Epistemological Asymmetry Research Articles

Falsifying Falsificationist Legal Theory

A number of attempts have been made to conceptualise legal reasoning along falsificationist lines. This paper criticises a recent one by Bernhard Schlink. After familiarising the reader with falsificationism, I argue that falsificationism is premised on an epistemological asymmetry between singular observation statements and universal hypotheses, and that absent such an asymmetry in the context of statutory interpretation, framing jurisprudence in falsificationist terms is unwarranted and misleading. To get off the ground, legal falsificationism would need to combine with some kind of broadly intuitionist moral cognitivism, but even then, it would still misrepresent what is going on in legal reasoning. The arguments in this paper apply mutatis mutandis to all falsificationist theories of legal and ethical reasoning. I point to some by Albert, Canaris and Larenz.

The Epistemological Asymmetry of Framing “Woman” via US Women's Rights Pioneers

AbstractNineteenth-century US social activist contemporaries Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth are memorialized as women's rights pioneers. White activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony cemented a generational canon. Black activist Sojourner Truth anticipated the eventual crystallization of intersectionality. These figures’ historical proximity underscores the high epistemological and political stakes of claiming gendered categories, namely via “woman” as a mark of aggrievement. I link concepts of intersectionality, epistemic agency, epistemic resources, and social movement framing to examine how “woman” is asymmetrically categorized. To this end, I perform a textual analysis of memorialized documents: “Declaration of Sentiments” (1848) by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States” (1876) by Susan B. Anthony, and “Ain't I a Woman?” (1851) by Sojourner Truth. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony frame “woman” as a single-axis and vertical category, ultimately deferring to the seeming preeminence of the US nation-state. By contrast, Sojourner Truth frames “woman” as a multi-axis and horizontal category by synthesizing her feminist consciousness, lived experience of enslavement, and personal religiosity. This article revisits key memorialized events by utilizing a conceptual toolkit that interlaces feminist and social epistemology with social movement theory.

The Social Bifurcation of Reality: Symmetrical Construction of Knowledge in Science-Trusting and Science-Distrusting Discourses.

This article proposes a conceptual framework to study the social bifurcation of reality in polarized science-trusting and science-distrusting lay worldviews, by analyzing and integrating five concepts: science work, number work, emotion work, time work, and boundary work. Despite the epistemological asymmetry between accounts relying on mainstream science and science-distrusting or denialist ones, there are symmetrical social processes contributing to the construction of lay discourses. Through conceptual analysis, we synthesize an alternative to the deficit model of contrarian discourses, replacing the model of social actors as “defective scientists” with a focus on their culturally competent agency. The proposed framework is useful for observing the parallel construction of polarized realities in interaction and their ongoing articulation through hinge objects, such as vaccines, seatbelts, guns, or sanitary masks in the Covid-19 context. We illustrate the framework through a comparative approach, presenting arguments and memes from contemporary online media in two controversies: namely, vaccine-trusting versus vaccine-distrusting views and Covid-convinced versus Covid-suspicious discourses.

Exploring the Grounds for the Study of the Identity of Indigenous English Language Teachers in Colombia

This article addresses the invisibilization of the existence of indigenous teachers in the Colombian ELT (English language teaching) field. Their existence, which is admittedly a phenomenon that lacks quantitative saliency, offers opportunities to reflect on the epistemological asymmetries that traditionally have linked the Colombian ELT field to an instrumental mainstream bilingualism, often ignoring the conditions of linguistic and cultural diversity in the country. Besides, there is an exploration of how the study of indigenous teachers’ identities might contribute to the re-signification of pedagogy; this paper elaborates on the idea that scholars in the Colombian ELT have already built some horizons of understanding between the ELT and the diversities and epistemic privileges of Colombian indigeneity. The article is part of an ongoing research on the identities of indigenous teachers in the Colombian ELT being carried out within the Interinstitutional Ph.D. in Education at Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, Bogotá

North Perspectives for a Better South? Big Data and the Global South in Big Data & Society

