Epistemology Commons^™

American Absurdity: Reconciling Conceptions Of The Absurd In European And American Literature, Benjamin Spencer

Senior Theses

This thesis aims to examine the development of the concept of the absurd in literature across different time periods and cultural contexts. The absurd, as defined by Camus, is the gap between humanity’s desire to understand the world and the impossibility of doing so.

However, the ways in which the absurd is recognized as an aspect of existence depends heavily on the sociological contexts in which an individual lives. By analyzing the works of absurdist authors, filmmakers, and artists across time, we can track the development of these absurdist conceptions in both Europe and American literary movements.

Looking at these …

Walking As A Way Of Knowing: An Autoethnography Of Embodied Inquiry, Lauriel-Arwen Amoroso

Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this study was to understand and describe the role of walking in my own ways of knowing and to explore how walking itself is an epistemological process by using personal narrative to examine and story my experience. I used an embodied narrative research method, known as evocative autoethnography, in which I explored my own innate ways of knowing, including intellectual, embodied, emotional, and spiritual knowledge. I collected data using field notes, reflective journaling, reviewing past writing, and artistic interpretations of experiences such as photography and poetry. I compiled my data into a series of short essays, stories, …

What Documents Cannot Do: Revisiting Michael Polanyi And The Tacit Knowledge Dilemma, C. Sean Burns

Information Science Faculty Publications

Our culture is dominated by digital documents in ways that are easy to overlook. These documents have changed our worldviews about science and have raised our expectations of them as tools for knowledge justification. This article explores the complexities surrounding the digital document by revisiting Michael Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowledge—the idea that “we can know more than we can tell.” The theory presents to us a dilemma: if we can know more than we can tell, then this means that the communication of science via the document as a primary form of telling will always be incomplete. This dilemma …

A Glitch In The Matrix, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of A Glitch in the Matrix (2021), directed by Rodney Ascher.

Motivation And The Primacy Of Perception : Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology Of Knowledge, Peter Antich

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notion of motivation advances a compelling alternative to the empiricist and rationalist assumptions that underpin modern epistemology.

Arguing that knowledge is ultimately founded in perceptual experience, Peter Antich interprets and defends Merleau-Ponty’s thinking on motivation as the key to establishing a new form of epistemic grounding. Upending the classical dichotomy between reason and natural causality, justification and explanation, Antich shows how this epistemic ground enables Merleau-Ponty to offer a radically new account of knowledge and its relation to perception. In so doing, Antich demonstrates how and why Merleau-Ponty remains a vital resource for today’s epistemologists.

A Defense Of Locke’S Moral Epistemology, Jamie J. Hardy

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke provides an empirical account of all of our ideas, including our moral ideas. However, Locke’s account of moral epistemology is difficult to understand leading to mistaken objections to his moral epistemological theory. In this paper, I offer what I believe to be the correct account of Locke’s moral epistemology. This account of his moral epistemology resolves the objections that morality is not demonstrable, that Locke’s account fails to demonstrate the normativity of statements, and that Locke has not provided us with the means to determine the correctness of the moral rules.

It's Funny 'Cause It's True: The Lighthearted Philosophers’ Society’S Introduction To Philosophy Through Humor, Jennifer Marra Henrigillis, Steven Gimbel

Open Educational Resources

It's Funny 'Cause It's True is an introductory text in philosophy exploring logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics through questions in the philosophy of humor. Subfields receive a substantive introduction with interactive essays written to be accessible to undergraduates.

Ecological And Holistic Analysis Of The Epistemic Value Of Law Libraries, Paul D. Callister, Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

We examine the libraries' roles within the "epistemic foundation of society.” Our analysis is in response to the omission of Yale Law Dean Gerken of the role of libraries in her recent article about legal education's new focus and to remarks by AALS President Vicki Jackson that suggest an uncertain role for libraries. We have adapted holistic ecological media theory, as developed by Ronald Deibert, to reject a technologically deterministic view of libraries as having no future. We have considered the role of law libraries in the social epistemology or cognitive authority of the legal community, the role of law …

Non-Indian Reservations, Joshua Matthew Rosenau

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis is a skeptical treatment of the logical distinctions presumed to exist between “Indian” and “non-Indian” people. Despite representing 99 percent of the U.S. population, “non-Indians” represent a legal identity which has no explicit definition. The basis for the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions regarding non-Indians and Indians rests not on any objective, empirical or logical criterion or proof, but rather on the “assumption of a ‘guardian-ward’ status. This thesis investigates this assumption, and recommends that we suspend judgment on whether the difference between “Indians” and “non-Indians” can be determined either by logical argument or by legal assumption.

On The Wrongs Of Fake News, Samuel Fiske

CMC Senior Theses

While fake news has become a hot political issue in the past years, it presents novel and apolitical philosophical problems that are often neglected. This paper explores the epistemic and moral wrong of fake news, drawing on work from Immanuel Kant, Seana Shiffrin, and Miranda Fricker to explain exactly why fake news is so problematic. I argue that creating and sharing fake news violates Kant’s Categorical Imperative because it cannot be willed into a universal law and because it fails to respect rational agents as ends in themselves. I also argue that fake news presents distinct epistemic harms as it …

The Economic And Philosophic Manuscripts Of Data, Sage D. Young

CMC Senior Theses

Society is filled with words and images that elucidate the positive force radiating from technology entities. I push back against this imprecise and inaccurate narrative by breaking down the illusions created by surveillance capitalism. I argue that there exists a unique relationship between an individual and their environment in creating value, especially in the form of data. This relationship tears down the smokescreens prompted up by the surveillance state because it demonstrates the costs of technology and surveillance capitalism. I found that how data is created and made monetarily valuable has significant, adverse repercussions on the capability to flourish as …

