Epistemology Commons^™

Sustainable Roots: The Environmental Genealogies Of Chicanas And Latinas, Marlene Andrade

Master's Theses

Ingenuity and tending to the land are anything but contemporary to Communities of Color (COC). Even when our communities become targets of environmental racism and experience the brunt of institution-based degradation, COC resist in a multitude of ways. While there is a plethora of documented social movements led by the Chicanx community for civil, educational, and labor rights, there is a paucity of Chicanx presence in environmental discourse. Thus, my scholar-activist commitments are to highlight Chicana/Latina herstories, epistemologies, and praxes that debunk the narrow white-heteropatriarchal male narrative in mainstream environmentalism. This dominant narrative fails to: (a) address the historical and …

Secondary Traumatic Stress Is An Occupational Hazard For Pet Hospice Support Staff: Psychoeducational Support Groups Provide The Cure, Kari Hayden

DSW Capstone Projects

There are three separate yet interrelated products presented in this final capstone product. The completed product is focused on pet hospice veterinary support staff and the need for an evidence-based social work intervention to combat secondary traumatic stress. This capstone uses the andragogical approach to adult learning theory as the foundation to construct a psychoeducational peer support group specific to this population. Implications for clinical social work in veterinary medicine are presented within this project.

The first scholarly product presented is the Systematic Literature Review (SLR). The SLR utilizes a scoping review process in an attempt to locate prior research …

An Arbitrary Aesthetic: Cultural Reproduction And Hegemonic Canonical Formations In The Western Theatrical Academy, Sim C. Rivers

Theses and Dissertations

Theatre as an artistic practice has often been celebrated as an art of and for the people, being a modality that in theory the common person has access to learn, explore and experience. In recent years I have become preoccupied with the growing rarification and privileging of this art form, particularly in how it is cognized and taught in the academic world. As such, I set out to investigate the mechanisms at work at levels structural, artistic, and personal that determine how theatre is taught and understood within the western academy.

This thesis seeks to examine and unpack the perceived …

Traveling Epistemology, Or An Intersection Between Ethics And Epistemology Through The Philosophy Of Pragmatism., Pablo Patricio Olivas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The concept of traditional epistemology carries with it values and expectations that are rarely talked about. Based on the critiques of traditional epistemology by the pragmatist tradition, there is an opportunity to think of an alternative to the traditional view of epistemology as solely a theory of knowledge based on theories like the correspondence theory of truth. The concept of traveling epistemology serves as an alternative that questions the values of traditional epistemology, where things like certainty, and authority are expected in conjunction with a view of knowledge that rests on a mind-independent reality. Traveling epistemology offers a view that …

Exploring The Role Of Epistemic Cognition And Self-Efficacy In The Career Decision-Making Processes Of College Students: An Explanatory Sequential Study, Raelynn Frazier

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

College students are asked to make critical decisions about which academic major to choose and subsequently to make specific career decisions. Students come to college with a myriad of different skill sets, backgrounds, developmental levels, cognitive processes, familial support, and levels of self-efficacy that may influence how they make these decisions. The purpose of this study was to explore the role that epistemic cognition and self-efficacy may play in the career decision-making processes of college students utilizing a mixed methods approach. Results of this study indicate that there are internal and external influences that impact college students’ career decision-making processes …

Introduction To Confronting Teacher Preparation Epistemicide: Art, Poetry, And Teacher Resistance, Richard D. Sawyer, Daniel Ness

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

In this special issue, we present different perspectives from a documentary project on curricular epistemicide. We view curriculum epistemicide —the annihilation of curriculum—as an embodied process. It limits ways of knowing, questioning, and envisioning the world, and it constricts multiplicity and erases identity and culture. Authors within this volume responded to two requests: 1) they examined some form of epistemicide; and 2) they did not reinforce current systems of power and inequity. Throughout the issue, poetry and photography weave through theoretical papers and empirical studies. A range of methodologies are considered within the articles.

