General Epistemology Research Articles

Reflecting on One’s Own Philosophical Practice

Abstract Metaphilosophy is defined as philosophical reflection on philosophy itself, and so is part of philosophy. If one lacks the category of philosophy, one can still do philosophy, but one may not be in a position to do metaphilosophy. Cases are discussed of tension between a philosopher’s metaphilosophical theory and their philosophical practice, in epistemology (scepticism), metaphysics (ontological minimalism), and philosophy of language (verificationism and intensionalism). Such tensions often provoke charges of self–defeat. However, the self–defeat turns out to be just one more manifestation of more general inadequacies in the philosophical theory at issue. The epistemology of philosophy is just an application of general epistemology; the philosophy of philosophical language is just an application of general philosophy of language, and so on. These considerations are used to support anti–exceptionalism about philosophy: philosophical thought and talk are much less different from other thought and talk than many philosophers suppose. The second half of the paper describes the author’s own experience of the complex dialectic between metaphilosophy and more general philosophy, in which metaphilosophical disputes about specific aspects of philosophical practice draw attention to more general cognitive phenomena, which require to be understood philosophically, but may also call for revisions of philosophical practice in metaphilosophically significant ways.

Dialogical cognition

In this article we review Per Linell's work within the last five decades that led to his dialogism framework, which he defines as a general epistemology of language, cognition and communication. We critically discuss how his contribution on the one hand, altered and qualified existent models within language, communication and cognitive science, because dialogism removed language and cognition from their abstract and mental seat in the brain, and embedded them instead in situational contexts and embodied interaction. In that sense, his dialogism successfully replaced monological assumptions about the mind, action and thinking with more contextual and temporally distributed ones. On the other hand, we also question why Linell has not pursued a more rigorous empirical program for studying human cognition, when he did establish a theoretical apparatus for approaching cognition from a dialogical starting point. In going through Linell's arguments over the past five decades we suggest that this absence of an empirical program is due to his humanistic roots which both have sensitised him to appreciating the contingencies and dynamics of human sense making and cognition, and have impeded him from buying into a necessary condition for pursuing a cognitive analysis, even if he conceptually and methodologically accepts a distributed view on cognition. The outcome of this discussion leads to an empirical-based cognitive analysis of a medical interaction. Altogether, the purpose of this article is to show how Linell's conceptual framework can be put to use in ways that make a dialogical cognitive science achievable.

The Advancement of Western Epistemology in Islamic Education

<em>This article examines the development of Western Epistemology in the World of Islamic Education. The findings in this paper explain that: There are two conflicting methods in achieving knowledge, namely rational and empirical methods. Both are biased methods in Western epistemology. In fact, in real terms, both methods play an equal role in discovering knowledge. Therefore, science is now more empirical in nature, placing greater emphasis on experience, observation and research/experimental plus Descartes' ways of thinking. This combination of reason and empirical is called the scientific method. This method developed rapidly and colored Western or general epistemology.</em>

Modelo de análise aplicado ao estado da arte da epistemologia da administração

Abstract The article proposes a systematization of the epistemological paradigms already identified by research that studied the literature on administration epistemology. Such systematization is carried out through an analytical review, in which an analysis model, the result of a theoretical consortium between Ramos and Piaget, is the guiding thread. The different paradigms are analyzed according to their degree of reflexivity against the backdrop of the philosophical foundations of general epistemology. In the field of administration epistemology, it was observed that from the pioneering to the current works, the different authors defend a reflective decentring capable of generating a movement that takes the theory of organizations from the construct that Ramos calls the theory of necessity to the field of theory of possibility and beyond. Thus, the use of Platonic/Aristotelian/Cartesian archetypes by Kantian and post-Kantian archetypes was overcome. The analysis model is applied a second time to the abstracts of the last 30 theses of a graduate program in administration, defended from July 2019 to November 2022. Ten abstracts from each of the three lines of research were analyzed. In this second application, the model was adjusted with the inclusion of other theoretical and methodological aspects, now containing nine reflexivity indicators. It was demonstrated that, due to the different degrees of reflexivity, each line of research has its own characteristics in adopting theories and methods.

Fundamental Issues in Social Science

Philosophy of science pays meagre attention to the social sciences and humanities. It deals with basic questions in the natural sciences like Hempel, or general epistemology like e.g. Putnam and Kripke. Popper is the main exception.

