Epistemology Commons^™

Navigating Epistemological Barriers For Inclusive Assessment: A Collaborative Self-Study, Yuankun Yao, Comfort M. Ateh

Education Faculty Publications

While inclusive pedagogy has been increasingly embraced in teacher education, inclusive assessment of student learning remains an area that has received limited attention. A critical friend (Ateh) from an outside institution encouraged Yao to examine how he approached inclusive assessment in a course on assessment strategies for preservice teachers. The collaborative self-study showed that his initial understanding of inclusivity was limited when he taught and practiced inclusive strategies in the assessment course. Yao’s reflections came upon moments of tensions as he navigated through barriers for conceptualizing and implementing inclusive assessment strategies. The weekly interactions with his critical friend, helped Yao …

Queerform/Ing, Matthew Solon-Lee Weimer

Art Theses and Dissertations

My artwork is situated within and around vessels and the Queer Homoerotic World and explores sexuality as a Demisexual within them. This is accomplished through the two processes of my creation, Minivague and Queerform/ing: balancing sexual tension and explicit expression, while subverting traditional norms and stereotypes with queerness to distance oneself from stereotypical Gay Art. Altering/emphasizing makes the artwork more romantic, lighter, whimsical, softer, and tender than the figure/s and the situations actually are. The process is also emphasizing what one sees or wants to be seen. The Pink Boy becomes a celebration of intimacy of any form. I discuss …

Aristotle's Division Of The Sciences And The Impossibility Of A Science Of Everything, Christopher Lutz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Aristotle’s division between practical, productive, and theoretical sciences is widely acknowledged, and it is uncontroversial to say that it organizes his texts. However, contemporary scholarship often treats the division of the sciences as a mere organizational structure without investigating its underlying principles. My dissertation seeks to correct this oversight by investigating the logical principles of Aristotle’s division of the sciences in the Posterior Analytics’ account of scientific knowledge (ἐπιστήμη). My central argument is that Aristotle sees the sciences as inherently divided, so that a demonstrative science of everything is impossible. By understanding why science is divided, we are better …

Intuition In Modal Epistemology: Concept-Based Or Imagination-Based?, Jeremy Bachman

Honors Scholar Theses

In both George Bealer’s moderate modal rationalism (MMR) and Peter Kung’s modal evidence from imagination (MEI) intuition plays an indispensable role in modal knowledge. However, these modal epistemologies differ in whether modal knowledge is based on intuitions yielded by concepts or by imaginations. Both MMR and MEI take intuitions to be sui generis propositional attitudes, basic epistemic units, reasons for belief, and sources of evidence. However, MEI holds that sensory and intellectual content can prompt a rational intuitions. On the other hand, MMR is restricted to intuitions yielded by non-sensory content. According to MMR, intellectual intuitions about privileged concepts give …

The Drivers Of Academic Novelty In Digital Capitalism: Job Insecurity, Mental Illness And Time Poverty, Adalberto Fernandes

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

The present-day digital capitalist academy increases novel academic results by leveraging factors such as precarious academic employment, time poverty, and mental illness. This paradigm reveals a confluence that turns seemingly negative aspects into productive elements. The consequence of this hypothesis is that by enhancing work, time and mental health conditions, there may be a reduction in the number of novelties, with an enhancement of academic's role as producers of truth.

Minds Among Minds: An Analysis Of Identity And The Self In The Hyperconnected World, Anabelle S. Bergstrom

Undergraduate Fellows' Research

Since the dawn of online environments such as social media platforms, individuals have coupled their social lives with their online presence in various formats such as through posting, commenting, following, and liking the media others publish on media outlets such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter (now known as X), TikTok, and others. The rise of the widespread use of social media in the 21st century has fueled a divide between the in-person world and the virtual world. This gap can impact not only one’s self-identity but their social identity as well. This raises an important question about human sociality in the …

