Epistemological Project Research Articles

Концептуальная инженерия: идея и проблемное поле

The article analyzes the ideas and methods of conceptual engineering, its goals, problem field and opportunities. Conceptual engineering as a philosophical di­rection arises at the intersection of descriptive and normative approaches, repre­senting a revisionist strategy. Emphasizing the correlation between science and social life, the developers of the idea draw attention to the need for a conscious attitude to conceptual representation and terminological choice. Particular atten­tion is paid to the analysis of the name of the direction: the engineering perspec­tive is associated with the idea of ​​managing the scientific process. Theoretical and methodological origins of conceptual engineering are considered: the ideas of J. Dewey on the development of “conscious thinking”, R. Carnap on explica­tion, S. Haslanger on the importance of a critical attitude towards significant so­cial theoretical constructs. It is shown that conceptual engineering as a revi­sionist epistemological project is aimed at changing specific forms of social interaction through the revision of current ideas about the world and about one­self. Given the paramount importance of language in organizing everyday intel­lectual practices, conceptual engineering focuses on concepts and their meaning. In essence, it represents another attempt to eliminate linguistic ambiguity, but no longer with the help of a special symbolic language, but by manipulating mean­ing and sense. The problems of semantic modifications of concepts associated with semantic drift, linguistic intuition and communication, knowledge transfer are analyzed

How Did Bengal Become a Society?

AbstractStarting in the nineteenth century, ‘society’ emerged as a new object of contemplation, a new conception of historicity, and a new framework of norms in Bengal. This article asks what kind of epistemological project this turn to the social represented, and what its emergence suggests about the historical circumstances that underwrote its conditions of possibility. I suggest that, beyond the narrower framework of colonial knowledge, the social emerged as a reflexive inquiry into the ways in which the conditions of collective and individual life were being transformed by practices of interdependence that defied containment to regional geographies.

The Cartesian test of modern love: imagination, free will and passions

This article tackles the role of emotions in convincing on the dualism advanced by Descartes, closely following the constitution of love at the edge of modus cognoscendi and modus volendi. The following two questions inspire the reflection on love as a spiritual exercise and a constitutive emotion for (self)knowledge: Does love represent a core-emotion for Descartes that regains his Christian thinking at the edge of his metaphysical and epistemological project, apparently excused of any religious implications? What is Descartes’s account of love and how does it (emotionally) change the sense and reception of passions? The Christian implications of love and devotion to God provide access to a so-called implicit political project engaged by Descartes’s work, grounded on the loyalty and adoration of a sovereign anointed in the name of faith.

An epistemic argument for evolutionary dispositions

The use of dispositions has been put into question many times in the philosophical literature, especially with regards to how dispositional attributions can be justified. Yet, dispositions are an important part not only of our everyday talk but also of our scientific practices. In this paper, we develop an argument that infers the epistemic justification of dispositional talk from itsindispensability for carrying out basic epistemological projects, and we apply it to the use of dispositions in evolutionary biology. For doing this, we first advocate for a function-based strategy for the epistemic justification of dispositional attributions. We next review the functional role of some key dispositional notions in evolutionary biology, such as fitness and evolvability. Then, we show that alternative non-dispositional substitutes of these dispositions fail to fulfill their roles to the same degree. We conclude that the use of dispositions is justified in evolutionary biology.

Practices and normativity: Philosophy of Science, Agency and Epistemic Normativity

The present work aims to present the notion of eidetic agency as a novel account for the understanding of an epistemic normativity based on practices. The eidetic agency (Fonseca, 2020) and (Fonseca, 2023) is a modality of material agency that, scaffolded and extensively, delegates epistemic agency to formal artifacts that become evident in the materiality of the signifiers of artificial languages. Such eidetic artifacts constitute an epistemic normativity that, although it is based on implicit practices and norms of scientific practices, overcome certain problems derived from that reading. The first section of the text presents a definition and general analysis of the project of a normative epistemology based on practices. In the second part, the relationship between practices in science and scientific regulations is deeply analyzed, based on the premises of Martínez and Huang (2011). Finally, a possible solution to the theoretical problems derived from such reading is proposed, with the approach of an epistemic normativity based on eidetic agents.

Reading for post qualitative inquiry

This paper advocates reading philosophy and using its concepts in educational and social science research. The lengthy engagement with the various concepts and conceptual orders of poststructuralism required for post qualitative inquiry exceeds the scope of reading required for a conventional literature review at the beginning of a typical empirical research project. Reading that spans many years of an academic career does not serve the epistemological project of stabilizing what is known through recognition, representation, and summary but attends to an ontological project of re-orienting thought through experimentation, invention, and creation to enable what does not yet exist but might.

