Epistemological Questions Research Articles

Science, Society, and Politics

Social ideology and all modern derivatives begun with either Adam Smith, 1776, Wealth of Nations, or Karl Marx, 1848, The Communist Manifest, with Engels. Neither are grounded on science both were created before there existed even the most basic understanding of psychology. Neither deals with modern understanding of the forces that drive a modern free democratic society. Both ideologies have globally failed. My work, the spiritual model of humanity, corrects this failure. It begins with a scientific general theory of psychology which itself must begin with the question what exactly is the relationship between knowledge in mind and the object of that knowledge? This epistemological question only able to be answered by identifying and applying method able to lead the conceptualization process and create the necessary theoretical structure between the selected variables. The method chosen and proved is referred to as Ashby tools. Until the selection of Ashby tools and proof they are tools to lead conceptualization, the only other third level conceptualization method was mathematics. Ashby tools are far more powerful than mathematics, giving rise to understanding of selected systems of much greater verisimilitude, chiefly due Ashby tools manipulate variables that must be drawn directly from the system under study, which is not the case of mathematics, for example the 1927 Solvay Conference to decide the psi function in the Schrodinger equation was a probability function. The modern analysis of humanity begins with the scientific general theory of psychology as the paradigm, which is then applied to all human circumstance referred to as the normal science. Together, the paradigm and its application collectively referred to as the spiritual model of humanity. The correct science of people states in romantic analogy: ideas are the set of the sail, emotions the wind in the sail. It follows that society is not as to people as a tree or photon, since society is built of our own ideas, therefore the society in which our children develop is defined by the ideas we decide to apply to build the society in which they will develop. This paper, a letter, as a practical political policy document based on the following logic: 1. All things are explicable. 2. There must always be a clear, well defined start point to enable reasoned, scientific explanation. 3. All circumstance flowing from the explanation must be reasoned using the start point as the base. Overriding all is the crucial ethic of determining the best ideas based on reason, science being the core of reason (but science as defined by strategic science within the spiritual model of society). This paper applies this structure of thinking to the questions … (1) what choice of society in New Zealand and the free world using New Zealand as the example; (2) having decided the type of society, what policy options offer greatest chance of implementing the type of society desired.

BOOK REVIEW: Southeast Asia’s Modern Architecture: Questions of Translation, Epistemology and Power, edited by Jiat-Hwee Chang and Imran bin Tajudeen

BOOK REVIEW: Southeast Asia’s Modern Architecture: Questions of Translation, Epistemology and Power, edited by Jiat-Hwee Chang and Imran bin Tajudeen

The (im)possibility of monitoring and evaluating the impact of community engagement performance in South African universities: A review

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) allow universities to learn from past experiences, improve service delivery, plan, and allocate resources and demonstrate results as part of their accountability to stakeholders. M&E also assists in keeping projects on track, providing a basis for reassessing priorities and creating evidence-based data for projects. Considerable scholarship is illuminating insights and sharing experiences of community engagement in higher education. However, the question of M&E remains contestable due to the complexities in implementing community engagement in higher education. This article discusses the (im)possibility of facilitating M&E in higher education community engagement spaces. In 2009, the University of Venda established a directorate for community engagement, which I became its first director. I use the insider lens to reflect on the intersections of concepts and constructs such as knowledge co-production, ecosystems, societal impact, and an M&E framework in higher education. I intend here to bring some problems and contestations in generating a framework for monitoring and reviewing community engagement, arguing that the framework should embrace multiple ontologies and be intentional about robust engagement with epistemological, ontological, and ethical questions around exclusivity and dominance. Hopefully I will add a much-needed dimension acknowledging the complexity of a community engagement discourse – toward an inclusive, participatory-ecosystemic way of self-assessment, monitoring and evaluation.

Life Embodied: The Promise of Vital Force in Spanish Modernity by Nicolás Fernández-medina

