Epistemological Questions Research Articles

“KILL THE MAN WHO KILLED THE DOG - STORIES BURIED UNDER THE SKYSCRAPERS”

The current paper intends to draw a kind of picture of numerous compelling viewpoints of the Kuwaiti community relying on folk tales. The research is in line with the theoretical and epistemological questions that are cornerstones of researching folk narratives.

Announcement

Pain is notoriously tricky. Pain is central to the human condition, but its very nature—at once biological, cultural, and social—slips easily from grasp. Recent events like the murder of George Floyd and, more broadly, the public spectacle of recorded Black pain, the COVID-19 pandemic, the refugee crisis, and the opioid crisis have moved problems of pain and its representation to the fore.The moment is ripe to reevaluate pain in literary and cultural studies. Thirty-five years after its publication, Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1985) remains a cornerstone of pain studies, as scholars continue to read the experience of pain through its diptych: pain “unmakes” the world of the subject by destroying language even as it “makes” art and culture from emotional, psychological, and physical suffering. Pain destroys, but it also creates. Pain exhausts as much as it enrages, inflames, and inspires. From narratives of enslavement to sentimental fictions—from tales of labor injuries to stories of war wounds, illness, and chronic suffering—American literature provides a voluminous archive with which to interrogate and reimagine this dialectical model of pain as well as to reflect on the many ways pain is experienced, suffered, inhabited, resisted, and transformed through representation. Building on the more recent work of Rachel Ablow, Cynthia Davis, Justine S. Murison, Margaret Price, Michael D. Snediker, Simon Strick, Keith Wailoo, and Xine Yao, among others, this issue calls for scholars to attend to the complex work of pain in American literature and culture in the wake of Scarry’s critical paradigm and cultural shifts over the past few decades, perhaps reassessing how pain operates at the level of discourse, ideology, subject formation, and collective affiliation, as well as its social, political, and aesthetic forms. How we know pain, how we experience it, and how we understand its nature—that is, questions of epistemology, phenomenology, and ontology—are also ripe for rethinking.We welcome submissions on any period or genre of American literature, but we are particularly interested in the shift from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, when pain became “unacceptable” (Karen Halttunen) and the culture of pain moved from “prayer to pain killers” (Joanna Bourke). We are also especially interested in reconsiderations of the race, gender, ability, sexuality, and class dimensions of pain and its cultural forms.We invite essays that might address any of the following topics: The aesthetics, representations, and genres of painVarieties and intensities of pain and/in the politics of sufferingRace and painGendered pain; pain and sexualityThe global politics of US pain; American figurations of pain in and beyond US bordersAcute or chronic pain; pain and diseasePain and illness; pain beyond/outside of illness; pain and disabilityFeeling/unfeelingPain and the willReligious and/or secular understandings of painPain and memory; pain and public memory/memorializationTechnologies of pain management; pain, drugs, stigmaPain, woundedness, and vulnerabilityPain and the bodymind; pain and personhoodPain and the subject/object; pain and subjectivity/objectivityCommunities of pain; communal or distributed painHuman and nonhuman pain, especially in relation to environmental justiceEpistemologies and ontologies of painSpectacles of pain and pain’s invisibilitySubmissions of 11,000 words or less (including endnotes and references) should be submitted electronically at mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/dup-aml by September 5, 2022. For assistance with the submission process, please contact the office of American Literature at am-lit@duke.edu or 919-684-3396. For inquiries about the content of the issue, please contact the coeditors: Sari Altschuler (s.altschuler@northeastern.edu) and Thomas Constantinesco (thomas.constantinesco@gmail.com).