Over the last few years, data studies within Social Sciences watched a growth in the number of researches highlighting the need for more proficuous participation from the Global South in the debates of the field. The lack of Southern voices in the academic scholarship on the one hand, and of recognition of the importance and autonomy of its local data practices, such as those from indigenous data movements, on the other, had been decisive in establishing a Big Data in the South agenda. This paper displays an analytical mapping of 131 articles published from 2014-2016 in Big Data & Society (BD&S), a leading journal acknowledged for its pioneering promotion of Big Data research among social scientists. Its goal is to provide an overview of the way data practices are approached in BD&S papers concerning its geopolitical instance. It argues that there is a tendency to generalise data practices overlooking the specific consequences of Big Data in Southern contexts because of an almost exclusive presence of Euroamerican perspectives in the journal. This paper argues that this happens as a result of an epistemological asymmetry that pervades Social Sciences.

THE NEGLECTED NEXUS BETWEEN CONVIVIALITY AND INEQUALITY

ABSTRACT Starting from a detailed review of recent publications oriented by the concept of conviviality and etymologically related expressions (convivialisme, Konvivenz, Konvivialitat), the article explores a common analytical deficit in these different contributions: the disregard of the reciprocal constitution of conviviality and inequality. To overcome this deficiency, the essay develops an analytical framework, according to which inequalities defined along four complementary and interdependent axes (material, power, environmental and epistemological asymmetries) are always signified, reproduced, and negotiated within convivial interactions.

What asymmetry? Knowledge of self, knowledge of others, and the inferentialist challenge

There is widely assumed to be a fundamental epistemological asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of others. They are said to be ’categorically different in kind and manner’ (Moran), and the existence of such an asymmetry is taken to be a primitive datum in accounts of the two kinds of knowledge. I argue that standard accounts of the differences between self-knowledge and knowledge of others exaggerate and misstate the asymmetry. The inferentialist challenge to the asymmetry focuses on the extent to which both self-knowledge and knowledge of others are matters of inference and interpretation. In the case of self-knowledge I focus on the so-called ‘transparency method’ and on the extent to which use of this method delivers inferential self-knowledge. In the case of knowledge of others’ thoughts, I discuss the role of perception as a source of such knowledge and argue that even so-called ’perceptual’ knowledge of other minds is inferential. I contend that the difference between self-knowledge and knowledge of others is a difference in the kinds of evidence on which they are typically based.

Tupi ou não Tupi? Predação material, ação coletiva e colonialismo no Espírito Santo, Brasil

Este artigo trata das interações entre populações indígenas e não indígenas no sul do Espírito Santo (costa sudeste do Brasil) nos séculos XVIII e XIX, a partir de uma abordagem da arqueologia interpretativa combinada a teorias sobre a agência dos humanos e dos objetos. Sua primeira parte é uma discussão crítica sobre a assimetria epistemológica, estabelecida e mantida ao longo de séculos de colonialismo, entre histórias locais e a história da colonização americana pelos ocidentais. A partir de um estudo de caso, discute-se como a mesma metanarrativa do devastador impacto ocidental sobre populações nativas, consideradas culturalmente estáticas e socialmente passivas, opera em modelos teóricos arqueológicos correntes e no discurso nacionalista do século XIX sobre a conquista dos índios do Espírito Santo. Em seguida, apresenta-se uma perspectiva alternativa de estudo do aparato material tupi setecentista, atenta à noção indígena de reciprocidade e ao potencial do mundo material para a mobilização de ações coletivas. Com o contexto interpretativo construído para os sítios arqueológicos do Espírito Santo, procura-se discutir, a partir de cerâmicas, líticos, manuscritos e mapas, a ação tupi na colonização europeia.

