Objectivist Epistemology Research Articles

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AbstractThe author contends that the Objectivist epistemology has lacked a viable model of propositional knowledge for nearly fifty years, due to neglect of Rand's unit-perspective view of concepts. This pioneering insight, he says, not only is an essential building block of her concept theory, but also welds together the three levels of logical theory and provides the clearest X-ray picture of our multilayered conceptual knowledge. Using the unit-perspective to expand Rand's theory of concepts, the author then devises a theory of the proposition, giving considerable attention to axioms and statements about nonexistent subjects.

“Longing on a Large Scale Is What Makes History”: The Uses of Baseball and the Problem of Storytelling in Don DeLillo’s Underworld

“Longing on a Large Scale Is What Makes History”The Uses of Baseball and the Problem of Storytelling in Don DeLillo’s Underworld Philipp Löeffler (bio) Critics like to speak in superlatives when they measure the impact of Don DeLillo on postwar American fiction, but there is considerable disagreement about the precise nature of his greatness.1 According to John Duvall, DeLillo is “one of the most important American novelists since 1970” because of “his fiction’s repeated invitation to think historically.”2 Duvall’s assessment is a viable starting point, because however central Don DeLillo’s work really is, it no doubt reflects an almost obsessive interest in the history of the postwar decades. DeLillo’s novels are all—in some way or another—focused on the extent to which the Cold War has shaped American culture in ways that are not documented in official, textbook versions of the twentieth century. His novels remind us constantly to think beyond the confines of the ordinary and to look at those figures that often evade the frameworks of historiography proper. And yet the point of DeLillo’s fiction is not mainly to envision alternative plots and speculative counterhistories that would oppose more traditional accounts of the postwar era. That would be a traditional postmodernist agenda, asking what we can or cannot know about history. For DeLillo, American history is relevant as a very practical archive of stories that people need to get a grip on their own lives—here and now—and not primarily as a field of epistemological inquiry or skepticism. In this article, I plan to discuss this shift in focus—from history understood as an epistemological object to history understood as a site of memory—in the context of DeLillo’s much acclaimed novel Underworld (1997). The novel celebrates individual moments of commemoration as a legitimate and reliable form of historical sense-making and thus provides a contrast to more traditional versions of postmodernist historiographic metafiction. As readers of Underworld delve into the worlds of the postwar decades, they learn about the uses rather than the truth of history that such literary encounters enable. That is to say, readers learn that how we perceive a series of historical events [End Page 91] is conditioned by the ways we conceptualize them within a coherent narrative. DeLillo seems to be suggesting that we need such narratives to stabilize our individual life worlds, rather than to find out about what really happened at a particular point in time. This is why for DeLillo the Cold War period is integral as a cultural reference frame: not because we need additional knowledge about the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of John. F. Kennedy, or Watergate, but because the Cold War period itself sparked the coevolution of a historical vocabulary that allowed people in the postwar decades to know what they believed in and what their stories about life in America meant. Hence, my argument will be that Underworld is a novel dedicated not exclusively to crucial events of the Cold War decades but also to the mechanisms of storytelling and a corresponding belief system that helped people to define themselves meaningfully as historical subjects. The second claim I want to make pertains to the problem of storytelling and how Underworld appropriates the history of postwar American baseball, more particularly the history of the Dodgers versus Giants series in October 1951. Many critics read DeLillo’s baseball obsession as just another moment of allegorizing the Cold War decades, famously suggested by the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” in John Drebinger’s article for the New York Times.3 But the incorporation of baseball into the novel goes way beyond mere allegorical symbolism. The cultural logic of baseball is inextricably entwined with Underworld’s theoretical commitment to a memory discourse in which the subjectivity of individual experiences supplants the authority of “objective” history, as it were. Like baseball, history depends on sudden and often unpredictable turns of events. Such events evade traditional analytical categories and become meaningful only through their incorporation into the story worlds of very personal lives. This is how they are endowed with meaning and reliability no matter how implausible their...

Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies

Abstract This article reviews the first two works featuring essays derived from talks given before the Ayn Rand Society, an affiliated group of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. The books are both edited by the late Allan Gotthelf (editor) and James G. Lennox (associate editor), each dealing with a different aspect of Ayn Rand's philosophy. The first is a study in Ayn Rand's normative theory (Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue: Studies in Ayn Rand's Normative Theory) and the second offers reflections on Rand's theory of knowledge (Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology).

The Role of Tacit Knowledge in Developing Networks for Sustainable Agriculture

AbstractWhilst objectivist epistemologies have been dominant in productivist agriculture, the local, cultural and environmental contexts of sustainable agriculture are more fully informed by constructivist epistemologies. Within constructivism, tacit knowledge – an intuitive knowledge that cannot be formalised – is explored empirically. Six types of tacit knowledge were identified as a result of working closely with a sustainable food network: the Brighton and Hove Food Partnership. Customs cohere around integrating food with other sustainable activity; developing a complex unregulated organisation requires savoir‐faire. The unique character of Brighton has developed an operational folklore, and network identity is important, particularly in relation to conventional agriculture and to the city as a whole. A confidence in people's roles has helped define network development and using different discourses, communicating the network in diverse contexts, is important for understanding the network. All these tacit knowledge elements have a strong influence over the network but have to be assimilated knowledge rather than learned.

When Teaching Makes a Difference: Developing science teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge through learning study

It is a common view that developing teachers’ competence to restructure or reframe their knowledge and beliefs is inevitably a complex challenge. This paper reports on a research project with the aim to develop science teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) through their participation in a learning study. A learning study is a collegial process in which teachers work together with a researcher to explore their own teaching activities in order to identify what is critical for their students’ learning. During one semester, three secondary science teachers worked in a learning study together with a researcher in a cyclical process in order to create prerequisites and further identify conditions for students’ learning. During the learning study, data were collected from video-recorded lessons and stimulated recall sessions in which the teachers and the researcher reflected on the lessons to analyze their development of PCK, their students’ learning and the impact of that knowledge on their own teaching. The results provide an insight into how the teachers developed their self-understanding in which they questioned their own epistemological beliefs, aims and objectives of teaching and taken-for-granted assumptions about science teaching and learning. As such, the study provides an understanding of teacher professional learning through a careful investigation of how teachers’ PCK is enhanced through their participation in the learning study, and further, how students’ learning might be developed as a consequence.

English as a Lingua Franca: An Immanent Critique

Over the past 15 years or so there has developed a school of thought within English language education and applied linguistics globally which refers to the phenomenon and use of English as a lingua franca (ELF). The thinking of ELF movement researchers has placed their work at the centre of current debates about the form, function and legitimacy of the English that is used by speakers from diverse linguacultural backgrounds when they are in interaction with one another. In this article, I intervene in the arguments of the ELF movement from the perspectives of Marxism, globalization theory and poststructuralism by means of an immanent critique. This shows that in the articulation of its discourse the ELF movement reifies and hypostatizes ‘ELF’ as a seemingly stable form, that in its ideology it exhibits an idealist rationalism which blinkers it to the political economy and class stratification of English in a globalized world, and that in its theory it combines a rationalist, positivist and objectivist epistemology with a transformationalist, postmodern and poststructuralist sensibility which is both incommensurable and undertheorized.

The moral fixed points: new directions for moral nonnaturalism

Our project in this essay is to showcase nonnaturalistic moral realism’s resources for responding to metaphysical and epistemological objections by taking the view in some new directions. The central thesis we will argue for is that there is a battery of substantive moral propositions that are also nonnaturalistic conceptual truths. We call these propositions the moral fixed points. We will argue that they must find a place in any system of moral norms that applies to beings like us, in worlds similar to our own. By committing themselves to true propositions of these sorts, nonnaturalists can fashion a view that is highly attractive in its own right, and resistant to the most prominent objections that have been pressed against it.