Computational philosophy: reflections on the PolyGraphs project

In this paper, we situate our computational approach to philosophy relative to other digital humanities and computational social science practices, based on reflections stemming from our research on the PolyGraphs project in social epistemology. We begin by describing PolyGraphs. An interdisciplinary project funded by the Academies (BA, RS, and RAEng) and the Leverhulme Trust, it uses philosophical simulations (Mayo-Wilson and Zollman, 2021) to study how ignorance prevails in networks of inquiring rational agents. We deploy models developed in economics (Bala and Goyal, 1998), and refined in philosophy (O’Connor and Weatherall, 2018; Zollman, 2007), to simulate communities of agents engaged in inquiry, who generate evidence relevant to the topic of their investigation and share it with their neighbors, updating their beliefs on the evidence available to them. We report some novel results surrounding the prevalence of ignorance in such networks. In the second part of the paper, we compare our own to other related academic practices. We begin by noting that, in digital humanities projects of certain types, the computational component does not appear to directly support the humanities research itself; rather, the digital and the humanities are simply grafted together, not fully intertwined and integrated. PolyGraphs is notably different: the computational work directly supports the investigation of the primary research questions, which themselves belong decidedly within the humanities in general, and philosophy in particular. This suggests an affinity with certain projects in the computational social sciences. But despite these real similarities, there are differences once again: the computational philosophy we practice aims not so much at description and prediction as at answering the normative and interpretive questions that are distinctive of humanities research.

Back to sensuality itself. Jocelyn Benoist’s anti-phenomenological turn?

The article presents Jocelyn Benoist’s criticism of phenomenology as an epistemological project that reduces sensuality to a tool of reference to meaning, and his proposal to supplement phenomenology with an ontology of perception that does justice to sensuality itself. Following the philosopher, the parallels between formal and material phenomenology and modern aesthetics and poetics as a practice that reveals sensuality are drawn. The phenomenology of sound and the discussion of the avant-garde revolution in music (atonality, microtonality, concrete music) point to the limitations of modern aesthetics and illustrate possible directions for the development of a phenomenology of sensuality.

The smugness of privilege

AbstractThis essay answers the question What good is anthropology? via a discussion of Susan Sontag's review of photographer Diane Arbus's 1972 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Sontag asserts that Arbus, in depicting people whom Sontag smugly regards as “ugly,” is necessarily exploiting them. I perceive an exact comparison between Arbus's photographs and anthropology as an epistemological project and a representational practice. Like Arbus's photographs, anthropology is good for subverting the privileged protocol articulated by critics like Sontag, who are prepared to contemplate “ugly” people, vastly different from themselves, but only through an optic of pity or of vicarious indignation at the supposedly unrelentingly grim conditions under which such people are imagined to live their lives.

Nonalignment and Its Forms of Knowledge

Third Worldism, Afro-Asianism, nonalignment, and their associated projects were not simply diplomatic agendas on the international stage; they were cultural and epistemological projects tied to smaller, older geographies of significance. Beyond the politicians’ conferences, whether at Bandung (1955), Belgrade (1961), or Cairo (1964), events that receive the bulk of scholarly interest in nonalignment's trajectory and significance, nonalignment occurred at a different scale. Scrutinizing nonalignment's intellectual history can reveal forms of knowledge that can be salvaged from nonalignment's irretrievable political past. Rather than simply recounting the events of nonalignment—the grand accumulation of solidarity, the limits of which were subsequently revealed—it may be prudent to bring our attention to the ideas of nonalignment. To account for the content and conditions of nonaligned thought, this article narrates a history of Arab and Indian intellectuals thinking together in the second half of the twentieth century. The author focuses principally on the work of the Lebanese scholar-diplomat Clovis Maksoud (1926–2016), the most articulate Arab theorist of positive neutrality and nonalignment.

The archive and the cafezinho: challenging (disembodied) histories by embodied archival experiences at Acervo Bajubá, an LGBT+ community archive in Brazil

ABSTRACT This article examines the challenges faced by Acervo Bajubá, an LGBT+ community archive located in São Paulo, Brazil. Departing from the observation of a disconnect between the recognition of the archive’s importance in terms of the content it holds and its consideration as a community epistemological project, the article argues for a paradigm shift in understanding archives. Contrariwise, the article proposes viewing Acervo Bajubá as an epistemological project that challenges conventional notions of community, history, and memory. It calls for a re-evaluation of the archive’s material conditions, bringing them to the forefront, and operating a recognition of its role as a legitimate knowledge producer – and not only as a repository for disciplinary projects and commitments. The article suggests that by expanding the concept of the archive-as-object and embracing archive-as-community-practice, alternative relationships with the past can be forged. Finally, through the analysis of two art-pieces produced in the context of an inventory process, the article argues for a concept and practice of archive that challenges disembodied notions of history, memory, and community, emphasising community practice and recognising the lives and bodies embedded within archival devices. It concludes by highlighting the importance of grounding the archive in the present time, and fostering creative tactics for envisioning alternative historical imaginaries and political repertoires.

