Epistemological Reflection Research Articles

Conceptualizing boundaries for the professionalization of healthcare ethics practice: a call for empirical research.

One of the challenges of modern healthcare ethics practice is the navigation of boundaries. Practicing healthcare ethicists in the performance of their role must navigate meanings, choices, decisions and actions embedded in complex cultural and social relationships amongst diverse individuals. In light of the evolving state of modern healthcare ethics practice and the recent move toward professionalization via certification, understanding boundary navigation in healthcare ethics practice is critical. Because healthcare ethics is endowed with many boundaries which often delineate concerns about professional expertise and authority, epistemological reflection on the relationship between theory and practice points toward the social context as relevant to the conceptualization of boundaries. The skills of social scientists may prove helpful to provide data and insights into the conceptualization and navigation of clinical ethics qua profession. Empirical ethics research, which combines empirical description (usually social scientific) with normative-ethical analysis and reflection, is a way forward as we engage and reflect upon issues which have implications for practice standards and professionalization of the role. This requires cooperative engagement of the descriptive and normative disciplines to explore our understandings of boundaries in healthcare ethics practice. This will contribute to the ongoing reflection not only as we envision the professional role but to ensure that it is enacted in practice.

Internet como simulacro cultural malentendidos y reflexiones al respecto de las cibersociologías

Este trabajo intenta de una forma sintética y tal vez superficial enlazar una serie de reflexiones de carácter teórico y epistemológico sobre el tratamiento y formas de pensar la red que se dan de forma generalizada en la literatura específica que desde cada disciplina de las ciencias sociales parece haberse orientado hacia una ciberespecialización.

Para além da dupla consciência: Gestão Social e as antessalas epistemológicas

A partir da noção de dupla consciência, observada na obra The souls of black folk (1903), de W. E. B. Du Bois e utilizada como metarreferência discursiva, este artigo, como ensaio teórico, objetiva estabelecer uma reflexão epistemológica que contribua para que a Gestão Social não recaia na patologia da dupla consciência - uma gestão, na forma de ação social, que se credita normativamente emancipatória, mas que representa na materialidade da vida, de modo contraditório, a continuidade de uma realidade social opressora. Para tanto, após a identificação do sentido axiológico atribuído à Gestão Social e o apontamento das principais dificuldades, limitações e críticas mapeadas na literatura especializada, foram trazidas à baila duas temáticas pouco exploradas no âmbito da Gestão Social - relações de poder, consubstanciadas no conceito de colonialidade de poder, e a relação homem/natureza, delineada pelo aspecto da ecologia - a fim de demonstrar que tal gestão, uma gestão-problema, não uma gestão-resposta, deve desenvolver a capacidade de se autoproblematizar, de sentir-se como um problema e de refletir acerca de suas próprias questões não explicitadas. Ao final, após a exposição de um conjunto de caracteres epistemológicos, demonstrou-se que a Gestão Social, para não padecer das lacunas epistemológicas observadas na Gestão Estratégica, rompendo com a tendência de constituir uma antessala epistemológica, ao filtrar seletivamente as realidades observáveis e significativas e, dessa feita, mantendo a coesão social propiciada pela ideologia da gestão hegemônica, ela deve constituir a possibilidade plural de outras gestões, a partir de saberes e prática situados.

Preparing BSW Students for Service-Learning: Enhancing Epistemological Reflection

This article includes a review of the literature on personal epistemology and the reflective judgment model and applies these theoretical concepts to undergraduate students who engage in service-learning projects. The application will provide instructors with greater understanding of students’ abilities and limitations in their service-learning experiences. Included are traditional, modern, and expressive teaching activities that were designed, with literature support, to enhance students’ epistemological reflection and aid them in preparing for and completing service-learning projects.