Evolutionary debunking arguments: moral realism, constructivism, and explaining moral knowledge

One of the alleged advantages of a constructivist theory in metaethics is that the theory avoids the epistemological problems with moral realism while reaping many of realism's benefits. According to evolutionary debunking arguments, the epistemological problem with moral realism is that the evolutionary history of our moral beliefs makes it hard to see how our moral beliefs count as knowledge of moral facts, realistically construed. Certain forms of constructivism are supposed to be immune to this argument, giving the view a key advantage. This paper considers the challenge that evolutionary debunking arguments pose for the possibility of moral knowledge and concludes that such arguments do not reveal any advantages for constructivism. Furthermore, once we consider how defenders of moral knowledge should best respond to this epistemological objection, constructivists may face more difficulties, not less, explaining how our moral beliefs represent moral knowledge.

The Elasticity of Thought: A Note on the Drive in Worringer and Freud

The essay approaches recent discussions of ‘life’ and biopolitics from the historical context of early 20th century German vitalist thought. By closely analysing the concept of the ‘drive’ in art historian Wilhelm Worringer's ion and Empathy (1908) and Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), the essay shows how the paradoxes of those texts prefigure and contribute to the contemporary problematic of ‘life’ in theoretical discourse across the humanities. In Worringer and Freud, the drive is an ‘elastic’ concept stretching beyond – and yet constitutive of – the epistemological object (‘life’) that it is called upon to describe. The distortion of the drive in each author's thought – from an impulse of organic vitality to a principle of inorganic primordiality – manifests the contradictory ‘life’ of vitalist concepts themselves in their elastic potential for transformation, regression and contradiction.

MARXISMO Y PSICOANÁLISIS: UNA RESPUESTA A MANUEL MARTÍNEZ

Este artículo es una respuesta a la propuesta de Manuel Martínez. Aquí se analiza críticamente el planteamiento de él con respecto a la relación entre psicoanálisis y marxismo. Se plantean algunas de las fallas del enfoque martineziano, con el fin de acceder a una mejor comprensión de los elementos que unen ambos paradigmas teóricos. Finalmente, se analiza el concepto de autoestima, en tanto nuevo objeto psicoanalítico.

The Ontology of Entrepreneurial Opportunity

This paper takes a fresh look at a core question in entrepreneurship: are opportunities objective, formed by exogenous shocks to pre-existing markets or industries that entrepreneurs then discover, or are they subjective, formed endogenously by the entrepreneurs who create them? The question is challenging, in part, because of the lack of consensus on the underlying nature of opportunity. Getting clear on the nature of opportunity requires distinguishing clearly between its ontological status (what it is) and its epistemological status (what we believe about it). We take a foundational approach, borrowing tools from philosophy, to look at the ontological structure of social institutions inside of which opportunities reside. We demonstrate that entrepreneurial opportunity, like the social structures in which they are nested, is ontologically subjective. As such, entrepreneurial opportunity is best understood not as a static object that sits fixed somewhere on the epistemological continuum between the subjective and objective but as the initial starting condition of a process vector that starts somewhere on that continuum but always moves across it (a greater or shorter distance) into increasing epistemological objectivity. Epistemologically, opportunity is the creative process of embedding a venture ever more deeply into the objective institutions where it needs to exist to thrive.

Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century

There is a familiar opposition between a 'Scientific Revolution' ethos and practice of experimentation, including experimentation on life, and a 'vitalist' reaction to this outlook. The former is often allied with different forms of mechanism - if all of Nature obeys mechanical laws, including living bodies, 'iatromechanism' should encounter no obstructions in investigating the particularities of animal-machines - or with more chimiatric theories of life and matter, as in the 'Oxford Physiologists'. The latter reaction also comes in different, perhaps irreducibly heterogeneous forms, ranging from metaphysical and ethical objections to the destruction of life, as in Margaret Cavendish, to more epistemological objections against the usage of instruments, the 'anatomical' outlook and experimentation, e.g. in Locke and Sydenham. But I will mainly focus on a third anti-interventionist argument, which I call 'vitalist' since it is often articulated in the writings of the so-called Montpellier Vitalists, including their medical articles for the Encyclopédie. The vitalist argument against experimentation on life is subtly different from the metaphysical, ethical and epistemological arguments, although at times it may borrow from any of them. It expresses a Hippocratic sensibility - understood as an artifact of early modernity, not as some atemporal trait of medical thought - in which Life resists the experimenter, or conversely, for the experimenter to grasp something about Life, it will have to be without torturing or radically intervening in it. I suggest that this view does not have to imply that Nature is something mysterious or sacred; nor does the vitalist have to attack experimentation on life in the name of some 'vital force' - which makes it less surprising to find a vivisectionist like Claude Bernard sounding so close to the vitalists.

Doublethinking or Dialectical Thinking: A Critical Appreciation of Hoffman's “Doublethinking” Critique

Irwin Z. Hoffman's (2009) “Doublethinking our way to ‘scientific’ legitimacy” is an important and thought-provoking paper that tends to evoke passionate and polarized responses. Important threads running throughout his paper include the pitting of objectivist against constructivist perspectives and a concern that the objectivist epistemology underlying most systematic empirical research endangers important psychoanalytic values. In this paper I underscore and elaborate on the importance of certain aspects of Hoffman's paper, while at the same time arguing for a less polarized perspective, by appealing to contemporary developments in the philosophy of science that seek a middle ground between objectivism and constructivism. This middle ground recognizes that science has an irreducibly social, hermeneutic, and political character, and that data are only one element in an ongoing conversation between members of a scientific community. I also argue that the rules and standards of practice are worked out and modified over time by the scientific community, and that it is critical for psychoanalysts to be members of this larger community.

Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (review)

Reviewed by: Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England Marvin Sasser Picciotto, Joanna. Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010. 880 pp. Labors of Innocence superbly investigates how seventeenth-century thinkers appropriated an innocent Adam as an intellectual model to understand experimentalist science, intellectual labor, and the creation of a public sphere. Picciotto situates her work at the intersections of science and literature and traces the development of this relationship in early modern England. Along the way she explains how these thinkers transformed curiosity—originally accepted as a vice resulting from original sin—into a virtue, reimagined labor as a way to overcome the Fall instead of a punishment for it, and separated innocence from ignorance by associating it with epistemological objectivity. After tracking “an ethic of imitatio Adami” across multiple disciplines, Picciotto convincingly asserts that intellectuals used this Adam as an model to understand paradise and the concept of objectivity, and “according to this ethos, it is by performing the work of defamiliarization that contemplation becomes productive, [End Page 61] a means of working on and transforming the world” (2). Picciotto divides her work into two parts, centering the first, “Contexts,” within the discourse of imitatio Adami. Chapter 1, for instance, addresses issues surrounding typological representations of the prelapsarian self, the hortus conclusus, and the doctrine of the felix cupa. She focuses on how the prehistory of Adam, the garden, and the trial shaped various facets of social, religious and political imaginations, but primarily figured only in intellectual life before 1660. However, by the late seventeenth-century, the “delving Adam” had become a “specifically intellectual laborer” and the “mystical body… public” (40). Picciotto further suggests that paradise and purgatory were released concurrently into the world, and she explains how “the effort to restore creation as a commons of knowledge production, an open field in which innocent curiosity could assert itself, and evolve, converted the hortus conclusus into a purgatorial paradise of pains” (40). The rest of part I follows the development of the early modern scientific community throughout the Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration. Chapter 2 explains the founding of the Royal Society of London (1660) and its production of a “new kind of gentleman,” or “virtuoso,” who was the “product of a distinctly Adamic ideal of representativeness” (131). Chapter 3 posits the “literary lens” as a key metaphor for Picciotto’s discussion since it was an “instrument of empirical demystification… applied to the fallen world” and served as a kind of “tool with which to excavate the material causes of the visible and open the world up to new kinds of cultivation” (16, 188–89). Finally, chapter 4 links the new concept of the public person with “the emergence of a curious public” which survived the Interregnum and helped create a public space that promoted the spirit of curiosity (257). After establishing these contexts, Picciotto turns to specific literary texts in part II. She “documents how the experimentalist effort to bring together thoughts and acts, words and things, influenced intellectuals who worked exclusively with words” as she digs deeper into the relationship between science and early modern literature (13). Chapter 5 further investigates how the lens became an inescapable metaphor in Restoration poetry and criticism in texts such as William Davenant’s Gondibert (1650), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), Andrew Marvell’s The Last Instructions to a Painter (1667), and John Dryden’s As Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668). Chapter 6, “Milton and the Paradizable Reader,” amply treats Milton. It is the penultimate chapter of Picciotto’s scholarship and is perhaps the most significant contribution to an already impressive project. She compares Milton to other experimentalists who “turned Bacon’s paradise of exercise and experiment into a working model for their own activities” and “restored the first man as a corporate producer of knowledge” (401). Thus, Picciotto argues that, for Milton, “the recovery of paradise and the reformation of public life were not separate things: to release paradise from its idolatrous identification with the first garden was to create the conditions for the emergence of a productive public” (401). Such was the project at work across all of Milton’s oeuvre. He “applied the...

