Epistemological Notions Research Articles

Understanding epistemological notions underlying scientific language use: a multifaceted analysis framework

Helping university students develop productive views of what characterizes good scientific research and scientific knowledge is an important objective of science education. However, many studies show that students’ views of the nature of science (NOS) do not become more informed or even become less informed after learning activities that engage students in scientific practice. This could mean that the way we teach students to conduct scientific research might unintentionally strengthen or bring about uninformed views of NOS. In this article, we argue that scientific discourse (how language is used in science) might play a role in this relation between learning scientific inquiry and uninformed views of NOS. We argue that there could be implicit notions relating to NOS underlying scientific discourse that uninformed readers might translate to uninformed views of NOS. We call these implicit notions underlying scientific language use “epistemological notions.” In this article, we further define this construct of epistemological notions, contrast it with explicit views of NOS and other related constructs, explain how we think epistemological notions might affect explicit views of NOS, and present a framework we developed to characterize them in scientific language use. It is a descriptive and interpretative analysis framework which combines, optimizes, and extends several text analysis methods, discourse analysis, and reflexive thematic analysis. We provide a guide to use the framework and point out quality criteria. We finish by advocating the framework for educational researchers interested in developing instructional interventions during which learning about science is combined with explicit reflection on NOS. Identifying epistemological notions in scientific language use could provide starting points for these activities by making explicit the translation from NOS understanding to scientific practice and vice versa.

Antiracist Anger as Social and Moral Inquiry in Colectivo Ayllu's Devuélvannos el oro: Cosmovisiones perversas y acciones anticoloniales (2018)

Abstract: My essay looks at how diasporic, racialized, and sexually-and gender dissident voices that collaborated with Colectivo Ayllu in their first year of residency at CRA Matadero Madrid (2017–18) approach antiracist activism from a decolonial feminist perspective that analyzes gender and sexuality in relation to race and coloniality. I analyze Devuélvannos el oro: Cosmovisiones perversas y acciones anticoloniales , a compilation of visual, poetic, and essayistic pieces curated by Ayllu that emerge from experiential and political reflections, as well as anticolonial actions developed during the group's residency. I read Ayllu's emancipatory thinking first within a view of decolonial epistemology that enacts situated notions of knowledge, beauty, and truth outside Eurocentric frameworks. I also bring to light a concurrent understanding of decolonized epistemology that permeates Devuélvannos 's project and allows for making normative truth claims about systems of inequality and human flourishing. I discuss the consequences of both (compatible) notions of decolonial epistemology in Ayllu's formulation of antiracism activism. My essay bridges critical lenses from postpositivist realist theories of identity, women of color feminism and decolonial feminism to the study of emotions as embodied forms of knowledge that may offer "clarity" and insight into how ideologies and structures of power operate in a society.

Epistemologies with no name: Normalistas-teachers and their metaphorical knowledge

Normalistas-teachers are not recognized as providers of epistemic insights in the development of knowledge. Canonical elites have excluded ordinary and anonymous people as active subjects in the epistemic construction of knowledge. In part, this is because normalistas-teachers make their epistemic contributions through non-traditional vehicles of knowledge, in other words, through metaphorical knowledge. This article looks at the case of one normalista-teacher, Vicky Rodríguez, and the epistemic insights she offers in one of her literary works, La Noria (The Water Borehole). This study addresses this research question: what epistemic notions does the normalista-teacher, Vicky Rodríguez, offer through her work, La Noria? This study utilizes the method of looking at the relationship between philosophy and literature developed by the Mexican–Catalan philosopher, Ramón Xirau, to study primary sources. The findings show how Vicky Rodríguez, like other normalistas-teachers, offers a critical epistemological notion of immediate power and whether or not there is a way of escape from it.

