Epistemological Limitations Research Articles

Tracking movements: Black activism, aerial surveillance, and transparency optics

This article examines the 2015 Baltimore uprisings that emerged in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) covert aerial surveillance of the protesters. It does so by investigating the records that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) extracted from the government agency through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The article first traces the process of discovering and circulating this corpus of information. It then considers what the digital disclosures, including 18-plus hours of aerial surveillance footage, can reveal about the racial and technological dimensions of contemporary state surveillance. In considering the agency’s strategies of public admission, I develop the concept of transparency optics and identify some of its potential logics at work. I then discuss these records’ epistemological limits, such as the shortcomings of analyzing digital processes through ocularcentric approaches. Finally, this article contrasts the FBI videos’ panoptic vantage of the protests with the embodied, ground-level perspective of a local participant’s documentary film.

Bubble effect: including internet search engines in systematic reviews introduces selection bias and impedes scientific reproducibility

BackgroundUsing internet search engines (such as Google search) in systematic literature reviews is increasingly becoming a ubiquitous part of search methodology. In order to integrate the vast quantity of available knowledge, literature mostly focuses on systematic reviews, considered to be principal sources of scientific evidence at all practical levels. Any possible individual methodological flaws present in these systematic reviews have the potential to become systemic.Main textThis particular bias, that could be referred to as (re)search bubble effect, is introduced because of inherent, personalized nature of internet search engines that tailors results according to derived user preferences based on unreproducible criteria. In other words, internet search engines adjust their user’s beliefs and attitudes, leading to the creation of a personalized (re)search bubble, including entries that have not been subjected to rigorous peer review process. The internet search engine algorithms are in a state of constant flux, producing differing results at any given moment, even if the query remains identical. There are many more subtle ways of introducing unwanted variations and synonyms of search queries that are used autonomously, detached from user insight and intent. Even the most well-known and respected systematic literature reviews do not seem immune to the negative implications of the search bubble effect, affecting reproducibility.ConclusionAlthough immensely useful and justified by the need for encompassing the entirety of knowledge, the practice of including internet search engines in systematic literature reviews is fundamentally irreconcilable with recent emphasis on scientific reproducibility and rigor, having a profound impact on the discussion of the limits of scientific epistemology. Scientific research that is not reproducible, may still be called science, but represents one that should be avoided. Our recommendation is to use internet search engines as an additional literature source, primarily in order to validate initial search strategies centered on bibliographic databases.

Uwarunkowania epistemologiczne obrazowania rzeczywistości politycznej w mediach

The author reflects on the issue of epistemological limitations in the process of media imaginings of political reality. Using reference theory and description theory the author tries to answer the question of what makes up the image of political reality as verbalized in media coverage. His conclusion is that attempts to reflect the factual image in the media presentation of politics produce a specific politico-journalistic construction of this reality, the apparent reality. Therefore, the category of truth in media communications concerning the field of poli- tics usually fails. One should thus expect that this traditional realism, which is expressed on the one hand by the factual nature of the media, and on the other by the morality of the media, will constitute a pillar that supports the image of political reality that is presented, interpreted and commented on in the media. In principle, this should not be a naïve realism, giving priority to individual cognitive spontaneity rather than to reflection, analysis and experience, or a spiritual realism seeking the truth about reality through human spirituality.

Limites e possibilidades da criminologia crítica nos estudos dos crimes dos Estados e dos mercados

Este trabalho objetiva identificar limites e possibilidades da criminologia crítica nos estudos dos danos sociais provocados por instituições poderosas. Através de pesquisa bibliográfica, o estudo identifica como principal função da criminologia a visibilização dos danos de grandes proporções, algo que somente pode ser atingido se ampliados os seus limites epistemológicos. A pesquisa se divide nos estudos sobre crimes dos Estados, crimes dos mercados, crimes estatal-corporativos, e encerra sinalizando algumas dificuldades da pesquisa empírica na área. Destaca-se a necessidade de se fortalecer a agenda de estudo em criminologia, bem como de uma interdisciplinaridade investigativa de danos resultantes da manipulação do poder.

A constructive approach to the epistemological problem of emergence in complex systems.

