Epistemology Commons^™

The Evolution Of Psychological Altruism, Gualtiero Piccinini, Armin Schulz

Philosophy Faculty Works

We argue that there are two different kinds of altruistic motivation: classical psychological altruism, which generates ultimate desires to help other organisms at least partly for those organisms’ sake, and nonclassical psychological altruism, which generates ultimate desires to help other organisms for the sake of the organism providing the help. We then argue that classical psychological altruism is adaptive if the desire to help others is intergenerationally reliable and, thus, need not be learned. Nonclassical psychological altruism is adaptive when the desire to help others is adaptively learnable. This theory opens new avenues for the interdisciplinary study of psychological altruism.

Looking Past The Images: Art And Film As Propaganda Apparatuses, Alexander Schumm

Theses

This paper aims to show that art and film can operate as propaganda in subtle and unintentional ways. Jacques Ellul called such propaganda “sociological propaganda.” Recent work in philosophy has relied on the notion of intention in defining how propaganda works to affect the beliefs and attitudes of its recipients. This paper argues that intention is not a necessary condition for messages to be propagandistic and works to decouple propaganda from intention. Because our current models rely on intention in defining propaganda, recent work in philosophy cannot account for sociological propaganda. Ellul’s gestures toward defining propaganda explicitly feature intention as …

Psychological Profiling Of Political Leaders: Searching For Three White Whales, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article describes three types of information crucial to psychological profiling of political leaders.

Cautious Realism And Middle Range Ontology, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

Anjan Chakravartty's book Scientific Ontology is centrally about how metaphysics is embrangled with epistemology. I begin by discussing the broader literature in science and values, where arguments akin to Chakravartty's have been much-discussed. Then I talk about my own preferred approach, middle range ontology, which does not fit neatly into any of the three stances Chakravartty discusses. Finally, I use these considerations to pose a dilemma.

Designing Epistemic Concepts, Luke E. Elwonger

Department of Philosophy: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The analysis and theorizing about concepts like “knowledge” and “justification” has played a central role in much of epistemology in the past half century. This dissertation argues for the claim that we should understand this conceptual concern as one of design. Concepts are tools and the concepts of interest to epistemologists must be those that we can best use in service of our epistemic interests. On this understanding of the conceptual project, we determine the content of epistemic concepts, not by consulting our naïve linguistic intuitions, but by determining what concepts will best help us express and enforce the epistemic …

The Institution Of Gender-Based Asylum And Epistemic Injustice: A Structural Limit, Ezgi Sertler

Philosophy, Religion, and Classics

One of the recent attempts to explore epistemic dimensions of forced displacement focuses on the institution of gender-based asylum and hopes to detect forms of epistemic injustice within assessments of gender related asylum applications. Following this attempt, I aim in this paper to demonstrate how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. This structural limit becomes visible when we realize how the institution of asylum is formed to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy. This institutional comfort afforded …

Deleuze And Derrida: Difference And The Power Of The Negative, Vernon W. Cisney

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

The first scholarly comparative analysis of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze's philosophies of difference.

Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze are best known for their respective attempts to theoretically formulate non-dialectical conceptions of difference. Now, for the first time, Vernon W. Cisney brings you a scholarly analysis of their contrasting concepts of difference.

Cisney distinguishes their conceptions of difference by differentiating them on the basis of the criticisms they level against Hegel, as well as their valorisations of Nietzsche, and the ways in which they understand Nietzsche's thought to surpass that of Hegel. The contrast between the two, Cisney argues, is …

Deep Disagreement And The Virtues Of Argumentative And Epistemic Incapacity, Jeremy Barris

Humanities Faculty Research

Fogelin’s (1985) Wittgensteinian view of deep disagreement as allowing no rational resolution has been criticized from both argumentation theoretic and epistemological perspectives. These criticisms typically do not recognize how his point applies to the very argumentative resources on which they rely. Additionally, more extremely than Fogelin himself argues, the conditions of deep disagreement make each position literally unintelligible to the other, again disallowing rational resolution. In turn, however, this failure of sense is so extreme that it partly cancels its own meaning as a failure of sense. Consequently, it paradoxically opens new possibilities for sense and therefore rationally unexpected resolutions.

Secrecy And Intelligence: Introduction, Kathleen Vogel, Brian Balmer

Secrecy and Society

The catalyst for this special issue of Secrecy and Society stems from a workshop titled “Secrecy and Intelligence: Opening the Black Box” at North Carolina State University, April, 2016. This workshop brought together interested scholars, intelligence practitioners, and civil society members from the United States and Europe to discuss how different facets of secrecy and other practices shape the production of knowledge in intelligence work. This dialogue aimed to be reflective on how the closed social worlds of intelligence shape what intelligence actors and intelligence analysts, who include those within the intelligence establishment and those on the outside, know about …

Feeling As Knowing: Trans Phenomenology And Epistemic Justice, B. Lee Aultman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a critical intervention into the literatures on epistemic and phenomenological claims about trans experiences, and embodied knowledge more generally. It also addresses the conception of ordinary affects, or feelings of self-adjustment in everyday life, and their political implications for trans people. Traditional literatures on the political tend to avoid questions of embodiment and the experiences of everyday life in favor of institutional interpretations of courts, elections, and protest movements. This has become particularly true of scholarship on trans politics and theories of ordinary life. These literatures often reduce political movements to their presumed universal intentions for constitutional …