Action research contextualizes DEA in a multi-organizational decision-making process

The theory of participatory action research (PAR) grew out of the practice of problem-solving in groups and organization by involving the participation of all pertinent stakeholders in decision-making process through empowerment. The ontological assumption is that “the world out there” is defined by the participating stakeholders as they understand and perceive it. The actionable knowledge thus produced is mostly used subjectively in the hope of a favorable organizational change or a transformation for betterment. On the other hand, Management Science/Operations Research (MS/OR) is more concerned with epistemological objectivity in identifying and defining managerial issues and finding solutions. In this paper we shall show that MS/OR can benefit from and contribute to PAR in complex decision making contexts. This kind of mutual benefit will be illustrated through a study reported in the area of R&D planning. It will be shown that PAR “contextualizes” problem structuring whereas MS/OR “optimizes” the consensual decision-making process in a multi-organizational context.

Art and Objectivity in the House of Busirane

This essay analyzes a sequence of descriptions of art objects near the end of the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene. In the first room of the House of Busirane, Britomart encounters a tapestry that, as the romance’s longest ekphrasis, provides an immersive experience of art. The second room, however, treats art differently: No longer animated by the viewer’s imaginative involvement, these objects appear to be mere objects, antiquarian refuse from a dead past. I argue that this progression from immersion to detachment parallels a larger historical development in the period toward epistemological objectivity. By embodying imaginative forms in antiquarian objects, Spenser distances his readers from what he perceives as the imagination’s dangers. But he is ambivalent about the resulting detachment, as an analysis of his final metaphor of the Roman hermaphrodite statue shows. In the end, his highly imaginative poetry depends on the very same interfusion of subject and object that his poetry also seeks to reject.1

Partisan Scholarship in Technoscientific Controversies: Reflections on Research Experience

