Epistemological Theory Research Articles

Reflection and Conditionalization: Comments on Michael Rescorla

AbstractRescorla explores the relation between Reflection, Conditionalization, and Dutch book arguments in the presence of a weakened concept of sure loss and weakened conditions of self‐transparency for doxastic agents. The literature about Reflection and about Dutch Book arguments, though overlapping, are distinct, and its history illuminates the import of Rescorla's investigation. With examples from a previous debate in the 70s and results about Reflection and Conditionalization in the 80s, I propose a way of seeing the epistemic enterprise in the light of practical requirements to be met by demands for synchronic coherence and probability updating policies. This includes a defense of principles rejected by Rescorla, while allowing for the value of his results in the borderland between theories of cognition and formal epistemology.

What is the aim of models in formal epistemology?

It is certainly well accepted that formal models play a key role in scientific job. Its use goes from natural sciences like physics and even to social sciences like economics and politics. Using mathematics allows the researcher to consider more complicated scenarios involving several variables. Some models are developed to make predictions, others to describe a phenomena, or just to improve the explanation of events in the world. But what has all this to do with philosophy? The aim of the present paper is to investigate debates on the role of formal models in a specific philosophical subject, precisely, the epistemology of rationality. Are we able to explain why models are needed in epistemological work? This answer will be addressed on the assumptions that epistemological theorizing is committed with normative statements. More specifically, epistemologists are concerned with normative questions about what rationality requires from epistemic agents. The first goal is to discuss some assumptions about the role of mathematical models in formal epistemology undertaking. And secondly, I will argue for the following two claims: (i) formal models are useful tools for predicting consequences of normative assumption about what is intuitively required by rationality; and (ii) insofar rationality theory is normative in virtue of being instrumentalist and aiming at truth, formal models are means-end tools, therefore, for rationality, mathematical models are devices for maximizing truth in doxastic states.

Rationalism in Harun Nasution’s Epistemology of Islamic Law

The term 'epistemology' is a term directly related to the field of philosophical debate. As one of the branches of philosophy, it studies science in terms of its definition, the establishment of its types, the determination of its sources and channels and the identification of its limits and limitations. Although these epistemological questions are commonly used in the disciplines of philosophy and the sciences, for some scholars they are also relevant and useful in the field of Islamic law. The following brief study will attempt to elaborate on the epistemological theory of Islamic law by analyzing the thoughts of a prominent Islamic scholar, Harun Nasution, an expert in Islamic philosophy and theology.

Nomothetae: Friedrich Hayek’s project of a constitutional reform

The article offers a comprehensive reconstruction of a constitutional reform project, proposed by a well-known economist Friedrich Hayek. The reconstruction implies recognition of three interconnected aspects. The first theoretical aspect deals with the key problem of a democratic government - the problem of empowering parliaments with two dangerously “mixed” powers, namely the power to manage specific resources and the power to proclaim abstract rules of justice. Hayek proposes to enshrine a clear definition of the rules of justice in order not to confuse the development of these rules with the solution of resource management issues. The theoretical aspect is followed by the institutional aspect of the constitutional reform. The institutional aspect of the reform implies formation of a special representative body whose exclusive competence would be strictly limited to proclamation of the abstract rules of justice. Formation of such a representative body is the only way to avoid unjustified empowerment of the same people to decide both the questions of justice and current budget policy. To make sure that these questions will not be treated in the same political manner, Hayek leaves a few remarks concerning the type of mind that most fit to deal with the rules of just conduct. These remarks constitute the third, «anthropological» aspect of the reform project. In accordance with this third aspect, not every type of mind is inclined to prefer justice over the other, more utilitarian issues. It is that type of mind which is prone to follow customary «opinion» rather than organizational «will» that is more reliable when it comes to the matters of justice and its rules. And though this «anthropological» aspect is not at the center of the Hayek’s reform project, it seems to be one of the most characterizing elements of his constitutional proposal. In one way or another, all the other elements can be derived from this anthropological division between «opinion» and «will», which means that Hayekian reform project is based not only on his political preferences, but also underpinned by his epistemological theory.