An Egalitarian Approach To Explanations In Mental Disorders, Eli Driskill

Theses

Explanations of mental disorders come from a wide array of disciplines and epistemologies. How we conceive of and order these explanations has great importance for agency. Yet, psychiatry as a discipline has long suffered from the assumption that these explanations are multi-level. That is, some lower-level mechanism (i.e. neurobiology) constrains the information produced at a higher-level behavior. I argue that this approach is unsatisfying, and offer a new perspective: the egalitarian approach to mental disorders. The egalitarian model of mental disorders is non-hierarchical, dynamic, and cross-cultural. The paper begins by highlighting an inherent feature of psychiatry which I coin the …

Criticisms Of Evidentialism:A Critique Of Jonathan Way’S Solutions To The Issues Of Evidentialism, Kailey Echeverria

Global Tides

This paper will begin with a brief introduction of Richard Feldman and Earl Conee’s definitions and examples ascribed to their original argument for Evidentialism in order to provide context for the remainder of the paper. The paper will turn to Jonathan Way’s concerns surrounding the original argument for Evidentialism, and break down his revamped definitions of Evidentialism and what Way calls “incentives”. Then, the paper will turn to Way’s solutions to the concerns he addressed, where he introduces the “argument from good reasoning” and the Link principal, a modified and refreshed version of Feldman and Conee’s “argument from reasoning”. Further …

On Learning Your Gender: A Comprehensive View, Audra M. Hazelwood

Theses

This essay provides a metaphysical and epistemological account of gender. The metaphysics involves a ‘non-reductionist view of gender’, which is to say that gender cannot be reduced to a single factor. On this view gender begins with one’s innate gender inclinations (in the vein of Julia Serano). These inclinations pick out a specific range of gender possibilities from the gender spectrum that apply to a person. At the same time we live in communities and cultures with certain gender norms. This is where epistemology comes into play since our gender inclinations are filtered through gender norms and some people are …

Mythos And Logos: Foucauldian Subjectivities Of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Hayley R. Cisney

Student Publications

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography details a centuries-long battle between Orlando and the sexual structures of repressive power in England. The biographical framework of the novel implies its contribution to objective, historical fact, while the miraculous nature of Orlando’s sexual transformation directly conflicts with constituted epistemologies of being. This paper examines these contrasting forces through Michel Foucault’s post-structuralist considerations of knowledge, power, and sexuality, in addition to the incorporation of other scholarship on Woolf’s conceptions of gender. I specifically follow the timeline of Foucault’s interpretation of the repressive hypothesis as it unfolds throughout the course of Woolf’s novel. By establishing …

Working Logic Parameter Types And Philosophical Assumptions Of Selected Evaluation Approaches—A Descriptive Qualitative Analysis, Thomas J. Lyzenga

Dissertations

The purpose of the study is to enhance the selection and use of selected contemporary evaluation approaches through the development of a descriptive profile that combines the parameters of their working logics and their philosophical assumptions. The profile provides a unique structure to understand, identify, select, and apply evaluation approaches. I catalogued 86 evaluation approaches described in 13 sources that discuss multiple evaluation approaches and applied citation analysis to identify the most used or most quickly growing approaches. For 11 of the commonly used evaluation approaches, I identified the seven features of the feature profiles through a qualitative content analysis …

The Myths Of Plato: Socratic Kenosis And The Call Of Beauty, Daniel Edward Shirley

Master of Arts in Classical Studies

The myths of Plato have been inordinately subordinated to the “intellect” of Plato since the eighteen-thirties. The ancient Christian tradition of interpreting stories and scriptures with symbolic understanding serves as a potentially primary hermeneutical pattern that could correct the modern tendency of subconscious materialism. To restore the Platonic myths, there are two foundational arguments to be made about the myths. The first is that these myths are kenotic in function. Observing the Socratic call to self-emptying, especially in the cosmological image of the World Axis, challenges modern assumptions concerning the second goodness of Platonic myth. The second argument is the …

Of Method: A Propaedeutic To Coleridge's Prose Works, Michael A. Granger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Coleridge’s prose works, published and unpublished, demonstrate a thorough and critical testing and understanding of British and German philosophical responses to skepticism and the ability of philosophy to progress by maintaining a double-minded and conflicted suture of both the practical or imaginative eclipse of knowledge and theorizing the hypothetical epistemological absolute that explains the relativity of facticity. Any inadequate method of inquiry stagnates within attempting a purely figurative or purely demonstrative solution to skepticism. Thus, the appropriate way to approach Coleridge’s understanding of philosophy is the struggle to make inquiry adequate though progression. Coleridge’s methodological impulse originates explicitly in a …