Death To Curriculum, M. Francyne Huckaby

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

No abstract provided.

Life In The Multiverse: Bringing Chaos Out Of Order?, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This paper was given as the opening keynote address at the International Conference on Religion and Film at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on June 8, 2022, and is here presented in that form.

My thanks go to those who organized the conference for Vrije Universiteit, notably Professor Johan Roeland and Miranda van Holland.

Belonging Amidst Bias: Embracing Difference On The Path To Common Humanity, Alyssia Sheikh

Mindfulness Studies Theses

The mindfulness community prioritizes self-awareness and common humanity, but is often entrapped by the idea that oneness is equivalent to sameness. This inclination for objectivity is rooted in the same neural propensities that facilitate bias; the brain is a subjective organ, however, and so neurologically speaking, bias is inevitable. This paper asks: Is striving for sameness separating us from interconnectedness? A human experience is a subjective, diverse, and variable one. The path to shared humanity and social justice co-occurs with increasing cultural humility through mindful awareness and acknowledging our subjective nature. Exploring our neurological tendency to make assumptions, we …

Beyond True And False: Fake News And The Digital Epistemic Divide, Gilad Abiri, Johannes Buchheim

Michigan Technology Law Review

The massive fact-checking, flagging, and content removal campaigns run by major digital platforms during the 2020 elections and the Covid-19 pandemic did some good. However, they failed to prevent substantial portions of the population from believing that the election was stolen or that vaccinations are dangerous.

In this Article, we argue that the reason for the ineffectiveness of truth-based solutions—such as fact-checking— is that they do not reach the heart of the problem. Both scholars and policymakers share the implicit or explicit belief that the rise of digital fake news is harmful mainly because it spreads false information, which lays …

Epistemic Priors, Social Justice, And The Ethics Of Humor, Paul Butterfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I set out a theory of humor ethics and, in particular, I establish what difference humorousness makes to an instance of speech’s moral value. I set out by making the case for this approach to the topic, demonstrating that focusing on how humorous speech differs, morally, from non-humorous speech allows us to avoid getting caught up in prior ethical debates that are not strictly about humor itself – a shortcoming that is common to many treatments of humor ethics in the existing literature. I show that, in cases of humorous speech, we typically do not assert the …

Recovering Authenticity: Care, Conversation And Value, Shannon M. Brick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Suppose you learn that your steak-loving friend has just adopted a vegan diet. You ask her what prompted the change, and she tells you that someone she trusts recently tweeted “Eating meat is immoral.” Your friend’s response is a little disappointing and shallow, but why? Most of our knowledge comes from trusting what other people tell us, so why, when it comes to moral matters, does deference seem inappropriate? Some philosophers think it’s because moral testimony cannot transmit important epistemic goods, like knowledge or understanding. Others think that when people defer to moral testimony, their actions or characters will be …

Necessity, Essence And Analyticity: Toward An Analytic Essentialist Account Of Necessity, Dongwoo Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Some truths could not have failed to hold. Such are called metaphysically necessary truths. As Michael Dummett once aptly formulated, the philosophical problem about necessity is twofold: what makes necessary truths necessarily true and how do we recognize them as such? This dissertation aims to address these questions by developing and defending a novel account of necessity, which has the following three main theses: (1) the necessity of a statement about an entity is established as a consequence of a general principle implying that if the entity is a certain way then it is necessarily that way and the fact …

No History Or Society To Be Found: Object-Oriented Ontology And Social Ontology, Bennett B. Gilbert

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

It is widely theorized that the advent of the “Anthropocene Age” (under this or any other name) is bringing one form of human temporality to an end while it initiates another (Simon 2021). Because human activity threatens the duration and well-being of the planetary biosphere, the new age that this activity is bringing on—though it is proving to be extremely difficult to define—does present specific onto-epistemological and moral challenges behind its political and social problems. The most prominent and perhaps the core of these challenges is the demand to shed anthropocentrism in human culture, a change that would deeply alter …

