Ordinary Knowledge Research Articles

Knowledge Attributions in Iterated Fake Barn Cases

In a single-iteration fake barn case, the agent correctly identifies an object of interest on the first try, despite the presence of nearby lookalikes that could have mislead her. In a multiple-iteration fake barn case, the agent first encounters several fakes, misidentifies each of them, and then encounters and correctly identifies a genuine item of interest. Prior work has established that people tend to attribute knowledge in single-iteration fake barn cases, but multiple-iteration cases have not been tested. However, some theorists contend that multiple-iteration cases are more important and will elicit a strong tendency to deny knowledge. Here I report a behavioral experiment investigating knowledge judgments in multiple-iteration fake barn cases. The main finding is that people tend to attribute knowledge in these cases too. Ironically, the results indicate that the presence of fakes could prevent iterated errors from lowering knowledge attributions. The results also provide evidence that ordinary knowledge attributions are based on attributions of cognitive ability.

Teaching and Learning at the Autonomous University during Barcelona’s Seventies

The opening pages in the traditional edition of Aristotle's Metaphysics are focused on the test that may be used to distinguish ordinary knowledge (aisthesis or sensation and empeiria or experience) from science. The elementary form of science is what Aristotle calls techne, i.e., art in the family of the Latin translation. The essential difference between the sensations and the experiences elaborated from the repetition of sensations, on one side, and art, on the other side, is evident when we perceive that animals are reduced to the first two kinds of knowledge, while art is a human affair. If a deeper distinction must be underlined, the clearest is that when somebody is in the domain of art, he or she is necessarily able to teach it. And teaching, adds Aristotle, is equivalent to stating the why and the cause.Leaving aside the details and the conceptual analysis of this classical text, it seems to me interesting that, in a book in which the word philosophy is first used meaningfully, the teaching and learning game is already present in the definition of the first characteristic of, in Aristotle's words, the searched for science. Philosophy and teaching/learning are concepts that belong one to another in a mutual embracement.In some way, this reflection allows me to recognise that the remains of Philosophy, in our times often deprived of any shadow of it, are for me the remains of my teaching and learning. By now just my learning will be treated, i.e., their teaching, the teaching of my beloved old colleagues at the Autonomous University of Barcelona forty years ago.I have had other masters, and very close friends that have influenced strongly my attachment to the study of philosophical texts. Seneca's quotation Dum docent discunt opens, even more, the possibility of being oneself a kind of insufferable and constant teacher of oneself. I learn while I teach. It's absolutely true. But let me leave aside the possibility of an elegant lesson. I'll forget for a moment this real nightmare, and I'll stay just with what remains of the teaching of some of my professors at UAB.The Philological PerspectiveThe first one I ever had (yet a neighbour, a friend, a marvellous presence in family life) is Josep Montserrat. In 1975 he used to teach Ancient Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy of UAB. He was quite famous at this moment for his heterodox versions of Christian History, based in his deep knowledge of several ancient languages (including Coptic). In the last moments of the dictatorship of Franco and some of his foolish bishops, this profile was not for amusement. But this is not our subject. I would like to distil honestly the remains of his teaching. Not the one nowadays, full of an elegant lesson: it doesn't matter who you are and who you have become; he stayed always at his place beside you, always the same person, clever and simple for his real friends. This is more real and a very private subject. Philosophical subjects become more and more private with age. No, I want, as in all the other cases that I'll try to report here, to find out a distillation of my memory with the concrete teaching of that time, even if the best lesson is the private one. Certainly it is a memory of the present, but memory in any case.The best lectures of Josep Montserrat that I have in my mind were on a few dialogues of Plato: Parmenides, Sophist, and Philebus in particular. This is not the field in which he has been more celebrated and conspicuous, because his works on the thought around the first centuries of Christianity are really well known. But those lectures on Plato's mature writings were developed with an intellectual elegance and daring, and at same time so close to the original texts that I felt the taste of the truth, for the fist time, far from the vitalist and speculative conceptual preferences that two or three years ago had inclined me to leave a scientist career and fall in love with Philosophy. …

