Epistemology Commons^™

Traveling Epistemology, Or An Intersection Between Ethics And Epistemology Through The Philosophy Of Pragmatism., Pablo Patricio Olivas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The concept of traditional epistemology carries with it values and expectations that are rarely talked about. Based on the critiques of traditional epistemology by the pragmatist tradition, there is an opportunity to think of an alternative to the traditional view of epistemology as solely a theory of knowledge based on theories like the correspondence theory of truth. The concept of traveling epistemology serves as an alternative that questions the values of traditional epistemology, where things like certainty, and authority are expected in conjunction with a view of knowledge that rests on a mind-independent reality. Traveling epistemology offers a view that …

Exploring The Role Of Epistemic Cognition And Self-Efficacy In The Career Decision-Making Processes Of College Students: An Explanatory Sequential Study, Raelynn Frazier

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

College students are asked to make critical decisions about which academic major to choose and subsequently to make specific career decisions. Students come to college with a myriad of different skill sets, backgrounds, developmental levels, cognitive processes, familial support, and levels of self-efficacy that may influence how they make these decisions. The purpose of this study was to explore the role that epistemic cognition and self-efficacy may play in the career decision-making processes of college students utilizing a mixed methods approach. Results of this study indicate that there are internal and external influences that impact college students’ career decision-making processes …

Introduction To Confronting Teacher Preparation Epistemicide: Art, Poetry, And Teacher Resistance, Richard D. Sawyer, Daniel Ness

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

In this special issue, we present different perspectives from a documentary project on curricular epistemicide. We view curriculum epistemicide —the annihilation of curriculum—as an embodied process. It limits ways of knowing, questioning, and envisioning the world, and it constricts multiplicity and erases identity and culture. Authors within this volume responded to two requests: 1) they examined some form of epistemicide; and 2) they did not reinforce current systems of power and inequity. Throughout the issue, poetry and photography weave through theoretical papers and empirical studies. A range of methodologies are considered within the articles.

Death To Curriculum, M. Francyne Huckaby

Northwest Journal of Teacher Education

No abstract provided.

Life In The Multiverse: Bringing Chaos Out Of Order?, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This paper was given as the opening keynote address at the International Conference on Religion and Film at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on June 8, 2022, and is here presented in that form.

My thanks go to those who organized the conference for Vrije Universiteit, notably Professor Johan Roeland and Miranda van Holland.

Belonging Amidst Bias: Embracing Difference On The Path To Common Humanity, Alyssia Sheikh

Mindfulness Studies Theses

The mindfulness community prioritizes self-awareness and common humanity, but is often entrapped by the idea that oneness is equivalent to sameness. This inclination for objectivity is rooted in the same neural propensities that facilitate bias; the brain is a subjective organ, however, and so neurologically speaking, bias is inevitable. This paper asks: Is striving for sameness separating us from interconnectedness? A human experience is a subjective, diverse, and variable one. The path to shared humanity and social justice co-occurs with increasing cultural humility through mindful awareness and acknowledging our subjective nature. Exploring our neurological tendency to make assumptions, we …

Beyond True And False: Fake News And The Digital Epistemic Divide, Gilad Abiri, Johannes Buchheim

Michigan Technology Law Review

The massive fact-checking, flagging, and content removal campaigns run by major digital platforms during the 2020 elections and the Covid-19 pandemic did some good. However, they failed to prevent substantial portions of the population from believing that the election was stolen or that vaccinations are dangerous.

In this Article, we argue that the reason for the ineffectiveness of truth-based solutions—such as fact-checking— is that they do not reach the heart of the problem. Both scholars and policymakers share the implicit or explicit belief that the rise of digital fake news is harmful mainly because it spreads false information, which lays …

Epistemic Priors, Social Justice, And The Ethics Of Humor, Paul Butterfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I set out a theory of humor ethics and, in particular, I establish what difference humorousness makes to an instance of speech’s moral value. I set out by making the case for this approach to the topic, demonstrating that focusing on how humorous speech differs, morally, from non-humorous speech allows us to avoid getting caught up in prior ethical debates that are not strictly about humor itself – a shortcoming that is common to many treatments of humor ethics in the existing literature. I show that, in cases of humorous speech, we typically do not assert the …

Recovering Authenticity: Care, Conversation And Value, Shannon M. Brick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Suppose you learn that your steak-loving friend has just adopted a vegan diet. You ask her what prompted the change, and she tells you that someone she trusts recently tweeted “Eating meat is immoral.” Your friend’s response is a little disappointing and shallow, but why? Most of our knowledge comes from trusting what other people tell us, so why, when it comes to moral matters, does deference seem inappropriate? Some philosophers think it’s because moral testimony cannot transmit important epistemic goods, like knowledge or understanding. Others think that when people defer to moral testimony, their actions or characters will be …