Epistemology of religion and phenomenology of revelation in post-revolutionary Iran: The case of Abdolkarim Soroush

Abdolkarim Soroush’s theory of ‘The Theoretical Contraction and Expansion of Religious Knowledge’ is arguably one of the most controversial theories of religion in post-revolutionary Iran. Soroush’s theory paves the way for recognising a pluralist interpretation of religion (Islam) by merging the epistemological and hermeneutical theory of religion. However, he later adds another approach to his reformist framework to explain the phenomenon of revelation. In this paper, after carefully laying out Soroush’s contraction and expansion theory, I will discuss his three approaches, that is, epistemological, hermeneutical and phenomenological approaches to religion, through presenting Kantian and Quinian interpretations of contraction and expansion of religious knowledge, addressing the epistemology of contraction and expansion and the phenomenology of revelation, and pointing out some issues about error recognition within contraction and expansion of religious knowledge. I argue that the role of error recognition is crucial in understanding Soroush’s reformist project since it links his epistemology and hermeneutics of religious knowledge to the way he theorises about revelation phenomenologically.

POLİTİK EPİSTEMOLOJİDE EPİSTEMİK ADALETSİZLİK VE HİBRİT KÖTÜLÜK

This study claims that Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice can be extended in two ways. First, the excess of credibility can be evaluated as an epistemic injustice. Fricker suggests that a deflated level of credibility causes epistemic injustice. However, practices such as forcing false statements result from excess credibility and cause epistemic injustices especially during war and detention processes. In some hierarchical situations, social actors’ hearer and speaker roles may turn into a hegemonic relationship by suggesting that the speaker has knowledge. This kind of relationship motivates exclusion, marginalization and alienation due to identity bias. Then, it can be argued that not only the lack of credibility but also its excess is an epistemic injustice. In this study, the excess of credibility is accepted as the situation faced by “people who are interrogated with the claim of having knowledge.” Second, epistemic injustice can be defined as a hybrid evil. It refers to instances of evil that contain complex motivations such as political evil, since it can neither be reduced only to the character nor to the environmental conditions. Fricker’s proposal for resolving epistemic injustice is hybrid virtues such as intellectual and reflexive critical-social sensitivity. Therefore, while individuals’ situations and context provide reflexive thinking, they also support a normative critical attitude. Fricker offers hybrid virtues for the solution while she does not define the problem as hybrid. Thus this paper proposes to extend Fricker’s concept in two ways: first, including excess of credibility within the scope of the epistemic injustice, and second, defining such injustices as political hybrid evils. Then this expansion will give political epistemology an opportunity to reevaluate given theories of politics, ethics and epistemology and increase its normative contribution to them.

Political Obligation as Prudential Obligation in the Political Philosophical Thought of Thomas Hobbes

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes’ best-known work, the obligation to obey the state assumes a rational or prudential character because of the philosophical and epistemological theories from which this thinker has conceived the human nature. Those principles are related to a mechanical vision of the world in which the obedience to the sovereign is explained only as a need to conserve the life motion.According to Hobbes’ view, transcendental values do not exist as a moral foundation like in Aristothelic-Tomist School, neither categorical imperative like in Kantian ethics; only the passions and the universal motion principle constitute the elements which make possible the logic of the political obligation in his theory.

Dans l'existence et dans l'inexistence : types, instances et l'analyse de Dawarān comme test de causalité

Qiyās, or “correlational inference” (often glossed as “analogy”), comprises a primary set of methodological tools recognized by a majority of premodern Sunnī jurists. Its elements, valid modes, and proper applications were the focus of continual argument and refinement. A particular area of debate was the methodology of determining or justifying the ʿilla: the legal cause (or occasioning factor, or ratio legis) giving rise to a ruling in God’s Law. This was most often discussed (and disputed) under the rubric of “the modes of causal justification” (masālik al-taʿlīl). Among these modes was the much debated test of dawarān (concomitance of presumed cause and effect). In brief, proponents of dawarān employed it to justify claims that a property (waṣf) occasioned the ruling (ḥukm) in an authoritative source-case (aṣl). In concert with other considerations, the demonstrated co-presence (ṭard) and co-absence (ʿaks) of property and ruling—that is, their concomitance “in existence” (wujūdan) and “in nonexistence” (ʿadaman)— was taken as an indication that the property was the ruling’s ʿilla. Delving further into dawarān and causation (ʿilliyya), the current study interprets “in existence” and “in nonexistence” not as a kind of metaphor for true and false (within the framework of a classical truth-functional formal semantics), but as an accurate terminology vis-à-vis the meaning of causality statements, fully compatible with dominant Islamicate views on causal agency. In brief, a deeper logical and linguistic analysis of the different existential modes of dawarān strongly suggests that we should distinguish property (or phenomenon) and ruling (or effect) as types (concepts or propositions linguistically expressed by a sentence) as opposed to tokens (instantiations of the type; the real, ontological events that verify the proposition). Our reading of dawarān as shaped by a finer-grained structure not only allows us to identify the efficient occasioning process as a function which takes some particular token of the ʿilla (arguably, the property or properties which provide the ruling’s material cause) and renders a token of the general ruling type, but it allows us to elucidate the role of taʿlīl (causal justification) in shaping an epistemological theory of argument to the best explanation: a sophisticated, premodern manifestation of abductive reasoning.