European Comparative Literature as Humanism

In his article "European Comparative Literature as Humanism" Bernard Franco presents an epistemological reflection on comparative literature in the context of the evolution of the relationships between different forms of knowledge. Franco argues that in the late nineteenth century the notion of the "humanities" replaced that of the "human sciences," but that we have recently returned to a humanist concept of knowledge linked to ethics. Franco focuses on the origins of this critical reflection about the nature of knowledge and on the debate in the Romantic period between rational and non-rational forms of knowledge. The idéologues (Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy, Fauriel) and Dilthey, Goethe, and Humboldt were at the heart of this epistemological debate, a debate that in early modernity had already been related to the question of humanism in the dialog between Erasmus and Luther. In the mid-twentieth century Zweig and Thomas Mann looked to literature to seek a European spirit and to build a model of cosmopolitanism in which literature becomes a deeper source of knowledge.

Reflexões epistemológicas para a pesquisa em administração: contribuições de Theodor W. Adorno

O pensamento de Adorno passou a ser considerado nas pesquisas também na área de administração, especialmente nos assim chamados estudos organizacionais (Batista-dos-Santos, Alloufa, & Nepomuceno, 2010; Faria, 2004; Paes de Paula, 2008, 2012). O presente ensaio pretende contribuir para com as reflexões epistemológicas e suas implicações no uso da dialética como método de análise. A contribuição de Adorno para as pesquisas em administração se materializam em pelo menos 6 pontos: (a) combate à instituição dos sistemas totalitários de compreensão; (b) indicação de que, quando os pensamentos são elementos da práxis, estes passam a ter potencial concreto no mundo objetivo; (c) a primazia do objeto faz do sujeito um objeto qualitativamente distinto; (d) o objeto a ser estudado não é nada sem o sujeito que vai estudá-lo, pois, sem o sujeito, o momento do objeto não existe; (e) o sujeito pensa a realidade principalmente por concepções e por conceitos; (f) sendo a realidade estudada não plenamente cognoscível, aquilo que não se mostra somente pode ser conhecido por meio daquilo que se mostra, ou seja, o não conceito só pode ser conhecido por meio do conceito, pois a relação de mútua existência permite afirmar que existe uma totalidade em potência.

Investigación y práctica reflexiva como categorías epistemológicas del desarrollo profesional docente

Este artículo de reflexión procura entrever cómo, dado que la reflexión epistemológica es fundamental en todos los procesos del ámbito escolar, llevada a la pregunta por el conocimiento profesional docente, implica descentrar la discusión en torno a su formación y el desarrollo profesional como elementos fundante en la construcción de su conocimiento. En este proceso emerge la investigación como una categoría que articula y pone de manifiesto que el profesorado en su formación y ejercicio deviene sujeto investigador, especialmente mediante la reflexión sobre sobre su propia práctica, que denota por tal un proceso de cuestionamiento continuo sobre su quehacer, no tanto sobre la práctica sino sobre el sentido de la misma. En lo que sigue se pretende hacer una aproximación al sentido de la investigación y la práctica reflexiva en el desarrollo profesional del profesor.

Quale storia naturale per l’estetico? L’ipotesi darwiniana rivisitata

In spite of the great number of publications, contemporary evolutionary aesthetics seems to have reached deadlock, for the lack of a real epistemological reflection on the theoretical nucleus of its own experimental investigations. Starting from an introduction to the current debate, the essay aims to indicate the basic points of a theoretical model able to face speculative risks and methodological complexities of contemporary evolutionary aesthetics. In this very perspective is placed the analysis of Darwin’s sexual paradigm, and the hypothesis of partially revising it in order to extend the notion of aesthetics as an expressive and intrinsically motivated dimension of animal cognition.

Cruzando fronteiras: entre a Antropologia e a Educação no Brasil e na Argentina

A relação entre a Antropologia e a Educação tem sido marcada por aproximações e distanciamentos que mostram não ser esta uma história pronta e acabada; ao contrário, é ampla, difusa e complexa e, nos últimos anos, temos assistido a um processo de aproximação da Antropologia com a Educação como nunca se viu no Brasil. Mas, se, para a Antropologia brasileira esta parece ser uma nova realidade, outras experiências desenvolvidas na América Latina podem revelar um quadro fecundo ao exercício da reflexão epistemológica em perspectiva comparada. O objetivo deste artigo é analisar a relação entre a Antropologia e a Educação, com base na apropriação, por parte de pesquisadores do campo educacional brasileiro e argentino, da etnografia educacional proposta por Elsie Rockwell e Justa Ezpeleta, representantes do Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas (DIE) do Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados (CINVESTAV) do Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) do México.