Educational Inclusion of People With Disabilities and Well-Being: Desires, Needs and Wishes

This article aims to demonstrate how the transformation of the concepts of health, illness, and well-being interacts with the process of educational inclusion for people with disabilities. The reflection is based on the conceptions of the Policy Cycle, articulated with the concepts of inclusion, health, and well-being, and has as material for analysis Brazilian political-normative texts that guide the process of educational inclusion of people with disabilities. It is intended to reconstruct the context of influence from scratch using the Policy Cycle Approach that enabled the emergence of the discourse of inclusion from the perspective of social well-being and to problematize the context of text production and the context of practise through the analysis of public policies aimed at the educational inclusion of people with disabilities. Based on sociology of health studies, which understand health and disease as the subjects' social, material, and cultural contexts, this study understands that the new conceptions of health and disease give a new meaning to disability, distancing it from its immediate association with the concept of disease. Considering disability as not limiting individual potential, educational inclusion is approached from the perspective of promoting social well-being as a form of full participation by the disabled person in all dimensions of community life. Thus, it is concluded that inclusion, widely understood, contributes to the construction of a cultural, political, ethical, and epistemological project aimed at social emancipation, autonomy, and the guarantee of human rights, thus valuing various aspects of the demands for equality in differences.

Symptom and Evidence: Feminism as a Form of Psychoanalysis

For about sixty years, feminism has been in a complicated relationship with psychoanalysis. On the one hand, psychoanalysis deals with topics important to feminism, and many of its ideas could be rethought. On the other hand, the substantive contradictions between feminism and psychoanalysis hinder their productive collaboration. This article proposes that the problems faced by the project of feminist psychoanalysis arise not so much from the differences as from the similarities between these two discourses. The feminist view is based on the basic foundations of psychoanalysis. The structure of society in feminism is understood in the same fashion as the psychoanalytic unconscious. Feminist discourse aims to “capture” a symptom and offer it up for interpretation. At the same time, the interpretive apparatus of feminism differs from psychoanalytic theory for it is based on an internally coherent system of prescriptions. So long as the symptom is successfully interpreted, political involvement is something that feminism has hopes to achieve. Thus individual cases are taken as analogous to the “conscious” in psychoanalysis and the system of prescriptives the “unconscious”. In such a way a “collective” political subject can be formed. Since psychoanalysis and feminism find the causes of the symptom in different areas that do not intersect they come into conflict.The introduction briefly describes the context of the study. The first section introduces the concepts of description and prescription and analyses feminism’s theoretical foundations. The author comes to the conclusion that the foundations of feminism could be thought of as a system of prescriptives. The second section examines the structures that feminism and psychoanalysis share and how they come into conflict. In the third section, feminism is compared with queer theory, and the differences between the two are used to bring together the idea of a collective political subject. In conclusion, the main strategies for strengthening feminist discourse are considered. Particular emphasis is given to the project of feminist epistemology. The materials used in the article are academic and journalistic articles written by feminists, blog posts and comments from discussion platforms, and a single public interview.

Knowledge and society: A comprehensive approach to social epistemology

This article proposes an alternative approach to social epistemology – a comprehensive approach. It argues that the dominant approaches to social epistemology, which it identifies as communitarian and veritistic, are inadequate. It observes that the nature of the emphasis that the communitarian approach places on the epistemic community foster mindless tolerance in epistemology, which makes the pursuit of the cognitive goal of truth difficult to attain. It also observes that the veritistic approach that seeks to refocus social epistemology on the pursuit of the cognitive goal of obtaining truth does this at the expense of the affective goals of social epistemology. To overcome the inadequacies of the communitarian and the veritistic approaches and to ensure that social epistemology effectively pursues its cognitive and affective goals, this article offers the comprehensive approach. This approach absorbs the virtues of the communitarian and the veritistic approaches while avoiding their errors. Hence, it thrives on a view of truth that posits an objective and a subjective dimension of truth. The objective dimension ensures that the community only fosters and never impedes social epistemological projects such that social epistemology continues to pursue the cognitive goal of truth. The subjective dimension guarantees that the concern for truth does not lead to the neglect or abandonment of the pursuit of the affective goals of social epistemology. The rationale behind this approach is that for social epistemological projects and practices to remain truly epistemological and social, they must always take into consideration the cognitive and affective features of knowledge and knowers.