Case method in psychological counseling (on the example of psychological counseling of Muslims)

The article describes and analyzes the theoretical problems associated with the case method in both General and Social (but not classical, communicative) Epistemology. The paper discloses the author's approach in solving and presenting cases. The approach is aimed at achieving the goal, which is in-depth training of consultants in the fi eld of confession-oriented psychological counseling. The author focuses on the description of the case method as an additional way to train specialists in confession-oriented counseling, including psychological counseling of Muslims. The article discloses the ways of reaching the goal by describing the case method in general and in a viewpoint of Social Epistemology. The author shows the specifi cs of the method not so much as a tool for description, but for training specialists. Revealing the case method as a tool that helps the counseling psychologist to carry out self-refl ection necessary to recognize and maintain internal and external self-boundaries, the author derives the defi nition of the internal and external boundaries of the case naming them as cultural and personal which can lead to a voluminous understanding of the problems that arise in the process of psychological counseling for all parties involved. The author draws preliminary conclusions and off ers a number of recommendations for the training of specialists, particularly in the situation of confession-oriented counseling. The article provides general information on the current state of psychological counseling for Muslims, as well as gives a sample case with its solutions. Moreover, the paper analyses the features of perception and errors of interpretation associated with external and internal cultural boundaries misunderstanding, after which proposes some recommendations for the results practical application.

Epistemology of Islamic and Western Perspectives (Teaching The Concepts of Scientific Thinking for Elementary-Age Children)

Epistemology related to philosophy can be likened to a branching tree. The tree of philosophy has branches in the form of subdisciplines. Philosophy of science, ethics, aesthetics, philosophical anthropology and metaphysics. Epistemology as a branch of philosophy is devoted to the sources of knowledge. To arrive at an understanding of Islamic epistemology, it is necessary to use a genetivus subjectivus approach, which places Islam as the subject and object of epistemology. Epistemology as a result of human reason does not intend to interpret Islam, but aims at how to acquire knowledge, how the methodology of knowledge, the nature of knowledge and so on related to epistemology. So by itself Islamic epistemology studies Islam itself, or in other words epistemology according to Islam. This formulation makes a distinction between Islamic epistemology in general. Islamic epistemology in addition to general epistemology concerns relevance as a source of knowledge and inspiration. Epistemology generally assumes that truth is human-centered because humans have the authority to determine knowledge. This paper tries to compare epistemology in the Islamic and Western worlds as teaching the conception of thinking for elementary age children.

Belief revision as a problem of scientific epistemology

The fundamental question that must be answered by any theory of knowledge that claims to be adequate is the question of how it is possible to change our knowledge. The very fact of change undoubtedly takes place, and the problem is to theoretically explicate this fact. The methodological significance of this issue is due to the fact that changing knowledge means nothing more than its development, namely, the question of the ways and means of developing our knowledge is of central importance both for the logic and methodology of science, and for general epistemology. This work is of a review character, and aims to draw the reader’s attention to a new promising direction in the modern theory of knowledge called “belief revision”.

Conceptual Approaches of Prospective Pedagogy

The theoretical and methodological foundation of Prospective Pedagogy has become one of the key issues of contemporary pedagogy, when exploring various aspects of the science of education related to personality formation, to deal requiments for present and future. The analysis perspectives of the prospective education presented the degree of complexity in terms of the characteristics that were inserted in the research, as conditions of its conceptualization. Studies of general epistemology state four main conditions that a certain field of knowledge must meet in order to acquire the status of science: to have its own research object, to develop a conceptual and explanatory system; to have its own methods and techniques; investigation of the object of study reunited in a scientific methodology; and, to have a praxiology of the field, in the sense of influencing, directing, and controlling the phenomena it studies. Thus, it confirms the theoretical conceptualization of the paradigm of prospective education, as science of education.

What does Kant’s ‘compass’ show?

In this article, the author points to a somewhat neglected Kant?s metaphor - a metaphor of the ?moral compass.? The idea of a ?moral compass? is nothing more than the concept of the moral law itself as a ?categorical imperative.? The author suggests that this simple metaphor points to two things that are often forgotten in the interpretation of Kant?s ethics. Firstly, Kant believes that moral knowledge is available literally to everyone. Secondly, the path of acquiring knowledge in morality differs from the path of moral knowledge in Kant?s general epistemology. Finally, the author, for example, offers an explanation of the mechanism of ?moral compass.?

Why Thomas Reid Matters to the Epistemology of the Social Sciences

AbstractLittle attention has been paid to the fact that Thomas Reid's epistemology applies to ‘political reasoning’ as well as to various operations of the mind. Reid was interested in identifying the ‘first principles’ of political science as he did with other domains of human knowledge. This raises the question of the extent to which the study of human action falls within the competence of ‘common sense’. Our aim is to reconstruct and assess Reid's epistemology of the sciences of social action and to determine how it connects with the fundamental tenets of his general epistemology. In the first part, we portray Reid as a methodological individualist and focus on the status of the first principles of political reasoning. The second part examines Reid's views on the explanatory power of the principles of human action. Finally, we draw a parallel between Reid's epistemology and the methodology of Weberian sociology.

