Epistemology Commons^™

Epistemic Injustice And Sexual Violence Intervention Advocacy, Jennifer Ware

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this project, I will explore how victims of sexual violence have faced epistemic injustices by reviewing the histories of two advocacy movements aimed at improving collective understanding of those experiences. In doing so, I will consider how those very activist movements may have introduced new epistemic lacunas and, even while successfully addressing some injustices, committed further epistemic wrongs as well. I will explore forms of hermeneutical resistance used by victims of sexual violence and their advocates. While these methods of resistance have been discussed elsewhere, I contribute to this ongoing work by applying these ideas to new examples. Finally, …

A Narrative Case Study Of Transfer Students In Instrumental Music Education, Ashley Glenn

Dissertations

Transfer students in music fields face challenges that are different from other fields of study. Research has shown that transfer students in music are expected to acclimate and operate as upperclassmen with minimal onboarding while also potentially having to retake courses they received credit for at the community college level. This study examines the experiences of five transfer students in music education through the lens of Schlossberg’s transition theory and Dewey’s model of transaction. Building on existing transfer student research, it asks: what do transfer students experience in terms of acceptance and self-integration, and how do these experiences affect transfer …

Using Lenses To Understand Policy Failures: The Case Of The 2012 Census In Chile, M. Angélica Pavez

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Policy failures are controversial, costly, and above all, messy. More often than we wish, what begins as a well-intentioned policy becomes a failure. In all countries and policy areas, some initiatives end up failing miserably, wasting resources, creating endless political struggles, and even affecting countries' governance. However, the perceptions and understanding of failure are dissimilar. Different actors, including researchers, have diverse and indeed conflicting viewpoints of what constitutes failure, its characteristics and avenues of resolution. The growing policy failure literature offers concepts and models to approach this elusive phenomenon, emphasizing the critical role of social perceptions, characteristics of failure episodes, …

Recognizing Mathematics Students As Creative: Mathematical Creativity As Community-Based And Possibility-Expanding, Meghan Riling

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Although much creativity research has suggested that creativity is influenced by cultural and social factors, these have been minimally explored in the context of mathematics and mathematics learning. This problematically limits who is seen as mathematically creative and who can enter the discipline of mathematics. This paper proposes a framework of creativity that is based in what it means to know or do mathematics and accepts that creativity is something that can be nurtured in all students. Prominent mathematical epistemologies held since the beginning of the twentieth century in the Western mathematics tradition have different implications for promoting creativity in …

The Crisis Of Communication In The Information Age: Revisiting C.P. Snow's Two Cultures In The Era Of Fake News, Aaron Green

Irish Communication Review

The purpose of this paper is to revisit C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture in light of the cultural dominance of information technology. The crisis of communication in the information age, whether in fake news, political polarisation or science denial, has come about because both scientific and literary cultures, in seeking a world without entropy, have inadvertently stumbled upon a world without meaning. In order to explain how this has happened, the paper first explores Snow's challenge: to describe the second law of thermodynamics. The paper then provides a description of entropy that is neutral with regard to thermodynamics and information, …

Finding Commonality: The First Principles Of The Leadership Thought Of Theodore Roosevelt And Traditional Chinese Culture, Elizabeth Summerfield, Yumin Dai

The Journal of Values-Based Leadership

This paper argues that, while the imperative to find global solutions to complex problems like climate change and resource management is agreed, dominant ethical and intellectual thought leadership in many western nations impedes progress. The Cartesian binaries of western post-Enlightenment culture tend instead toward oppositional binary divides where each ‘side’ assumes to be the whole and not a part. And the present and future similarly assume precedence over the past. The paper points to systems thinking as both a method and a practice of wise leadership of past western and eastern societies, including their conservation of natural resources. Two historical …

Proper Scoring Rules In Epistemic Decision Theory, Maomei Wang

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

Epistemic decision theory (EpDT) aims to defend a variety of epistemic norms in terms of their facilitation of epistemic ends. One of the most important components of EpDT is known as a scoring rule (used to measure inaccuracies of credences). This thesis addresses some problems about scoring rules in EpDT. I consider scoring rules both for precise credences and for imprecise credences. For scoring rules in the context of precise credences, I examine the rationale for requiring a scoring rule to be strictly proper, and argue that no satisfactory justification has been given. I then investigate one possible response to …

The Data City, The Idiom And Questions Of Locality, Noel Fitzpatrick

Articles

The paper aims to provide both a radical critique of the “smart city” as a techno-ideological apparatus,that through data analysis and algorithmic forms of governmentality tends to colonize space and time, and an attempt to reframe the very concept of intelligence within the smart cities. Two concepts are presented as tools for such a reframing: locality and idiom, where the first is conceived as openness of meaning generated by a territory, while the latter,analysed througha paradigmatic Irish example (Friel’s play Translations), prepares the ground for the pars construensof the paper. The claim, built by intertwining a set of authors (Ricoeur, …

Questions Concerning Attention And Stiegler’S Therapeutics, Noel Fitzpatrick

Articles

The article sets out to develop the concept of attention as a key aspect to building the possible therapeutics that Bernard Stiegler’s recent works have pointed to (The Automatic Society, 2016, The Neganthropocene, 2018 and Qu’appelle-t-on Panser, 2018). The therapeutic aspect of pharmacology takes place through processes that are neganthropic; therefore, which attempt to counteract the entropic nature of digital technologies where there is flattening out to the measurable and the calculable of Big Data. The most obvious examples of this flattening out can be seen in relation to the use of natural language processing technologies for …

Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An essay lived by John Ashbery's Three Poems with special attention to the possibility of cosmic relevance. This paper attempts to imagine priorities and needs proper to celestial bodies. Three Poems is the consciousness that gives possibility to the text, while Blanchot, Nietzsche, and other thinkers ground its exploration in philosophical analysis.

