Fundamental Epistemological Problems Research Articles

Divinity in nursing: The complexities of adopting a spiritual basis for care.

In this paper, the historical alignment of nursing with divinity-based perspectives and modern New Age nursing theories are explored. The nature of divinity in nursing is examined, together with the complexities and issues that arise in adopting a spiritual basis for care. The work of the key theorists in this area (Rogers, Newman, Parse, Watson, Dossey) is reconsidered and fundamental epistemological problems inherent in this approach reviewed. Specific concerns with the interpretation of holistic care, adoption of doxastic logic, faith-based rationales, influence of Caucasian Judeo-Christian and New Age values, misappropriation of science, use of pseudoscience and development of divinity as social consumer product are discussed. Practical problems with using a spiritual basis in contemporary nursing practice are also explored and the alignment of divinity-based nursing theories with the modern antiscience movement is examined. Overall, the re-emergence of divinity-based nursing and spiritual basis for care may be problematic, and would seem to counter the development of an inclusive profession. Additionally, the alignment of nursing with antiscience movements rejecting biomedicine has significant public health implications. This is argued as a regressive step for the advancement of the profession.

DESCARTES' OTHER DECEPTION PROBLEM

The problem of skepticism is the fundamental epistemological problem Descartes addresses. He introduces three forms of it, each embedded in a possible error-scenario. The first possibility is that, since my sense perception is sometimes misperception, my sensory experience in any given case may not reflect how things are outside my experience. The second possibility is that maybe I am dreaming when I think I am awake. And the third possibility is that maybe I am deceived in all my ideas and beliefs by a powerful demon. The third is the most radical, far-reaching, and potent of the error-scenarios Descartes discusses. Unlike the first two, it threatens knowledge of all kinds. So, if Descartes is to defeat skepticism in a fundamental and comprehensive way, he must eliminate that possible scenario.

Where is the Evidence in South African Clinical Psychology?

While a rich body of research exists to inform the practice of clinical psychology, South African mental health professionals have failed to incorporate empirical findings in their clinical work. This article argues that South African psychology has become increasingly devoid of an empirical base, to the detriment of the clients it purports to serve. A fundamental epistemological problem that faces clinical psychology is the credibility it bestows on non-falsifiable theories. As such, practitioners have been led to rely to an inordinate degree on so-called clinical intuition and experience. Yet, the application of both of these practices yields demonstrably inferior treatment outcomes when compared with actuarial methods of judgement and prediction, and empirically supported interventions. While the notion of empirically supported treatments and its emphasis on randomised controlled trials are not unproblematic, far worse is the practice of giving credibility to clinical practices based on folklore and theoretical dogma in the absence of evidence. The argument presented in this article is that if South African clinical psychology is to make itself relevant to the needs of contemporary society, it needs to abandon non-falsifiable theoretical tenets and adhere more vigorously to the criteria of evidence when dispensing clinical services.

Piaget’s Framework for a Scientific Study of Consciousness

While largely unacknowledged, Piaget’s views on the epistemology of consciousness presaged key positions now held by contemporary philosophers and psychologists. This paper examines Piaget’s views about two fundamental epistemological problems central to any theory of consciousness: (1) the general problem of the subject-object relationship in any type of knowing; and (2) the specific problem of the physical-mental relationship within the knowing subject. Piaget adopts a unique form of internal interactionism toward the first issue and a sophisticated form of parallelism toward the second; he aimed for an eventual integrative monism while providing compelling reasons why such a monism may always exist in name only. While his approach to these problems did not solve them, his examination of the problems – and his proposed coordination of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience – is an important path toward consilience in the scientific study and understanding of consciousness.

Ethnography, Belief Ascription, and Epistemological Barriers

While ascribing beliefs to one's subjects is a common practice for most ethnographers, I argue that this task is far more difficult and error-prone than commonly realized. I lay out the fundamental epistemological problems for belief ascribers and explain why certain sorts of ascriptions are especially difficult to make accurately. I suggest some guidelines for making ethnographic belief ascription less error-prone.

Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty

Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty was finished just before his death in 1951 and is a running commentary on three of G.E. Moore's greatest epistemological papers. In the early 1930s, Moore had written a lengthy commentary on Wittgenstein, anticipating some of the issues Wittgenstein would discuss in On Certainty. The philosophical relationship between these two great philosophers and their overlapping, but nevertheless differing, views is the subject of this book. Both defended the existence of certainty and thus opposed any form of scepticism. However, their defences and conceptions of certainty differed widely, as did their understanding of the nature of scepticism and how best to combat it. Stroll's book contains a careful and critical analysis of their differing approaches to a set of fundamental epistemological problems.

Visual architecture and cognitive architecture

Traditional architectures have fundamental epistemological problems. Perception is inherently resource limited so controlling perception involves all the same AI-complete problems of reasoning about time and resources as the full-scale planning problem. Allowing a planner to transparently assume that the information it needs will automatically be present and up-to-date in the model thus presupposes a solution to a problem at least as difficult as planning itself. Although one can imagine many possible solutions to this problem, such as allowing the planner to recurse on its own epistemological problems, there have been no convincing attempts at this. In this paper, I compare behaviour-based and traditional systems in terms of their representational power and the strengths of their implicit epistemological theories. I argue that both have serious limitations and that those limitations are not addressed simply by joining the two into a hybrid. I discuss my work with using vision to support real-time activity and give an example of an interesting intermediate point between reactive and classical architectures that preserves the simplicity and parallelism of behaviour-based systems while supporting ‘symbolic’ representations. Traditionally, AI theories have assumed, either implicitly or explicitly, an architecture in which modules of the mind (perception, reasoning, motor control, etc.) are linked by way of some centralized database like structure, often referred to as a world model. Recently, a number of alternative architectures have been proposed which, to greater or lesser degrees, claim to do away with world models or with representations entirely. Many of the criticisms of traditional architectures revolve around speed and timescale. Planning, so the story goes, is slow but flexible, while feedback loops are fast but stupid. A common approach, both in this special issue and in the literature in general, is to adopt a hybrid which fuses a slow planner running on a long time-scale and a set of fast feedback loops running on a short time-scale. The problem with this argument is that planning is not slow, it is combinatorially explosive. Running an O(2 n ) algorithm on a time-scale ten times slower is the same as running it on a computer ten times faster : it simply lets one increase n by three. If time-scale were the true problem, faster CPUs would make tiered architectures obsolete in a few years. I believe the true issues are not speed, in the sense of time-scale, but combinatorics and epistemology. The former has been extensively discussed, so I will focus on epistemology. Clearly, if an agent architecture is to be successful it must take into account the capacities and limitations of perception. In this paper I discuss the influence of perceptual architecture on agent architecture, argue that the recent wave of tiered architectures do not adequately address these problems, and discuss my work on using vision to support real-time activity.

Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty was finished just before his death in 1951 and is a running commentary on three of G.E. Moore's greatest epistemological papers. In the early 1930s, Moore had written a lengthy commentary on Wittgenstein, anticipating some of the issues Wittgenstein would discuss in On Certainty. The philosophical relationship between these two great philosophers and their overlapping, but nevertheless differing, views is the subject of this book. Both defended the existence of certainty and thus opposed any form of scepticism. However, their defences and conceptions of certainty differed widely, as did their understanding of the nature of scepticism and how best to combat it. Stroll's book contains a careful and critical analysis of their differing approaches to a set of fundamental epistemological problems.

Moore and Wittgenstein on certainty

Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty was finished just before his death in 1951 and is a running commentary on three of G.E. Moore's greatest epistemological papers. In the early 1930s, Moore had written a lengthy commentary on Wittgenstein, anticipating some of the issues Wittgenstein would discuss in On Certainty. The philosophical relationship between these two great philosophers and their overlapping, but nevertheless differing, views is the subject of this book. Both defended the existence of certainty and thus opposed any form of scepticism. However, their defences and conceptions of certainty differed widely, as did their understanding of the nature of scepticism and how best to combat it. Stroll's book contains a careful and critical analysis of their differing approaches to a set of fundamental epistemological problems.

