Epistemology Commons^™

How Racial Injustice Causes Ignorance, Eric Bayruns

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

According to a (Jones and Saad) 2016 Gallup poll 69% of US whites and 32% of US blacks believe that blacks and whites have equal opportunity in the US job market. Much ink has been spilt showing that this belief is false (Alcoff 2015; Anderson 2010; Bertrand and Mullainathan 2003; Fricker 2007; McConahay 1983; Mills 1997; Mills 2007; Stanley 2015). But if its falsity is well publicized, then why do so many people persist in believing this falsehood? In this dissertation, I argue that racial injustice and whites’ current dominant-group status explains why such a high percentage of people in …

Signals In The Black Stack / Geometyr Design Manual, Jason T. Scaglione

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following white paper provides a critical accompaniment to my capstone project: the GEOMEtyr Design Manual. GEOMEtyr is a virtual reality to be made accessible as a mobile and web platform for the visualization of certain systemic elements of a utopic world that parallels our own planet’s geographies, polities, and climates. As such, the GEOMEtyr virtualization is designed to derive utopian space from the informational structures of our own world. The operations by which this may be accomplished are broadly described within the accompanying GEOMEtyr manual. The white paper, Signals in the Black Stack, elaborates vital world-building characteristics of informational …

Is Ai Intelligent, Really?, Bruce D. Baker

SPU Works

The question of intelligence opens up a bouquet of interrelated questions:

Suppose that some future AGI systems (on-screen or robots) equaled human performance. Would they have real intelligence, real understanding, real creativity? Would they have selves, moral standing, free choice? Would they be conscious? And without consciousness, could they have any of those other properties?[1]

The only way out of the morass is to recognize that truth claims do not stand on their own, aloof and cut off from the sea of meaning which grants epistemic access. In other words, truth presumes access to: (1) a way of knowing, …

Replies To Laura Guerrero, Rachanna Kamtekar, And Jennifer Nagel, Ethan A. Mills

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Classical Indian Skepticism: Reforming Or Rejecting Philosophy, Jennifer Nagel

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

The Presuppositions Of A Skeptic, Rachana Kamtekar

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Don’T Stop Believing: An Argument Against Buddhist Skepticism, Laura Guerrero

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Overview, Ethan A. Mills

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Implicit Bias And The Boundaries Of Belief: A Single-Representational Dual-Attitude Account Of Implicit Attitudes, Austin Dakota Synoground

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since their inception, implicit attitudes have been defined as associative mental states, separate from beliefs, which are considered to be propositional in nature. Recently, several philosophers have challenged this distinction, arguing that implicit attitudes are actually unconscious beliefs. In turn, I argue that the attitudes detected by current experimental paradigms are blind to distinctions between implicit attitudes, which I define as the products of an associative learning mechanism, and unconscious beliefs, which are the products of a propositional learning mechanism. Specifically, I argue for a single-representational dual-attitude account of implicit bias.

Wholeheartedness And Acquaintance With God, Sarah Naomi Dannemiller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I demonstrate that wholeheartedness is a constitutive intellectual virtue. Wholeheartedness consists of a definite and unified volitional structure in which one’s desires are integrated around union with God and which contributes to one’s personal intellectual worth by positively orienting her toward acquaintance with God. Since wholeheartedness consists of a hierarchy of the will that prioritizes a desire for union with God, wholeheartedness aims towards the epistemic good of acquaintance. By desiring that one have a will that wills union with God, she cooperates with God toward wholeheartedness. As one becomes aware of her volitional structure changing, she …

The Color Of Water: An Autoethnographically-Inspired Journey Of My Becoming A Researcher, Trude Klevan, Bengt Karlsson, Alec Grant

The Qualitative Report

In this paper, the first author autoethnographically describes, discusses and reflects on her process of becoming a researcher based on her PhD journey. She explores how the development of knowledge and her understandings of what counts as knowledge is entangled with her personal and professional development. The second and third authors join with her to explore and comment on the ways in which her doctoral topic knowledge and her process of becoming a researcher co-evolved. On this basis, all authors challenge and trouble what counts as qualitative knowledge and inquiry in contemporary academia and discuss the need for the provision …

A Metacognitive Approach To Trust And A Case Study: Artificial Agency, Ioan Muntean

Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings

Trust is defined as a belief of a human H (`the trustor') about the ability of an agent A (the `trustee') to perform future action(s). We adopt here dispositionalism and internalism about trust: H trusts A iff A has some internal dispositions as competences. The dispositional competences of A are high-level metacognitive requirements, in the line of a naturalized virtue epistemology. (Sosa, Carter) We advance a Bayesian model of two (i) confidence in the decision and (ii) model uncertainty. To trust A, H demands A to be self-assertive about confidence and able to self-correct its own models. In the Bayesian …

“To Be Men, Not Destroyers”: Developing Dabrowskian Personalities In Ezra Pound’S The Cantos And Neil Gaiman’S American Gods, Michelle A. Nicholson