El abogado inocente. Reflexiones en torno a la Antropología y sus relaciones con el Derecho, a partir de una experiencia de campo con los ngäbes de Costa Rica

La experiencia de trabajo de campo del autor en los territorios indigenas ngabes de Costa Rica sirve como punto de partida para plantear una reflexion epistemologica sobre el que- hacer de los antropologos y sus consecuencias politicas, asi como para explorar algunos ambitos de la relacion entre el Derecho y la Antropologia.

Enseigner l’évolution du vivant dans un contexte concordiste

Tunisia, Arab Muslim country, is characterized by a concordist socio-cultural context. Students mobilize conceptions of the diversity of life that are a mixture of religious and scientific knowledge. The teaching of the biological evolution described in this paper addresses these concepts in classroom debates that include epistemological reflections on the scientific characteristics of evolution as a historical science. During the teaching, students have developed different explanations, manifested a better understanding of what is scientific knowledge and finally, many of them developed separate explanations of the diversity of life.

Order and Disorder - Legal Adjudication and Quantum Epistemology

The central issue of this paper concerns the discretion of judges in the application of the law, discretion that has expanded enormously, since judges are engaged in the direct application of principles drawn from the constitution or even - at times - from other legal orders altogether. Every legal system has its own methods of selecting and instituting judges, but of no system can it be said that they enjoy full democratic legitimacy and may be free to create law at will. Both in the US and in continental Europe many perceive the need to find some strategies that might bring the interpretative discretion under control, seeking suggestions sometimes in the theory of legal sources, sometimes in the theory of legal interpretation. The point of this paper is that no answer can be found because we are asking the wrong questions.The work is divided into two parts. In the first part, I make use of some hints provided by epistemological reflections of quantum physics theorists, above all Heisenberg. The critical perspective is that of “ontological materialism”, i.e. the idea that in the process of legal interpretation and application, the interpreter is dealing with a “thing” that exists independent of his/her intervention. In the second part, I attempt to suggest a possible solution to the impasse, exploring the meaning of the institutional dimension of legal interpretation and application.

Re-Meaning The Indigenous Muisca Cemetery 0f Usme, Colombia: Ethnography of Collaborative Project and Patrimonial Debate

The paper exposes an ethnographic view of a collaborative field work, made in Hacienda El Carmen in Usme, Colombia, a terrain where an indigenous muisca cemetery was found. The analysis focuses on the struggles between the named “authorized patrimonial discourse” and the “cultural process of patrimony”. In the first part, I want to expose the processes that led us to purpose a current collaborative research project implemented by the Universidad Santo Tomas’ Group of Memory and the Indigenous Muisca Community of Bosa. Based on a situational analysis methodology, this part is the result of an ethnographic field work of some spaces of dialogue and encounter among different logics to understand the patrimony and the heritage. In middle of struggles with the public institutions, the academy and other social groups, the muisca people build and negotiate their ethnic identity as part of their cultural and political project. In the second part, the situational analysis will be applied in scenarios where the muisca people began to interpret the archaeological territory of Hacienda El Carmen. In this part, I will try to expose some epistemological reflections about alternative and inclusive ways of knowledge and remembering. The new senses and narratives, produced as a result of this exercise, let us thinking about the symbolic strategies used by the muisca people to occupy an important place in the present and the possibility of understanding and purposing current citizen visions from creative and original ways of incorporate ancestral memories.