Two Millian Arguments: Using Helen Longino's Approach to Solve the Problems Philip Kitcher Targeted with His Argument on Freedom of Inquiry

Philip Kitcher argued that the freedom to pursue one's version of the good life is the main aim of Mill's argument for freedom of expression. According to Kitcher, in certain scientific fields, political and epistemological asymmetries bias research toward conclusions that threaten this most important freedom of underprivileged groups. Accordingly, Kitcher claimed that there are Millian grounds for limiting freedom of inquiry in these fields to protect the freedom of the underprivileged. I explore Kitcher's argument in light of the interpretation Helen Longino gave to Mill's argument. She argued that free critical dialogue in the community allows bias to be overcome, through intersubjective criticism of hypotheses and the background assumptions that frame them. I suggest that Longino's approach allows for the identification of the fundamental problems of the research programs Kitcher targeted, and for the rejection of their claims to knowledge. Thus it is possible to address Kitcher's problem without limiting freedom of speech.

Epistemological asymmetries between belief and experience

Epistemological asymmetries between belief and experience

Des lieux avec lesquels penser, des livres auxquels penser

Many Aymara men and women claim that human knowledge as transmitted through language is pure ‘siwsawi’, i.e. talk, opinions, views and judgments of particular individuals. As such it is knowledge of a particular kind; it is knowledge concerning the opinions of other humans, nothing else. It is thereby significantly different from the non-linguistic, experiential knowledge that is lived-through and gained in, from, with and within the world. This kind of knowledge is ‘ukamaw’, the way things are. Lines of reasoning such as these have been addressed by linguists interested in the dynamics of ‘evidentiality’, i.e. the way languages provide an array of mechanisms for communicating how people regard the source and trustworthiness of their knowledge. It has been shown that Aymara speakers constantly use linguistic ‘data-source marking’ in order to indicate whether they are speaking from personal experiential knowledge, from knowledge acquired through language, or from non-personal knowledge. In this paper, the two first categories will be discussed in some detail. When people distinguish between the ‘siwsawi’ nature of the knowledge acquired through human language and the ‘ukamaw’ nature of the personal knowledge acquired through non-linguistic interaction with other knowledgeable subjects in the world, they use a fundamental Aymara linguistic logic. In Aymara society, the failure to indicate from what kind of knowledge one speaks is looked upon with suspicion. When university lecturers fail to do so, e.g. when they seem to claim to have personal knowledge of a certain topic for having read a book about it, Aymara students tend to come to the conclusion that lectures and books are good enough if you are interested in people’s opinions and judgments, but they are no more than siwsawi; words said, heard and read, not experience lived. Thus, this way of distinguishing between different kinds of knowledge according to their source and supposed reliability has interesting implications for the current process of decolonization of the Bolivian University and the recent establishment of ‘indigenous universities’ as integral parts of the decolonizing state politics launched by the Evo Morales administration. In this paper I pose the question that if books and lectures are basically about the opinions and judgments of particular individuals, and proper knowledge is to be gained only in the experiential, non-linguistic, inter-relational dealings with and in the world, wouldn’t a project aimed at decolonizing knowledge and decolonizing the University precisely by way of books and lectures, i.e. a logocentric project of decolonization, be a venture fated to reproduce the colonial epistemological asymmetries of knowledge production? On the one hand, then, this paper scrutinizes the problems linked to the ‘siwsawi’ nature of conventional (colonial) academic knowledge in relation to a critical process of decolonization. On the other hand, it explores the ‘ukamaw’ nature of experiential knowledge and the prospects for this kind of knowledge to lay the fundaments for a decolonial epistemological transformation of the Bolivian University. Fundamentally, this paper addresses issues such as what it means to know, what knowledge is, and what it means to be a knowing and knowledgeable subject in the Bolivian Andes today, in a context where subalternized traditions of thought gain new urgency in new educational and political dynamics and where different visions and claims of truth coexist, coalesce and collide.

Modernity and the hybridization of nationalism and religion: Zionism and the Jews of the Middle East as a heuristic case

This article looks at nationalism and religion, analyzing the sociological mechanisms by which their intersection is simultaneously produced and obscured. I propose that the construction of modern nationalism follows two contradictory principles that operate simultaneously: hybridization and purification. Hybridization refers to the mixing of “religious” and “secular” practices; purification refers to the separation between “religion” and “nationalism” as two distinct ontological zones. I test these arguments empirically using the case of Zionist nationalism. As a movement that was born in Europe but traveled to the Middle East, Zionism exhibits traits of both of these seemingly contradictory principles, of hybridization and purification, and pushes them to their limits. The article concludes by pointing to an epistemological asymmetry in the literature by which the fusion of nationalism and religion tends to be underplayed in studies of the West and overplayed in studies of the East/global South.