Knowledge attributions in iterated fake barn cases

In a single-iteration fake barn case, the agent correctly identifies an object of interest on the first try, despite the presence of nearby lookalikes that could have mislead her. In a multiple-iteration fake barn case, the agent first encounters several fakes, misidentifies each of them, and then encounters and correctly identifies a genuine item of interest. Prior work has established that people tend to attribute knowledge in single-iteration fake barn cases, but multiple-iteration cases have not been tested. However, some theorists contend that multiple-iteration cases are more important and will elicit a strong tendency to deny knowledge. Here I report a behavioral experiment investigating knowledge judgments in multiple-iteration fake barn cases. The main finding is that people tend to attribute knowledge in these cases too. Ironically, the results indicate that the presence of fakes could prevent iterated errors from lowering knowledge attributions. The results also provide evidence that ordinary knowledge attributions are based on attributions of cognitive ability.

The Fragility of Common Knowledge

Ordinary common knowledge is formally expressed by strong probabilistic common belief. How strong exactly? The question can be answered by drawing from the similar equivalence, recently explored, between plain and probabilistic individual beliefs. I argue that such a move entails that common knowledge displays a double fragility: as a description of a collective state and as a phenomenon, because it can respectively disappear as group size increases, or more worryingly as the epistemic context changes. I argue that despite this latter fragility, the effects of common knowledge on action are robust. Unfortunately, this in turn leads to a third fragility, that of the concept of common knowledge, which threatens to collapse on probabilistic common belief. This also reveals a disanalogy between the individual and the collective cases. I finally pinpoint the subtle difference entailed by the two concepts, expressed in terms of the attitude towards contrary evidence or of the agents’ awareness. As a result, common knowledge can be defended as a concept, which refers to a fragile yet distinct collective attitude.

MENGUJI KHARISMA KYAI DALAM KEHIDUPAN MASYARAKAT MADURA JEMBER JAWA TIMUR

Charisma of kyai has been facing more socio-cultural challenge overtime due to the development of society. The intervention of governmentto eliminate poverty and enhance the quality of education, globalization,modernization as well as the change of paradigm within society hasinfluenced paternalistic tradition. However, the role of kyai in Maduresesociety has performed differently. In socio-cultural tradition, kyai hasstill played significant role to shape people’s understanding about worldview especially on religious and cultural values. Additionally, kyai hasalso still influenced people’s political view and even has more power toshape its society by challenging its organization structural hirearkhy.This paper comes with conclusion that kyai for Madurese people is stillcharismatic because they have extra ordinary knowledge to responsesocial problem. Additionally, people perceive kyai as a representative ofcreative minority group.

Belief is not always what you believe it is: Between belief and knowledge

We are paradoxically used to calling beliefs ideas we do not believe in, whereas we persist in considering as knowledge ideas we firmly believe in. This subjective distinction between beliefs and knowledge entails two drawbacks: first, it deprives both notions of any heuristic value; secondly, it conceals the fact that our knowledge is partly composed of beliefs. The author proposes to redefine the notion, in order to distinguish two types of beliefs, each of them including simultaneously religious and scientific representations. This definition offers a new outlook on ordinary knowledge: often considered as based on science, reason or common sense, ordinary knowledge constitutes an important part of our modern Western beliefs.

Alfred Schhtz's Sociology as a Naive Science

Alfred Schutz has paid considerable attention to the position of scientist in the world and particularly to that of social scientist. His analyses make extensive use of phenomenological concepts and contain detailed descriptions of scientific cognitive style in its relation to the everyday life. However, Schutz is surprisingly silent on the motives that could justify quitting the ordinary 'world of working' and entering the scientific attitude. This paper discusses whether the Schutz normative justification for science can be deduced from Husserl's philosophy of science. It is argued that despite the fact that Schutz was in fact considerably influenced by Husserl's system of science suggested in 'Ideas II', the two thinkers diverge radically on the cultural mission and methodology of science. While Husserl advocates the critical method of reduction as the sole way to pursue genuine science, Schutz in fact explores the possibility of building a 'naive science'. He accepts relying on ordinary knowledge in social science and ends up by rejecting the methodology of reduction in general. Schutz's opposition to the idea of science contained in Husserl's phenomenology, together with his neglect of normative grounding of science, suggest that he considered the value of science as laying beyond rational philosophical justification.