Meaning and reference from a probabilistic point of view

The rise of Bayesian models of cognition requires that traditional questions in epistemology and metaphysics, such as how models relate to reality and how one observer's models relate to another's, be reframed in probabilistic terms. In this paper we take up these questions beginning from a subjective (Bayesian) conception of probability, in which distinct observers hold potentially different probabilistic models of the world, with no one observer necessarily possessing the “true” one. The key question is what terms in a probabilistic theory mean—that is, what they refer to and what their truth conditions are. We address this question with tools from information theory. We introduce the translation uncertainty, a generalization of the Kullback–Leibler divergence that expresses the discrepancy between two observers’ probabilistic models of a common environment. We derive a number of basic information-theoretic relationships among observers, showing for example that the probability that two Bayesian observers will classify the world similarly (called the concordance) depends on the translation uncertainty between their respective models of the world. Our framework suggests a pathway to a semantics for a “probabilistic language of thought.”

Forward to a methodological proposal to support cancer patients: the dialogics' contribution for the precision care.

In scientific context, the first step for scientific theoretical and methodological production is the epistemological analysis. What are assumptions for interaction between oncology and psychology? What are the conditions for psycho-oncological contribution in treating cancer? Furthermore, what are epistemological observations about the current developments in cancer field? And what are implications for sciences treating patients with neoplasms? Due to advances in oncology and in sciences supporting oncology, epistemological questions focus on the object of study of the integration between oncology and psychology. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to describe a proposal of theoretical and methodological frame suitable for current clinical and research needs in cancer patients asking for psychological support. Epistemological analysis lets the health professionals and researchers observe there are sciences using formal languages and sciences using ordinary language. Currently, personalized approach is pursued by oncology, identifying specific patients' characteristics to define the proper treatment process: not only tumor characteristics but also behavioral and psychological features. Cancer patients features can be found in patients' narrations about neoplasms: narration represents the core of clinical and research in psychoncology. Therefore when formalized, language provides the connection between oncology and psychology. Language used by patients and all the roles involved in the care of cancer patients can become a measure of these patients' features. Dialogics science measuring the ordinary language allows the ordinary language formalization, pursuing a personalized medicine.

Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature

Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature

DOES AN INKLING BELONG IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION? HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS, EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE IMAGINATION

AbstractHow do we come to know things, and how are such epistemological questions treated in the field of science and religion? Recent critiques of science and religion methodology argue for an anti‐essentialist approach to science and religion that acknowledges their different epistemic territories and promotes interdisciplinarity. This article operates in such a vein, considering the contributions of Owen Barfield, member of the Inklings, an Oxford literary group, to the study of human consciousness, epistemology and metaphysics, and apologetics, all topics with particular relevance to science and religion. Barfield's understanding of the evolution of human consciousness as revealed by the history of language has scientific import, and may be developed by more intentional cross‐disciplinary collaborations between psychological and cognitive scientists and humanities scholars. His approach to mythopoesis and the imagination resists scientific reductionism, and can inform epistemological dialogue between science and religion, as well as contemporary apologetics.

Bio, psycho, or social: supervised machine learning to classify discursive framing of depression in online health communities

Supervised machine learning on textual data has successful industrial/business applications, but it is an open question whether it can be utilized in social knowledge building outside the scope of hermeneutically more trivial cases. Combining sociology and data science raises several methodological and epistemological questions. In our study the discursive framing of depression is explored in online health communities. Three discursive frameworks are introduced: the bio-medical, psychological, and social framings of depression. ~80 000 posts were collected, and a sample of them was manually classified. Conventional bag-of-words models, Gradient Boosting Machine, word-embedding-based models and a state-of-the-art Transformer-based model with transfer learning, called DistilBERT were applied to expand this classification on the whole database. According to our experience ‘discursive framing’ proves to be a complex and hermeneutically difficult concept, which affects the degree of both inter-annotator agreement and predictive performance. Our finding confirms that the level of inter-annotator disagreement provides a good estimate for the objective difficulty of the classification. By identifying the most important terms, we also interpreted the classification algorithms, which is of great importance in social sciences. We are convinced that machine learning techniques can extend the horizon of qualitative text analysis. Our paper supports a smooth fit of the new techniques into the traditional toolbox of social sciences.

