Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review Of Duncan Pritchard, Epistemic Luck, Jason Baehr

Jason Baehr

No abstract provided.

The Consequences Of Narrative, Kylie Mosbacher

IdeaFest: Interdisciplinary Journal of Creative Works and Research from Cal Poly Humboldt

No abstract provided.

The Discursive Functioning Of Knowledge Claims In Research Studies On Children’S Conceptual Knowledge Of Number, Patrick D. Byers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Researchers interested in the development of conceptual knowledge of number have studied children’s behavior in various tasks or other contexts in order to draw conclusions about what they know. The guiding assumption of this work is that the presence or absence of a given form of knowledge is typically reflected in the ability/inability to perform certain types of behavior. Researchers complicate this assumption when they claim that (1) the ability to perform a given behavior may also reflect simple imitation or rote learning in the absence of understanding, and/or (2) that the inability to perform a certain behavior may reflect …

Wisdom: Understanding And The Good Life, Shane Ryan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

I argue that a necessary condition for being wise is: understanding how to live well. The condition, by requiring understanding rather than a wide variety of justified beliefs or knowledge, as Ryan and Whitcomb respectively require, yields the desirable result that being wise is compatible with having some false beliefs but not just any false beliefs about how to live well-regardless of whether those beliefs are justified or not. In arguing for understanding how to live well as a necessary condition for wisdom, I reject the view, proposed by both Ryan and Whitcomb, that subjects such as chemistry lies within …

Understanding And Its Role In Inquiry, Benjamin T. Rancourt

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that understanding possesses unique epistemic value. I propose and defend a novel account of understanding that I call the management account of understanding, which is the view that an agent A understands a subject matter S just in case A has the ability to extract the relevant information and exploit it with the relevant cognitive capacities to answer questions in S. Since inquiry is the process of raising and answering questions, I argue that without understanding, it would be impossible to engage in successful inquiry. I argue that understanding is indispensable for effective cognition and …

Agency And Reasons In Epistemology, Luis R.G. Oliveira

Doctoral Dissertations

Ever since John Locke, philosophers have discussed the possibility of a normative epistemology: are there epistemic obligations binding the cognitive economy of belief and disbelief? Locke's influential answer was evidentialist: we have an epistemic obligation to believe in accordance with our evidence. In this dissertation, I place the contemporary literature on agency and reasons at the service of some such normative epistemology. I discuss the semantics of obligations, the connection between obligations and reasons to believe, the implausibility of Lockean evidentialism, and some of the alleged connections between agency and justification.

A Case For A Husserlian Willardarian Approach To Knowledge, Joseph Gibson

Masters Theses

This thesis introduces certain aspects in the thought of Dallas Willard and Edmund Husserl as a new way forward in the internalism externalism debate. Husserl’s detailed analysis of cognition has application to epistemology and addresses in great depth an area which in the current discussion is often tertiary and shallow at best. It is argued that in both internalist and externalist camps there is a common assumption about cognition which Husserl argues forcibly against. This assumption is that thought, or cognition, is essentially linguistic. (The notion that ‘thought is essentially linguistic’ means that thought requires the use of language.) Whatever …

Principles Of Anti-Discriminatory Design, D. E. Wittkower

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Technical design can produce exclusionary and even discriminatory effects for users. A lack of discriminatory intent is insufficient to avoid discriminatory design, since implicit assumptions about users rarely include all relevant user demographics, and in some cases, designing for all relevant users is actually impossible. To minimize discriminatory effects of technical design, an actively anti-discriminatory design perspective must be adopted. This article provides examples of discriminatory user exclusion, then defining exclusionary design in terms of disaffordances and dysaffordances. Once these definitions are in place, principles of anti-discriminatory design are advanced, drawing upon a method of phenomenological variation employed in the …

A Defense Of The Ambiguity Theory Of 'Knows', Mark R. Satta

Open Access Dissertations

In recent years, questions regarding the truth conditions of knowledge ascriptions (sentences of the form ‘S knows that P’ where S is a subject and P a proposition) and knowledge denials (sentences of the form ‘S doesn’t know that P’) have been at the fore of a certain sector of analytic epistemology and philosophy of language. These questions include “How do we determine the truth conditions of a particular knowledge ascription or denial?”, “What sorts of factors are relevant in this determination?”, and “Is context among the relevant factors in a non-trivial way, and if so, how?” A variety of …

Service And Learning For Whom? Toward A Critical Decolonizing Bicultural Service Learning Pedagogy, Kortney Hernandez

LMU/LLS Theses and Dissertations

The notion of service has enjoyed historical longevity—rooted deeply within our institutions (i.e., churches, schools, government, military, etc.), reminiscent of indentured servitude, and rarely questioned as a colonizing practice that upholds oppression. Given the relentless insertion of service learning programs into working class communities, the sacrosanctity awarded and commonsensically given to service is challenged and understood within its colonial, historical, philosophical, economic, and ideological machinations. This political confrontation of service learning practices serves to: (a) critique the dominant epistemologies that reproduce social inequalities within the context of service learning theory and practice; and (b) move toward the formulation of a …

Wabi-Sabi Mathematics, Jean-Francois Maheux

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Mathematics and aesthetics have a long history in common. In this relation however, the aesthetic dimension of mathematics largely refers to concepts such as purity, absoluteness, symmetry, and so on. In stark contrast to such a nexus of ideas, the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi values imperfections, temporality, incompleteness, earthly crudeness, and even contradiction. In this paper, I discuss the possibilities of “wabi-sabi mathematics” by showing (1) how wabi-sabi mathematics is conceivable; (2) how wabi-sabi mathematics is observable; and (3) why we should bother about wabi-sabi mathematics

Forget Not The Whip! Nietzsche, Perspectivism, And Feminism: A Non-Apologist Interpretation Of Nietzsche’S Polemical Axiology, Jennifer L. Hudgens

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is notoriously a misogynist according to many feminists. In parallel, Nietzsche’s theory of value, perspectivism, is relativist according to many philosophers. However, I propose a counter-reading of both Nietzsche’s comments regarding women and his comments regarding perspective in which I interpret Nietzsche as neither misogynistic nor relativistic. I adopt a stance which is non-apologist, in that I do not merely wash my hands of Nietzsche’s apparently sexist remarks about women as Walter Kaufmann does, for example. Rather I demonstrate that Nietzsche is performing a polemical attack on a particular kind of naïve feminism which …

08j3c71v17y, Margot Kalach Hanono

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Human consciousness seems uniquely constituted. We add, subtract, divide, link, memorize, imitate, transform, reform, measure, categorize, analyze, predict, deconstruct, and rebuild the world around us as a way of understanding. These structures are ingrained in our everyday life. What does it mean that we know through these illuminating boundaries? And how does knowledge build up on itself on the basis of their entwined systems?

The making of this work consists of a questioning of our constant desire to make sense of things, and the criteria that we build in order to satisfy this desire; in other words, the thought-spheres that …