Knowledge use and learning in everyday social work practice: a study in child investigation work

AbstractThe aim of this study was to explore knowledge use and learning among social workers in everyday child investigation work. Research was undertaken in two Swedish children's services departments. The study applied an ethnographic approach. Methods for data collection included interviews, participant observations, reflective dialogues and a documentary analysis of case files. The social workers' knowledge sources were classified into research‐based, practice‐based and ordinary knowledge. The findings show that the social workers preferred practice‐based knowledge, which was primarily conveyed from colleagues and previous experience, and rarely consulted knowledge from sources found outside the practice setting. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the integration of knowledge was made possible through the social workers' engagement in both a verbal and a more cognitive (tacit) reasoning activity, processes that fostered learning at work. The social workers' learning was predominantly adaptive as they learned to handle tasks in a fairly routinized way on the basis of rules or procedures. The findings lend support to the notion that the use of different knowledge forms could potentially trigger learning in everyday social work.

Категории «смысла» и «понимания» как интеграция обыденного и теоретического знания в социологической парадигме Макса Вебера

Категории «смысла» и «понимания» как интеграция обыденного и теоретического знания в социологической парадигме Макса Вебера

Crossing the Epistemological Divide: Foucault, Barthes, and Neo-Kantianism

The schism between ‘ordinary’ and scientific perception and knowledge implies that we lack any total or systematic means of describing the world or identifying any framework-independent reality. Philosophers as diverse as Kant, Putnam, Strawson, Barthes, and Foucault have attempted to overcome this epistemological divide by constructing a unified, continuous theory of knowledge capable of accounting simultaneously for an allegedly primitive, unreflective, unmediated view of the world and an abstract, highly technical, scientific product. Rather than identifying analytic and continental epistemologies, adverting to continental philosophy to resolve the analytic problems of defining knowledge or determining its necessary and sufficient conditions, as in Gettier problem cases, or homogenizing ordinary and scientific cognition, I assess diverse epistemological responses to the Cartesian problem of bridging perceptual experience and conceptual knowledge in order to catalog and validate the turn from a structuralist phenomenology to a historical deconstruction of isolated, ahistorical notions of subjectivity and objectivity. However, in place of Foucault’s closed, tripartite model of space, time, and power, I use certain late nineteenth-century, neo-Kantian scientific models to develop and justify an open, critical, pragmatically validated, historical heuristic for scientific explanation able to account nonreductively for ordinary experience, ordinary perception, and ordinary knowledge.

The absurdity of sin and the creaturely life of faith in Karl Barth's theological epistemology

This article critically takes up the reaffirmation of Barth's reaction to the analogia entis in the recent work of Keith L. Johnson in order to question Johnson's appeal to human sin as the pivotal factor in Barth's rejection of the Catholic doctrine. By explicating what I call Barth's ‘theological particularism’, it will become more apparent that Johnson's reference to sin in Barth functions abstractly in the very ‘as such’ way that Barth sought to methodologically foreclose while also conflating ordinary creaturely knowledge and being with a view of sin that places God and creatures in epistemic and ontological contradiction. By filling out Johnson's missing account of Barth's view of the shadow of sin, a positive account of creatureliness has the chance to emerge that highlights faith and prayer as the fulfillment of creaturely life in the life of God.

The Cinematographic Archive: Selections from Early German Film Theory

Over a century ago, at a time when Henri Bergson deployed the cinematograph as a metaphor for “the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge” in Creative Evolution (1907), other, lesser-known theorists envisaged the medium's potential to offer unique modes of perception and cognition. For these thinkers, the cinematograph did not signify a mechanical, spatialized temporality pervasive within industrial modernity, but instead provided a novel means of experiencing time and history. Just one year after the publication of Bergson's book, Ludwig Brauner wrote an article for Der Kinematograph, Germany's first film trade journal, calling for the creation of “cinematographic archives” in the country's municipalities. Brauner juxtaposed film with traditional sources of historical reconstruction, distinguishing the new medium not only for its lucid, impartial recording of past events but also for its effortlessly lifelike form of documentation. Imagining that the cinematograph had been invented a hundred years prior, Brauner stated, “A single filmstrip would offer us the possibility of capturing the spirit of that time in living form” (p. 29 below).

