Epistemological Work Research Articles

Duboisian Leadership through Standpoint Epistemology

Abstract I outline a defence of a naive group-level standpoint epistemology. According to this view then under conditions often met in real situations of oppression, it is the majority view on questions of import to those marginalised by oppression that ought to be treated as deference worthy. I further argue that this view is inspired by and coheres well with various doctrines laid out and defended by W.E.B. Du Bois, making this a recognisably Duboisian vision of standpoint epistemology. The central conceptual move is to relate principles of social epistemology under conditions of oppression that were of great interest to Du Bois with the conditions for group accuracy that have been studied by social-choice theorists working on Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, as well as contemporary epistemological work on group polarisation. I argue that once these elements are brought together a surprisingly cogent case for deference to the simple majority view of the marginalised can often be made.

Two Emphases of Virtue and Vice Epistemology

AbstractThis paper discusses two important emphases of epistemology – of virtue and vice epistemology in particular – one concerning agency and patiency, and the other concerning self-regard and other-regard. The paper offers, for the first time in the literature, a framework in which four types of epistemological work can be categorized according to their respective dual emphases: Type 1 (agent/self-regarding), Type 2 (agent/other-regarding), Type 3 (patient/self-regarding), and Type 4 (patient/other-regarding). The paper also shows how four ways of doing epistemology can be categorized in terms of these four types and draws particular attention to one dubbed other-centering.

Receptive Ecumenism and Assent

precis: This essay engages Cheryl Bridges Johns's call at the 2007 Global Christian Forum gathering for a death of the "old mainstream ecumenical paradigm" and the current strategies employed within the modern ecumenical movement. Taking up this call, it begins by exploring new "ways of knowing," for which Johns called, and suggests the epistemological work of nineteenth-century theologian John Henry Newman as being a seedbed for alternatives that will enliven the ecumenical movement. Particularly, it offers a Newmanian reading of Receptive Ecumenism in order to suggest that this new paradigm must include ecclesial and personal transformation through the practice of assent between churches. Receptive Ecumenism calls for a posture of learning and transformation by attending to the needs or "wounds" of one's own church and to seek new ways forward through the reception of expressions of the church of Christ, or the reign of God, found within one's ecumenical other. This essay argues that, beyond simply notional learning, Receptive Ecumenism, read through the lens of Newman, offers a path forward for transformation through its emphasis on real apprehension of the ecumenical other and the practice or application of that which is received with "dynamic integrity."

Hamlet after Genocide: The Haunting of Soghomon Tehlirian and Empirical Fabulation

AbstractSoghomon Tehlirian was acquitted in Berlin in 1921 for the killing of Talat Paşa, Ottoman minister and architect of the Armenian Genocide. Complicating clear-cut distinctions between truth and fabulation, and personal revenge and legal justice, this paper examines the 1921 trial in light of Tehlirian’s 1953 memoir, to show the legal, moral, and epistemological work done by the ghost of Tehlirian’s mother. I move beyond the usual designations of Tehlirian as mere political assassin or self-evident moral witness and consider him instead as an “empirical fabulist.” My coinage of the term empirical fabulation is animated by Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) call for “critical fabulation,” and my reading of Tehlirian as an empirical fabulist recognizes him as a genocide survivor who aspired for collective justice, a son haunted by his mother’s ghost, and a historical actor who gave a fabricated testimony that was nonetheless based on the empirical facts of genocide. This paper is an invitation to explore the political and ethical potential, and perhaps even the necessity, of fabulation in recounting acts of genocidal violence that strain or defy straightforward representation, especially in cases when the existing rule of law does not rise to the demands for justice.