VACÍOS EN LA LITERATURA SOBRE FILOSOFÍA DE LA EDUCACIÓN AMBIENTAL: UNA REVISIÓN DE LAS CORRIENTES DE LA FILOSOFÍA AMBIENTAL

This article is a preliminary product of the research project “A proposal of guidelines for environmental training in Colombian Higher Education” carried out with Universidad Antonio Narino during the years 2011and 2012. There are two objectives to be achieved: to demonstrate the void of literature on environmental education philosophy and to show that, despite the epistemological reflections on environmental philosophy are poor, the literature on trends in environmental philosophy is prolific. Thus, the order of the presentation is, first, a literature review on environmental education philosophy;, secondly, a literature review on environmental philosophy; and in third place, an analysis of the main trends, namely, deep ecology, conservation biology, bioregionalism and ecofeminism.

Paisaje cultural y región: una genealogía revisitada...

The concepts of cultural landscape and region are essential components in the study of geography, territory and planning throughout the last century. The same, throughout all these years, have been subject of various debates, approaches, epistemological reflections and perspectives of action. In this sense, this article intends to make a tour on the historical genealogy of these terms in order to be able to reflect on what their role and importance at present, since these concepts have had and continue to have a key role in the process of formation, consolidation and maintenance of territorial identities.

Respectus et relatio : la relation chez Descartes

The point of departure of this article is a lexical analysis, extended to the entire Cartesian corpus, focusing on the lemmas respectus and relatio and their adjectival forms. Starting from here, the article addresses Descartes’ doctrine of the relation, in so far as it is developed in the Regulae ad directionem ingenii. In this writing, two notions of ‘relation’ emerge: on the one side, the notion of respectus, that Descartes employes in the epistemological reflection of the first twelwe rules; on the other side, the notion of relatio, which is the object, especially of the last four rules. The analysis developed in the article shows that the two notions are distinct and different. The first (respectus), whose nature is mainly noetic, is related to the Cartesian topic of the ordo, which constitutes the sequential disposition of knowledge in connection with the unity of the mens; the second (relatio), on the contrary, has a more technical meaning, and concerns the function of the numerical unity, which is the term of reference in the construction of mathematical proportions.

Knowledge, Justification, and the Normativity of Epistemology

Epistemology is sometimes said to be a nor- mative discipline, but what this characterization means is often left unclear. This paper distinguishes two kinds of normativity and thereby provides a new way of un- derstanding attributions of normativity. Associated with this distinction are two kinds of epistemological reflection. These are shown to be parallel to two kinds of ethical reflection. In the light of what emerges in showing these points, the paper clarifies the requirements for naturaliz- ing epistemology, the place normativity might have, given certain kinds of naturalization, and the sense in which knowledge and justification may be viewed as normative. An important question about epistemology is whether the notions of knowl- edge and justification are normative. A related question is whether, if they are, their normativity is epistemic. The terms 'normativity' and 'epistemic' are relative newcomers to philosophy; and, unlike many that figure im- portantly in the field, they have no everyday uses. Lacking such uses does not automatically indicate that they have no clear meaning, but it tends to indicate that intuitions about the concepts expressed by the terms are less clear, and more subject to differences in judgment, than intuitions evoked by terms in common use such as—to take philosophically impor- tant cases—'believe', 'know', 'good', 'property', and even 'cause'. One might think that we can gain clarity by considering the long-standing use of 'norm' and related terms in social-scientific parlance. This is doubtful. As commonly understood, especially in the social sciences, a norm is simply a prevailing pattern and represents what is usual. What pertains to norms in this statistical sense need not be normative in the sense—if there is just one sense—important in philosophy. The term 'normative' has a longer history in philosophical parlance than does 'normativity', and in clarifying the associated concept we can be guided by the usage of the former as well as by discussions explicitly focusing on normativity as the intended referent of the abstract noun, which I take to express (in most of its uses) the property of being normative. My aim here is, first, to clarify the terms 'normativity' and 'epistemic' and, second, in that light, to pursue the question in what sense epistemology

Historical Epistemology and Pentecostal Origins: History and Historiography in Ethiopian Pentecostalism

Abstract This article revisits the issue of historiography in Pentecostal studies, seeking to connect this debate to recent theories of history coming from postcolonial and poststructuralist thought. I argue that the historian of Pentecostalism should seek not only to reconstruct past events, but, more than that, to offer a historical analysis of Pentecostal historiography. By drawing on four related theoretical insights into history and applying them to a concrete example from Ethiopian Pentecostalism, I aim to contribute to the epistemological reflection of Pentecostal historiography.