Epistemic contextualism can be stated properly

It has been argued that epistemic contextualism faces the so-called factivity problem and hence cannot be stated properly. The basic idea behind this charge is that contextualists supposedly have to say, on the one hand, that knowledge ascribing sentences like “S knows that S has hands” are true when used in ordinary contexts while, on the other hand, they are not true by the standard of their own context. In my paper, I want to show that the argument to the factivity problem fails because it rests on the mistaken premise that contextualists are committed to the truth of particular ordinary knowledge attributions.

TIME CONSTRAINTS AND PRAGMATIC ENCROACHMENT ON KNOWLEDGE

AbstractCiting some recent experimental findings, I argue for the surprising claim that in some cases the less time you have the more you know. More specifically, I present some evidence to suggest that our ordinary knowledge ascriptions are sometimes sensitive to facts about an epistemic subject's truth-irrelevant time constraints such that less (time) is more (knowledge). If knowledge ascriptions are sensitive in this manner, then this is some evidence of pragmatic encroachment. Along the way, I consider comments made by Jonathan Schaffer (2006) and Jennifer Nagel (2008, 2010) to construe a purist contextualist and a strict invariantist explanation of the data respectively, before giving reasons to resist them in favor of an account that indicates pragmatic encroachment. If successful, this may suggest a new way to argue for the controversial thesis that there is pragmatic encroachment on knowledge.

Making and the sense it makes

Making is ubiquitous, and it is as ancient asculture. In fact, making is the practical dimension of culture. It transformsmatter, and it articulates meaning. Making has a cognitive dimension; it makes sense. But this sense is not ordinary discursive knowledge – making yields another kind of knowledge, often referred to as ‘tacit’ because it seems to gowithout saying. Now, if it is tacit how can we speak about it, and whatis its role in making?

Gettier made ESEE

Previous research in experimental philosophy has suggested that moral judgments can influence the ordinary application of a number of different concepts, including attributions of knowledge. But should epistemologists care? The present set of studies demonstrate that this basic effect can be extended to overturn intuitions in some of the most theoretically central thought experiments in contemporary epistemology: Gettier cases. Furthermore, experiment 3 shows that this effect is unlikely to be mediated by a simple desire to blame, suggesting that a correct psychological account of ordinary knowledge attribution may include moral judgment.

Towards pragmatic, ecological and political app roaches to expertise

The article offers a retrospective look at the study and sociological critique of expertise. The research has focused on its role in society, its legitimacy and its links to academic knowledge. As its legitimacy and credibility have been challenged by controversy and the issue of conflict of interest, the research was interested in its relationship to the functioning of politics and markets, as well as how to become an expert and the practice of expertise in the situation. Expertise is then studied as a social practice that combines know-how, understanding and assembling to reveal a problematic situation. The article gives an account of the constitution of two research orientations: one deals with the joint constitution of the statements and the infrastructures on which their creation is based; the other qualifies the situations in which ordinary knowledge is not sufficient to form a judgment or find a solution. It also deals with the transformations of the places of expertise (the emergence of think tanks in particular) and their practices (in particular the system of check and balance and advocacy), as well as policies (technical democratization) and forms of expertise management. The text aims to decentralise the way in which expertise has been seen to be owned by scientists. Instead, it proposes a reconstitution of relations and transfers of knowledge between the academic and "profane" (non-expert) worlds, between society and its respective authorities. The article advocates a pragmatic, ecological and political approach to expertise. Viewing expertise from a pragmatic approach, the heterogeneity of practices, the transformation of the knowledge-power relationship, in which the generation of knowledge is related to the inclusion of different groups of experts and the generation of new relationships, should be studied. The ecological approach describes the mechanisms of expertise and its governance and the construction of spaces for dialogue, resulting in the consolidation of expert knowledge in different problem situations. Finally, the text gives us a look at the modes of existence of the politics of expertise, its institutional and performative dimension, and its regulation. Therefore, the article suggests studying the devices of expertise and the perspectives that the actors deploy as experts.