Several academic traditions have addressed epistemological objectivity and/or partisanship in the study of technoscientific controversies. On the one hand, positivist and relativist scholars agree that the political commitments of the social researcher should not impinge on scientific enquiry, while on the other hand, feminist and Marxist scholars not only take stands in diverse technoscientific debates, but even claim their agendas to be more credible than those of orthodox scientists. Such perspectives stress that all research is partisan in one way or another because it involves questions of who controls, manipulates, and establishes decisions, facts, and knowledge. With this in mind, it is possible to identify different forms of partisan research including capture by participants, de facto and overt partisanship, and mercenary scholarship. These different forms of partisan scholarship are characterised by differences in the motives underlying epistemological choices of research topic and method, personal commitments to the fields studied, use of research findings in controversies, and positioning of results in wider debates. Two examples help to illustrate partisan scholarship: first, a study of new technologies for managing climate change (carbon dioxide capture and storage); and second, the construction of the new underground metro system in Athens and its accommodation of accessibility standards. Both cases entail partisan positions and raise similar concerns about the orthodox epistemological assumptions underpinning sociotechnical systems, especially when it comes to technoscientific controversies. Supporting STS partisan scholarship, therefore, enables greater social and democratic engagement with technoscientific development.

Philosophical and methodological beliefs of instructional design faculty and professionals

The purpose of this research was to probe the philosophical beliefs of instructional designers using sound philosophical constructs and quantitative data collection and analysis. We investigated the philosophical and methodological beliefs of instructional designers, including 152 instructional design faculty members and 118 non-faculty professionals. We used the Philosophy of Social Science Inventory, a 52-item questionnaire, to measure 20 beliefs within four categories. We probed four ontological beliefs (ontological realism, ontological relativism, physicalism, and idealism); five epistemological beliefs (epistemological relativism, fallibilism, epistemological objectivity, rationalism, and empiricism); three axiological beliefs (ethical realism, ethical relativism, and valueneutrality in research); and eight methodological beliefs (nomothetic, idiographic and critical methods, scientific naturalism, humanism, and quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods). Our research questions included (a) What are the predominant philosophical and methodological beliefs of instructional designers? (b) Do instructional design faculty and non-faculty instructional designers, identifying with different research methodologies, hold different sets of philosophical beliefs? and (c) What relationships exist between philosophical beliefs and age, gender, ethnicity, level of education, and/or years of service? Overall, the philosophical profile of instructional designers can reasonably be described as pragmatic. Belief characterizations of methodological subgroups (e.g., those identifying with qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods research) generally supported our hypotheses. Although demographic variables (except gender) were not singularly important, our analyses suggest that a combination of ethnicity, gender, research preference, and level of education can be used to predict philosophical and methodological beliefs.

Toward a Broader Definition of Evidence-Informed Practice: Intersubjective Evidence

Evidence-informed practice is highly valued in social work today. There are several forms of evidence-informed practice, including the use of practice-based evidence. To date, the literature on practice-based evidence emanates from an objectivist epistemology. Since the scientific discovery of intersubjectivity, however, there is now strong support for intersubjective evidence that can guide successful treatment. After considering research supporting an intersubjective epistemology, the author discusses the practice implications and provides case examples of how intersubjective evidence can inform decisions regarding the goals and direction of clinical social work.

Pragmatic antirealism: a new antirealist strategy

In everyday speech we seem to refer to such things as abstract objects, moral properties, or propositional attitudes that have been the target of metaphysical and/or epistemological objections. Many philosophers, while endorsing scepticism about some of these entities, have not wished to charge ordinary speakers with fundamental error, or recommend that the discourse be revised or eliminated. To this end a number of non-revisionary antirealist strategies have been employed, including expressivism, reductionism and hermeneutic fictionalism. But each of these theories faces forceful objections. In particular, we argue, proponents of these strategies face a dilemma: either concedes that their theory is revisionary, or adopt an implausible account of speaker-meaning whereby the content of certain types of utterance is opaque to their speakers. In this paper we introduce a new type of antirealist strategy, which is thoroughly non-revisionary, and leaves speaker-meaning transparent to speakers. We draw on work on pragmatics in the philosophy of language to develop a theory we call ‘pragmatic antirealism’. The pragmatic antirealist holds that while the sentences of the discourses in question have metaphysically contentious truth conditions, ordinary utterances of them are pragmatically modified in context in such a way that speakers do not incur commitment to those truth conditions. After setting out the theory, we show how it might be developed for both mathematical and ethical discourse, before responding to some likely objections.