Towards a method for evaluating technological expectations: Revealing uncertainty in gene silencing technology discourse

This paper investigates the dynamics of expectations from a cognitive semantic perspective, specifically the relationship between epistemological asymmetry and uncertainty. Building on the work of several other authors since the 1980s, we propose a new framework based on frame semantics for discovering and organizing information related to expectations. When this framework is applied to two sets of expectations surrounding the applications of RNA interference, a recently discovered molecular genetic phenomenon with increasing notoriety, uncertainty seems to be correlated with what we call conceptual distance, the difference between past/present and future aspects of expectations. In essence, levelling of epistemological asymmetry through frame semantic analysis can decrease or increase uncertainty based on conceptual distance from previously fulfilled expectations.

"I'm a Bit Concerned"--Early Actions and Psychological Constructions in a Child Protection Helpline

This article analyzes early actions in 50 calls reporting cases of abuse to a national child protection helpline in the UK (the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Helpline, NSPCC). It focuses on the early turns in the caller's reason for call, in particular, a class of constructions in which the caller describes himself or herself as "concerned about x" (or similar). Analysis of the corpus of calls suggests concern constructions are canonical early elements of the reason-for-call sequence. Concern constructions (a) are oriented to a pre-move in the caller's reason for call, (b) project the unpacking of concerns in a way oriented to the NSPCC's institutional role, (c) attend to epistemological asymmetries between caller and call taker and remove the requirement for disaffiliative next actions such as asking for the basis of claims, (d) provide a way for the Child Protection Officer to take abuse claims seriously while not presupposing their truth, and (e) display an appropriate caller stance. These observations are supported by an analysis of deviant cases. The broader implications of this study for the relation between psychology, interaction, and institutions are discussed.

Prediction, explanation and the epistemology of future studies

This article is a contribution to the development of the epistemological foundations of Futures Studies. The article starts by presenting the conventional “covering-law” model asserting the symmetry between prediction and explanation, a model that continues to undermine the authority of Futures Studies as a discipline despite the fact that Logical Positivism, the epistemological paradigm that inspired it, is no longer dominant. Then the article outlines the fatal weaknesses of that model showing how out of its criticism emerges the prospect of a coherent and robust epistemology of prediction. Two major points are made: First that predictive argumentation is not demonstrative but merely evidential. Therefore formal logic argumentative structures of the “covering law” type are inadequate in giving a complete and accurate account of predictive argumentation and practice. If the nature of predictive arguments is evidential then the epistemology of prediction should be based not on mere formal logic but on a larger theory of argumentation. Second, the criticism illuminates the complex problem of the types of knowledge and information used in predictive arguments to build up evidence. Explicit and formalized knowledge and statistical evidence are not enough for a successful predictive procedure. Background information and personal, local and tacit knowledge play a surprisingly major role in predictive arguments and procedures and that has very important epistemological consequences.

Epistemological Restraint—Revisited

THOMAS NAGEL has argued that ‘true liberalism’ excludes appeals to conceptions of the good in political argument. According to Nagel, liberalism's impartiality is grounded not in skepticism but, rather, in its commitment to ‘epistemological restraint.’ As he puts it, ‘We accept a kind of epistemological division between the private and the public domains: in certain contexts I am constrained to consider my beliefs merely as beliefs rather than as truths, however convinced I may be that they are true, and that I know it.’ Nagel's notion of epistemological restraint has been roundly criticized by perfectionist liberals and advocates of liberal neutrality alike. In fact, even Nagel has come to reject the epistemological argument—in part, because of the epistemological asymmetry that it presupposes. In this paper, I offer an answer to Nagel's critics, one that makes the notion of epistemological asymmetry coherent. In so doing, I show how to defend liberal neutrality without embracing skepticism. I structure the paper in the following way: Section II lays out the critique of epistemological restraint; Section III defends the coherence of this notion; and Section IV considers an objection to the analysis developed in Section III.