Plurality Of Traditions And Metatheories In Information Science, Taufik Asmiyanto, Muhamad Prabu Wibowo

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Information science presupposes multi traditions because of its close relationship to the convergence of several fields of science that saw epistemic and practical needs and demands due to the phenomenon of the information revolution and information and communication technology (ICT). The multi traditions in information science are relevant to explain limitless study objects in information science in understanding reality and ways of gaining knowledge throughout the development of science. A previous study on ontology and epistemology shows that there is a limitation on human reasoning on the understanding reality that affects further development of science. The plurality of traditions enables …

Hinduism As A Political Weapon: Gender Socialization And Disempowerment Of Women In India, Aindrila Haldar

Master's Theses

There is a growing use of religion as a political tool to control Hindu women in India, contributing to a rise in gender inequality. Immediate authoritative patriarchal domains such as household and politics, continuously speak of “protecting” Hindu women by disregarding their voices and needs. Consequently, potentially creating a loss of agency among women. This research will use inductive reasoning to understand the position of Hindu women in modern Indian society. Particularly, through the understanding of the involvement of religion in the political and household sphere. Hindu women are highly influenced by the expectations of what being an ”ideal” woman …

Real Possibility: Modality And Responsibility, Julia Gaul

Honors Scholar Theses

Imagine: someone is backing out of a parking space and does not look in their rear view mirror. They subsequently hit a car that was passing by. One could argue that they simply could have avoided the accident had they looked in their mirror. This non-actual possibility, that they could have looked in the mirror, seems legally and morally relevant. One could also argue that they could have avoided the accident had they stuck their feet out of their window and sung La Marseillaise.

My leading questions is: how do we distinguish possibilities that are legally and morally relevant from …

Sounding The Nile: River Politics, Environment And Nubian Musical Expression, Regan L. Homeyer

Music ETDs

ABSTRACT

In the mid 1960s, almost 100,000 Egyptian Nubians, people Indigenous to the Nile River Valley, were removed from their ancestral homeland due to the creation of the Aswan High Dam. In the years surrounding their displacement, Nubian musicians in Cairo and villages in new settlement areas gathered traditional Nubian songs and composed new songs to form a distinctive Nubian musical repertoire. This thesis addresses contemporary Nubian musical performance and the role of these reclaimed and newly-written songs in maintaining and revitalizing not only Nubian languages and culture, but especially senses of self in relation to place and, above all, …

Benefits Of The Waldorf Educational Model On Students' Academic Success, Tyler J. Curry

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

As traditionally ran public schools have focused more on testing in the past few decades, alternative methods of education have been rising in relevance. One model of alternative education, the Waldorf method, has an emphasis on developmental stages and the arts in a way that has been shown to increase test scores and reduce behavioral problems in their students. This capstone project examines the academic benefits of the Waldorf model of education and whether their curriculum is equitable for all students in one of the schools in the Monterey Bay area.

Perceptual Characterization: On Perceptual Learning And Perspectival Sedimentation, Anthony Holdier

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In her analysis of perspectival effects on perception, Susanna Siegel has argued that perceptual experience is directly rationally assessable and can thereby justify perceptual beliefs, save for in cases of epistemic downgrade or perceptual hijacking; I contend that the recalcitrance of known illusions poses an insurmountable problem for Siegel’s thesis. In its place, I argue that a model of perceptual learning informed by the dual-aspect framework of base-level cognitive architecture proposed by Elisabeth Camp successfully answers the questions motivating Siegel’s project in a manner that avoids such issues.

Telling And Testimony, Sam Filby

Theses

A central question in the epistemology of testimony concerns whether a

speaker’s testimony should count as a reason for a hearer to believe the

content of the speaker’s assertion. Proponents of the interpersonal view of

testimony (IVTs) contend that it is the interpersonal relationship between

speaker and hearer that provides the hearer with a reason to believe what

the speaker says. In contrast, critics of IVTs argue that the interpersonal

relationship between speaker and hearer is epistemically superfluous. Call

this the superfluity objection to IVTs. In the following paper, I defend

an IVT against the superfluity objection. I argue that …

Probability Of Naturalism And Metanormative Realism, Curtis Howd

Theses

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution can be mobilized to provide epistemological challenges to metanormative realism. It is argued that, since natural selection selects for behaviors adequate for survival and fecundity, our psychologies must be shaped by this same process. A-type challenges point to the improbability of the vast number of true normative beliefs given that they evolved to track survival and fecundity, not truth. B-type debunking arguments point to the improbability of the hypothesis that evolution would track truth given that there are a multitude of defeaters for this hypothesis. I will argue that both a-type and b-type arguments fail to …

Plato's Ban: Why The Poets Are Exiled, Seth J. Gerberding

Honors Thesis

This thesis examines Plato’s ban of poetry in the Republic. In particular, I draw a link between Plato’s method for finding the truth, dialectic, and his banishment of the poets. There are three parts to this thesis. First, I analyze dialectic as a process, understanding what the science searches for and how it does so. Second, I analyze poetry and its metaphysical standing and how that influences psychology. Finally, I argue that the design of dialectic has an inherent weakness, a weakness that allows poets and rhetoricians to corrupt former students of dialectic. In Plato’s perfect state, there is no …

Cosmological Models And The Christian Faith In John Milton's Paradise Lost, Jacob R. Taylor

Tenor of Our Times

In this work the author argues that John Milton justifies the intelligibility and priority of Christian faith against modern revolutions of science in his epic poem Paradise Lost. Milton argues against scientists who choose to believe modern astronomy over cosmology. He argues that Christian faithfulness stands firm despite the crumbling of its medieval cosmological basis. This endurance of the faith is the primary scientific theme of the epic English poem.