Emergent patterns in complex systems are related with many intriguing phenomena in modern science. One question that has sparked vigorous debates is if difficulties in the modelization of emergent behaviours are a consequence of ontological or epistemological limitations. To elucidate this question, we propose a novel approximation through constructive logic. Under this framework, experimental measurements will be considered conceptual building blocks from which we aim to achieve a description of the microstates ensemble mapping the macroscopic emergent observation. This procedure allow us to have full control of any information loss, thus making the analysis of different systems fairly comparable. In particular, we aim to look for compact descriptions of the constraints underlying a dynamical system, as a necessary a priori step to develop explanatory (mechanistic) models. We apply our proposal to a synthetic system to show that the number and scope of the system’s constraints hinder our ability to build compact descriptions, being those systems under global constraints a limiting case in which such a description is unreachable. This result clearly links the epistemological limits of the framework selected with an ontological feature of the system, leading us to propose a definition of emergence strength which we make compatible with the scientific method through the active intervention of the observer on the system, following the spirit of Granger causality. We think that our approximation clarifies previous discrepancies found in the literature, reconciles distinct attempts to classify emergent processes, and paves the way to understand other challenging concepts such as downward causation.

María de Zayas’s ‘Tarde llega el desengaño’ and the Contradictions of Modernity

Through an analysis of Maria de Zayas’s story, ‘Tarde llega el desengano’ (1647), this essay argues that Zayas highlights moments when her characters, in failed attempts to categorize other people, experience admiratio, or marvel. These scenes unveil the limits of epistemology in the face of contradictory phenomena. In this way, Zayas’s stories offer us an intriguing use of literature as a tool of philosophy during the Baroque period. Zayas employs the interpolated story to demonstrate to her readers how the attempt to shed illusion (desenganar) and achieve certainty through narrative explanation – which, in this case, comes in the form of an interpolated story that purports to explain the contradictions contained in the frame story – leads only to more uncertainty. By exposing the contradictory claims of different social categories, Zayas’s stories point to the tragic outcome of the competing values of modernity.

Transpersonal Psychology And The Self-Field: An Overview Of The Works Of Jungian Analyst Erich Neumann

In this essay the author gives a concise overview of the use of the word transpersonal in the life and writings of the Israeli Jungian analyst, Erich Neumann, who was born in Berlin Germany in 1905 and lived from 1934 until his untimely death, in 1960, in Tel Aviv. The paper provides readers with an overview of the correspondence that took place between Neumann and Jung from 1934-1959 and traces the way in which the word transpersonal was used in their mutual efforts to map out the terrain of the human psyche. What is made clear in the paper is that while Jung remained within the epistemological limits of empirical psychology in his theory of the collective unconscious, Neumann attempted to extend Jung’s epistemology into metaphysical territory, and in so doing he charted out a structural diagram of the psyche that extends beyond the archetypal field, to what he called the Self-field. The Self-field, Neumann argued, is a necessary postulate to include it in any complete inventory of depth-psychology that attempts to reach a new Weltanschauung. His attempts to extend Jung’s hypothesis of the Self into transpersonal territory began in his 1948 Eranos lecture in Ascona, Switzerland, “Mystical Man”. His calling from the Self led Neumann to venture forth a postulate of what he called a “New Ethic” for the field of depth-psychology as a whole. A distinction is made between the personal and archetypal shadow and evil, and the “Voice” Neumann refers to as part of the Transpersonal Self. The essay concludes saying it is tragic Neumann died at so young an age of 55, before he could formulate further how his Ethic related to his metaphysic. Neumann was the first Jungian analyst to present the world with a truly transpersonal theory of the Self that the author sees as essential reading for any transpersonal pedagogue who attempts to place Jungians in the history of the Integral movement. KEYWORDS Mystical man, numinous, Godhead, transpersonal, field-knowledge, Voice, Self-field, Wholeness, New Ethic, archetypal shadow, evil.