Essence, Explanation, And Modal Knowledge, Antonella Mallozzi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The primary aim of this project is to put forward a novel account of knowledge of metaphysical modality. I call this the “Essentialist Superexplanatory” account of modal knowledge, because it relies on the following two main theses: (a) knowledge of metaphysical necessity is grounded in knowledge of essence; and (b) essences are properties, sets of properties, or mechanisms, having distinctive explanatory powers for how things are. While thesis (a) is quite popular in the current debates, mostly thanks to Kit Fine’s recent work in modal metaphysics, thesis (b) introduces an original brand of essentialism. As I show by means of …

The Philosophical Foundations Of Plen: A Protocol-Theoretic Logic Of Epistemic Norms, Ralph E. Jenkins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I defend the protocol-theoretic account of epistemic norms. The protocol-theoretic account amounts to three theses: (i) There are norms of epistemic rationality that are procedural; epistemic rationality is at least partially defined by rules that restrict the possible ways in which epistemic actions and processes can be sequenced, combined, or chosen among under varying conditions. (ii) Epistemic rationality is ineliminably defined by procedural norms; procedural restrictions provide an irreducible unifying structure for even apparently non-procedural prescriptions and normative expressions, and they are practically indispensable in our cognitive lives. (iii) These procedural epistemic norms are best analyzed in …

Experimental Philosophy And Feminist Epistemology: Conflicts And Complements, Amanda Huminski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The recent turn toward experimental philosophy, particularly in ethics and epistemology, might appear to be supported by feminist epistemology, insofar as experimental philosophy signifies a break from the tradition of primarily white, middle-class men attempting to draw universal claims from within the limits of their own experience and research. However, the relationship between the two is not so straightforward, and an analysis of their connection bears on broader questions concerning intuitions, philosophical methodology, and epistemic standards more generally. This dissertation project aims to 1) examine the conception of intuitions that appears to underpin many projects in experimental philosophy, 2) levy …

The Larger Conversation: Contemplation And Place By Tim Lilburn, Emory Shaw

The Goose

Review of Tim Lilburn's The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place.

Epistemic Dimensions Of Gaslighting: Peer-Disagreement, Self-Trust, And Epistemic Injustice, Andrew D. Spear

Open Access Publishing Support Funded Articles

Miranda Fricker has characterized epistemic injustice as “a kind of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower” (2007, Epistemic injustice: Power & the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 20). Gaslighting, where one agent seeks to gain control over another by undermining the other’s conception of herself as an independent locus of judgment and deliberation, would thus seem to be a paradigm example. Yet, in the most thorough analysis of gaslighting to date (Abramson, K. 2014. “Turning up the lights on gaslighting.” Philosophical Perspectives 28, Ethics: 1– 30), the idea that gaslighting has …

Epistemic Beliefs And The Innovation-Decision Process: A Mixed Methods Analysis Of Faculty Classroom Assessment Practice, Sharon G. Peterson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study focuses on epistemic belief change and the innovation-decision processes of 193 faculty who participated in a professional development workshop series on classroom assessment. From this study population, focus groups were conducted with a criterion-based research sample of 30 workshop participants (i.e., spring workshop completers n = eight, spring workshop non-completers n =eight, fall workshop completers n = seven, and fall workshop non-completers n = seven). Very little attention in higher education research is devoted to how faculty conceptualize new knowledge during professional development, and how decisions about new knowledge affect existing knowledge. This study addresses this gap by …

Time, Tense, And Ontology: Prolegomena To The Metaphysics Of Tense, The Phenomenology Of Temporality, And The Ontology Of Time, Justin Brandt Wisniewski

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

What does it mean to say that something is “temporal” or that something “exists” in time? What is time? And how should we interpret the “ontology” of time? One important strand in twentieth century thought and the philosophy of time has given these fundamental questions a neat and tidy set of influential answers—according to this view, time itself is understood to be a kind of series, and the basic ontology of time is taken to consist of events, together with either the tenses, which get interpreted as special sorts of second order properties known as “A properties” (i.e. the properties …

Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim …

Explaining The Obvious: Privileged Hermeneutics And The Irony Of Explicitly Literal Interpretation, Joshua Alkire

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to examine why so many uses of the word literal (whether taken from everyday contemporary speech or the works of well-respected ancient writers) seem at odds with the word’s theoretical definition and to explore the implications of this disparity for those who privilege a literal interpretation of Scripture. The examples will show that the meaning of literal was not altered at a particular point in time, nor is it altered on an ongoing basis by a small subset of particularly idiosyncratic individuals. Rather, the word is predisposed to behave strangely the moment it is …

Semantic Realism And Historicity: Brandom, Habermas And Hegel, Norman Schultz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The thesis of this dissertation is that Habermas’ universal pragmatic and the recent neo-pragmatist semantic realism of Brandom, aimed at bridging the divide, are both based on misinterpretations of Hegel. Both approaches misunderstand the central Hegelian idea of historicity, and thus fail to establish a correct connection to Hegel. The aim of the dissertation is to point to and sketch Hegel’s idea of historicity. As part of the discussion, I will defend the controversial thesis that Hegel did not have a system, but rather a historical account of how we develop knowledge under the historical conditions of society. Hegel, unlike …