Enjeux psychiques de l’entretien clinique de recherche en contexte interculturel

The interview is an intersubjective meeting in which the stakes are complex. This frequently used method in social and human sciences research brings to the foreground various mental processes. Despite its clear distinction from the therapeutic interview, due to its purpose and the origin of the request, the research interview generates for both the participant and the researcher unconscious phenomena and contributes to the epistemological reflection inherent to the clinical approach. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the mental processes mobilized in the participants and in the researcher, who belong to the same culture of origin during the research interview, may be analyzed in four dimensions: intrapsychique, intersubjective, projective and group. So as to illustrate the various mental processes that are engaged, a research conducted in clinical intercultural psychology regarding the adaptive processes and the identity strategies of Korean mothers living in France or in Quebec is used. In order to offer maximum freedom of expression to the participants, the interviews were conducted in Korean, and then translated into French. The intrapsychic dimension is illustrated by an example from the interview with a 44-year-old Korean woman met in Paris. Following the Rogerian theory (1952, 1961), we understand that the participant comes to a coherent reorganization of her own conception throughout the interview, allowing her to speak and to think about her autobiography. From the interaction between two subjectivities, the thought and the discourse are involved in the co-construction of meaning. The understanding of the intersubjective dimension is supported by the theory of Winnicott (1971), developed for the transitional space. Like the mother-child relationship in the game device, the mental permeability available to the researcher is supposed to guarantee the development of the interviewee's confidence. The example of the interview conducted with another 39-year-old Korean woman living in Paris illustrates this intersubjective dimension. The analysis of the relationship between the researcher and his object of research will argue the projective dimension. In the quoted research, the researcher is facing a situation in which the participant's problems remind him of his own questionings. The work of analysis, with hindsight and in the after fact, on the position of the researcher and his subjective implication, is necessary to avoid the possible risk of subjectivation. The group dimension has several levels: institutional, national, international or even worldwide. Thus, the intercultural aspect is particularly highlighted in an attempt to present the complexity of the process. The idea of the interculturality awareness at several levels was highlighted in particular by taking the institutional transference/counter-transference movement into consideration. The transfer mezo level revealed itself as one of the analyzers of the group dimension, such as the motivation for accepting the participation in our investigation. In other words, it requires understanding both the relationship conducted by each individual with the institution, and that conducted by two subjects met within the institution. In the current world marked by globalization, "the geohistory of the clinical encounter" (Derivois, 2010) becomes an interesting tool to understand the complexity of the encounter issues arising from the clinical consultation.

On the road to science education for sustainability?

In this paper I discuss three issues relevant to the ideas introduced by Colucci-Gray, Perazzone, Dodman and Camino (2012) in their three-part paper on epistemological reflections and educational practice for science education for sustainability: (1) social studies of science for science education, (2) education for sustainability or sustainable development, and (3) curriculum studies and action-research. For the first issue, I address the need for science education efforts dedicated to an epistemological renewal to take seriously into consideration the contributions of the social studies of science. This perspective may be fruitful for an education for sustainability that also requires one to consider the political dimension of environmental issues and their intrinsic power relationships. It also encourages the abandonment of dichotomies that hamper democratic participation: experts/lay people, science/society, scientific knowledge/values, etc. For the second issue, my commentary focuses on the challenges that education for sustainability or sustainable development pose to science education with a shift from subject matter contents to socio-educative aims and socio-political actions. These challenges lead to the third issue with an invitation to apprehend science education for sustainability within the frameworks of curriculum theory and design-based research.