Reviewed by: Life Embodied: The Promise of Vital Force in Spanish Modernity by Nicolás Fernández-medina Rebecca Haidt Nicolás Fernández-medina. Life Embodied: The Promise of Vital Force in Spanish Modernity. McGill-Queen's UP, 2018. 416 pp. While reading medical essays from Benito Jerónimo Feijoo's Teatro Crítico Universal for the project that became Embodying Enlightenment (1998), I was amazed to find that Feijoo explored epistemological questions around language's imperfect claims to representation of bodily experience. Feijoo's exploration of the body's interior invisibility to and through language positions his writings on medicine well within a larger historical struggle traced by Foucault, in Birth of the Clinic, as the modern medical gaze's search for truth through "the dogmatic stage of a name." Yet Feijoo's inquiry into embodiment had been scarcely remarked, despite his being a foundational Enlightenment figure. As Nicolás Fernández-Medina points out in this beautifully written volume, investigations such as Feijoo's into the knowability of the body were a Spanish "reality whose complexity and character" were long denied within European historiographies of science and medicine (xxviii-xxix). Countering that denial through a tour de force of scholarship, Life Embodied argues for the importance, in modernity, of Spanish writing around the "new and imaginative relations between knowledge and body that vital force forged across disciplines" (xxiii). The book's premise is that debates around the concept of vital force are "at the heart of the modern" (xvi). Toward the close of the seventeenth century, the emergence of modern subjectivity entailed an "irrevocable power shift" away from institutions (the church, the Crown) and toward "the silent, invisible depths" of the thinking, feeling individual (xviii). In Spain, inquiry into relations between body and soul, mind and body, and body and world has for centuries challenged dominant epistemologies, regulations, and institutions. From Juan de Cabriada's 1687 Philosophical Medico-Chemical Letter envisioning the body as "a dynamic system of vital movement and change" (64), to Martín Martínez's 1730 Philosophia sceptica (which takes up "the subject of embodiment [and] the strange fact of existence and the nature of human life" [97]), and through Miguel de Unamuno's 1912 Tragic Sense of Life, in which the philosopher argued that "individuals, if they ever aspired to recognize their own self-deception and embrace the authentic truth about life, had to come to terms with their vital flesh-and-bloodness" (261), Fernández-Medina offers a chronology of the distinctively modern fascination with vital force by placing a wide range of Spanish texts within European and ancient scientific, medical, and philosophical contexts. Life Embodied has a preface, an introduction, six chapters, a conclusion, and twenty illustrations, along with an extensive bibliography and an excellent index. The study is divided into three sections: part I, "Blood, Circulation, and the Soul," [End Page 117] discusses late seventeenth-century Novatores and early eighteenth-century writings by Torres Villarroel, Martínez, and Boix y Moliner; part II, "Political Reform and the Order of Nature," takes readers through late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thinking about nature, the body, and the self; and part III, "From Neo-Hippocratism to the Avant-Garde," covers texts by Mata y Fontanet, Sanz del Río, Unamuno, Baroja, and Gómez de la Serna. Along the way, numerous theories and concepts are probed, including Cartesianism, vitalism, the sublime, Romanticism, materialism, positivism, Krausism, and Nietzsche's "will to power." The overall argument is couched chronologically, in part because the author wants to persuade the reader of the persistent importance of "vital force" within Spanish intellectual and scientific cultures. But, as Fernández-Medina points out, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical and chemical discoveries advanced an "epistemological enterprise" that undergirded, yet proved insufficient to satisfy, early twentieth-century writers', artists', and philosophers' searches for "a solution to the problem of modern existence," which seemed to require "a profound, intuitive understanding of how the lived body (and not just the mind) served as the medium through which the world was known" (302). The reader comes to understand connections defying boundaries of periodization: challenges to "established distinctions between pathology and...

Meinong Epistemologist of Measurement

Contemporary theories of measurement seem to have almost forgotten the epistemological questions linked to the psychological aspects of measurement. Indeed, the received approaches, i.e. the representational theory of measurement and the model-based account, are well developed from the mathematical and operational points of view; however, they do not consider sufficiently the reliability of the perceptual impressions involved in any measurement. In contrast, Gustav Theodor Fechner, one of the fathers of modern experimental psychology, addresses this question at length. His work stimulated an epistemological analysis of the quantification of qualities - a process necessary for empirical science - in an almost forgotten paper by Meinong. I present Meinong’s approach in much greater historical and epistemological detail than has been done in the literature thus far. Moreover, I show how Meinong’s approach can fruitfully enrich the received view on measurement theory.

Towards Open Science for the Qualitative Researcher: From a Positivist to an Open Interpretation

This reflection by a qualitative researcher stems from a concrete experience with data handling in a funded research project. The researcher followed Open Research Data guidelines and found optimal solutions to pseudonymise data, but this later evolved into a deep epistemological questioning on praxis. During the first phase of the project, a tailor-made software was developed with help from librarians and an IT professional to automate the pseudonymisation of the 150 data chunks generated by 16 students, 3 tutors and 3 decision makers. In the second phase of the project, this experience sparked questions about the meaning of such data handling and interpretations of Open Science, which led the researcher to suggest a framework for the professional development of qualitative researchers in their understanding of Open Science. The article raises awareness of normative frameworks in institutional data handling practices and calls for active contributions to defining qualitative research in an Open Science perspective, particularly taking as a reference the recent draft recommendation by UNESCO (2020)