Introduction: Severe Uncertainty in Science, Medicine, and Technology

Introduction: Severe Uncertainty in Science, Medicine, and Technology

Kaplan’s Way with Skepticism

Abstract Austin is not much in fashion these days. In Austin’s Way with Skepticism, Mark Kaplan swims against the current, arguing that Austin still has much to teach us about how to do epistemology. Methodologically, Austin’s insistence on fidelity to ordinary ways of talking about knowledge is a non-negotiable constraint on epistemological theorizing. Substantively, Austin has important things to say about knowledge. But while I am fully in accord with the spirit of Kaplan’s enterprise, I take Austin to occupy a more radical position: that getting the linguistic facts straight should lead us to call into question the very idea of a theory of knowledge, at least as ‘theory of knowledge’ has traditionally been understood.

Through the Newsfeed Glass: Rethinking Filter Bubbles\xa0and Echo Chambers

In this paper, we will re-elaborate the notions of filter bubble and of echo chamber by considering human cognitive systems’ limitations in everyday interactions and how they experience digital technologies. Researchers who applied the concept of filter bubble and echo chambers in empirical investigations see them as forms of algorithmically-caused systems that seclude the users of digital technologies from viewpoints and opinions that oppose theirs. However, a significant majority of empirical research has shown that users do find and interact with opposing views. Furthermore, we argue that the notion of filter bubble overestimates the social impact of digital technologies in explaining social and political developments without considering the not-only-technological circumstances of online behavior and interaction. This provides us with motivation to reconsider this notion’s validity and re-elaborate it in light of existing epistemological theories that deal with the discomfort people experience when dealing with what they do not know. Therefore, we will survey a series of philosophical reflections regarding the epistemic limitations of human cognitive systems. In particular, we will discuss how knowledge and mere belief are phenomenologically indistinguishable and how people’s experience of having their beliefs challenged is cause of epistemic discomfort. We will then go on to argue, in contrast with Pariser’s assumptions, that digital media users might tend to conform to their held viewpoints because of the “immediate” way they experience opposing viewpoints. Since online people experience others and their viewpoints as material features of digital environments, we maintain that this modality of confronting oneself with contrasting opinions prompts users to reinforce their preexisting beliefs and attitudes.

Democratic freedom as an aesthetic achievement: Peirce, Schiller and Cavell on aesthetic experience, play and democratic freedom

In this essay, I reconsider the constitution of democratic freedom in aesthetic terms. My interest is in articulating a conception of aesthetic freedom that can be mapped onto a conception of democratic freedom. For this purpose, I bring together Charles Sanders Peirce’s ontology, which comprises fragments of an aesthetic theory, Friedrich Schiller’s concept of aesthetic play and Stanley Cavell’s democratic perfectionism. By providing a philosophical framework for constructing an aesthetics and politics that supports the recent aesthetic turn in political theory, which urges overcoming political theory’s excessive dependence on an epistemological theory of representation, and by proposing a modification to the turn’s heavy reliance on theories of affect, my reading of Peirce, Schiller and Cavell offers a new way to think about the political significance of the autonomy of aesthetic experience and affect for democratic freedom.