Wisdom, Not Veritism, Shane Ryan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this response to Pritchard's "In Defence of Veritism", I defend the view that it is wisdom rather than truth that is fundamental in epistemology. Given that recent philosophical discussions of the nature of wisdom may be unfamiliar to some epistemologists, a brief overview of these discussions is provided and that which is relevant for the subsequent discussion in this piece is highlighted. I explain that scholars working on the topic tend to accept that wisdom comprises at least one familiar epistemic standing and that, unlike other epistemic goods, wisdom is thought to be tied to a narrowly specified content. …

Automating Autism: Disability, Discourse, And Artificial Intelligence, Os Keyes

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems shift to interact with new domains and populations, so does AI ethics: a relatively nascent subdiscipline that frequently concerns itself with questions of “fairness” and “accountability.” This fairness-centred approach has been criticized for (amongst other things) lacking the ability to address discursive, rather than distributional, injustices. In this paper I simultaneously validate these concerns, and work to correct the relative silence of both conventional and critical AI ethicists around disability, by exploring the narratives deployed by AI researchers in discussing and designing systems around autism. Demonstrating that these narratives frequently perpetuate a dangerously dehumanizing model …

Structure, Neutrostructure, And Antistructure In Science, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In any science, a classical Theorem, defined on a given space, is a statement that is 100% true (i.e. true for all elements of the space). To prove that a classical theorem is false, it is sufficient to get a single counter-example where the statement is false. Therefore, the classical sciences do not leave room for partial truth of a theorem (or a statement). But, in our world and in our everyday life, we have many more examples of statements that are only partially true, than statements that are totally true. The NeutroTheorem and AntiTheorem are generalizations and alternatives of …

Building Bridges: Epistemic Violence And Mother–Daughter Pedagogies From The U.S.–Mexico Border, Tanya J. Gaxiola Serrano, Elvia Serrano

Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs

Living in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, residents have intimately learned about the impact of the militarized policing of the physical border on their lives. While not often discussed, the policing transcends the border institution and targets the ways of knowing of People and Immigrants of Color. This essay features pláticas between two Mexican women educators from the border, la frontera, to challenge epistemic violence on the lives of U.S. Chicanas/Latinas. Intergenerational pedagogies of a mother–daughter dyad from the Tijuana–San Diego region serve as exemplars of the survival and resistance found in the borderlands. The narratives highlight their unique experiences, one as …

Medieval Thinking In The 21st Century: Crystal Balls, Black Swans, And Darwin's Finches In The Time Of Corona, George Conesa

The International Journal of Ecopsychology (IJE)

Twenty years into the 21st Century, a sizable swath of the world populace thinks, makes decisions, and defines itself in a conflicted and contradictory chimera. Millions of individuals make use of cutting-edge technologies while simultaneously throwing salt over their shoulders and consulting with the local ‘healer’ about any number of illnesses--to caricaturize, a sort of medieval-thinker-tech-savvy orientation. It is here affirmed that the practical consequences of this agentic amalgamation, modes of thinking, and “being in the world” are counterproductive at best and self-defeating at worst, resulting in much uncertainty and leading to, for example, mixed messages in public health …

Skeptical Buddhism As Provenance And Project, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

The past century and a half has seen various attempts in both Asia and the West to reform or re-conceptualize Buddhism by adding a simple, often provocative, qualifier. This paper examines some of the links between “secular,” “critical,” “sceptical,” and “radical” Buddhism in order to ascertain possibilities in thinking Buddhism anew as a 21st-century “project” with philosophical, ethical, and political resonance. In particular, I am motivated by the question of whether “sceptical” Buddhism can coexist with Buddhist praxis, conceived as an engaged response to the suffering of sentient beings in a globalized and neoliberal industrial capitalist world order. Let …

Nonculpably Ignorant Meat Eaters & Epistemically Unjust Meat Producers, C.E. Abbate Dr.

Philosophy Faculty Research

In the United States (U.S.) alone, nearly 10 billion farmed animals are raised and killed for food each year, and approximately 99% of these animals are raised in factory farms, where they are mutilated without anesthetic, confined to cramped and overcrowded cages and sheds, forcibly separated at birth from their mothers, deprived of the opportunity to move freely and engage in species-specific behavior, and killed violently (Sentience Institute 2019). Given the terrible harms that billions of animals endure on U.S. factory farms each year, we must ask: why do so many people repeatedly partake in and support such a morally …

Trusting In Order To Inspire Trustworthiness, Michael Pace

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

This paper explores the epistemology and moral psychology of “therapeutic trust,” in which one trusts with the aim of inspiring greater trust-responsiveness in the trusted. Theorists have appealed to alleged cases of rational therapeutic trust to show that trust can be adopted for broadly moral or practical reasons and to motivate accounts of trust that do not involve belief or confidence in someone’s trustworthiness. Some conclude from the cases that trust consists in having normative expectations and adopting vulnerabilities with respect to the trusted; others that trust involves accepting (without necessarily believing) that someone will prove trustworthy. Although there are, …

Locke’S Rebellious Progeny: Phenomenology And Ethics Of Leopardi’S A-Dialectical Materialism, Paolo Pellecchia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With this study I reconstruct a genealogy of the a-dialectic materialism that defines the production of 19^th-century Italian author Giacomo Leopardi and with which he criticizes canonical metaphysical stances. In this regard, I consider John Locke as the first instance of a philosophical outlook that stands as an alternative to the anthropocentrism demanded by traditional metaphysics. By focusing on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its significant influence on Leopardi’s philosophical and aesthetic work, I emphasize how Locke’s system finds a synthetic formulation in the hypothesis, at the time highly contested yet groundbreaking, that matter might be endowed …