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Full-Text Articles in Epistemology

The Possibility Of Post Binary Reflexivity: A Genealogy Of Binary Logic In Western Philosophy, Vaughan A. Bidois Jun 2026

The Possibility Of Post Binary Reflexivity: A Genealogy Of Binary Logic In Western Philosophy, Vaughan A. Bidois

Critical Humanities

This article traces a genealogy of binary logic within Western philosophy, from its origins in Platonic metaphysics through to its deconstruction in poststructuralist theory. Drawing on the genealogical methods of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, it critiques how oppositional structures, such as mind/body, reason/emotion, and truth/error, have persisted through shifting intellectual paradigms while shaping knowledge, power, and subjectivity. Structuralist and linguistic theories are examined for their role in reinforcing binary meaning-making, while poststructural critiques (notably Derrida and Foucault) are explored for their attempts to subvert such hierarchies. However, the article argues that these critiques remain paradoxically ensnared within the same …


Llms And Crisis Epistemology: The Business Of Making Old Crises Seem New, Mich Ciurria Dec 2023

Llms And Crisis Epistemology: The Business Of Making Old Crises Seem New, Mich Ciurria

Critical Humanities

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have set in motion a series of crises. These include disruptions to the labor force, education, and democracy. Some people believe that rich technocratic ‘saviors’ should solve these crises. Naomi Klein, however, argues that this is a neoliberal fantasy. Tech CEOs will not solve AI-related crises because they have a vested interest in perpetuating disaster capitalism and the social inequalities that keep wages low. Who, then, can solve the AI crisis? I submit that the answer is: oppressed groups with experiential and intergenerational knowledge of crises. To oppressed folks, technological crises are not new, …


Deep Disagreement And The Virtues Of Argumentative And Epistemic Incapacity, Jeremy Barris Sep 2018

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.


The Convergent Conceptions Of Being In Mainstream Analytic And Postmodern Continental Philosophy, Jeremy Barris Oct 2012

The Convergent Conceptions Of Being In Mainstream Analytic And Postmodern Continental Philosophy, Jeremy Barris

Humanities Faculty Research

There is ultimately a very close convergence between the conceptions of being in widely recurrent elements of both mainstream Anglo-American philosophy and mainstream postmodern Continental philosophy. One characteristic idea often drawn upon in Anglo-American or analytic philosophy is that we establish what has meaning (at all or as such) and so what we can say about what is, by making evident the limits of sense or what simply cannot be meant. A characteristic idea in Continental philosophy of being is that being emerges through contrast and interplay with what it is not, with what has no being at all and …


An Internal Connection Between Logic And Rhetoric, And A Legitimate Foundation For Knowledge, Jeremy Barris Jan 2007

An Internal Connection Between Logic And Rhetoric, And A Legitimate Foundation For Knowledge, Jeremy Barris

Humanities Faculty Research

It has often been argued that a theory that tries to justify itself fully is either viciously circular or produces an infinite regress of justifications. Thinking that tries to establish ultimate foundations for itself seems in the end to base itself on nothing but its own insistence that it is right. As a result it offers no real knowledge. As Robert Almeder notes, for example, a strong appeal attaches to arguments such as that "there is no non-question-begging way to answer questions such as 'Are you justified in believing your definition of justification?'"


The Problem Of Comparing Different Cultural Or Theoretical Frameworks: Davidson, Rorty, And The Nature Of Truth, Jeremy Barris Jan 2006

The Problem Of Comparing Different Cultural Or Theoretical Frameworks: Davidson, Rorty, And The Nature Of Truth, Jeremy Barris

Humanities Faculty Research

In comparing very different cultural, theoretical, or methodological standpoints, the nature of truth itself becomes a problem. If the standpoints have different conceptions of truth, a comparative approach that respects both involves the contradiction of conflicting legitimate claims to truth. But if we reject this contradiction, we eliminate the possibility that standpoints can have legitimately different conceptions of truth. And with that we reject the sense of a genuine comparison in this respect, rather than a reading of one framework in the light of the other. Davidson and Rorty have mounted especially powerful arguments against the very sense of this …


Review Of Derrida's Archive Fever And Caputo's Deconstruction In A Nutshell, Jeremy Barris Oct 1997

Review Of Derrida's Archive Fever And Caputo's Deconstruction In A Nutshell, Jeremy Barris

Humanities Faculty Research

Derrida's beautifully written and clear Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression is concerned with the establishment of Freud's London house as a museum or archive, with the interpretation of Freud's public and private texts as the source or archive of psychoanalytic science, and with the identification of sources and beginnings generally. Derrida's focus is on how psychoanalytic insights themselves problematise this identification. Caputo's Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida sets out specifically to correct widespread failures by Derrida's critics to notice the novelty of the implications of Derrida's position (48). The book consists in a 26-page record of …