Teori administrasi dan metodologi administrasi publik

In the context of an ontology of administrative science that is under stood by four key administrative, organizational, administrative principles, administrator. The essence of the philosophy of administration is a trust and responsibility. The value of trust and responsibility in the future be important for the development of administrative science in addition to the effective-ness, efficiency, rationality and fairness. While the context of epistemology, the study of public administration because the number was not less important to follow three methodologies: (1). Lack of testing the theory; (2). The lack of cumulative research, because of low initial study and the low effort to build theory through the early work; (3). Publication of research is rarely done. Methodological limitations associated with restriction and development of administrative theory in epistemology. The choice of strategy of both qualitative and quantitative research relevant to the development of contemporary public administration theory. A variety of public problems and issues of public administration provide a space for the use of methods in public administration, the choice of using the combination method in the future become a rational choice in order to obtain validity and reliability in finding generalizations as well asthe depth of analysis in order to obtain the conclusion of representation. With the methodology of public administration that are easier to be under stood by scientists administration is expected to produce development of administrative science theory of the state administration which is conducive for developing countries especially Indonesia.

Teori administrasi dan metodologi administrasi publik

In the context of an ontology of administrative science that is under stood by four key administrative, organizational, administrative principles, administrator. The essence of the philosophy of administration is a trust and responsibility. The value of trust and responsibility in the future be important for the development of administrative science in addition to the effective-ness, efficiency, rationality and fairness. While the context of epistemology, the study of public administration because the number was not less important to follow three methodologies: (1). Lack of testing the theory; (2). The lack of cumulative research, because of low initial study and the low effort to build theory through the early work; (3). Publication of research is rarely done. Methodological limitations associated with restriction and development of administrative theory in epistemology. The choice of strategy of both qualitative and quantitative research relevant to the development of contemporary public administration theory. A variety of public problems and issues of public administration provide a space for the use of methods in public administration, the choice of using the combination method in the future become a rational choice in order to obtain validity and reliability in finding generalizations as well asthe depth of analysis in order to obtain the conclusion of representation. With the methodology of public administration that are easier to be under stood by scientists administration is expected to produce development of administrative science theory of the state administration which is conducive for developing countries especially Indonesia.

Realism and Knowledge First. Interview with Timothy Williamson

The renowned British philosopher Timothy Williamson talks about his philosophical views and main lines of research. Williamson is a metaphysical realist in a broad sense. Fir him there are true or false answers to questions about all aspects of reality. Classical logic is a universal true theory. Knowledge-first epistemology is an alternative to the traditional belief-first epistemology. The former takes the concept of knowledge as a basic concept, explaining other epistemic concepts, including belief, in its terms, whereas the latter does the opposite. Knowledge, not truth, is the fundamental epistemic good. The Gettier problem and the skeptical problem that arise within traditional epistemology are ill posed and therefore cannot be solved. Hybrid epistemological theories do not satisfy the principles of simplicity and beauty and are refuted by counter-examples. Epistemic contextualism is problematic, and relativism violates the semantics of the phenomena being explained. Knowledge does not entail knowledge about knowledge. Knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that. The distinction between a priori and a posteriori is superficial, and there are no analytical truths. The concept of qualia is unhelpful for solving the problems related to consciousness. The so-called “hard problem” of consciousness points to an area of conceptual confusions in which we do not know how to reason properly. Speculative metaphysics is quite a respectable enterprise. But progress in metaphysics is not automatic; it requires the right methodology.

Measure for Measure: Exploring the Virtues of Vice Epistemology

Alessandra Tanesini’s The Mismeasure of the Self can be read as promoting non-ideal theory in epistemology. Tanesini articulates the virtue of intellectual humility (central for accurate self-assessment) in close connection with the human vices of superiority and inferiority. I begin by showing how her novel analysis that situates humility in a cluster of differently-functioning ‘attitudes’ enriches both the positive motivational resources and the pitfalls that a knower must negotiate. The proximity of virtues and vices in the conceptual map that constitutes humility, explains feminist claims of how subjects who are harmed as knowers can still flourish and even resist their cognitive marginalization. I then move on to critiquing Tanesini’s understanding of intellectual humility because it fails to be a truly ‘liberatory virtue.’ I suggest alternative ways of connecting intellectual humility to shame and hope that still remain true to Tanesini’s broader ethical context but make it potent for social justice. In spite of mindfulness of social context, Tanesini works with an epistemic selfhood bleached out of its historical and social embeddedness and hence, whose self-knowledge through humility does not involve the knowledge of the world and of others. Such an intellectual humility, I argue, cannot be justice-conducive.