Racial-Sexual Normativity In/As Narratives Of “The Human”, Jeri Brand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis synthesizes Sylvia Wynter’s and Judith Butler’s models of identity-formation to analyze discourses of racialization and sex/gender difference in normative scientific theories of “the human.” I argue that eugenicist white supremacism and sex/gender normativity form a single conceptual framework – what I call “the racial-sexual matrix” – throughout these scientific narratives. I then trace an epistemological consistency across 18^th- through 21^st-century scientific literature as evidence for the ongoing legacies of coloniality, white supremacy, and eugenics in current hegemonic sex/gender ontologies. Finally, I contend that the racial-sexual matrix functions as an index of proper humanness not …

Organizational Good Epistemic Practices, Lisa Warenski

Publications and Research

Epistemic practices are an important but underappreciated component of business ethics; good conduct requires making epistemically sound as well as morally principled judgments. Well-founded judgments are promoted by epistemic virtues, and for organizations, epistemic virtues are arguably achieved through organizational good epistemic practices. But how are such practices to be developed? This paper addresses this normative and practical challenge. The first half of the paper explains what organizational good epistemic practices are and outlines a means for their construction. The second half of the paper demonstrates how specific good epistemic practices could be developed by considering a case of corporate …

Spacious Theories Of Object Relativity & Objective Reality Book Review For "Seven Brief Lessons On Physics" By Carlo Rovelli, Carmiella Salzberg Zorzi

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

An Arts-based Review of Carlo Rovelli’s 2016 book "Seven Brief Lessons on Physics" that incorporates original artworks by the book reviewer. This review concludes with the harvesting of an Expressive Arts Academic Consultation session that was informed by this work of Carlo Rovelli, among many other great creative thinkers in physics.

Tikkun Olam, Book Review For "Art-Care Practices For Restoring The Communal: Education, Co-Inquiry, And Healing” By Barbara A. Bickel And R. Michael Fisher, Valerie Oved Giovanini

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

A book review of Barbara A. Bickel’s and R. Michael Fisher’s "Art-Care Practices for Restoring the Communal: Education, Co-Inquiry, and Healing" published in 2023 by Routledge.

The Yes Of Soul: Book Review For "Poetry In Expressive Arts: Supporting Resilience Through Poetic Writing" By Margo Fuchs Knill & Sally S. Atkins, Katrina Plato, Lucien Zell

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Abstract

A book review of Margo Fuchs Knill’s and Sally S. Atkins’s “Poetry in Expressive Arts: Supporting Resilience through Poetic Writing” published in 2021 by Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Like the authors of the book, this review is written in partnership. Author and creative writing teacher Lucien Zell reflects on the book’s theme of resilience. Expressive arts professional Katrina Plato follows with a couple of her own poems and then work by clients in response to the book’s prompts.

Harvesting A Blessing, Alba Torres Robinat, Katrina Plato, Alexandra Goodall, Valerie Oved Giovanini, Sinem Lanacı

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

The process of collectively writing the Artizein articles in this issue has come to an end. In this video you can see how we harvested the gifts of our writing collaboration. Each of us made a visual artwork that we shaped as a creative digestion of our work together. The group responded to each members’ art through written words and movement. Each member then gave a final message that gathered what emerged and touched her from the group, the blessing.

Teaching Philosophy As A Pedagogic Practice-Ing: Are You The Type Of Person That Says, “Everything Happens For A Reason”?, Valerie Oved Giovanini Ph.D.

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

In this paper, I discuss a classroom activity that was intended to create an environment attentive enough for students to scrutinize whether their touted beliefs matched their implicit assumptions. Drawing upon Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face-to-face relation, Carol A. Taylor’s posthuman orientations for pedagogical practice-ings, and Bickel’s and Fisher’s emergent theory of art-care, I explore my pedagogical approach in teaching philosophy to explain how affective encounters in communitas between teacher and learners can expand personal understandings and imagine new meaningful possibilities together. These affective encounters serve an ethic of concern where each is capable of a unique response and …