The Subversion and Transcendence of the Subject

The focus of contemporary studies in religion on methodology can be explored as the recognition of a fundamental epistemological problem. This paper is first an acknowledgment that we do not have an adequate conceptuality to render intelligible inward turning and then an experiment with the meaning of intelligibility. The dispossession of consciousness as the sole place and origin of meaning constituting an intellectual aporia is presented as an experience of the subversion of the subject by the discovery of the unconscious in depth psychologies and the discovery of the transcendence of the subject in foundational theologies. Taking account of this duplex expression of what lingers in disguise behind the scripts of ordinary life is defined as a fundamental exigency in the further development of human understanding and theological reflection.

Beauty in Aquinas and Joyce

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDITORS: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS oF THE PRoviNCE oF ST. JosEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington 17, D. C. VoL. XII JULY, 1949 No.3 BEAUTY IN AQUINAS AND JOYCE JAMES JOYCE is one of the very few modem artists to quote St. Thomas Aquinas as an authority on esthetic philosophy. Many times, in the esthetic theory presented in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the name Aquinas recurs. The purpose of this essay is to appraise Joyce's pronouncements on the beautiful, using Thomism as a toqchstone. The existence of the beautiful, in terms of the fundamental epistemological problem of realism and idealism, has disturbed esthetic philosophers from Plato to Croce. Does beauty exist in the mind, or does it exist in nature? Is beauty a logical being, a concept; or is it a real being, an extra-mental phenomena ? Or perhaps it is both a product of nature and a product of mental activity. The last of these suggests the traditional solution the Scholastics have accorded this problem of the locus of beauty. They assert beauty is both a physical and a psychical fact. The French neo-Thomist, Maurice de Wulf, viewing esthetic ~61 FRANK L. KUNKEL experience in the light of this objective-subjective interpretation , says the beautiful does not ". . . belong exclusively to things, as the Greeks thought, nor to the subject alone who reacts. and enjoys, as some contemporary philosophers maintain. But it is as it were midway between object and subject, and consists in a correspondence between the two." 1 Leonard Callahan summarizes the whole Thomistic position as follows: " Beauty is not a simple but a complex notion; not an absolute , but a relative conception. In its entirety it exists neither as a physical nor as a psychical fact; it is neither wholly in the object, nor wholly in the subject, but the result of an intimate connection of both object and subject. In fine, beauty is a quality of a work of art or of an object of nature, which by reason of its adaptation to the perceptive faculties of the subject, can arouse a feeling of admiration in him who contemplates it." 2 This dual aspect of the beautiful is clearly indicated in the writings of St. Thomas, as will subsequently be shown. While the unity of the esthetic experience must be insisted upon, it will be advisable to consider its two aspects separately. A choice presents itself at this point between two approaches which cannot be simultaneously presented though they are closely interwoven. Should an analysis of the ontological qualities of beauty be given at the outset, or should the psychological aspects be considered first? Since being is prior to being known, the extra-mental and ontological elements of the beautiful will be considered first, and then the perceptive and emotive characteristics will be analyzed. "Beauty is in the object according to the perfection of its being, the proportion of its parts; and in a metaphysical sense, all things which are, are beautiful." 3 Hence, the three conditions assigned to it by St. Thomas: "For beauty three things are requisite. In the first place, integrity or perfection, for whatsoever things are imperfect , by that very fact are ugly; and due proportion or con1 Maurice De Wulf, Mediaeval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1922), p. 186. • Leonard Callahan, A Theory of Esthetic According to the Principles of St. Thomas Aquinas, Baltimore, 1927, p. 29. • Mortimer Adler, Art and Prudence, New York, 1987, p. 88. BEAUTY IN AQUINAS AND JOYCE fl63 sonance; and again effulgence: so bright colored objects are said to be beautiful." 4 The condition of integrity requires that an object of beauty have a positive fullness, completeness, and a richness of perfection . Integrity or perfection is to be understood not in a moral sense but in its primary ontological meaning, so that an object of beauty is perfect when it lacks no essential parts or elements. "The importance of this factor in arousing a sense of beauty is evidenced by everyday experience. An aspect of nature which suggests incompleteness and imperfection, such as a barren field, leaves us cold and indifferent. The...