Между Кантом и Тренделенбургом: к вопросу о генеалогии теории познания Кудрявцева-Платонова

Viktor D. Kudryavtsev-Platonov is one of the most prominent representatives of Russian religious-academic philosophy of the second half of the nineteenth century whose theory of cognition bears an imprint of the Kantian theoretical philosophy. Kudryavtsev was not only thoroughly familiar with the Königsberg thinker’s work, but offered a critically reinterpreted version of Kant’s teaching on space, time and categories of understanding. But was the Russian philosopher original in his reading and critique of Kant? In his later works Kudryavtsev often cites the works of Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg whose works turn out to be very close to the Russian philosopher. Could it be that Kudryavtsev read Kant through Trendelenburg’s optics? To answer this question consistently I give outlines of Trendelenburg’s and Kudryavtsev’s theories of cognition and compare their views on the basis of the sources. I then draw on archive materials to characterise Kudryavtsev’s acquaintance with the works of Kant and Trendelenburg. It turns out that Kudryavtsev was well-versed in Kant’s philosophical ideas already in the early years of his teaching activities — but not from primary sources, but largely through German historical-philosophical renderings. I establish similarities between the teachings of Trendelenburg and Kudryavtsev on space, time and the categories of understanding and their critique of the relevant Kantian teaching. Finally, Kudryavtsev’s early manuscripts attest to his acquaintance with Trendelenburg’s ideas. I conclude that Trendelenburg influenced Kudryavtsev’s own theory of cognition, a fact that should be borne in mind when reading the Russian philosopher’s epistemological works.

Gestalt Epistemology: From Gestalt Psychology to Phenomenology in the Work of Michael Polanyi

Gestalt psychology of perception was one of the main inspirations behind the philosophical work of the Hungarian polymath Michael Polanyi. Seeing scientists and philosophers backing away from its implications, he proposed instead to take those implications seriously. I detail four ways in which he did so, the result of which was his theory of “tacit knowing”. This can be thought of as a Gestalt epistemology, because it takes the figure/ground relation as the model for all knowing. Polanyi took his Gestalt epistemology to apply widely. I argue that it is more successful with some of the problems to which he applied it than with others, and thus that Polanyi was wrong to think that they all exhibit a common pattern. Polanyi’s epistemological work led him to a position alongside phenomenology. He compared his project to the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty in a positive way. But, while he sympathised with the phenomenological method, and strongly endorsed its anti-reductionist conclusions, he criticised phenomenologists for acquiescing in a positivistic or mechanistic view of the natural sciences, and he went on to develop a metaphysics or ontology which he considered to have gone beyond phenomenology. However, Polanyi did sometimes follow certain phenomenologists in an existentialist direction, to conclusions about meaningfulness and its “destruction”, and to his related account of the various degrees or levels of “indwelling”. I conclude by arguing that, in the places where he did this, Polanyi’s thought over-extends, and that this raises a problem for his entire theory of tacit knowing.

Epistemic anxiety and epistemic risk

In this paper, I provide an account of epistemic anxiety as an emotional response to epistemic risk: the risk of believing in error. The motivation for this account is threefold. First, it makes epistemic anxiety a species of anxiety, thus rendering psychologically respectable a notion that has heretofore been taken seriously only by epistemologists. Second, it illuminates the relationship between anxiety and risk. It is standard in psychology to conceive of anxiety as a response to risk, but psychologists – very reasonably – have little to say about risk itself, as opposed to risk judgement. In this paper, I specify what risk must be like to be the kind of thing to which anxiety can be a response. Third, my account improves on extant accounts of epistemic anxiety in the literature. It is more fleshed out than Jennifer Nagel’s (2010a), which is largely agnostic about the nature of epistemic anxiety, focusing instead on what work it does in our epistemic lives. In offering an account of epistemic anxiety as an emotion, my account explains how it is able to do the epistemological work to which Nagel puts it. My account is also more plausible than Juliette Vazard’s (2018, 2021), on which epistemic anxiety is an emotional response to potential threat to one’s practical interests. Vazard’s account cannot distinguish epistemic anxiety from anxiety in general, and also fails to capture all instances of what we want to call epistemic anxiety. My account does better on both counts.

What is the aim of models in formal epistemology?