Unraveling Dna And Identity: A Humanistic Perspective On Epistemologies And Ethics Of Genetic Ancestry Testing., Eve Carlisle Polley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The advent of DNA ancestry testing motivated a burst of human activities that constitute a scientific-technological-industrial-personal-social movement of immense scale, infused with epistemological and ethical questions of great and important variety. This movement has motivated many discourses in the social sciences, with study subjects ranging from the language usage of geneticists, to moral conundrums faced by test-takers, to potential ramifications in global structures of political power. At the same time, and especially in recent decades, the discourses of the comparative humanities have included with increasing frequency and urgency research and theorization about concepts and consequences of human social identities, alongside …

On Types Of Certainty: From Buddhism To Islam And Beyond, Michael Chase

Comparative Philosophy

Studies the threefold hierarchy of certainty, from its origins in Mahāyāna Buddhism, through Islam, to 17^th century China. This tripartite scheme may be traced back to the ancient Buddhist scheme of the threefold wisdom as systematized by Vasubandhu of Gandhāra in the 4th-5th centuries CE. Following the advent of Islam in the 8th century, it was combined with Qur'anic notions of certainty (al-yaqīn). Initially taken up by early Islamic mystics such as Sahl al-Tustarī and al-Ḥākim al-Tirmiḏī (late 9th-early 10th centuries), the notion of yaqīn was gradually systematized into the three-level hierarchy of “knowledge or science of …

Regret Is Born Where Choice Dies, Shane Ryan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper analyses regret. On the basis of a number of examples, the case is made that regret is a negative affective state that has a perceived past choice as its object. More precisely, S regrets φ-ing, iff, and because (i) S has a negative affective state regarding φ-ing (Negative Affect State Requirement), the experience of which is explained by (ii) S perceiving that an alternative choice that was available to her would have been preferable to φ-ing (Perceived Forking Path Requirement). The resulting account is differentiated from Williams’ agent-regret and shown to avoid problems faced by Zeelenberg’s definition of …

A Framework For Understanding How People Can Draw Different Conclusions Based On The Same Information, Evan Schapiro

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

At least partially fueled by misinformation, political polarization is growing in the United States, leading to a breakdown of confidence in our traditional academic and political institutions. A popular belief is that a solution is to train people to think more rationally by eliminating the cognitive biases embedded in their subconscious thought patterns. This paper identifies the influences on my thinking and the framework used to look at these issues from a different perspective through methodological believing and the application of models of learning and conversation. The paper also points out that the methods of scientific inquiry often assume that …

How Speech Act Theory Can Help Address Problems In Theology And Church Posed By Modern Philosophy, Charles W. Westby

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation

Westby, Charles W. “How Speech Act Theory Can Help Address Problems in Theology and Church Posed by Modern Philosophy.” Ph.D. diss., Concordia Seminary, 2022. 347 pp.

This dissertation analyzes modern idealism as developed by René Descartes and Immanuel Kant to show how modern philosophy has impacted conservative theology, focusing on the theology of Carl F. H. Henry. The relationship between theology and philosophy is analyzed in terms of foundationalism, using postliberal theological analysis propounded by Hans Frei and George Lindbeck. Speech Act Theory as propounded by J. L. Austin and John R. Searle is used to critique modern idealism in …

Metaphysical Coherentism, Jan Swiderski

Dissertations - ALL

I defend metaphysical coherentism, according to which reality is an interdependent network, system, or web, held together by a relation philosophers call "metaphysical explanation" or "grounding". If coherentism is true, nothing is ungrounded, things ground each other, and understanding what it is to be any given thing – a tree, a house, or a person – is grasping how it fits in: how it grounds and is grounded by its environment.

Coherentism is inconsistent with a widely-accepted, orthodox view of grounding, according to which certain fundamental facts about reality asymmetrically determine everything else. In Chapter 1, I argue that this …