Lotteries, Quasi-Lotteries, and Scepticism

I seem to know that I won't experience spaceflight but also that if I win the lottery, then I will take a flight into space. Suppose I competently deduce from these propositions that I won't win the lottery. Competent deduction from known premises seems to yield knowledge of the deduced conclusion. So it seems that I know that I won't win the lottery; but it also seems clear that I don't know this, despite the minuscule probability of my winning (if I have a lottery ticket). So we have a puzzle. It seems to generalize, for analogues of the lottery-proposition threaten almost all ordinary knowledge attributions. For example, my apparent knowledge that my bike is parked outside seems threatened by the possibility that it's been stolen since I parked it, a proposition with a low but non-zero probability; and it seems that I don't know this proposition to be false. Familiar solutions to this family of puzzles incur unacceptable costs—either by rejecting deductive closure for knowledge, or by yielding untenable consequences for ordinary attributions of knowledge or of ignorance. After canvassing and criticizing these solutions, I offer a new solution free of these costs. Knowledge that p requires an explanatory link between the fact that p and the belief that p. This necessary but insufficient condition on knowledge distinguishes actual lottery cases from typical, apparently analogous ‘quasi-lottery’ cases. It does yield scepticism about my not winning the lottery and not experiencing spaceflight, but the scepticism doesn't generalize to quasi-lottery cases such as that involving my bike.

Derived embodiment and imaginative capacities in interactional expertise

Interactional expertise is said to be a form of knowledge achieved in a linguistic community and, therefore, obtained entirely outside practice. Supposedly, it is not or only minimally sustained by the so-called embodied knowledge. Here, drawing upon studies in contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology, I propose that ‘derived’ embodiment is deeply involved in competent language use and, therefore, also in interactional expertise. My argument consists of two parts. First, I argue for a strong relationship among language acquisition, language use and the real world (i.e. the world accessible to the senses). Biological constraints in very early childhood anchor language to the body. These constraints are by-products of our evolutionary peculiarity that we gain because of our physical and psychological immaturity at birth. Thus, infancy is predominantly concerned with the bodily needs and experiences of the concrete while language acquisition takes place. Particular interest in the concrete furnishes our linguistic world and installs ‘concrete’ language as the principal constituent of competent language use. Second, I argue that well-established concrete language implicitly and explicitly elicits mental representations, namely partial reactivations of sensorimotor states that occur during experience. These are stepping stones by which we subsequently make sense of expressions in new linguistic areas. Like any competent language user, the interactional expert, therefore, prompts multimodal imagination and re-enacts concrete experiences when acquiring linguistic knowledge pertaining to a specialist field. Finally, I outline the characteristics of those imaginative powers to identify mechanisms that improve interactional expertise and discuss the obvious relation between interactional expertise and ordinary knowledge acquisition after the concrete language stage.

Twenty-First Century Pain Education: The Rediscovery of Compassion

The sociocultural dimensions of pain are as significant as its nociceptive machinery [1–7]. Andrew Greer, speaking through the voice of the African American woman protagonist in his latest novel, has said “I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain”[8]. In this issue of Pain Medicine , Murinson and colleagues [9] report an innovative approach to addressing the gap between the universal recognition of pain as a fundamentally intersubjective experience [10–12] and its presentation within the medical curriculum—if presented at all—as ordinary biomedical knowledge to be absorbed passively in large lecture halls. They describe their “greater vision for the course (as one) that … would build opportunities for emotional development … spur students to more deeply acknowledge the affective consequences of strong pain, (and) begin to recognize their own emotional responses to pain in self and others”[9]. To do so, they supplemented core knowledge about nociceptive and analgesic mechanisms, assessed by conventional standardized testing, with “socio-emotional” activities conducted in small groups. The latter activities consisted of written narrative, assessment of personal affective responses to nociceptive …