It is certainly well accepted that formal models play a key role in scientific job. Its use goes from natural sciences like physics and even to social sciences like economics and politics. Using mathematics allows the researcher to consider more complicated scenarios involving several variables. Some models are developed to make predictions, others to describe a phenomena, or just to improve the explanation of events in the world. But what has all this to do with philosophy? The aim of the present paper is to investigate debates on the role of formal models in a specific philosophical subject, precisely, the epistemology of rationality. Are we able to explain why models are needed in epistemological work? This answer will be addressed on the assumptions that epistemological theorizing is committed with normative statements. More specifically, epistemologists are concerned with normative questions about what rationality requires from epistemic agents. The first goal is to discuss some assumptions about the role of mathematical models in formal epistemology undertaking. And secondly, I will argue for the following two claims: (i) formal models are useful tools for predicting consequences of normative assumption about what is intuitively required by rationality; and (ii) insofar rationality theory is normative in virtue of being instrumentalist and aiming at truth, formal models are means-end tools, therefore, for rationality, mathematical models are devices for maximizing truth in doxastic states.

Losing grip on the third realm: against naive realism for intuitions

Abstract Naive realism in philosophy of perception is the view that (factive) perception involves a direct relation between perceiving subjects and the world. The naive realist says that your perception of a cat on the mat is a worldly relation that is partially constituted by the cat and the mat; a spatio-temporal chunk of the world is presenting itself to you. Recently, Elijah Chudnoff and John Bengson have independently developed an extension of this view to intellectual experiences, or intuitions, for traditionally a priori domains. We argue that this view, which we call ‘intuitional naive realism’ (INR), will not have the epistemic advantages that Chudnoff and Bengson claim that it does. In perception, but not intuition, there is a deeper explanation of what makes it the case that one experience is constituted by the world while another is not. Whether or not INR is true, then, it does no interesting epistemological work for traditionally a priori domains.

Contributions and Blind Spots of Constructivist Norms Research in International Relations, 1980–2018: A Systematic Evidence and Gap Analysis

Abstract The study of international norms from a social constructivist perspective has been one of the major conceptual innovations to the discipline of international relations (IR) over the past forty years. However, despite the concept's ubiquity, there is only a limited understanding of the large-scale trends in research associated with its rise. This analytic essay interrogates conventional wisdom, using a dataset of 7,795 mainstream, English-language journal articles from the Teaching, Research and International Policy Journal Article Database, supplemented with data from Web of Science. How have international norms been studied substantively and methodologically, what are major contributions and blind spots, and which opportunities for future innovation might exist? Although norms research has historically helped expand the scope of issues covered in IR (e.g., gender issues and public health), others have evidence gaps relative to the broader discipline of IR (e.g., terrorism and public opinion). Over the years, the proportion of empirical studies has increased, while purely theoretical, epistemological, and methodological work and innovation have decreased. Despite calls for methodological pluralism, norms research is significantly more qualitative and conceptual than mainstream IR in general and far less multi-method. While more international and less US-based than IR in general, norms research in mainstream journals seems to be no closer to a “Global IR,” measured by regional focus and author affiliation. This suggests three promising avenues for future innovation: greater attention to specific substantive blind spots, more multi-method research, and increased attention to the agenda of Global IR. Beyond these individual insights, this review illustrates the general utility of complementing narrative literature reviews with ones based on quantitative data. It also provides a case study on conceptual proliferation and innovation in IR.

Re‐thinking historical consciousness in a pandemic: From commemoration to contestability

AbstractThe paper critiques the curriculum construction of historical consciousness within Australian school systems. National and trans‐national discourses about identity, culture, gender, race and class influence the development of historical consciousness in Australian classrooms. During this unprecedented period of shared grief and global trauma, re‐interpreting historical narratives that build children's concepts of social justice, equity and global inclusivity is important epistemological work for the future. This paper uses survey data and interviews from Australian school children and teachers as the COVID‐19 pandemic emerged to examine what are the key narratives about Indigenous stories, resilience, adversity, global migration, and national identity, and how these narratives distort present realities. The analysis considers how historical consciousness is enacted within the current Australian school curriculum with stories from commemoration to contestability. Survey data from students from school years 6–12 is analysed in terms of how personal agency and empathy is formed through historical practices and inquiry in the classroom. This is supported by interviews about teaching practices. This paper reveals how globalized experiences can bridge historic boundaries of racism, prejudice and exclusion and how curriculum frameworks can develop critical historical consciousness for the future.