Resurgence as a Method to Overcome the Abyssal Line: Challenging Notions of Epistemology and Ontology

Resurgence as a Method to Overcome the Abyssal Line: Challenging Notions of Epistemology and Ontology

Las prescripciones y la epistemología práctica de los profesores de música: el caso de la orquesta escolar

This study focuses on research into the work of music teachers and visiting musicians in a primary school in France. Their teaching activities are part of the "Orchestre à l'école" scheme. This scheme enables children from working-class and sometimes disadvantaged backgrounds to access and develop instrumental and orchestral practice at different times of the week. The observations were made at the request of the music teachers, who wanted to take stock of their work after several years. The pedagogical quality of these music and music teaching professionals, the institutional framework and the friendly atmosphere of the project enabled this participatory research to take place under the best possible conditions. The study focuses on the effects of the prescriptions set out by the instrument teachers on their practical epistemology. The hypothesis is that the polymorphous nature of the prescription, of the instruction, has as much effect on the pupils as on the teacher's practical epistemology. To verify this hypothesis, the analysis of the documents collected during this participatory research concerns the transcripts of the instrument lessons and the simple self-confrontation interviews conducted with the teachers. How does the practical epistemology of a music teacher evolve through feedback from his or her pupils?
 After reviewing the literature on the notions of prescription and practical epistemology, the article describes the main methodological aspects and develops an analysis of snippets of lessons and interviews selected by the teachers, before proposing a discussion. If the top-down prescription reveals the teacher's practical epistemology, then the students' bottom-up prescriptions should reveal what makes it evolve.

Beyond Reproduction: An Epistemological Search for a “Woman” in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape and The Island of Lost Girls

Abstract Who is a woman? In a gender-fluid typical world, the answer to this question invites a serious exposition of non-linear and non-binary possibilities. As the biological definition becomes more inclusive of fragmented identities, it becomes extremely complicated to arrive at a simplistic, innocent truth of recognition. Within the third-world dynamics, this question invites more dimensions. Set against the backdrop of mass female genocide on the occasion of perfecting cloning, Manjula Padmanabhan in her works of futuristic dystopian fiction, Escape (2015) and The Island of Lost Girls (2017), has taken up this issue of womanhood and furtively trodden to arrive at a philosophical space that allows the modernist epistemological notion of a “woman” as a well-defined category to reincarnate within a postmodern paradigm to help locate women beyond the generic nuances of reproduction and menial labour. Through analysing the selective works, this research article aims at arriving close to the model of womanhood and depicting the plurality of truth in action.

Immanent obligations of response: articulating everyday response-abilities through care

ABSTRACT The geological epoch of the Anthropocene provokes the reconceptualization of responsibility as response-ability. Going beyond bounded individualism and human exceptionalism, this notion emphasizes the constitutive relationality of heterogeneous more than human beings that allows for response. Feminist STS scholar and biologist Donna Haraway has developed response-ability primarily as an epistemological notion with ontological and ethico-political aspects, crucial in the context of professional technoscientific research practices. This article articulates a nonprofessional, everyday response-ability, by rereading it as a combination of forms of care that are worldmaking, an etho-ecological practice, and experimental in nature. Thinking through María Puig de la Bellacasa’s multispecies care and Isabelle Stengers’ etho-ecological practices, I articulate everyday response-abilities. Response-abilities, like Puig de la Bellacasa’s worldmaking care, are ubiquitous. They constitute multiple, conflicting worlds in need of sustenance. Response-ability is self-reinforcing, which is both promising and problematic since it leads to unequal burdening and overburdening. Relaying response-ability as Stengers’ etho-ecological practice lays out its immanent obligations that both limit and allow for agency to respond beyond self-reinforcing appeals and amid conflicting obligations. This agency in response-able practices requires careful experimentation. Everyday response-abilities are something we are all engaged in yet need cultivation in times of crises through careful tinkering.