Нормативность в философии сознания

The paper deals with the problem of normativity in the philosophy of mind. It points out that the normativity of conscious experience has long been ignored in the discipline. This is largely due to the fact that philosophers paid attention primarily to the metaphysical aspects of mind. The work also notes that the turn to the epistemology of mind makes it important to study the normativity of mental states. Such research can help us not only to clarify a number of epistemological questions, but also to solve some metaphysical questions. In particular, an inquiry into the problem of normativity can justify an acceptance of externalism in the philosophy of mind. In the paper, the problem of normativity in the philosophy of mind is considered through the viewpoint of the rule-following problem, posed by Wittgenstein. It demonstrates that any internalist understanding of the content of mental states either ignores the normative aspect of conscious experience or faces the skeptical paradox formulated by Wittgenstein. The only way to avoid these difficulties is to adopt the externalist view about the content of mental states advocated by John McDowell. According to this position, the content of mental states is understood as an objective state of affairs, which can function as a reason for the conscious activity of the subject.

Never on Sunday: Feminist questioning of dominant epistemology and philosophical tradition

Through the interpretation of the movie Never on Sunday (1960) by Jules Dassin, this paper opens some important epistemological questions from the feminist perspective. Namely, the film is set in the contemporary Greece, while the main characters are a prostitute Ilia and an American tourist Homer, who is at the same time disappointed in Greece and in the beautiful woman he meets. His inability to understand people and social context in which he finds himself, as well as his effort to educate Ilia and impose her his own values and ideas about ancient Greece reveal much of chauvinism and cultural colonialism, opening questions crucial for feminist and other critical epistemologies which are: who produces knowledge, for whom and how to approach it critically. Finally, through the interpretation of Ilia?s attitude to knowledge, I will turn also to the feminist notion of embodied feminist subject. Apart from that, I will deal with hegemonic attitude of the West towards ancient Greek past.

The Grammar of Knowledge: A Look at Feminism and Feminist Epistemologies

The aim of the article is to reflect indirectly first on all the contributions in this volume, and second to help fix the present line of thought onto feminist epistemologies. Some postulates of feminist epistemologies are presented. The key question of feminist epistemology as a field of inquiry is defined according to Iris Van Der Tuin (2016) – it involves “the epistemic status of the knowledge produced by privileged and marginalized subjects”, and the reflection about the intersection of knowledge and power. There are ethical and moral implications here: the challenge and responsibility to recognise power relations. If a knowing subject is understood as epistemically inferior, this has a negative effect on how they are understood in non-epistemic contexts (Fricker, 2017). Feminism, in other words, is an epistemological project (Bahovec, 2002).

A “Geoeconomia” como instrumento da Geopolítica? Uma análise dos casos dos Estados Unidos e da China

Since Antiquity, so-called “economic instruments”, such as commercial embargoes and financial sanctions, have been used by several nations in their geopolitical struggles aiming to expand the territories in which they enjoy advantages in material accumulation and exert privileged power positions. Recently, authors such as Robert Blackwill and Jennifer Harris have been supporting the hypothesis that so-called “geoeconomics” has returned to the core of international relations, defining and delimiting this object and debating its relations with geopolitics. In this sense, this paper aims to analyze the employment of such instruments by the United States and China over the last decades, as well as their objectives and results. However, the elements raised in such exercise gave rise to an epistemological question concerning the supposedly “economic” nature of such instruments, allowing us to present a hypothesis to be explored in future research: is there, in fact, a “geoeconomics” as an autonomous phenomena in international relations?