The Destiny of Phenomenology: Gadamer on Value, Globalism, and the Growth of Being

The Destiny of Phenomenology: Gadamer on Value, Globalism, and the Growth of Being

The Second Person in Dialogue

I first present a conception of the relata involved in the dialogic relation. I and thou are persons endowed with a first-person perspective and concepts through which they can represent themselves as distinct of anyone or anything else. Then I briefly discuss the epistemology and metaphysics of persons as agents. I adopt a realist view against any epistemological projects denying (or feigning to deny) the existence of the second person. Then I expose the complementary view of the secondperson perspective, which close the gap between the first- and third-person perspectives. I expose some historical milestones recognizing the importance of the second-person perspective in dialogue. After an examination of the conditions for the use of mental terms, I propose an analysis of dialogue in sequences of illocutionary acts, stressing the importance of perlocutionary plans. Any dialogue worthy of the name involves mutual understanding. In my reconstruction, I use distinctions proposed by Burge, Dummett and Austin. There are degrees of understanding in dialogue. In the highest degree, we have a real “meeting of minds.” Finally, a genuine dialogue is different from a fictional dialogue. I also suggest, taking side with Descartes, that the interaction man-machine cannot be classified as genuine dialogue.

Эпистемология сначала-знания и релайабилизм добродетелей Кристофа Келпа

This article examines Christoph Kelp’s project of epistemology, which combines the approaches of Timothy Williamson’s knowledge-first approach and Ernest Sosa’s virtue reliabilism. Arguments are given in favour of the position that Kelp’s theory of competence is a quite productive and substantially self-contained epistemological concept. It allows to construct special epistemologies and to analyse the competence of non-human actors

Jung and James

This paper draws parallels between William James’ thought and Carl Gustav Jung’s work in Psychological Types, showing that both provided epistemologies that strived to redefine the notion of scientific objectivity to incorporate the realm of psychological experience. Jung generally admired James’ pragmatism and his pluralistic vision. He shared James’ idea that philosophical (and, therefore, epistemological) positions were ultimately expressions of certain psychological attitudes, which meant that a psychological typology could be used to account for the “personal equations” of philosophers, scientists, and psychologists in particular. It will be shown that Jung borrowed from James the idea of a psychological typology as an epistemological method, which he believed would ensure a more complete understanding of scientific objectivity. Parallels will then be drawn between Jung’s notion of the “problem of opposites” and James’ concept of the “divided self,” both of which were resolved through religion. Crucially, for both Jung and James, expanding the borders of science to include psychology also meant incorporating religious experience. Finally, this paper argues that Jung’s epistemological project in Psychological Types effectively expanded on James’ pragmatism by synthesising various elements of James’s thought – pluralism, the personal equation, typology, and the divided self – into one epistemological framework. Jung’s work thus provides an important case study for the history of pragmatism.

ARISTOTLE'S COSMOLOGY AND THE MODERN TURN WITH NEWTON AND DESCARTES

This text aims to highlight the foundations of the construction of ancient cosmology and also the modern cosmological "turn" from the physics of Kepler, Galileo and Newton and the philosophy of Descartes. Firstly, we tried to rescue how Aristotle's epistemological project, which is a continuity and a break with Plato, formed the metaphysical basis for a later cosmology of the ancient Greek world. In order to understand nature one must first understand the assumptions of the given definition. In order to understand motion, one must understand that change is the realization of what the object is subjected to, the realization of a possibility. Things that have the power to generate motion are nature and have substance. At the advent of the Modern Age, Newtonian physics and Cartesian philosophy provide the framework for a new cosmological conception coming from Aristotle, a new cosmology of modernity.

On some intracranialist dogmas in epistemology

Research questions in mainstream epistemology often take for granted a cognitive internalist picture of the mind. Perhaps this is unsurprising given the seemingly safe presumptions that (i) knowledge entails belief (viz. the entailment thesis) and that (ii) the kind of belief that knowledge entails supervenes exclusively on brainbound cognition. It will be argued here that (contra orthodoxy) the most plausible version of the entailment thesis holds just that knowledge entails dispositional belief. However, regardless of whether occurrent belief supervenes only as the cognitive internalist permits, we should reject the idea that dispositional belief supervenes only in cognitive internalist-friendly ways. These observations, taken together, reveal two things: first, that a cognitive internalist picture of the mind is much more dispensable in epistemology than has been assumed and, second, that pursuing questions in extended epistemology need not involve any radical departure from the commitments of more traditional epistemological projects.