An Empirical Approach in Culinary Fiqh of Coastal Communities: Critical Study of ‘Aysh al-Baḥr

The lives of fishermen are said to have a profound influence on the lives of coastal towns. Their attitude toward marine resources effects their theological perspective as well. This fact is supported by Kiai Anwar's book ‘Aysh al-Baḥr, which discusses the legal position of consuming numerous aquatic animals. This article seeks to trace the book ‘Aysh al-Baḥr's understanding of culinary fiqh. As an analytical tool, this paper employs a normative approach and the notion of Islamic epistemology pioneered by al-Jābirī and Mulyadhi. This article demonstrates how the epistemology of culinary fiqh in ‘Aysh al-Baḥr employs an empirical approach to determining the legal status of ingesting animals by viewing and direct observing them. Kiai Anwar's background as a fisherman gives him an edge in developing normative and empirical reasons for marine animal laws. This conclusion demonstrates that coastal cultures have an extensive understanding of aquatic animal environments. This article suggests utilizing empirical approaches to derive rules that necessitate direct observation.__________The original draft of this article has been presented at the 20th Annual International Conference on Islamic Studies (AICIS), Surakarta, 2021.

Rigid Designators and Descriptivism

Kripke distinguishes necessity and priority as two different categories: priority is a notion of epistemology, while necessity is a notion of metaphysics. Based on this fundamental argument, Kripke objects to Descriptivism, which takes certain properties as the criteria of identity across all possible worlds, and he argues for the legitimacy of a posteriori necessary truths. Kripke also criticizes Russell’s methods for dealing with empty descriptions, and he puts forward a modal world to explain the rigidity of proper names. However, the concept of rigid designation faces some challenges, including Kripke admitting to weak essentialism when he rejects transworld identification, and the fact that the truth value of a sentence containing a rigid designator may change.

Seeing as Worldmaking: Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock and Yogācārin Epistemology in Late Ming China

This paper examines Wu Bin’s (c. 1543–c. 1626) Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock (1610) from the perspective of Buddhist epistemological notions in seventeenth-century China. In studying a series of gazes focusing on a single object—a stone with a very complex surface—my discussion posits an act of excessive seeing as a process of making worlds. I take a theoretical cue from contemporaneous intellectual discourses, especially those that flourished with the revival of Yogācāra Buddhism in late Ming China. This paper will show how an art object comes into being in perceivable worlds interconnected by the individual’s sensory experiences. My study aims to inquire into the role of illusion as sensory experiences, phenomenological processes, and even notions of soteriological efficacy beyond formal artistic devices. To that end, this paper is the first attempt to situate Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock alongside Buddhist thoughts and artmaking.

On Dankwa's Gift

On Dankwa's Gift

A Review of Decolonial Feminist Research: Haunting, Rememory and Mothers (Futures of Data Analytics in Qualitative Research)

How do we begin to connect to those who are no longer living, those who have been historically silenced, and those whose memory becomes a faint existence in our modern, colonial imaginary? Within Decolonial Feminist Research: Haunting, Rememory, and Mothers, Jeong-eun Rhee, a qualitative educational researcher, examines the tension that often accompanies the implementation of decolonial feminist knowledges, methodologies, and epistemologies, especially when these theoretical perspectives challenge the academic canon rooted in modernity and social scientific empirical realities. This review addresses Rhee’s major theoretical conceptualizations such as Rememory, M/others and Haunting throughout the various processes that often connect individuals through death and grieving. Rhee demonstrates that the production of knowledge being constructed through the rememory of those who have since passed, not only provides existence to their stories, but makes their lives, histories, and memories “very much alive and present.” Rhee challenges notions of the living/dead, remembrance/forgotten, time, national borders, and the fragmented self in an effort to establish new decolonial imaginaries and methodologies for bringing the silenced voices of women of color to the forefront of our modern reality. This book is recommended for any qualitative researchers and decolonial feminist scholars who are interested in challenging colonial matrices of power that often silence voices/stories from being included in western canons of academia, and those who want to examine the very notions of academic scholarship, epistemology, ontology, and methodology in order to secure a place where the rememory of those silenced out of existence can thrive and whose haunting enacts a decolonial resistance to the continued systems of oppression dominating the colonized other.