Les trois cultures de la psychiatrie computationnelle

IntroductionWhether on the social, economic or scientific level, the digital sciences tend to change the conception of health. Computational Psychiatry, in the sense of a psychiatry based on “numbers” and information flow, has evolved rapidly. MethodsIn this article, we propose the distinction between three fields of Computational Psychiatry. A first field corresponds to “Digital Psychiatry”, i.e. a field using digital, connected, tools in the main goal to collect digital data (especially important in this period of COVID-19). A second field corresponds to “Big Psychiatry”, or Big Data Psychiatry, which deals with large amounts of data, e.g. through recent methodologies in Machine learning or artificial intelligence. A third field corresponds to “Psychiatry Modeling”, which corresponds to the utilization of formal hypothesis (i.e. mathematical models) about brain and behavior (and their dysfunctions) in line with computational neurosciences. ResultsThe collection of digital data fits into methodologies of assessments and interventions in daily life, named Ecological Momentary Assessment. Of course, these digital data, which differ quantitatively and qualitatively from what psychiatry has been able to collect in its history, raise numerous epistemological and ethical questions. In the field of Big Psychiatry, most Machine learning techniques provide predictions rather than pathophysiological mechanisms, and these Machine learning techniques makes it possible to propose new delineations of disorders in a logic of stratified medicine. Lastly, resulting from studies in computational neurosciences, explanatory modeling of the brain (often called “Generative modeling”) proposes a number of theories to understand the functioning of the brain in psychiatric disorder (e.g. predictive coding, reinforcement learning, decision making theories, but also dynamical systems theories and graph and network theory). Discussion and conclusionThis field could offer a framework to characterize the origin of the psychiatric symptoms. Obviously, these three fields are highly mutually dependent, with for instance a data access provided by Digital Psychiatry (with Digital Tools), a data processing operated by Big Psychiatry (with Machine learning) and a formalization of hypotheses offered by Generative modeling of the brain from Psychiatry Modeling. This triple organization of Computational Psychiatry offers a robust framework for personalized and precision psychiatry, articulated around statistical and mathematical methodologies, focused on prediction and explanation and using qualitatively and quantitatively varied data. However, such a framework is necessarily geared to a common subject: the patient of the psychiatric clinic.

Who Owns the Theorem?

Epistemological and sociological questions about ownership of mathematical and scientific discoveries.

Import of “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty” in Shakespeare’s<i> The Tempest</i>

This article is an attempt to probe the preconceptions prevalent in the most perfect of Shakespeare’s plays Tempest. Since the inequity of the playwright’s approach towards the characters is more pronounced, a genuine effort to bring it out has been initiated herewith. Keats is the proponent of the most popular line “Beauty is Truth, Truth beauty” which ignites many literary minds with sparks of ontological and epistemological questions and the search for the rationale behind it and its connotation remain an ongoing process. The article uses the etched line of the romantic poet to state that the concept is not a new one since the Bard of Avon had already employed it in a unique way in his last play The Tempest. It also rationalizes the way in which Prospero ill-treats and exploits the natives - Caliban and Sycorax - and compromises with the renegades from Naples which substantiates the Eurocentric White man’s bias against the black and the consequential racial legacy of ‘otherness’.

Whose Research Is It? Reflection on Participatory Research with Women and Girls with Disabilities in the Global South

Drawing on the Transforming Disability Knowledge, Research, and Activism project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2016-2020), this article critically reflects on the project’s participatory research process that involved young women and girls with disabilities in the Global South. I discuss epistemological and methodological questions related to the deployment of decolonizing research methodologies in the Global South in relation to theoretical and methodological approaches for engaging girls with disabilities. I argue that a critical, reflexive, and decolonizing research approach that embodies knowledge from the Global South is essential for empowering these girls to express themselves through multiple forms of representation.

Knowledge, Method and Upbringing in Descartes and Comenius

This paper examines two methodological proposals presented in the XVII century as a way to enface the so-called knowledge problem. Comenius as well as Descartes, both pay attention to educational problems in a different way; and, most importantly, it must be remembered that theoretical and methodological disscussions are not strictly separate from practical ones. In other words, education problems are intrinsically related to epistemological questions and vice versa. For example, there is no methodological or epistemological proposal in Comenius and Descarted which is related to a way of educating and individual human being. Whatever philosophical construction is presented, it also involves an anthropological construction whcch is fulfilled in some kind of educational Proposal.

Understanding and deciphering the past in Graham Swift’s Shuttlecock

Like the other influential events in world history, the two world wars of the twentieth century have deeply influenced the following generations and forced them to evaluate their existence and ask epistemological questions about fact and fiction, history and story, and truth and falsity in order to understand and situate themselves in a constructed present world. Shuttlecock, Graham Swift’s second novel, follows a senior police archivist who inherits a past from his veteran father and attempts to reach a natural flow of life by fully grasping the past. He thinks that he can dissolve the unnaturally constructed reality of the present by digging the past but scrutinizing the past does not provide the necessary answers to settle him down in harmony. In the end, he leaves his epistemological quest and seems to come to terms with the fragmented reality between the past and present. However, as Slavoj Žižek notes in The Sublime Object of Ideology, overseeing the modern alienation is a dangerous fantasy and it is impossible to return to a natural balance. This article aims to discuss the relationship between memory, trauma and modernity in order to come to terms with the impossibility of knowing the past.