ОПЕРАТИВНО-РОЗШУКОВЕ ДОКУМЕНТУВАННЯ ЗЛОЧИНІВ: ДО ВИЗНАЧЕННЯ ПОНЯТТЯ

The article is devoted to the study of problematic issues of operational and investigative documentation of crimes by employees of operational units in the interests of criminal justice. The purpose of the article is to analyze the doctrinal approaches to the definition of the concept and content of operational and investigative documentation of crimes and, on this basis, with due regard for its essential features, to formulate the author’s own definition of this concept which would meet the essence of this process and the needs of practice. The article substantiates that for successful operational and investigative documentation of crimes by operatives, it is important that they know the theory of criminal procedural evidence as a methodological basis for operational and investigative documentation, since the theory of criminal procedural evidence reveals such fundamental concepts as evidence, its properties, subject matter of proof, etc. These categories of the theory of criminal procedural evidence orient operatives to the objects of operational and investigative documentation, their features and properties, and give them an idea of what qualities the actual data on the signs of a crime must meet in order to be used as evidence in criminal proceedings. Understanding of the subject matter of proof by operatives enables operatives to understand the amount of information they should receive in the course of operational and investigative documentation. The article covers the following categories: operational search, recording, factual data, operational case, materials of operational search activity, operational search information, operational search support, document of operational search activity, operational search case, operational search cognition, etc. Based on the analysis of the theory of activity, epistemology, systemic and comparative analysis of legal provisions, and doctrinal approaches, the author defines the concept of operational and investigative documentation of crimes. The author concludes that operational and investigative documentation of crimes is the essence of operational and investigative activity and consists in the implementation by authorized officials of law enforcement agencies’ operational units of a set of search and investigative measures established by the Law of Ukraine «On Operational and Investigative Activity» and departmental regulations aimed at learning the circumstances of a crime and reliable reflection (fixation, recording) of the results and procedure of this.

Intellectual Virtues in the Infodemic Age

One of the core problems provoked by the Coronavirus pandemic is the problem of the infodemic. The abundance of informational sources, the lack of sufficient skills and opportunities for its critical comprehension make the task of understanding the infodemic by the majority of the population highly relevant and significant in the era of informatization. Principally, in conditions of a real risk to the health and life of each individual. Often, disorientation in the information space about understanding the nature of the virus and possible ways of dealing with it causes no fewer fears and even phobias than the disease itself. The article deals with the problem of infodemic as a consequence of the post-truth era. The main attention is paid to the potential possibilities of the theory of virtue epistemology in solving the problem of infodemic. Thus, to clarify the problem of disinformation in the era of a pandemic, it is proposed to follow the virtue of phronesis (as the central virtue in Aristotle's theory), which allows us to make a qualitative assessment of the epistemological context and select the necessary tools for analyzing information and its sources. Also, ways are proposed for the formation of a research identity (self), which allows you to navigate a variety of informational sources due to the loss of elemental trust in experts. To do this, two levels of self-formation are analyzed, on the one hand, with the help of the function of the other (which is considered in the role of critic, model, support and authority), and on the other hand, with the help of independent work on oneself and concern for intellectual virtues.

Holographic Ethics for Intergenerational Justice

Building off Manulani Aluli-Meyer’s theory of holographic epistemology, this article explores how our understanding of intergenerational justice shifts when informed by relational interspecies ethics and nonlinear temporalities. Both intergenerational and interspecies ethics are greatly enriched if the dead, the living, and those yet-to-be are not (only) distinct generations of beings along a linear sequence but coexistent facets of every being. The second focal point of this article concerns what holographic epistemology reveals about Dipesh Chakrabarty’s notion of the planetary. Ultimately, the article argues that holographic intergenerational ethics highlight the need for a third earthly domain beyond the planet and the globe.

Концептуальная этика, метаэпистемология и нормативная эпистемология

This paper advertises the importance of distinguishing three different foundational projects about epistemic thought and talk, which we call "systematic normative epistemology", "metaepistemology", and "the conceptual ethics of epistemology". We argue that these projects can be distinguished by their contrasting constitutive success conditions. This paper is motivated by the idea that the distinctions between these three projects matter for epistemological theorizing in ways that have been underappreciated in philosophical discussion. We claim that attention to the threefold distinction we advance allows us to better understand and evaluate existing views and debates in the field; identify and appreciate new or underexplored theoretical options in the field; and avoid important defects and ambiguities in our research on epistemic topics.