The concept of svasaṃvedana in Dignāga and Candrakīrti

ABSTRACT The concept of reflexive awareness (Sanskrit svasaṃvedana or svasaṃvitti, Tibetan rang rig) is considered an important epistemological notion in the Dignāga tradition of Buddhist pramāṇa theory. The traditionally accepted view is that Dignāga advocates Yogācāra’s notion of reflexive awareness in the Pramāṇasamuccaya and Candrakīrti rejects it altogether. By contrast, the present paper revisits Dignāga and Candrakīrti in the context of svasaṃvedana and argues that Dignāga endorses the antarjñeyavādic notion of svasaṃvedana and Candrakīrti does not negate it at the conventional level. Candrakīrti attacks Dignāga by attributing him as an exponent of Sautrāntrika-Yogācāra notion of reflexive awareness, but his critique does not fundamentally affect Dignāga’s notion of reflexive awareness propounded in the Pramāṇasamuccaya. The submission of the paper is that the fundamental epistemic agenda of reflexive awareness in Dignāga and Candrakīrti is identical, though they diverge methodologically, and it is shown by reexamining Padma dkar po’s interpretation.

L’idée qui absorba les facultés de l’entendement. Du syncrétisme des conceptions linguistiques de Philippe Pinel

ObjectiveThe historical literature has produced a dismemberment of the figure of Pinel and his posterity.The purpose of this article is first to confront Pinel with himself and with the paradoxes of his theoretical influences. In this, the approach of the theories of language represents one perspective among many on the conceptual foundations of alienism. The highlighting of a syncretism in the conceptions of the relation of thought to language mobilized by Pinel makes it possible to cast doubt on the theoretical influences that he most ostensibly claims as his own, and that are most stubbornly attributed to him. MethodsIn an attempt to discriminate between the different conceptions of the thought-language relationship in Pinel's work, we analyze the occurrences of the word “idea” when the latter is used in an effort to describe, or conceptualize, the thought of the insane. We base ourselves on a typology of the varied modes that can be mapped onto the relation between thought and language, which we have established from the theories of language that may have influenced Pinel's conceptions: that of Condillac, that of Locke, and that of the Germanic tradition (Herder). ResultsThe perspective of the thought-language relationship shows the extent to which Pinel had relied on divergent and sometimes contradictory theoretical views. Whether or not Pinel drew on Condillac's theories of language is of little importance. He necessarily got something out of them ; and his conception of the thought-language relationship on the basis of Condillac's theories of language comes into direct contradiction with other significant theoretical influences. This allows us to define the linguistic conceptions of the alienist as syncretic. DiscussionMichel Foucault explains what he calls the “isomorphism” of language and of reality by the preponderant influence of the philosophy of Condillac on the doctors of the beginning of the 19th century. That is to say, the predetermination of what is perceived by doctors as a symptom, and by the structure of the taxonomy, and therefore of the language, which is called upon to perceive it. This is the constitutive fragility of psychiatry.The concept of an anthropological syncretism of the conceptual foundations of psychiatry, which we present here, opens up a perspective according to which it would be a constitutive quality that does not weaken psychiatry but, conversely, consolidates it by matching theories to the syncretism of human practice. ConclusionThe epistemological notion of anthropological syncretism qualifies the conceptual foundations of psychiatry viewed from the angle of its progressive elaboration by the men and women who put something of themselves into their practice of it. Because more than simply humanist, psychiatry is a human practice.

The Tacit Dimension of Touch: Tactile Recognition, Tangibility and Self-touch in Kurt Goldstein’s Studies on Agnosia

In his experimental studies on tactile recognition, the German neurologist Kurt Goldstein observes a peculiar ‘twitching movement’ of the body in neurologically impaired patients suffering from mind-blindness. Drawing on Goldstein’s interpretation of these bodily movements as kinaesthetic reactions, the present article advances a symmetrical conception of tactility that relocates the bipolarity of the sense of touch within the human body. In line with this symmetrical approach, the kinaesthetic reactions will be construed as tactile self-activation or self-touch of the body and conceptualized, following Michael Polanyi’s epistemological notion, as the ‘tacit dimension of touch’. Combining neuropathological aspects with a media theoretical and epistemological trajectory, this article aims at re-evaluating the centrality of the registers of the sense of touch as the fundamental ground for grasping the world in its concrete encounters as well as in its symbolic abstractions.