Shattering crystal with crystal: Galileo's rhetoric, lenses, and the epistemology of metaphor.

The terms that Galileo's contemporaries used for lenses (cristallo/i, lente/i, and vetro/i) have often been treated, and even translated, interchangeably. In this article, we argue that Galileo used references to crystals as lenses to embed epistemological and cosmological arguments in the material object of the telescope. Across Galileo's correspondence and letters, the term crystal had many uses and meanings. As a substance, crystal was a form of raw material, but crystal was also a substance that was central to scholastic cosmology and an explanatory device on which scholastics relied to explain first the appearance of the new star of 1604 and then Galileo's new telescopic discoveries. When Galileo began using the word crystals as a synonym for lenses, he endowed the material of his instrument with cosmological arguments. Galileo's choice of language was deliberate and polemical, serving as a joke at the expense of scholastics and as a linguistic marker of social proximity to Galileo and his intellectual agenda, especially among the members of the Academy of the Lincei. Rhetorically and linguistically, Galileo chose to refer to his lenses as crystals both because of the material from which they were made and because in so doing he signaled the epistemological work that the lenses would perform. Ultimately, the crystal lenses in Galileo's telescope and writings shattered the crystalline spheres, replacing explanatory metaphors with a polemical emphasis on the material and empirical realities of objects.

Philosophy of the Symbolic

AbstractThe historical beginnings of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of culture remain unclear. For it is not apparent how his major philosophy of culture and thePhilosophy of Symbolic Forms, published in the 1920s, emerged from his earlier epistemological work andSubstance and Functionfrom 1910. However, this gap can be filled to a certain extent by the “Disposition” of a “Philosophy of the Symbolic” from 1917 that could be reconstructed from Cassirer’s literary estate and is documented in this contribution. In the preceding “Introduction” an overview of Cassirer’s text is given and some consequences for our general understanding of Cassirer’s project of a philosophy of culture are put up for discussion.

Environmental attunement in the health and physical education canon: emplaced connection to embodiment, community and ‘nature’

ABSTRACT There have been unresolved calls for educators to connect and translate environmental links within health and physical education given the enduring absence, yet overlapping citizen priorities of health. In this Introductory paper to the Special Issue of environmental attunement in the health and/or physical education canon, we question if and how notions of nature and the environment might paradigmatically belong more centrally to the discipline. After some author positioning and situating this work, we draw on theories of attunement to consider what our use of the term ‘environmental attunement’ offers for shaping epistemological habits and ontological work across health studies and physical education. As part of this, we explore the possibilities and challenges for expanding embodied connections to place, space and ‘nature’. We highlight the omnipresence of eco-health, environmentalism, ‘nature’ and Indigenous ways of knowing as central to a pressing socio-cultural context and politics, yet the absence of epistemological habits in health and physical education responding to this need. To conclude we map links and possibilities from the literature to argue for the necessity of ‘environmental attunement’ to more centrally underpin teachers’ ecological identities in learning about health and human movement.

Historia de la penicilina: más allá de los héroes, una construcción social

El hecho científico conocido como “penicilina” se ha considerado tradicionalmente como el producto del ingenio de Alexander Fleming, ganador del Premio Nobel por descubrir esta “droga milagrosa”. Apartándose de esta idea popular, se hace necesario resaltar el desarrollo de la penicilina como un constructo social, producto del trabajo invaluable de varios científicos, sumado a un contexto social excepcional que motivó la voluntad política y el apoyo de la industria farmacéutica; en ausencia de cualquiera de estos, la penicilina no sería lo que significa hoy para nosotros o, simplemente, no existiría en el arsenal terapéutico. Los conceptos epistemológicos de “estilo de pensamiento” y “colectivo de pensamiento” como fundamentos en la construcción del conocimiento, presentes en la obra epistemológica de Ludwick Fleck, apoyan la conclusión, a partir del recuento histórico, de la necesidad de apartarnos de la penicilina como el producto de un descubrimiento de un único héroe, para verla como una construcción social, que además es un ejemplo clásico de serendipia. La penicilina, además, tiene otras facetas menos conocidas históricamente como el uso de ella de manera cruda, producida y usada por médicos generales, o la búsqueda de información para su producción durante la segunda guerra mundial; estas se abordan en este breve recuento histórico.

