action in ways that often differ from how individuals do, and social epistemologists should be careful to notice these differences, especially insofar as groups often structure themselves by employing various epistemically-relevant devices.

Epistemic and Nonepistemic Design in Textbooks in Social Studies for Lower Secondary School: Do the Textbooks Facilitate Knowledge Building and In-Depth Learning?

The subject renewal, the new Norwegian curriculum for the school, is part of an international trend with a shift towards more knowledge-based curricula, to bring knowledge and in-depth learning back to the school. Against this background, this study examines new Norwegian textbooks in social studies for schools. The analysis is based on a social realist framework, which combines semantics and content analysis and reveals major differences in the design of the textbooks. A distinction is made between epistemic and nonepistemic design, and this study shows that the absence of an epistemic structure is a problem that haunts new textbooks in social studies. When textbooks lack a design that connects subject concepts, content, and competencies, students will not get access to epistemic knowledge, something which creates barriers to in-depth learning and cumulative knowledge building in the subject.

The Scarcities ofUdolpho

AbstractThis essay identifies symptoms of the historical emergence of generalized scarcity in Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, which grants scarcity's ruthless logic a primary narrative function under the aesthetic cover of suspense. Radcliffe's novels generate occult phenomenologies of scarcity, which manifest as affect, epistemic structure, economic process, social relations, and transcendent force or metaphysic (both natural and supernatural). Suspense replicates the social operation of generalized scarcity by carrying us from one particular “conflict of choice” to the next, keeping a veil over the governing logic that conditions the whole process. If we treat crises as unpredictable and singular events rather than effects of identifiable systems, we avoid reckoning with capitalism's normalization of continual disruption and reorganization, what Marx called its “constant revolutionising of production, [and] uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions.” The scarcity-inflected narrative apparatus privileges personal volition—individual choices that lead to specific outcomes—over collective or systemic determinations, a distinction key to the coercive social power of scarcity. It is not just Radcliffean gothic but narrative in general that comes under the sway of this logic during the last decade of the eighteenth century.

Diagnostic uncertainty in patients, parents, and physicians: a compensatory control theory perspective

ABSTRACT Medical diagnoses offer a structure by which psychological uncertainty can be attenuated, allowing patients to diminish psychological threats and focus on health prognosis. Yet when no diagnosis can be made, patients may experience diagnostic uncertainty – perceiving the medical field as unable to provide an accurate explanation of the cause of their health problems. This review examines the psychological threat that diagnostic uncertainty imposes on individuals’ need for control and understanding, and the resulting consequences experienced by patients, parents of pediatric patients, and physicians. Using compensatory control theory as a framework, we propose a taxonomy of behaviors that people may adopt in order to regain control in the face of diagnostic uncertainty and to reaffirm that the world is not random and chaotic. To manage diagnostic uncertainty, people may bolster their personal agency, affiliate with external systems they see as acting in their interest, affirm clear connections between behaviors and outcomes, and affirm nonspecific epistemic structure. Diagnostic uncertainty is approached from the perspectives of patients, parents of pediatric patients, and physicians, demonstrating how each group responds in order to maintain a sense that the world has structure and is not random. Discussion centers on moderators, limitations, and implications for clinical practice.