Necessity, Essence And Analyticity: Toward An Analytic Essentialist Account Of Necessity, Dongwoo Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Some truths could not have failed to hold. Such are called metaphysically necessary truths. As Michael Dummett once aptly formulated, the philosophical problem about necessity is twofold: what makes necessary truths necessarily true and how do we recognize them as such? This dissertation aims to address these questions by developing and defending a novel account of necessity, which has the following three main theses: (1) the necessity of a statement about an entity is established as a consequence of a general principle implying that if the entity is a certain way then it is necessarily that way and the fact …

No History Or Society To Be Found: Object-Oriented Ontology And Social Ontology, Bennett B. Gilbert

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

It is widely theorized that the advent of the “Anthropocene Age” (under this or any other name) is bringing one form of human temporality to an end while it initiates another (Simon 2021). Because human activity threatens the duration and well-being of the planetary biosphere, the new age that this activity is bringing on—though it is proving to be extremely difficult to define—does present specific onto-epistemological and moral challenges behind its political and social problems. The most prominent and perhaps the core of these challenges is the demand to shed anthropocentrism in human culture, a change that would deeply alter …

Unraveling Dna And Identity: A Humanistic Perspective On Epistemologies And Ethics Of Genetic Ancestry Testing., Eve Carlisle Polley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The advent of DNA ancestry testing motivated a burst of human activities that constitute a scientific-technological-industrial-personal-social movement of immense scale, infused with epistemological and ethical questions of great and important variety. This movement has motivated many discourses in the social sciences, with study subjects ranging from the language usage of geneticists, to moral conundrums faced by test-takers, to potential ramifications in global structures of political power. At the same time, and especially in recent decades, the discourses of the comparative humanities have included with increasing frequency and urgency research and theorization about concepts and consequences of human social identities, alongside …

On Types Of Certainty: From Buddhism To Islam And Beyond, Michael Chase

Comparative Philosophy

Studies the threefold hierarchy of certainty, from its origins in Mahāyāna Buddhism, through Islam, to 17^th century China. This tripartite scheme may be traced back to the ancient Buddhist scheme of the threefold wisdom as systematized by Vasubandhu of Gandhāra in the 4th-5th centuries CE. Following the advent of Islam in the 8th century, it was combined with Qur'anic notions of certainty (al-yaqīn). Initially taken up by early Islamic mystics such as Sahl al-Tustarī and al-Ḥākim al-Tirmiḏī (late 9th-early 10th centuries), the notion of yaqīn was gradually systematized into the three-level hierarchy of “knowledge or science of …

Regret Is Born Where Choice Dies, Shane Ryan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper analyses regret. On the basis of a number of examples, the case is made that regret is a negative affective state that has a perceived past choice as its object. More precisely, S regrets φ-ing, iff, and because (i) S has a negative affective state regarding φ-ing (Negative Affect State Requirement), the experience of which is explained by (ii) S perceiving that an alternative choice that was available to her would have been preferable to φ-ing (Perceived Forking Path Requirement). The resulting account is differentiated from Williams’ agent-regret and shown to avoid problems faced by Zeelenberg’s definition of …

A Framework For Understanding How People Can Draw Different Conclusions Based On The Same Information, Evan Schapiro

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

At least partially fueled by misinformation, political polarization is growing in the United States, leading to a breakdown of confidence in our traditional academic and political institutions. A popular belief is that a solution is to train people to think more rationally by eliminating the cognitive biases embedded in their subconscious thought patterns. This paper identifies the influences on my thinking and the framework used to look at these issues from a different perspective through methodological believing and the application of models of learning and conversation. The paper also points out that the methods of scientific inquiry often assume that …

How Speech Act Theory Can Help Address Problems In Theology And Church Posed By Modern Philosophy, Charles W. Westby

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation

Westby, Charles W. “How Speech Act Theory Can Help Address Problems in Theology and Church Posed by Modern Philosophy.” Ph.D. diss., Concordia Seminary, 2022. 347 pp.

