Epistemological Frame Research Articles

Exploring the Futures of the Ummah

This article is both a critique of ways of approaching the future and a presentation of scenarios of the Islamic world a generation ahead. The critique covers various global models, including The Club of Rome's classic Limits to Growth (L TG), 1 Mankind at the Turning Point (MTP), and World 2000, and other approaches to the understanding of the future. Drawing from poststructural theory, we ask: What is missing, who does the analysis privilege, and what epistemological frames or ways of knowing are accentuated, are made primary, by the models used? What can the Islamic world learn from these models? We attempt to go a step further than merely asking the Marxist class question of who benefits financially. For us, the issue is deeper. We are concerned with what knowledge frames and (more appropriately, from an Islamic per­spective) what civilizational frames are privileged, are considered more important. An appendix presents recommendations focused on making the Islamic urrunah more future oriented. However, global models are only one way of approaching or under­standing the future. There are other ways of approaching the study of the future from which can be derived specific assertions about issues, trends, and scenarios as to the likely and possible shape of the future. We also inquire into the utility of these models for better understanding the future of the Islamic ummah. We conclude with visions of the future of the ummah ...

Ericksonian Approaches to Psychotherapy: From Objective to Constructed Reality

Psychotherapy historically has operated within an expert model context. Within this frame, patients present their symptomatology to the therapist expert for diagnosis and intervention. The work of Milton Erickson has offered an alternative perspective in which the idea of the problem is shifted from one of pathology to one in which the individual’s strengths and resources are utilized. This paper discusses the Ericksonian approaches from a postmodernist narrative perspective. Ericksonian hypnotherapy is considered from this epistemological frame, particularly the role and value of expectancy in creating a new therapeutic narrative.

Beyond Materialism: A Coevolutionary Reinterpretation of the Environmental Crisis

Materialism, both as a vision of the good life and as a cosmological basis underlying epistemology and modern science, drives humanity's environmental crisis. The dominant thrust of the environmental movement has been simply to shift to a longer slower materialism. Understanding how materialism creates our environmental problems and limits our vision of the good life is a necessary step toward creating a different future. Understanding development as a process of coevolution between knowledge, technology, social organization, values, and nature provides an alternative cosmological and epistemological framing which both gives us perspective on materialism and suggests an alternative vision for the future.

Symbole, Referenzkontexte und die Konstruktion mathematischer Bedeutung — am Beispiel der negativen Zahlen im Unterricht

When introducing negative numbers mathematics teaching is confronted with the following developmental problem: The students interpret natural numbers within the frame of concrete, empirical conditions of counting, adding and taking away etc. Negative numbers are no longer immediately applicable to real situations nor is it possible to deduce them logically starting from concrete contexts. According to the methodical principle to begin with the concrete and to go up to the abstract, mathematics teaching handles this contradiction between the concrete, visible perception and the formal-relational structure of the concept of negative numbers in a 'linear' way: The aim is to deduce this new concept in a methodically natural manner from the already known epistemological frame of the natural numbers. This didactical intention contradicts the epistemological insight, that the new concept cannot be reduced to empirical facts. The new symbol system of negative numbers, which is constructed by an 'operational extension' needs a generalised re-interpretation: These symbols no longer refer to empirical properties of real objects, they reflect relational structures within and between objects, and these relations have to be socially negotiated and to be controlled by the mathematical rule-structure.

Promoting community participation through training: The DANIDA/UNCHS training programme

Adaptation research and practice too often overlooks the wider social context within which climate change is experienced. Mainstream approaches frame adaptation problems in terms of the consequences that flow from biophysical impacts and as a result, we argue, ask the wrong questions. A complementary approach gaining ground in the field, foregrounding the social, economic and political context, reveals differentiation in adaptation need, and how climate impacts interconnect with wider processes of change. In this paper, we illustrate how this kind of approach frames a different set of questions about adaptation using the case of Nepal. Drawing on fieldwork and a review of literature, we contrast the questions that emerge from adaptation research and practice that take climate risk as a starting point with the questions that emerge from examination of contemporary rural livelihoods. We find that while adaptation efforts are often centred around securing agricultural production and are predicated on climate risk management, rural livelihoods are caught in a wider process of transformation. The numbers of people involved in farming are declining, and households are experiencing the effects of rising education, abandonment of rural land, increasing wages, burgeoning mechanisation, and high levels of migration into the global labour market. We find the epistemological framing of adaptation too narrow to account for these changes, as it understands the experiences of rural communities through the lens of climate risk. We propose that rather than seeking to integrate local understandings into a fixed, impacts-orientated epistemology, it is necessary to premise adaptation on an epistemology capable of exploring how change occurs. Asking the right questions thus means opening up adaptation by asking: ‘what are the most significant changes taking place in people's lives?’, along with the more standard: ‘what are the impacts of climate change?’ Viewing adaptation as occurring between and within these two perspectives has the potential to reveal new vulnerabilities and opportunities for adaptation practice to act upon.

Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age

Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition Acknowledgments Preface to the 1990 Edition Preface to the 1984 Edition Part I. Thin Democracy: The Argument Against Liberalism 1. Thin Democracy: Politics as Zookeeping 2. The Preconceptual Frame: Newtonian Politics 3. The Epistemological Frame: Cartesian Politics 4. The Psychological Frame: Apolitical Man 5. Thin Democracy in the Twentieth Century: The Potential for Pathology Part II. Strong Democracy: The Argument for Citizenship 6. Strong Democracy: Politics as a Way of Living 7. A Conceptual Frame: Politics in the Participatory Mode 8. Citizenship and Participation: Politics as Epistemology 9. Citizenship and Community: Politics as Social Being 10. The Real Present: Institutionalizing Strong Democracy in the Modern World Index

Linguistic Competence: What Is It Really?

'Conoscere e distinguere' (B. Croce): To attain scientific knowledge is, first of all, to make distinctions. Hence, if I were asked what I consider to be my main contribution to the understanding of language and consequently to the foundation of linguistics or, to put it in other words, what constitutes my permanent frame of reference, the very often implicit fundamental principle underlying my treatment of the different, general, or particular linguistic problems, I would answer that it is a relatively simple distinction, one also made intuitively by the speakers of any language, which became entirely clear to me only around I955; in any case, it was only in 1955 that I formulated it explicitly and undertook to justify it.1 This distinction, which originated as a result of the discomfort with the distinction langue/parole, language/speech in the context of the post-Saussurean discussion of these notions, concerns in reality the levels of language, but applies first of all to what in the last decades has been called 'linguistic competence' and what I called at that time and still continue to call 'linguistic knowledge' (saber lingiiistico). And I consider this distinction to be important, as it enables us to assign a precise position to the different problem areas of linguistics and to its various questions with respect to the complex object language. It has been, for me at least, a helpful epistemological frame of reference for the interpretation not only of the various linguistic problems ranging from that of linguistic change to that of translation and of linguistic correctness, but also of the structure of the linguistic disciplines themselves and of recent developments in linguistics.2 I shall say more about this in the second half of this lecture. Let us first consider the distinction as such and its justification. Alan Gardiner, one of the most penetrating commentators of the distinction made by Saussure between langue and parole, interprets this distinction as a distinction between language as the activity of speaking and the underlying knowledge or technique of this activity (science, knowledge): 'Speech is ... a universally exerted activity.... In describing this activity, we shall discover that it consists in the application of a universally possessed science, namely the science which we call language. ... Language is a collective term, and embraces in its compass all those items of knowledge which enable a speaker to make effective use of word-signs.'3 For Gardiner, speech and language in this sense are not coextensive: inasmuch as it is realized, language is entirely contained in speech; speech on the other hand is not only the realization of language, since it exhibits, along with 'the facts of language', features by which it differs from language or rather by which it goes beyond language ('facts of speech'). Gardiner thinks that the distinction thus formulated

The Construal of Reality: Criticism in Modern and Postmodern Science

I shall attempt to demonstrate here that the general categories of hermeneutics can be applied just as well to the natural sciences as to the humanities, and I shall explore the implications of this demonstration for both types of disciplines. In doing so, it will be necessary for me to raise some unfashionable issues about the objectivity and rationality of critical interpretations, and, as a result, I may appear to be cast in the role of advocatus diaboli. The value of lowering the critical barriers that have been set up between the human and natural sciences, however, will outweigh any incidental paradoxes that may crop up en route.

Le champ de la religiosité. Projet d'analyse de la religiosité populaire au Brésil

The author begins by delineating the approach to religiosity that is peculiar to anthropology, as distinguished from that of sociology which, in the main, investigates religion's political and ideological role. The phenomenon he studies is popular religiosity, seen against the background of Brazilian culture — one that is derived, and alive with change. Setting off from Weberian theory and Bourdieu's epistemological frame work, he proposes a new model, as more dynamic and founded on apter concepts. Side by side with the ' legitimate ' religious structures, such as the world religions, present-day Brazilian society exhibits numerous elements of popular religion. Some come from African or Indian religions, having survived the encroachments of western culture, while others are the remnants of primitive or pagan cults, that were imported with medieval Catholicism. The article analyzes several such phenomena, as well as studies made recently about them.