Knowledge transfer, templates, and the spillovers

Mathematical models and their modeling frameworks developed to advance knowledge in one discipline are sometimes sourced to answer questions or solve problems in another discipline. Studying this aspect of cross-disciplinary transfer of knowledge objects, philosophers of science have weighed in on the question of whether knowledge about how a mathematical model is previously applied in one discipline is necessary for the success of reapplying said model in a different discipline. However, not much has been said about whether the answer to that epistemological question applies to the reapplication of a modeling framework. More generally, regarding the nature of the production of knowledge in science, a metaphysical question remains to be explored whether historical contingencies associated with a mathematical construct have a genuine impact on the nature—as opposed to sociological practices or individual psychology—of advancing scientific knowledge with said construct. Focusing on this metaphysical question, this paper analyzes the use of mathematical logic in the development of the Chomsky hierarchy and subsequent reapplications of said hierarchy; with these examples, this paper develops the notion of “spillovers” as a way to detect cross-disciplinary justifications for better understanding the relations between reapplications of the same mathematical construct across disciplines.

On Facing Latin/South American Coloniality: The Travesía de Amereida and the Geo-Poetic Turn at the Valparaíso School

This article traces the aesthetics, fundaments, and poietic practices developed by the members of the School of Architecture and Design of the Catholic University of Valparaíso during the 1960s, which enabled them to elaborate a geo-poetic perspective linked to the land, or “Interior Sea”, of Latin/South America. In order to unpack this perspective, we present how their poetic exploration of ontological and epistemological questions about Latin/South America led to their performance of the Travesía de Amereida (1965), a radical poetic journey oriented around crossing and being crossed by the continental interior lands, and to the subsequent invention of the epic poem Amereida (1967). By examining the different Acts performed during the Travesía and analysing excerpts from the poem, we establish how the School situated actions together with the tropes of the unknown, or not-knowing, and the Interior Sea, as original ways to critically confront and question the coloniality imposed upon and still present in the continent. Concomitantly, we stress how this geo-poetic perspective grounded within the School generated a radical turn and delinking of the academicist episteme in design, which provides stimulating perspectives not only for design studies developed in the region but also for the field of cultural studies.

Free will ruled by reason: Pufendorf on moral value and moral estimation

ABSTRACT Pufendorf makes a clear distinction between the physical constitution of human beings and their value as human beings, stressing that the latter is justified exclusively by the regular use of the free will. According to Pufendorf, the regular use of free will requires certain inventions (divine as well as human) imposed on the free will and called moral entities. He claims that these inventions determine the moral quality of a human being as well as the standards according to which human beings and their actions are able to be judged. This article examines the normative aspects of Pufendorf's concepts of moral value and moral estimation in regard to the epistemological question of the accessibility of moral entities for human beings. In the first part, it reconstructs Pufendorf's doctrine of moral entities and the place of moral estimation in this doctrine. In the second part, it presents Pufendorf's account of the moral philosophy as a science in order to explain his theory of moral normativity as imposed, and the role of a person in regard to their own moral status. In the last part, it illustrates some consequences in regard to the problem of slavery in Pufendorf.

Scotus and Grosseteste on Phantasms and Illumination

This article examines the reception of Robert Grosseteste by John Duns Scotus on two related questions in epistemology. The first concerns the need of phantasms for cognition, and the second concerns divine illumination. The study first examines Scotus’s Questions on the De Anima with comparison to Grosseteste’s Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, a text Scotus cites specifically. It is argued that Grosseteste is the main influence behind Scotus’s opinion that the need for phantasms is not proper to human nature as such. The second part shows how Scotus disagrees with Grosseteste on a related question. Grosseteste retains a version of divine illumination with a qualified need for phantasms, whereas Scotus maintains the strict necessity of phantasms in this life and rejects illumination. The two parts of this study taken together indicate that Scotus saw Grosseteste as an authority but also felt free to ignore him where the two disagreed.

A Question of Epistemology: What is Science?

A Question of Epistemology: What is Science?