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Kazimierz Dabrowski’s psychological theory of positive disintegration is a lesser known theory of personality development that offers an alternative critical perspective of literature. It provides a framework for the characterization of postmodern protagonists who move beyond heroic indoctrination to construct their own self-organized, autonomous identities. Ezra Pound’s The Cantos captures the speaker-poet’s extensive process of inner conflict, providing a unique opportunity to track the progress of the hero’s transformation into a personality, or a man. American Gods is a more fully realized portrayal of a character who undergoes the complete paradigmatic collapse of positive disintegration and deliberate self-derived self-revision …

Universe Of Things: A Human Presentation Of Food-For-Thought., Madeline Halpern

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

I present this statement under three loose categories: People, Objects and their Environment. I consider People as human, Objects as art objects, domestic objects, and food, and Environment as the shared space of the former groups. Food directs this statement as I present each concept and creative process as a metaphorical dish. Material exploration carried me from a direct practice of reorienting acrylic paint and questioning object functionality through personified sculptures into theoretical thesis work in which I use interpersonal relations and the idea of consumption to translate tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensations into digital film. In this meal I …

Qualia, The Heart Of The Mind-Body Problem And Epistemology’S Quagmire, Allison Mangan

Augsburg Honors Review

Qualia are layered and complex, a labyrinth of a concept, rife with debate as to their existence, state, and what they mean for our understanding of knowledge, relationship with the world, and ourselves. Thoughtful exploration into the complexities of what qualia are and how they relate to the mind-body problem will be wrestled with though research applied within this paper.

The Ethics Of Occultic Communication: An Invocation Of Joshua Gunn And Sissela Bok, James Thomas Begley Jr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Occultic rhetoric, according to Joshua Gunn, is a genre of discourse concerned with the study and practice of secret communications. The strategic sharing of secret messages involves a host of methods and conventions designed for the selective disclosure of hidden knowledge, thus controlling the boundaries of (and accessibility to power between) insider and outsider groups. Occultic rhetoric has its uses in everyday encounters, but the abuse of such manipulative strategies, especially by those in the academy and other positions of power and trust, calls for an ethical response. This dissertation submits occultic rhetoric to moral investigation by incorporating the works …

The Contradiction Of Representation In Levinas's Command Of The Other And The Possibility Of Responding Through The Dialogicality Of The Self, Robert Claflin

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Emmanuel Levinas views the phenomenological tradition as being predicated on an asymmetrical relationship between the self and the other in which the self possesses the power to dominate and represent the other. This leads to the reduction of the other to the same. Instead, he wants to flip this relationship in favor of the other by showing how the very qualities of alterity and infinity enable the other to resist the self’s attempts at representation. Furthermore, he conceives of an ethics in which the self is compelled to listen to the other’s command and respond accordingly. The inherent issue in …

Who Needs Blame?: Answerability Without Expressed Blame, Sarah Gokhale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that we can hold other agents morally responsible without expressing blame and, more strongly, that doing so is preferable. I first argue that blame is fundamentally retributive, and that blame’s retributive foundation is incipiently present even in civilized guises. As such, even though some forms of expressed blame are quite civilized, expressed blame always involves a risk of emotional damage, entrenchment, and escalation. To make things worse, I argue that anger is an exacerbating feature of blame’s retributive foundation. I then argue that, generally speaking, cases of public blame involve higher stakes than cases of private judgments …

Will-Independent Mereological Trinity Monotheism: A Defense Of The Logical Coherence Of, A Priori Motivation For, And A Particular Model Concerning The Doctrine Of The Trinity, Andrew Kirschner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The doctrine posits that God is one being, but three persons. The orthodox parameters for affirming the Trinity are found in the early Ecumenical Creeds of Christendom, especially the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. Four primary affirmations emerge as a summary of the essential content of the doctrine: (ONE): There is one God; (THREE): The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct divine persons; (FATHERSOURCE): The Father is the source of the Son and the Holy Spirit (perhaps with the Son, perhaps not); and (EQUALITY): The three persons in the Trinity are ontologically equal; none is greater than any of the …

The Epistemic And Psychological Mechanisms Perpetuating Racism Within The Criminal Justice System, Danielle Walker

Theses

Abstract

Many attempts have been made by philosophers, political activists, psychologists, historians, social advocates, and others to explain the mechanisms at play in the perpetuation and resulting manifestations of systemic and institutional racism. On one side of the debate there lies a theory that there is an epistemic failure at the root of racial bias towards Blacks, white ignorance, a collective amnesia regarding what has and does take place in society, as it pertains to their oppression and isolation, like the view of philosopher Charles W. Mills. According to Mills, this type of ignorance, or non-knowing, is a cognitive phenomenon …

Fatal Attractions, Elective Affinities, And Deadly Epistemologies, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This article cites film, the novel, and news report to underline the deadly seriousness of the quest for knowledge.

