Epistemology Commons^™

Anaġoptaŋ Po! (Listen!) What We Can Learn About Our Own Stories By Accepting The Stories Of Others: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Competing Narratives Within The Dakota Access Pipeline Conflict, Scot Zellmer

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

There have been over five-hundred years of interactions between European Colonizer-settlers and the Indigenous peoples of North America. Starting with the 1493 Doctrine of Discovery through the present, language embedded in documents, laws, policies and popular culture, have created damaging and misleading stereotypes and identities for these Indigenous Peoples, the American Indians. This study connects historical and contemporary perceptions constructing the dominant narrative that informs many people about American Indians. Narrative Paradigm Theory, Critical Race Theory and Indigenous Theories all serve as a lens to deconstruct the legitimacy of the dominant narrative and promote the salience of counter-narratives constructed by …

Motivation And The Primacy Of Perception, Peter A. Antich

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

In this dissertation, I provide an interpretation and defense of Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception, namely, the thesis that all knowledge is founded on perceptual experience. I take as an interpretative and argumentative key Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological conception of motivation. Whereas epistemology has traditionally accepted a dichotomy between reason and natural causality, I show that this dichotomy is not exhaustive of the forms of epistemic grounding. There is a third type of grounding, the one characteristic of the grounding relations found in perception: motivation. I argue that introducing motivation as a form of epistemic grounding allows us to see …

D Is For The Most Cherished Sense (Whence It Comes And Wither It Goes), Hallie S. Mcneill

Theses and Dissertations

A transcript of the audio that constitutes the work by the same title, along with an introduction and relevant bibliography.

Spiritual Journeys: A Study Of Ifá /Òrìṣà Practitioners In The United States Initiated In Nigeria, Tony Van Der Meer

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The purpose of this study is to understand the culture of one of the newest branches of traditional Yorùbá Ifá/Òrìṣà practice in the United States from practitioners born in the United States that were initiated in Nigeria, West Africa.The epistemology of the Ifá/Òrìṣà belief system in the United States has been based on the history and influence of Regla de Ocha or Santeria that developed out of Cuban innovation and practice.This is an ethnographic and auto-ethnographic study that pulls from participant observation, field notes, interviews, and photos as data.The central question of this dissertation is what are the challenges and …

Refreshment For The Soul: A Phenomenological Study Of The Student Experience Of Beauty In School, Paul Reiff

Dissertations

Prompted by the ratio-scientific emphasis in the curriculum, I conducted this study to explore the lifeworlds of students to understand their lived experience of beauty in school. This investigation entailed a phenomenological study, the method of which included in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with four high school students. This study aimed to examine the essence of beauty in the lived experience of students in school, to explore the perceptions of students regarding school as a place to appreciate beauty, and to understand the needs of students as a place that develops their aesthetic sensibilities. The findings include the description …

The Consequences Of Narrative, Kylie Mosbacher

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

No abstract provided.

Three Essays In Intuitionistic Epistemology, Tudor Protopopescu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We present three papers studying knowledge and its logic from an intuitionistic viewpoint.

An Arithmetic Interpretation of Intuitionistic Verification

Intuitionistic epistemic logic introduces an epistemic operator to intuitionistic logic which reflects the intended BHK semantics of intuitionism. The fundamental assumption concerning intuitionistic knowledge and belief is that it is the product of verification. The BHK interpretation of intuitionistic logic has a precise formulation in the Logic of Proofs and its arithmetical semantics. We show here that this interpretation can be extended to the notion of verification upon which intuitionistic knowledge is based. This provides the systems of intuitionistic epistemic logic …

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 …

There’S Nothing To Beat A Backward Clock: A Rejoinder To Adams, Barker And Clarke, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Neil Sinhababu and I presented Backward Clock, anoriginal counterexample to Robert Nozick’s truth-tracking analysis ofpropositional knowledge. Fred Adams, John Barker and Murray Clarke argue that Backward Clock is no such counterexample. Theirargument fails to nullify Backward Clock whichalso shows that other tracking analyses, such as Dretske’s and one that Adams et al may well have in mind, are inadequate.

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 …

Epistemology In The Churches Of Christ: An Analysis And Critique Of Thomas B. Warren, Derek Estes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to understand at least one prevalent religious epistemology in the Churches of Christ by exploring the work of Thomas B. Warren. To accomplish this goal, I first offer a descriptive analysis of Warren’s theory of knowledge followed by an assessment of its strong and weak points. Ultimately finding his epistemology unsatisfying, I conclude the thesis by highlighting recent developments in religious epistemology that might point the way forward in accounting for knowledge of God in a theologically and philosophically robust way.

Nāgārjuna’S Pañcakoṭi, Agrippa’S Trilemma, And The Uses Of Skepticism, Ethan A. Mills

Comparative Philosophy

While the contemporary problem of the criterion raises similar epistemological issues as Agrippa’s Trilemma in ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism, the consideration of such epistemological questions has served two different purposes. On one hand, there is the purely practical purpose of Pyrrhonism, in which such questions are a means to reach suspension of judgment, and on the other hand, there is the theoretical purpose of contemporary epistemologists, in which these issues raise theoretical problems that drive the search for theoretical resolution. In classical India, similar issues arise in Nāgārjuna’s Vigrahavyāvartanī, but it is not entirely clear what Nāgārjuna’s purpose is. Contrary …

From Political Liberalism To Para-Liberalism: Epistemological Pluralism, Cognitive Liberalism & Authentic Choice, Musa Al-Gharbi

Comparative Philosophy

Advocates of political liberalism hold it as a superior alternative to perfectionism on the grounds that it avoids superfluous and/or controversial claims in favor of a maximally-inclusive approach undergirded by a "free-standing" justification for the ideology. These assertions prove difficult to defend: political interpretations of liberalism tend to be implicitly ethnocentric; they often rely upon a number of controversial, and even empirically falsified, assumptions about rationality--and in many ways prove more parochial than their perfectionist cousins. It is possible to reform political liberalism to address these challenges, but generally at the expense of the supposed normative force and universality of …

Vol 7 No 2 Contents Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 7 No 2 Information Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 7 No 2 Cover Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

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 …

Redefining Medicine: The Epistemology, Political Theory, And Phenomenology Of Health And Disease, Jacqline J. Murillo

Creative Activity and Research Day - CARD

This thesis argues that health needs to be redefined in a more comprehensive fashion, namely as a physiological/biological state, with social, environmental, and individual determinants always related to one’s personal needs to achieve one’s life plan. The benefits of this new definition include more emphasis on the distribution of health as a social good.

Additionally, redefining health puts the value of the individual’s life rather than the strict monetary value of their needed treatment as a focal point. It also draws more attention to medicine as a practice of care, rather than viewing it simply as a technology or science, …

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 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 …