Математические объекты, структуры и доказательства (введение к тематическому выпуску)

The paper serves as an introduction to the issues discussed in the following articles. It raises the problem (challenge) of integration, according to which an adequate solution of a philosophical problem should simultaneously be an answer to both ontological and epistemological questions. This problem is described speculatively and by referring to P. Benacerraf’s dilemma. In addition, the problem is illustrated by com-paring classical and intuitionistic mathematics and also through interpretation of the concept of computer proof. The paper demonstrates that adequate philosophy of mathematics must simultaneously take into account the ontological and epistemological aspects of mathematics and mathematical practice. Keywords: mathematical objects, structures, proofs, subject of mathematics, philosophy of mathematics.

Evolution of philosophical and socio-economic views of academician Victor Glushkov

The evolution of the philosophical views of the pioneer of cybernetics Victor Glushkov is studied. His understanding of the nature of human thinking and the possibility of building artificial intelligence is shown. The epistemological questions of the basics of cybernetics, the epistemological basis of creating models for the automation of mental processes are covered. Victor Glushkov's contribution to the development of philosophical ideas of cybernetics and information society is shown.

VASILI SESEMAN’S TRANSCENDENTAL THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE: BETWEEN PHENOMENOLOGY AND NEO-KANTIANISM

The article considers the theory of cognition of the Russian and Soviet philosopher Vasily Seseman (1884-1963) in its relation to the main philosophical orientations in early 20th-century: phenomenology, neokantianism, and intuitionism. Seseman’s theory of cognition is interesting today because, following the tradition of neo-Kantianism, it largely shares the principles and methods of phenomenology, poses epistemological problems that were not explicitly formulated by Edmund Husserl, and offers solutions that are relevant today. The article highlights a common thematic field combining phenomenology, neo-Kantianism, and intuitionism. This field is set by the initial subject-object cognitive attitude, the desire to identify the conditions for the possibility of cognition, the recognition of the presence of a non-linguistic level of knowledge. Moving in this unified theoretical cognitive context of the early twentieth century, Seseman offers his own solution to the following problems: defining the subject of cognition, developing the method of intuition in general and in relation to the contemplation of essence, distinguishing between objective and non-objective attitudes and using this distinction to describe different types of cognition, thematizing the irrational in cognition, and understanding the judgment and its role in the final formation of cognition. Seseman believes that the cognition of reality is preceded by the perception of its objects. He diverges from the Neo-Kantians, who claim that the objects of cognition are formed only in judgment, and holds a position than Husserl, according to whom we perceive the world around us already objectively. However, unlike Husserl, Seseman does not recognize the cognitive nature of perception and argues that knowledge begins with a reflexive fixation of the object of cognition. The cognition of an individual object is embodied in a judgment in which the relation of the object to its environment is fixed and the object is defined as a unique combination of universal properties. Finally, it is shown that the solution of epistemological questions inevitably leads Seseman to ontological issues.

Investigating gender in a world of gender consciousness

For better or worse, it has become difficult to conduct research in the social sciences without encountering gender, even well beyond fields that specifically focus on it. Since the advent of gender studies as a discipline, the concept has gained momentum both as a social fact and structure of social action, and as the analytic category through which these are conceptualised. This special issue of the BMS is embedded in the idea that the analysis of gender itself is indissociable from the history of the concept, and that the increasing spread of this notion throughout society has an impact on the way(s) gender is investigated. In the space of just a few decades the world has evolved from one in which researchers were working to give consistency to a nameless force, to one which is now gender conscious, where gender is mobilised, criticised, claimed, resisted, and debated. In a gender conscious world, the rules of research are changing. The notion of gender consciousness that is proposed here borrows carefully from research in the sociology of law developed under the name legal consciousness studies (LCS). The fact that there are different definitions of gender that compete with each other does not prevent us from considering that there is gender, and we may even consider that the proliferation of definitions participates in the stability of the social phenomenon we are studying, just as, for the theorists of LCS, the multiple representations of the law contribute to its hegemony. One of the central issues here is the problematization of the dialectic between categories of practice and categories of analysis, with a focus on the methodological and epistemological questions of these studies. This ‘return to the field’ will provide answers to these questions, beginning with a personal summary overview of what feminist epistemologies (I) and feminist methodologies (II) have contributed to social sciences, before moving on to contemporary research questions that emerge through the prism of gender consciousness (III).