The noetic effects of sin: a dispositional framework

One of the well-known theses of Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology of religious belief is his claim about the noetic effects of sin. But Plantinga does not clearly spell out how sin functions to undermine or weaken the believer’s natural knowledge of God. In this paper, I want to suggest a dispositional gloss on his account of religious epistemology that properly identifies the epistemic role of sin and other factors that may undermine knowledge of God. It will be further argued that the dispositional framework provides us with a principled basis for deriving some of the main contours of Plantinga’s general epistemology.

The Predicament of Moral Epistemology

Moral epistemology (henceforth ME) has been spoken of as a subject matter in its own right by philosophers in the last few decades and yet the delineation of ME as a sub-discipline remains uncharted. Many eminent scholars with rich contributions have not explicitly defined the scope or demarcation of this emerging field. Drawing from their writings, the paper tries to show that philosophers working on ME either conceptualise it as an application of epistemology to moral beliefs or as encompassing issues of epistemic access to moral truths. The paper contends that such conceptions of moral epistemology are not rigorous enough to warrant a discrete sub-discipline. This puts the paper in disagreement with those scholars who justify the creation of a subject-specific ME. David Copp and Todd Stewart figure prominently among such attempts. Copp and Stewart justify ME to be a separate epistemology, by alluding to the normative nature of moral beliefs, and through the introduction of emotions into the mix, respectively. The paper tries to show that neither normativity nor emotions appear to be robust enough to create a distinct epistemology. The predicament of moral epistemologists arises from the fact that while the practitioners seem to be keen on establishing ME as a discrete sub-discipline, they end up subsuming it under a general epistemology and fail to justify the need for such a subject-specific epistemology. The only way out of this quandary, the paper asserts, is to treat ME more as a methodological project that involves extending general epistemic tools to moral beliefs as a specific case, and not as a specialised topic-specific epistemology.

The Evil Demon Inside

This paper examines how new evil demon problems could arise for our access to the internal world of our own minds. I start by arguing that the internalist/externalist debate in epistemology has been widely misconstrued—we need to reconfigure the debate in order to see how it can arise about our access to the internal world. I then argue for the coherence of scenarios of radical deception about our own minds, and I use them to defend a properly formulated internalist view about our access to our minds. The overarching lesson is that general epistemology and the specialized epistemology of introspection need to talk—each has much to learn from each other.

Action, interaction and inaction: post-Kantian accounts of thinking, willing, and doing in Fichte and Schopenhauer

This article features the contributions of Fichte and Schopenhauer to a philosophical account of action against the background of Kant's earlier and influential treatment of the topic. The article first presents Kant's pertinent contributions in the areas of general epistemology and metaphysics (“transcendental philosophy”), general practical philosophy (“moral philosophy”), the philosophy of law (“doctrine of right”) and ethic (“doctrine of virtues”). Then the focus is on Fichte's further original work on the issue of action in those same areas. Finally, the article turns to Schopenhauer's radical revision of the Kantian and Fichtean affirmative accounts of acting and willing through the correlated introduction of the irrational will, the self-negated will and ethical inaction.

Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Moral Epistemology

The first part of the paper focuses on the elements of von Hildebrand’s general and moral epistemology that can be related to Brentano’s philosophy. The salient concepts discussed are those of Kenntnisnahme (taking cognizance) and Stellungnahme (response). I explain their meaning and show their role in von Hildebrand’s critical assessment of Brentano’s conception of the acts of higher (or correct) love and hate. In the second part of the paper, I argue that von Hildebrand’s material ethics is based on the basic ontological presupposition of Scheler’s material value ethics and that it is, therefore, to be considered a version of it, notwithstanding some quite basic differences from Scheler in other respects. In the third part of the paper, I discuss von Hildebrand’s most important analyses of the different epistemic acts through which values are given. The salient concepts are those of the seeing and feeling of values.