Concluding Remarks: Social Justice Requires Biocritical Inquiry

Our debate here, among social constructionists, has pivoted precisely on the fact that social constructionists are suspicious of claims about race and genetics for reasons that are much larger than science—issues tied to the limits of language and epistemology, the influence of cultural factors on knowledge production, and the economic realities that order social life. Unjust social and political systems necessarily alter the biological lives of marginalized groups and populations. Therefore legacies of discrimination, pernicious policy decisions, and economic inequality must be framed as causal factors in the emergence of health disparities and human biodiversity more generally. Social justice requires what I term a “biocritical inquiry,” which reverses the orthodox practice of situating genes as the base, foundation, and unmoved movers of human health, behavior, and perceived racial difference. Instead, biocritical inquiry synthesizes scientific research and critical forms of humanistic inquiry that denaturalize genetic differences, revealing the social inequalities and historical legacies of violence, conflict, and discrimination that are inseparable from human biological diversity.

Apontamentos epistemológicos a propósito da crise brasileira

Tendo em vista a compreensão do Jornalismo entre as narrativas da contemporaneidade, imerso em um conjunto de limitações epistemológicas - paradigmas vencidos, observação carente de experiências presenciais e análises precipitadas ou provenientes de reducionismos mentais -, este artigo busca, a partir de uma leitura integral dos periódicos Folha de S. Paulo e Estado de S. Paulo, no primeiro semestre de 2017, encontrar a manifestação de uma voz autoral que assine a voz coletiva no que tange a crise brasileira. Percebe-se, nesta leitura cultural, que é no Jornalismo de opinião que a imaginação criadora perante o caos alimenta quebras da razão analítica aprisionada pela esfera conceitual dada. O toque ensaístico se manifesta contrário, reticente, pluralista perante as afirmações/certezas estabelecidas. Conclui-se com uma proposta: o estímulo à reportagem-ensaio. Nela, o repórter que ousa a observação-experiência ensaia a compreensão sutil inspirada na responsabilidade ética, na qualificação técnica e na criatividade estética, permitindo romper com os reducionismos vigentes.

The Limits of Reconstructive Neologicist Epistemology

The Limits of Reconstructive Neologicist Epistemology

Śledzenie procesu w badaniach politologicznych. Warianty i potencjał zastosowania

Process-tracing is a method of within-case analysis, which can provide causal explanations of various social phenomena. Its focus on developing and testing causal theories attracts interest among qualitative researchers who do not want to limit their inquiries to exploratory or descriptive aims. At the same time, the case-centric variant of process-tracing, in which theories are used pragmatically as heuristic devices, provides a systematic but also creative way of researching singular events and processes. This paper attempts to show what process-tracing is and what it is not, what its variants are and how they should be used. It also probes the ontological and epistemological limits of the method, by showing how it can be used in idealist and interpretive research.

Theologia Ancilla Mysterii: epistemología relacional e interdisciplinariedad

The article presents Apophatism as the key element of a true theological epistemology, as proposed by the Fathers of Church in the fourth century and by Joseph Ratzinger. This shows a real convergence with the epistemological limitations discovered by natural sciences in their research, ranging from Galileo to Chaos Theory and Quantum Mechanics. This convergence points to the incommensurability of reality with respect to human conceptual categories. The role of theology in university could consist in safeguarding this incommensurability, which guarantees the very possibility of interdisciplinary dialogue.

Rethinking the Historiographical Impulse: The History of Ancient Israel as a Problem

ABSTRACTThe first part of this paper provides some insights into the problematic nature of the genre “history of ancient Israel”, both in terms of historiography and of historical epistemology. It is argued that the concept “history of ancient Israel” is essentially valid within a particular modern theological or biblical historiographical context. As such, this history of ancient Israel may indeed progress and generate new understandings but is nonetheless seriously limited by its main concern with “biblical Israel”. It is also proposed that in order to overcome these thematic and epistemological historical limitations, a wider history of ancient Palestine or the Southern Levant should be envisioned, into which to understand the epigraphic and archaeological realia of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, together with other contemporary polities in the region, and the later development of biblical traditions and texts. The second part of the paper addresses questions of ethnogenesis, socio-political organization and identity in the light of the previous discussion, setting the stage for an alternative history of Israel and other historical realities in ancient Palestine.

Children ruin everything!