Doing Post-Western sociology in Central and Eastern Europe before and after the Great Change: some epistemological questions

Analyzing the sociology in Central and Eastern Europe before and after the Great Change in 1989, the article aims to present the main epistemological questions that Post-Western sociology raises for the discipline of sociology as a whole. The focus is put on a paradoxical feature in the development of sociology in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe: before 1989, under conditions of Marxist monoparadigmality, relative isolation of scientific cognition, and political and ideological pressure, sociological research in these countries was characterized by methodological rigor and conceptual innovativeness, while after 1989, in the context of institutionalized plurality of paradigms (polyparadigmality), and intensive scientific exchange, the dominant tendency is—for social scientists in the countries in question—to borrow methodologies, theories, and concepts from the Western sociological tradition, without analyzing the epistemic relevance of these loans with regard to the societies in which they are applied. This paradox is examined in terms of sociological production in two research fields: the general sociological theory of society and sociology of youth. Comparing studies and analyses carried out in these two fields in Central and Eastern Europe before and after the Great Change, the article demonstrates that Post-Western sociology is a valid research posture for a wide variety of sociological practices regardless of the concrete national, theoretical, or institutional frameworks in which researchers are working. Sensitivity to the context of research is what permits Post-Western sociology to eliminate cognitive hierarchies and inequalities and restores the epistemic autonomy of each cognitive practice, emphasizing the inevitable cultural variations in the interpretation of one and the same phenomenon and the impact of these variations on methodology. In this sense, Post-Western sociology raises important epistemological problems regarding the relationship between maintaining the disciplinary principles of sociological knowledge on the one hand, and the application of those principles in different epistemic contexts on the other hand. The main question could be formulated as follows: how does Post-Western sociology enrich the deontological and epistemological principles of the discipline and in what way does it contribute to developing its scientific project?

An Analysis of Alvin Goldman’s Naturalized Epistemology

This work, “An Analysis of Alvin Goldman’s Naturalistic Epistemology,” aims at presenting the contributions of Alvin Goldman in am epistemic bent. As a branch of philosophy, epistemology has significantly advanced right from the classic, medieval, modern, and contemporary epochs. The effects of postmodernist thinkers’ radical approach to philosophy are evident in almost all philosophy branches. With the notion of doing epistemology through science championed by W.V.O. Quine, Alvin Goldman, John Kuhn, and some other scholars have raised objections and counter objections to such a deconstructionist mindset within the epistemic circle. Expectedly, these naturalistic epistemologists had discontinuity with one another in their positions. Goldman is concerned with such traditional epistemological problems as developing an adequate theoretical understanding of knowledge and justified believing. This paper shows that in his naturalistic discontinuity with Quine, Alvin Goldman did not conceive epistemology as part of science the same way Quine conceived it. Goldman’s view that answering traditional epistemological questions requires both a priori philosophy and the application of scientific results. Goldman’s naturalism is the view that epistemology “needs help” from science. His primary concern is in the area of traditional epistemological problems, including developing an adequate theoretical understanding of knowledge and justified believing. In this paper, I see Goldman’s divergence in the opinion of his naturalistic epistemology with Quine and other naturalistic epistemologists not as a problem but indeed part of epistemic consolidation. In the course of this work, analytic, evaluation, library research, and descriptive methods as well as internet materials, were employed.

KOLMOGOROV CONDITIONALIZERS CAN BE DUTCH BOOKED (IF AND ONLY IF THEY ARE EVIDENTIALLY UNCERTAIN)

AbstractA vexing question in Bayesian epistemology is how an agent should update on evidence which she assigned zero prior credence. Some theorists have suggested that, in such cases, the agent should update by Kolmogorov conditionalization, a norm based on Kolmogorov’s theory of regular conditional distributions. However, it turns out that in some situations, a Kolmogorov conditionalizer will plan to always assign a posterior credence of zero to the evidence she learns. Intuitively, such a plan is irrational and easily Dutch bookable. In this paper, we propose a revised norm, Kolmogorov–Blackwell conditionalization, which avoids this problem. We prove a Dutch book theorem and converse Dutch book theorem for this revised norm, and relate our results to those of Rescorla (2018).

Of a false dilemma and the knowledge of values

The work of Gabriel Marcel is retrieved and set in relation to the question of moral epistemology. I begin by surveying Marcel’s long-running critique of a false dilemma with implications for the nature of our knowledge of values. According to this dilemma, a person’s knowledge of something is either objective, and therefore transcendent but impersonal, or it is subjective, and therefore personal but immanent, reaching only one’s inner states. Applied to the knowledge of values, this false dilemma leaves philosophy with a choice between accounts of value-knowledge as scientific/objective knowledge or value-knowledge as self-knowledge. Building on Marcel’s critique of this false dilemma, I suggest a program for a Marcelian moral epistemology that identifies the comportments by which human person are receptive to values and hence to knowledge of values. Two examples of such comportment are discussed in relation to the problem of value-knowledge: exigence and fidelity.