Logic of imagination. Echoes of Cartesian epistemology in contemporary philosophy of mathematics and beyond

Descartes’ Rules for the direction of the mind presents us with a theory of knowledge in which imagination, considered as an “aid” for the intellect, plays a key role. This function of schematization, which strongly resembles key features of Proclus’ philosophy of mathematics, is in full accordance with Descartes’ mathematical practice in later works such as La Geometrie from 1637. Although due to its reliance on a form of geometric intuition, it may sound obsolete, I would like to show that this has strong echoes in contemporary philosophy of mathematics, in particular in the trend of the so called “philosophy of mathematical practice”. Indeed Ken Manders’ study on the Euclidean practice, along with Reviel Netz’s historical studies on ancient Greek Geometry, indicate that mathematical imagination can play a central role in mathematical knowledge as bearing specific forms of inference. Moreover, this role can be formalized into sound logical systems. One question of general epistemology is thus to understand this mysterious role of the imagination in reasoning and to assess its relevance for other mathematical practices. Drawing from Edwin Hutchins’ study of “material anchors” in human reasoning, I would like to show that Descartes’ epistemology of mathematics may prove to be a helpful resource in the analysis of mathematical knowledge.

Self-Evidence and Disagreement in Ethics

Moral epistemology, like general epistemology, faces a regress problem. Suppose someone demands to know why I am justified in holding a moral belief. In a typical case, I will respond by citing a further moral belief that justifies it. A regress arises because, in order for this further belief to justify anything, it too must be justified. According to a traditional position in moral epistemology, moral foundationalism, the regress comes to an end with some moral beliefs. Moral foundationalism is an attractive position because it promises to answer the regress problem. However, it inherits the burden of explaining why some moral beliefs have a particular privileged epistemic position – that is, why these beliefs are justified without requiring inferential support from other beliefs. The standard answer to this question is to insist that some moral beliefs have as their content propositions that are self-evident.
 A common way of resisting moral foundationalism is to argue from the fact of moral disagreement to the claim that no moral proposition is self-evident. I argue that while a simple version of this argument fails, this argument can be developed in such a way that it poses serious difficulties for moral foundationalism. I develop this argument by drawing on recent work in epistemology on the nature of our epistemic burdens in the face of peer disagreement. I then suggest that even if this argument does show that moral foundationalism fails, it need not have skeptical implications so long as coherentism remains a viable option in moral epistemology. Finally, I claim that this argument has implications for normative ethics. Namely, it rules out a position advocated by Peter Singer in his early work and indirectly supports the method of reflective equilibrium.

Moral Intuitions, Reliability, and Disagreement

There is an ancient, yet still lively, debate in moral epistemology about the epistemic significance of disagreement. One of the important questions in that debate is whether, and to what extent, the prevalence and persistence of disagreement between our moral intuitions causes problems for those who seek to rely on intuitions in order to make moral decisions, issue moral judgments, and craft moral theories. Meanwhile, in general epistemology, there is a relatively young, and very lively, debate about the epistemic significance of disagreement. A central question in that debate concerns peer disagreement: When I am confronted with an epistemic peer with whom I disagree, how should my confidence in my beliefs change (if at all)? The disagreement debate in moral epistemology has not been brought into much contact with the disagreement debate in general epistemology (though McGrath [2007] is an important exception). A purpose of this paper is to increase the area of contact between these two debates. In Section 1, I try to clarify the question I want to ask in this paper – this is the question whether we have any reasons to believe what I shall call “anti-intuitivism.” In Section 2, I argue that anti-intuitivism cannot be supported solely by investigating the mechanisms that produce our intuitions. In Section 3, I discuss an anti-intuitivist argument from disagreement which relies on the so-called “Equal Weight View.” In Section 4, I pause to clarify the notion of epistemic parity and to explain how it ought to be understood in the epistemology of moral intuition. In Section 5, I return to the anti-intuitivist argument from disagreement and explain how an apparently-vulnerable premise of that argument may be quite resilient. In Section 6, I introduce a novel objection against the Equal Weight View in order to show how I think we can successfully resist the anti-intuitivist argument from disagreement.

Epistemology and Responsibility

This paper emphasises that there is a deep unity underlying Pierre-Yves Raccah’s theory of argumentation, ethics, moral epistemology, general epistemology, philosophy of science and cognitive psychology. First I show that – on the background of his argumentative conception of justifications – Raccah’s moral antifoundationalism is a consequence of the importance he assigns to responsibility in ethics, and in particular to the meta-ethical requirement that we are fully responsible of the moral positions we hold and of the actions we perform in observance to them. Then I explain why his anticonventionalism, as well as his account of how humans can form higher-order effective metapreferences, play a very important role in achieving the target of safeguarding our full responsibility in the prescriptive realm. Finally, I argue that also Raccah’s general epistemology is aimed at supporting the thesis that we are morally responsible of both the scientific theories and the empirical statements we do accept as true. I show how Raccah can assign such a key role to responsibility also in the descriptive realm without abandoning empiricism.