This is a provocation. It is an adult’s attempt to argue for more agency for children, paradoxical though that may be. There is an urgent personal-political need for me, as a father of four boys with a critical arts practice (The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home), to understand children beyond the epistemological limits of ‘development’. This provocation consists in the suggestion that all adults need to undertake a radical and practical re-evaluation of what children actually are in the here and now. Children, my own children in particular, are robbed of much of their agency because of an unthinking reproduction of repressive ontologies born out of ‘development’. I recognise recognize this in my own parenting. For example, I call them ‘children’ and treat them as such as if one day I will start calling them ‘adults’ with full citizens’ rights. This re-evaluation will not happen overnight, so in the meantime it is necessary for me to experiment with other kinds of parenting and ontological positioning. For the afterwordAfterword, I experiment with a series of imagined reversals of power relations between a father and his children. In what follows, the children problematise problematize the ontological claims made by adults about children and in doing so enact newly established power relations where the categories of child and adult hopefully fall into disrepute. My aim here is to do some applied philosophy via four short performances on my children in order to re-evaluate not only the idea of children, but to provide an opportunity for adult readers of these pages to rethink children’s agency. The preceding pages of this journal have challenged the category of children in several ways, for this provocation I want to explode the category altogether. So, as a last-ditch effort what follows is a playful, but serious, account of imagined interactions between a father and his four sons, all invented, and all without their permission. I wish to speculatively determine how children, in ruining everything for their father are always- already in the process of building fresh, radically immanent understandings of agency out of the rubble of outdated ontologies. Children do this a lot. In other words, they ruin everything, thankfully.

La teoría austríaca del ciclo económico y la reciente crisis financiera

La argumentación de este artículo se basa en el reconocimiento de que la Teoría Austríaca del Ciclo Económico está desactualizada en su descripción de cómo los efectos del fenómeno monetario son transmitidos al sector real y generan ciclos de negocio. En el artículo se sostiene que hay limitaciones epistemológicas para prevenir exitosamente las expansiones inflacionarias por la adopción de políticas específicas de inflación y que la adopción de dichas políticas es la causa del “boom” económico que terminó en 2007. También se describe cómo ocurrió la contracción monetaria empezando en septiembre de 2008 y que se ofrece como una explicación para el inicio del declive. Finalmente, una vez el declive inició hubo una respuesta prudente de las autoridades monetarias. Una respuesta que habría sido la imitación de las reacciones de los proveedores de dinero, competidores en un mercado libre y que sería el curso de acción apropiado bajo los actuales acuerdos monetarios.

Anthropomorphism in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence – The limits of cognition?

The question “Are we alone?” lingers in the human mind since ancient times. Early human civilisations populated the heavens above with a multitude of Gods endowed with some all too human characteristics – from their outer appearance to their innermost motivations. En passant they created thereby their own cultural founding myths on which they built their understanding of the world and its phenomena and deduced as well rules for the functioning of their own society. Advancing technology has enabled us to conduct this human quest for knowledge with more scientific means: optical and radio-wavelengths are being monitored for messages by an extra-terrestrial intelligence and active messaging attempts have also been undertaken. Scenarios have been developed for a possible detection of extra-terrestrial intelligence and post-detection guidelines and protocols have been elaborated. The human responses to the whole array of questions concerning the potential existence, discovery of and communication/interaction with an extra-terrestrial intelligence share as one clear thread a profound anthropomorphism, which ascribes classical human behavioural patterns also to an extra-terrestrial intelligence in much the same way as our ancestors attributed comparable conducts to mythological figures. This paper aims at pinpointing this thread in a number of classical reactions to basic questions related to the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Many of these reactions are based on human motives such as curiosity and fear, rationalised by experience and historical analogy and modelled in the Science Fiction Culture by literature and movies. Scrutinising the classical hypothetical explanations of the Fermi paradox under the angle of a potentially undue anthropomorphism, this paper intends to assist in understanding our human epistemological limitations in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. This attempt is structured into a series of questions: I. Can we be alone? II. Who are we looking for? III. Or what are we looking for? IV. Where is everybody? V. What if we make contact and VI. So, what now?