This dissertation analyzes modern idealism as developed by René Descartes and Immanuel Kant to show how modern philosophy has impacted conservative theology, focusing on the theology of Carl F. H. Henry. The relationship between theology and philosophy is analyzed in terms of foundationalism, using postliberal theological analysis propounded by Hans Frei and George Lindbeck. Speech Act Theory as propounded by J. L. Austin and John R. Searle is used to critique modern idealism in …

Metaphysical Coherentism, Jan Swiderski

Dissertations - ALL

I defend metaphysical coherentism, according to which reality is an interdependent network, system, or web, held together by a relation philosophers call "metaphysical explanation" or "grounding". If coherentism is true, nothing is ungrounded, things ground each other, and understanding what it is to be any given thing – a tree, a house, or a person – is grasping how it fits in: how it grounds and is grounded by its environment.

Coherentism is inconsistent with a widely-accepted, orthodox view of grounding, according to which certain fundamental facts about reality asymmetrically determine everything else. In Chapter 1, I argue that this …

Counter-Archival Surplus: Remembering The Partisan Rupture In Post-Socialist Times, Gal Kirn

Artl@s Bulletin

The article departs critically from the postsocialist condition in Yugoslavia marked by conservative revisionism that transformed the memorial landscape. The nation-building process took a clearly negative attitude towards the Yugoslav, socialist and partisan/antifascist past. The first part of the text will shortly present the notion of »counter-archive« and the central features of the method. The second part of the text will offer a short analysis of four case studies: A short partisan poem written by Iztok, a drawing by Dore Klemenčič, a partisan dance by Marta Paulin and a partisan film by Rudi Omota.

The Brain Scan As Ideograph, Paige Welsh

English (MA) Theses

Medical imaging devices have enabled doctors to render images of the brain without cutting into the body. These images are colloquially called “brain scans.” Through journalism and mass dissemination online, brain scans have become an example of Michael Calvin McGee’s “ideograph,” a language term that subtly takes on outsized political and symbolic meaning to enforce state power. In conversation with theories of new materialism, I situate the brain scan as an ideograph within Jenny Edbauer’s model of rhetorical ecologies. The rhetorical force of the brain scan comes out of a collision between René Descarte’s mind/body dualism, the medical model of …

Down The Misinformation Rabbit Hole: Falling Or Jumping In?, Alex Siebenmorgen

Philosophy Undergraduate Honors Theses

The primary goal of this paper is to determine in which cases, if any, an individual is culpable for adopting, expressing, or acting upon a misinformed belief. To determine this, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms by which individuals select beliefs and the biases or mistakes that lead them to adopt false ones. I will compare and evaluate the views of Neil Levy and Dan Kahan, who offer opposing viewpoints on the source of misinformed beliefs. I will also consider the attempts to model belief adoption and expression through signaling theory. Finally, I will propose a particular standard to …

Impact Of Mentoring On Epistemic Cognition Of Higher Education Administrators: A Modified Explanatory Mixed Methods Study, Robert Levrant

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In today’s complex workplace, organizations have implemented mentoring programs to serve the needs of employees by providing career development and personal support. Mentoring relationships provide a variety of vocational, psychosocial and role modeling functions to protégés. Previous educational psychology research has examined the role of mentoring as it relates to self-regulation, self-efficacy, career promotions, motivation and other constructs. Epistemic cognition relates to the understanding of the nature of knowledge and knowing. Epistemic cognition relates to the development, in which one’s understanding of knowledge evolves from a belief that knowledge is finite, must be passed down by expert authorities toward an …

Researcher-Participant Privilege: Confidentiality And Qualitative Criminology, Eric Michael

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Research institutions have the responsibility to comply with laws that govern the oversight of all research including research with human subjects. Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) review research protocols and approve research based on the rights and safety of research subjects. When conducting qualitative criminological research, researchers must weigh ethical considerations around their methods. These methodological considerations are coupled with guiding ethical principles that are fundamental to human subject research. One major consideration regards breaking confidentiality which can bring about great risk to participants. The following thesis focuses on the ethics of researcher-participant privilege and issues that qualitative researchers have in …

Cognitive Tribalism: A Social Doxastic Model, Robert Ragsdale

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How are facemasks – seemingly innocuous artifacts of the biomedical industry – currently embroiled in cultural wars? What motivates popular rejections of scientific consensus and messaging about the reality and consequences of anthropogenic climate change or the COVID-19 virus and vaccine? The puzzle is that (a) despite its being in everyone’s rational interests to have a well-informed public and body politic about collective threats, and (b) despite the public availability of accurate and reliable information, scientific messaging and public discourse surrounding climate change, COVID-19, and vaccine hesitancy, nevertheless, tend to be hijacked by political interest. Yet, if belief is essentially …