Epistemological Asymmetries and Erotic Stagings: Father-Daughter Incest in Heinrich von Kleist's The Marquise of O ...

Focusing on the scene of reconciliation between the heroine and her father, the article traces the epistemological, erotic, and aesthetic impact of father-daughter intimacy in Kleist's Die Marquise von O .... While the protagonists rely on bourgeois notions of sexuality, daughterhood, and family bonds that allow them to ignore the libidinal dynamics at home, the reader is asked to reflect on the difficulties of distinguishing between emotions and eroticism within an intimate early nineteenth-century family. This epistemological asymmetry is paralleled by aesthetic ambiguities. By presenting father-daughter desire in the scene of reconciliation as a quotation from contemporary theater and tableaux vivants , the novel not only parodies dramatic traditions, but also reveals the erotic impact of successful theatricality. (IMKF)

Understanding Delusions

Delusions traditionally have been considered as fixed, false beliefs, born of morbidity. Whereas this definition serves to orient the clinician to the phenomena at hand, each element breaks down under scrutiny. It has been shown that delusions are not necessarily false, although in some sense they are discordant with reality. When delusions coincide with actual events their judgements can be shown to be independent of this evidential basis; when they refer to disorders of experience, such as first rank symptoms, the experience usually contains a distorted meaning. The supposition that delusions are a variety of belief has itself been questioned. On the one hand, they do not always refer in a meaningful way to anything, or when they do they fail to function as evaluative judgments; instead, delusions are experienced subjectively in ways that are characteristic of knowing rather than believing. On the other hand, delusions are not ascertained clinically by surveying the patient's belief system; rather their failure to achieve the status of objective knowledge leads to the post hoc relegation of delusions to the epistemologic waste basket of beliefs. To treat delusions as necessarily the product of morbidity is essentially tautologous insofar as delusions are, by definition, pathologic; that is, as defective judgments delusions are not simply erroneous, they are disordered. Finally, the fixity of delusions is an empirical matter and varies widely. Underlying this perceived intractability, however, are the subjective certainty and incorrigibility that Jaspers identified and which Spitzer has recast in the form of "epistemological asymmetry" misapplied to external reality. Although delusions typically have been recognized and categorized according to their manifest content, these formal considerations are crucial to understanding the nature of delusions.

Temporally-Asymmetric Principles, Parity between Explanation and Prediction, and Mechanism Versus Teleology

Three major ways in which temporal asymmetries enter into scientific induction are discussed as follows:1. An account is given of the physical basis for the temporal asymmetry of recordability, which obtains in the following sense: except for humanly recorded predictions and one other class of advance indicators to be discussed, interacting systems can contain reliable indicators of only their past and not of their future interactions. To deal with the exceptional cases of non-spontaneous “pre-records,” a clarification is offered of the essential differences in the conditions requisite to the production of an indicator having retrodictive significance (“post-record”), on the one hand, and of one having predictive significance (“prerecord” or recorded prediction), on the other. Purported counter-examples to the asymmetry of spontaneous recordability are refuted.2. It is shown how in cases of asymmetric recordability, the associated retrodiction-prediction asymmetry makes for an asymmetry of assertibility as between an explanandum (or an explanans) referring to a future event and one referring to a past one. But it is argued that this epistemological asymmetry in the assertibility per se must be clearly distinguished from a logical asymmetry between the past and the future in regard to the inferability (deductive or inductive) of the explanandum from the explanans. And it is then contended that the failure to distinguish between an epistemological and a logical asymmetry vitiates the critiques that recent writers have offered of the Popper-Hempel thesis, which affirms symmetry of inferability as between predictive and post-explanatory arguments. In reply to Scriven, it is maintained that predictions based on mere indicators (rather than causes) do not establish an asymmetry in scientific understanding as between predictive arguments and post-explanatory ones.3. As a further philosophical ramification of the retrodiction-prediction asymmetry, a set of sufficient conditions are stated for the correctness of philosophical mechanism as opposed to teleology.