Culture, Kinesiology, and the Free Society

ABSTRACTIn Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot asked whether culture should be understood as “essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people.” By “incarnation,” Eliot meant that “what we believe is not merely what we formulate and subscribe to, but that behavior is also belief.” It is, Eliot insisted, our actions, and not merely our ideas, which matter. Together, our actions and our ideas embody and then give life to culture. “Religion” is, no doubt, a contested term. For present purposes, all that needs to be conceded to make Eliot’s point worth pursuing is that every culture has some conception of the good, the true, and the beautiful, which it promotes, encourages, and thereby cultivates. What implications does this have for kinesiology? I will examine three points. First, the discipline of kinesiology cannot be abstracted from the culture in which it finds itself, without becoming an anti-culture. This fact means that kinesiology must necessarily attend to the ways in which physical activity is embedded in the historical, anthropological, sociological, and philosophical foundations of society. Second, kinesiology contributes to the cultivation or brutalization of society. This results from the attention paid (or not paid) to the question of truth in the field. Such attention to truth requires recognition of the epistemological limits of science as well as to the importance of free-will, choice, and example. Finally, kinesiologists must be willing to cultivate and defend intellectual freedom as part of a free society. A free society allows for a diversity of opinions, not as end in itself, but as the vehicle by which fallible human beings approach the truth.

Understanding the shift from micro- to macro-prudential thinking: a discursive network analysis

Macro-prudential thinking and its emphasis on endogenously created systemic risks, marginal in the banking regulation discourse until the mid-2000s, has become central post-crisis. This paper analyzes this intellectual shift by using discourse and citation-network analysis of the most-cited scholarly works on banking regulation and systemic risk from 1985 to 2014 and six in-depth interviews with central scholars. It demonstrates that the predominance of formalism, particularly partial equilibrium analysis, in studies on banking regulation pre-crisis impeded economists’ engagement with the endogenous sources of systemic risks discussed in the systemic risk sample. These studies excluded observed phenomena that could not be accommodated in mathematical models, largely ignoring contributions based on historical and practitioners’ styles of reasoning. Post-crisis, while informal analyses gain prominence in studies on banking regulation, attempts to conceptualize systemic risk as a negative externality indicate the persistence of formalism and equilibrium thinking and its concomitant epistemological limitations that stymie theoretical progress.

Transsystemic Legal Education and the Comparative Method(s)

A large part of the literature on “transsystemia” starts from the assumption that the transsystemic program of legal education should overcome the epistemological limitations of traditional comparative law. Transsystemism, in other words, has been conceived since its beginnings as onthologically different from “comparatism”. However, if comparative law is regarded as a “method” (or better as a theory), and not as a “discipline” (with its own history and constraints), what does “comparative law” really mean? And what are the differences between comparative and transsystemic approaches to the law? On the basis of my teaching experience in Europe (comparative law) and in Canada (transsystemic tort law), I will focus on the differences and similarities between comparative and transsystemic approaches to law and legal education. I will make three main points: 1) Comparative law – as a method – does not exist; we should rather speak of comparative approaches to the law; 2) Depending on the specific features of the single approach, comparative reasoning may reinforce or – on the contrary – disrupt the exclusionary epistemology implied in the positivist description of legal systems; 3) Conceived as a theory of law, comparativism largely overlaps with transsystemism, which is nothing but high-level comparative law in action; both approaches have to be conceived as liberating exercises and instruments aimed at a deep comprehension of the actual working of the law in a pluralist environment.

Castaway on the hyperobject: Getting Lost with Timothy Morton

Abstract Ecocritic and philosopher Timothy Morton introduced the term ‘hyperobjects’ in a blog post in March 2010. Morton elaborates on the concept of the hyperobject in the final chapter of The Ecological Thought (2010), and the term supplies the title of his 2014 book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. As Morton was articulating the idea of the hyperobject in the spring of 2010, the final season of the television show Lost (2004–10) was dramatizing the climactic instalments of its six-year narrative about a band of castaways stranded on a time-travelling, globe-trotting island, an uncanny object that exemplifies many of the characteristics Morton associates with hyperobjects. In its representation of the island as an inscrutable object punctuated by absence and mystery, in its examination of the dense interconnectedness of its sprawling human cast, and in its thematic emphasis on the epistemological limits that characterize our understanding of the natural world and even of ourselves, Lost not only presents its own version of Morton’s hyperobject but also suggests many of the same conclusions about the way our encounter with hyperobjects reconfigures our self-understanding and our relationship with the non-human world.