A dialogical philosophy: Bachelard’s “Introduction” to “Le Rationalisme appliqué”

The translation in the following essay of this issue of Philosophical inquiries makes available a preliminary version of what would become the introduction to Le Rationalisme applique (Bachelard 1949). We can regard it as a first step towards making Le Rationalisme applique accessible to the English readers, hoping that it may lead to a translation of the entire work. The introduction to Le Rationalisme applique can be regarded as one of the most canonical expositions of Bachelard’s philosophy of science. It echoes the introductions and conclusions of each of his epistemological works since The New Scientific Spirit, in a series of small philosophical treatises that offer a remarkable continuity.

R. B. Braithwaite’s influence on Bion’s epistemological contributions

ABSTRACT This paper presents evidence that Bion's epistemological contributions drew on the work of R. B. Braithwaite, a British philosopher of science, more than has generally been acknowledged. Braithwaite introduced the “scientific deductive system”, a term Bion adopted. It proposed that empirical scientific methods could be applied to immaterial subjects of study, including “unconscious mental processes” (Braithwaite 1953, ix). Bion's private work journal, collected in Cogitations, documents Braithwaite's direct influence throughout its entries, particularly in one dated 10 January 1959, entitled “Scientific method” (Bion 1959b). This paper reviews relevant elements of Braithwaite's work, and examines Bion's “Scientific method” and samples from his epistemological work to argue that one of Bion's goals was to bring an empirically based scientific model to psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. More than a matter of academic interest, Braithwaite's work lends pragmatically useful context to understand Bion's theoretical and clinical intentions in greater depth. It also suggests the main reasons why his project did not come fully to fruition, which led Bion to turn from the scientific deductive system towards his later developments.

Mute, mutation, and mutiny: on the work of feminist epistemology

PurposeThis paper aims to bring to the fore the importance of feminist epistemologies in the history of the organization of management studies since the 1980s by following various intellectual moves in the development of feminist theorizing as they cross over to organization studies, including their analytical possibilities for reclaiming historically the voices of major women scholars, especially in doctoral seminars. The paper narrates these epistemological activities by mobilizing and reconsidering from the past to the present, the notions of “unmuting,” “mutating” and “mutiny.” It ends in a reflection addressing the state of business schools at present and why the field of organization and management studies needs “mutiny” now.Design/methodology/approachThe paper adopts a narrative approach in which the voices of its authors appear to be central as they consider and reconsider over time their understanding of “unmuting,” “mutation” and “mutiny” as notions with analytical potential. This approach is influenced by Foucault’s “history of the present” but with contingencies brought about by feminist interpretations. The application of these notions is demonstrated by reclaiming and clarifying the epistemological underpinning in the works of three major women scholars as included in a doctoral seminar: Mary Parker Follett, Edith Penrose and Rosabeth Moss Kanter. These notions are further redeployed for their potential in institutional applications.FindingsAt present, the findings are discursive – if they can be called so, but the main motivation behind this writing is to go beyond discourse in the written sense, and to mobilize other activities, still in the realm of epistemological and scholarly work. These activities would legitimize actual interventions for changing business schools from their current situation as neoliberal entities, which mute understanding of major problems in the world, as well as the voices of most humans and non-humans paying for the foibles of neoliberalism.Originality/valueThe paper demonstrates the necessity of developing approaches for interventions in knowledge producing institutions increasingly limited by neoliberal premises in what can be said and done as legitimate knowledge. In doing this, the paper articulates the importance of keeping history alive to avoid the increasing “forgetfulness” neoliberalization brings about. The paper, in its present form, represents an active act of “remembering”.