Joyce in the Fold, the Fold in Joyce

Joyce in the Fold, the Fold in Joyce

Citizens in Search of Facts: A Case Study from the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review on Measure 82

ABSTRACT Accounts of public deliberation often refer to the notion of ‘facts’ or ‘accurate information.’ These epistemological notions, however, lack a stable, reliable definition used in research across disciplines or in practical politics across ideological fault lines. We consider realist definitions of fact within the analytical philosophy of language, specifically recent proposals to distinguish between facts of nature and socially constructed facts (Searle), and pragmatist definitions of fact (Peirce, Dewey). We argue that a pragmatist approach to facts as agreed upon circumstances that define a problem, i.e., consistent social constructivism, is more suitable for deliberative theory and practice. We use a case of The Citizens’ Initiative Review, where participants are explicitly asked to agree on a set of factual statements about the legislation at stake, as a clear example of cognitive difficulties that people experience when facts are treated as atomistic units with a context-independent truth value. We propose that in contexts of ideological pluralism facts can be defined as key parameters of problem situations that are consistently brought up in competing opinions. In such contexts, agreeing on facts will involve a complex syntactic pattern that brings these parameters into a coherent description of disagreement.

Islamic Epistemology in the Works of Ashraf Adeel. F. H Malkawi

The primary objective of this short paper is to examine the concept of epistemology in Islamic education. How does the Islamic concept of epistemology differ from other epistemological concepts of education in other religious and non-religious traditions? Why does the Islamic epistemological concept of education differ? According to Islamic epistemology, God is the ultimate sources of all knowledge and it is God who taught man all unknown things; It is God who taught the first man Adam the basic of all-natural sciences and yet, the modern man finds it difficult to grasp this idea of knowledge given by God. Modern man has challenged this notion with his rapid development in science, technology, and the Artificial intelligence. Some atheists and humanists have questioned this Islamic notion of epistemology. This paper evaluates and provides a critique to the works of two experts in Islamic epistemology. I will compare works of M. Ashraf Adeel, and F.H Malkawi on Islamic epistemological study to gauge its practical application in the modern digital world. This paper is divided into five parts. 1) Meaning and definition of the epistemology 2) M.Ashraf Adeel’s Qur’anic theory of Epistemology 3) Malkawi’s theory of epistemological integration. 4) Islamic epistemology and the Artificial learning. 5) Conclusion.

Participative epistemology in social data science: combining ethnography with computational and statistical approaches

ABSTRACT In this paper, I introduce the notion of participative epistemology and discuss how it can contribute to make social data science more accountable. I do so by offering the case of a project where ethnographic, computational and sequence analysis methods have been used in combination. By presenting here in greater detail research design and pilot results of a project using professional networking data to understand the careers of IT industry analysts, I suggest a view on the collaboration between data science and social science as coordinated labour. The application of participative epistemology to social data science is articulated in three points: (1) a more tactical view on the partnerships with commercial data where shared value system is not a pre-requisite for coordinated knowledge production; (2) an appreciation for complementarities in perspective between phenomenological sociology, expertise in computer science associated to digitalisation and the narrative positivism linked with the use of statistics and (3) a view on social data science as contributing empirical sociology with new sensitizing concepts, taking ethnography to reflectively address its own presuppositions.

Integration of Accountability and Fraud Diamond Theories as a Framework to Predict Fraud in the General Education Sector: A Case Study of Zambia

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a critical review of the contributions of more than one theory to fraud research (which is often referred to as “theoretical triangulation or integration” or “theoretical pluralism) in a public organization,”, with a particular focus on the manner in which chosen variables from a given theory could be employed to develop research assumptions. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conduct an analysis of how to employ theoretical integration and methodological monism in fraud research. To this end, they use three theories for illustrative purposes. Findings: The authors argue that using theories with varying epistemological notions that are captured by appropriate research methods enables one to explore and account for different layers of theoretical concepts pertaining to fraud in organizations. Originality/value: The paper contributes to the thinking about the interaction between theory applications by demonstrating that theoretical integration is more meaningful than single theories in order to provide deeper understandings of fraud phenomena.