Reworking The White-Masculine Ideal, Steven H. Gonzalez

Art Theses and Dissertations

This text functions as an exploration of self through artistic practice, a designated space for reflection on contemporary Queer experience. In looking specifically at the permeation of the idealized-white-masculine figure as found within Western visual culture, social media and gay pornography become isolated as sites where these figures are commonly found. This line of inquiry defines how the ideal is reified through these differing digital platforms and the social implications the homogenized male form has on raced individuals. In addition to determining the image of the perfect masculine physique through research, this text expands on how its' imaged representation becomes …

On The Lived Experience Of Truth In An Era Of Educational Reform: Co-Responding To Anti-Intellectualism, Matthew J. Kruger-Ross

Educational Foundations & Policy Studies Faculty Publications

The severity of the challenges made to traditionally and historically accepted understandings of truth, what is true, what is false and “fake,” and even what is real, continues unabated in American public discourse. Nevertheless, the primary argument in this paper does not aim to identify the causes of the breakdown of representation (i.e. in the Trump administration, within the education reform movement) and the correspondence-based conceptions of truth. Instead, the focus is on discussing the hermeneutic phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and offering a conceptualization of truth as lived and experienced. Challenges to truth are to be understood not as an …

Critical Embodied Praxis For Social Justice And Peace Educators: A Story Of Personal Transformation Through Analysis Of My Jewish And Settler Identities, Cara Michelle Silverberg

Capstone Collection

In this paper, I examine definitions of and relationships between violence, oppression, peace, liberation, and embodiment in the context of critical pedagogy in order to construct a theory of critical embodied praxis for social justice and peace educators. Considering the body to be a tangible vessel through which narratives and mechanisms of violence are expressed and maintained, I explore the potential of the body to be a vessel through which liberatory narratives may be generated and shared. After constructing a theory of critical embodied praxis, I illustrate this framework in action through a personal narrative that explores the intersections …

Collaborative Disagreement: Coming To See The Evidence In A New Light, Erin Wiebe

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Many disagreements regarding complex matters are essentially disagreements about how evidence ought to be assessed. After all, the way in which one assigns weight and strength to various pieces of evidence determines what one believes. These “evidential valuations” are the product of one’s previous experiences and background beliefs. One’s evidential valuations are determined by the ways of understanding the world one acquires from past evidence and the authority figures one recognizes. Accordingly, the greater the difference in two individuals’ background experiences, the greater the difference in their evidential valuations. Thus, disagreements over complex matters such as philosophy, religion, and politics …

Collaborative Disagreement: Coming To See The Evidence In A New Light, Erin Wiebe

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Many disagreements regarding complex matters are essentially disagreements about how evidence ought to be assessed. After all, the way in which one assigns weight and strength to various pieces of evidence determines what one believes. These “evidential valuations” are the product of one’s previous experiences and background beliefs. One’s evidential valuations are determined by the ways of understanding the world one acquires from past evidence and the authority figures one recognizes. Accordingly, the greater the difference in two individuals’ background experiences, the greater the difference in their evidential valuations. Thus, disagreements over complex matters such as philosophy, religion, and politics …

Academia Will Not Save You: Stories Of Being Continually “Underrepresented”, Lynette Deaun Guzmán

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

My entire life I have had to navigate educational structures labeled (by other people) as “underrepresented” in my fields—mathematics and mathematics education. As many people who are similarly labeled in this way know, this meant I had to navigate oppressive structures that positioned me as lesser (e.g., white supremacy, patriarchy). Making sense of these repeated interactions, I wrote my dissertation as a series of three articles, each prefaced with an essay that situated a broader social, cultural, and political context and also connected to my lived experiences navigating academia. These essays were some of my most personal academic writing, and …

The Rise And Fall Of The Fact (Research Materials), Holy Cross Libraries

Library Resources for Campus Events

A bibliography of resources available through the Holy Cross Libraries which provide additional information related to "The Rise and Fall of the Fact" a lecture by award-winning author and speaker Jill Lepore held at the College of the Holy Cross on January 31, 2019.

Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University who teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, humanistic inquiry, and American history. Much of her scholarship explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the histories and technologies of evidence and of privacy. As a wide-ranging and …

Inferring And Explaining, Jeffery L. Johnson

PDXOpen: Open Educational Resources

Inferring and Explaining is a book in practical epistemology. It examines the notion of evidence and assumes that good evidence is the essence of rational thinking. Evidence is the cornerstone of the natural, social, and behavioral sciences. But it is equally central to almost all academic pursuits and, perhaps most importantly, to the basic need to live an intelligent and reflective life.

The book further assumes that a particular model of evidence— Inference to the Best Explanation—not only captures the essence of (good) evidence but suggests a very practical, and pedagogically useful, procedure for evidence evaluation. The book is intended …

Glancing Back At The Camel’S Hump: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Of Saudi Family Therapists’ Dual Epistemologies, Rana M. F. Banaja

Department of Family Therapy Dissertations and Applied Clinical Projects

Since family therapy was brought only recently to Saudi Arabia, studies exploring the field in this context are few. This dissertation will be the first to focus on the self of the Saudi Arabian family therapist (SAFT). In particular, it will be the first to pay close attention to SAFTs’ ways of dealing with the differing and, perhaps, incompatible epistemologies of Saudi culture and religion on one side, and systemic thinking and family therapy on the other. This study seeks to shed a phenomenological light on what informs SAFTs and what influences their work. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), I …