Engaging knowledge and the knower: Design considerations for emerging modes of academic staff development

Curriculum design is a complex undertaking that requires both epistemological and ontological work. While there is an increased need for academics to develop and strengthen their capacity to design curricula, particularly in the context of Universities of Technology, which have gone through an intense period of identity finding and re-curriculation, there is little support for academics involved in this kind of work. This paper reflects on four iterations of an academic staff development intervention aimed at supporting academics engaged in curriculum design and renewal, with a particular focus on designing flexible curricula. Using a learning design model along with eleven design considerations developed by Gachago, et al. (2020) for online academic staff development and Maton’s Legitimation Code Theory – in particular the dimension Specialization - we show how curriculum work and learning design is iterative, contextual and messy. Most importantly, it is relational and involves collective sense-making. We recommend that each context needs to be carefully considered when designing courses, both face-to-face and online, and design considerations (such as motivation, facilitation, structuredness, level of collaboration) impact strongly on participants’ engagement and consequently experiences.

Bricks without Mortar: Looking at Lists

Bricks without Mortar:Looking at Lists Natalie Dohrmann Hair Dye Wet Cat food Bra, tights Vodka So reads a crumpled scrap of paper found in a gutter in Bologna and reproduced in large scale by conceptual artist Angela Lorenz. The note is nothing really, a discarded shopping list. Yet it is also a short story, a haiku, the opening scene in a film—or is it the closing scene? A world is eager to spin out from it, and after it is rescaled, reproduced, and displayed in a Bolognese gallery, the demand for meaning exerted by the scribbled words becomes even more insistent. As they do our own desks or our minds at 3 a.m., lists litter the archives of Jewish history. They appear in court documents and wills, all over the Bible and rabbinic literature, in the margins of literary works, as indices and tables of contents, as genealogies, containing the names of donors, in recipes, and bills of lading. They are utilitarian and ubiquitous, and perhaps for this reason, the list can be the fly-over country within a longer prose document, signaling that the text we are reading is about to get monotonous and the energy of the narrative about to deflate. But pause a minute, and the list will begin to stir. This JQR forum maps a range of ways that the list itself is an assertive literary genre, whose formal elements stake their own claims to the meaning of items enumerated. It may not be an accident that J. Z. Smith grants Judaism the honor of revealing the meaning-generating potential of list-ness that he sees as central to the dynamic experience of the sacred itself. Smith argues that the list contains the Ur-logic of scriptures—a canon is, after all, a list. A closed canon loosens the contents from the constraints of syntax—each of its several parts gaining the resonance of the whole, a transformation that unleashes the recombinant collaging of midrash and the creative profusion of gematria. Daniel Lord Smail observes that lists lack verbs, rendering their elements at first glance as akin to a pile of bricks without mortar. [End Page 335] Our forum shows that a lack of verbs poses no impediment to the form's semantic potential and vigor. On the contrary, it's an accelerant. _____ The scholars in this forum were invited to choose a list from their own field of study, then reproduce it and bring their distinctive lenses to its analysis, paying special attention to the form itself. Many lists are engendered by rupture (one rarely inventories one's property unless that property is in jeopardy or in transition) and, so, mark the joins in time. Others do the epistemological work of classification. Still others do things that are wholly unexpected, like the list you'll read that authorizes a religious performance. Joshua Teplitsky begins with a simple ledger recording the names of Jews who worked to manage a plague outbreak in Prague in 1713. Much can be learned about the Jewish community not only by parsing the list's ordering and implicit valuations, but also by assessing the meaning of its commissioning by and storage in the Bohemian Chancery of the Habsburg Monarchy. Leora Auslander quickens the ghosts in two Holocaust documents, one a ghoulish onomasticon of Jews deported from France to Auschwitz in 1944, the other an inventory of the confiscated furniture belonging to a family that was among those same deportees. She distinguishes the list from the inventory, which, unlike the spare column of names, holds in its weft traces of full humans who once built lives and families and futures. Dina Danon looks at a happier inventory: the contents of the trousseau of a late nineteenth-century Jewish Ottoman bride. Her modest catalog of jackets and undergarments freezes a moment of a world in flux and, in Danon's reading, serves as an unexpected check on grand narratives of Jewish modernity. Daniel Lord Smail's exemplum is a fourteenth-century court inventory of the moveable property of a recently deceased Jewish householder. Uncovering the document's organizing principle affords him an insight into medieval home economics that...