Collective, Vulnerable, Nascent (Post) Qualitative Inquiry-Writing, Catherine Thiele, Stephen Heimans, Catherine Manathunga, Suzanne Barry, Benjamin Cherry-Smith, Kristy Farrelly, Terry Grogan, Robyn Kemble, Lisa Mcilwain

The Qualitative Report

As a group of multidisciplinary postgraduate research students and teachers emerging as a “we,” we read, discussed, and then, without planning to do so, responded in writing to the textual provocations of three post qualitative texts. We picture ourselves as a “classing,” a “becoming class” (Meirieu, 2020, para. 1.). We are a study-group-thinking-writing experimentation; vulnerable, wobbling and joyously grappling to (re)shape (our) post qualitative inquiries. The experiment offered a scholarly place to critically, creatively, and softly curate post qualitative questions and wonderings. The writings below offer a lure into our nascent post-qualitative vulnerabilities. The purpose of this paper is to …

Where Epistemology And Metaphysics Touch In Lois Lowry's The Giver, Seth Vannatta

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

In Lois Lowry’s dystopian young adult novel, The Giver, the veil of perception— the gap between appearance and reality— is woven into the community as a policy measure meant to establish Sameness—the effort to insure a world without conflict, inequality, difference, pain, or freedom of choice. But a question lingers in the premise of the novel’s community. Given that our options for bridging the gap amount to building a bridge of experience across it or digging a tunnel of existence under it, has the bridge been sabotaged to render perception spurious, or has the tunnel been blocked to alter reality …

A Festival Of Form: Score, Anthony Elia

Bridwell Library Research

"A Festival of Form" was both an event at Bridwell and Perkins School of Theology and a conceptual piece of music that lasted several days. In this rendering, the "piece of music" was articulated in a fluid combination of activities that included works by other composers, including John Cage. The activities involved--from lectures, conversations, and meals to actual performances of both short works and especially the world-record breaking rendition of "Organ2/ASLSP" played by Christopher Anderson--comprise the entirety of "A Festival of Form" as performance piece. The challenge of this work is that unlike nearly any other music, it is purposely …

Knowledge Through Divine Light: Ghazali’S Notions Of Mystical Cognition, Maisara Maasoum Marzouk

The Undergraduate Research Journal

Illumination, or knowledge through divine light, is a type of mystical cognition that Abu Hamid Ghazali regarded to be the cause of his rescue from his famous skeptical crisis. According to him, this type of divine knowledge is the apex of knowledge, to which all other sciences are subordinate. The receptive organ of this knowledge is the heart, a divine and cognitive subtlety that is distinct though related to the physical heart. Such is done by removing the veils that obstruct divine light from reaching it by means of the science of unveiling. The disclosure of knowledge that occurs once …

Book Review: Reckonings: Numerals, Cognition, And History By Stephen Chrisomalis, Milton Rosa, Daniel Clark Orey

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This review of Reckonings shares our thoughts on the diverse insights presented by Stephen Chrisomalis’s version of the history of numerical notation. Chrisomalis suggests that members of distinct cultural groups write numbers as an active choice in accordance with their own sociocultural contexts, which reflect the influences of historical, cognitive, social, economic, political, environmental, and cultural factors. This book integrates comparative, cognitive, and evolutionary understandings on numerical cognition with historical and linguistic evidence on the use and transformation of numeral systems through the historical advancement of numeracy. Chrisomalis offers an interesting historical perspective on numbers that builds upon three main …

Theory Of Knowledge In The Tretise Of Al-Gazali “Al-Kistasu-Lmustakim” (Right Scales), Kodirov Davronbek

The Light of Islam

Today, one of the urgent tasks of the social sciences is the construction of the Third Renaissance in our country, the transfer of the heritage of our ancestors to the younger generation, and their education in the spirit of moral and spiritual ideas based on Islamic philosophy. Therefore, it is important to study and research the sources that underlie the religious and philosophical views that have been formed and consolidated in our country for centuries. One of these philosophical writings is Al-Qistasu-l-Mustakim (Right scales) by Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad alGhazali, a thinker, lawyer, philosopher, and mystic who lived and …

The Scope Of Inductive Risk, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

The Argument from Inductive Risk (AIR) is taken to show that values are inevitably involved in making judgements or forming beliefs. After reviewing this conclusion, I pose cases which are prima facie counterexamples: the unreflective application of conventions, use of black-boxed instruments, reliance on opaque algorithms, and unskilled observation reports. These cases are counterexamples to the AIR posed in ethical terms as a matter of personal values. Nevertheless, it need not be understood in those terms. The values which load a theory choice may be those of institutions or past actors. This means that the challenge of responsibly handling inductive …