Performative education inside and outside the ethics of care

Inspired by the provocations raised in Cañas’s RISE Manifesto (2015), this essay argues that language learning, language teaching, and performative activities are caring acts. They are qualitative offerings that manifest themselves as embodied, relational, and artful events concerned with fostering fairer and caring societies. I refer to them as qualitative acts of care. The essay also voices concerns regarding the structural constraints faced by language educators and educational practitioner-researchers when they seek to enact language learning, arts practice, or practice-based research as caring and ethical work. Qualitative care is an ever-changing process that is often difficult to capture (both conceptually and experientially) in the flow of practice, which raises epistemological questions about the way qualitative care is measured and deemed to be self-sufficient and self-contained. Paradoxically, measurement and evaluation turn qualitative care into practices that are referred to here as quantitative acts of care. The essay does not provide readers with answers to the problems raised by Cañas (2015). Rather, from the reflexive standpoint of a language teacher and practitioner-researcher, it suggests the need to leverage the qualities of performative learning and teaching by making any work of care a continual endeavour.

Revelation and the Veridicality of Narratives

On Christian doctrine, God is love; and the love of God is most manifest in Christ’s passion. The passion of Christ thus matters to philosophical theology’s examination of the divine attribute of love. But the passion of Christ is presented in a biblical story, and there are serious methodological questions about the way in which a biblical story can be used as evidence in philosophical theology. And these questions in turn raise deeper epistemological questions. How does any narrative transmit knowledge? And what counts as veridicality in a narrative? This paper deals with some of the questions for philosophical theology and then concentrates on the more general epistemological questions about narratively transmitted knowledge.

Narrating Memory: Weighing up the Testimony

Memory is the ability to store, maintain and recall information and experiences. Although predominantly an individual attribute, memory coincides with the life-world, with consciousness and with the ability to define reality – all of which are shared with others. When analysing narratives the sociologist needs to situate individual memory within its broader context. The article follows the argument that individuals acquire their memories within a broader social context. They also recall and localise their memories within a broader social context. This article interprets a remarkable testimony: the story of a former political prisoner who circumcised a large number of young fellow inmates in the notorious prison on Robben Island, South Africa, during the period of Nelson Mandela‟s incarceration. The article relates the narrative in question to the life-world of the narrator and to his experiences whilst serving his 18-year prison sentence. It reflects on the epistemological questions regarding memories. Memory as recollection, as reconstruction of events and information, and as process of re-membering come under the spotlight. Narratives that are often repeated start taking on a life of their own – particularly in the case of trauma memories. When analysing these narratives, the sociologist needs to distinguish between objective markers and subjective interpretation. Memory does not constitute pure recall by the individual. The article illustrates the effect of intersubjective and collective factors on the process of remembering. It calls for a reflexive process to identify, re-interpret and unpack the process of remembering.

‘There is no future with no acknowledgement of the past’ - phenomenological approach in analysing postgraduate studies in social work in Estonia

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the development of academic social work in Estonia by analysing 15 doctoral dissertations on social work undertaken by Estonian social work scientists between 1991 and 2018. The phenomenological approach to interpretive studies focuses on the question of how those doctorate studies perceive social work as a profession and field for practice-based research. Although many are not explicitly concerned with epistemological questions or with positioning social work as a profession in Estonian society as such, 10 out of the 15 studies are geared towards social work practice and all studies explain their research methodology. The nine practice-oriented studies are qualitative studies, lacking an outspoken, clear idea about the specific character or epistemology of social work research except for the last one, defended in 2018. PhD researchers witness the development of social work as it evolves from a helping profession into a more self-confident profession, with its own core values and tasks and positioned on the same level as other front-line professionals.