Epistemology Commons^™

Knowledge Studies, Jay Bernstein

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Intellectual And Curricular Spaces Of Knowledge Studies, Jay H. Bernstein

Publications and Research

The words “knowledge” and “information” are sometimes used interchangeably, but the connection between them is complex and problematic. Knowledge is a mental product gained from engaging with information. All educational subjects, scholarly disciplines, occupations, and activities produce knowledge as well as information. Because libraries encompass potentially all subjects, professional vision in librarianship would benefit from an examination of knowledge that transcends the methods and topical concerns of individual disciplines. An interdisciplinary (or transdisciplinary) framework in which to view knowledge was pioneered in the post-Sputnik age by Fritz Machlup and Michael Polanyi. Their insights have stimulated scholars to develop research, publications, …

David-Hillel Ruben’S 'Traditions And True Successors': A Critical Reply, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Learning From Experience: A Philosophical Perspective, Ethan Landes

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This work examines philosophical solutions to David Hume’s problem of induction—a skeptical attack on our ability to learn from experience. I explore the logical, ontological, and epistemic difficulties behind the everyday assumption that the future will resemble the past. While historical solutions by philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper have been unsuccessful at tackling these complications, combining recent work on natural kinds and naturalistic epistemology has promise. Ultimately, I expand on work done by Howard Sankey, Hilary Kornblith, and Brian Ellis to create an account of nature and epistemology that explains why objects in nature have predictable behavior. …

A Presuppositional Rejection Of Enlightenment Evidentialism, Ethan P. Rogers

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Epistemology is concerned with the nature of knowledge, truth, and the justification of belief. Epistemology of religion considers these issues in relation to religious truth claims (e.g., whether or not it is reasonable to believe that God exists). Often, the epistemology of religion leads to inquiry into fundamental attitudes towards the criteria for justification. For example, a major strain of contemporary epistemology of religion has been characterized “as a debate over whether evidentialism applies to the belief component of faith, or whether we should instead adopt a more permissive epistemology.” Thus, whether or not evidentialism is the appropriate approach to …

Knowing Knowledge, Noel Fitzpatrick

Articles

The position of the Art Academy in relation to third level education seems to be on the agenda in a number of ways at the moment. Recently at IMMA there was a panel discussion on the topic of “Art Academy+Knowing” in the context of the I Know You exhibition which is takign place there at the moment, but also within the wider sector there seems to be a sequence of alliances between the tradition Art College and third level education. The movement towards more integration of the stand alone Art Colleges and third level education is high on the agenda …

Ralph Waldo Emerson: From Buddhism To Transcendentalism, The Beginning Of An American Literary Tradition, Irene Jue

English

No abstract provided.

Intersections In Immanence: Spinoza, Deleuze, Negri, Abigail Lowe

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The connection between French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Italian political theorist Antonio Negri has drawn attention in academic publications over the last decade. For both thinkers, the philosophical concept of immanence is central to how both respectively conceptualize the world. However, in order to consider their work with regard to a metaphysical grounding, one may benefit from turning to each thinker’s engagement with Jewish Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza whose immanent ontology, or monism, was indeed his Ethics. This essay concentrates on drawing out an ontological distinction between the philosophical projects of Deleuze and Negri by way of a close reading …

Removing The Classical Landmark: Assessing An Epistemology Governed By Methodological Naturalism, Kegan Shaw

Masters Theses

This paper proposes to assess the naturalist project in epistemology with an eye towards exposing the project as deficient for serving as a robust epistemological project. Epistemologists treasure a certain family of questions and burden themselves with a number of specific concerns the most important of which, I think, cannot be answered by the epistemological naturalist. Ignoring these questions, I will argue, essentially amounts to a dismissal of the principle tension that primarily motivates and properly guides epistemological theorizing. This tension is the familiar appearance vs. reality distinction and characterizes what I am calling the classical landmark or boundary-stone for …

The Untenability Of A Priori Prior Probabilities In Objective Bayesian Conditionalization, C.S. Arledge

Senior Honors Theses

The problem of theory confirmation has been an issue in the philosophy of science for decades. Many valiant attempts have been made to formulate a generally accepted criterion for determining the validity of a scientific theory. Bayesian probability theory has been utilized in numerous attempts to examine the epistemic nature of theory confirmation and Jonathan Weisberg offers a formulation of Bayesian Conditionalization that he believes to be both objective and successful.

In this paper I intend to show the defects in Weisberg’s theory of objective Bayesian confirmation by utilizing the arguments of both W.V. Quine and Bas van Fraassen to …

Epistemology In "Stalker", Travis Wheeler

Cinesthesia

No abstract provided.

Unhinged: Kairos And The Invention Of The Untimely, Robert Leston

Publications and Research

Traditionally, kairos has been seen as a “timely” concept, and so invention is said to emerge from the timeliness of a cultural and historical situation. But what if invention was thought of as the potential to shift historical courses through the injection of something new or alien into a situation? This essay argues that kairos has not been able to free itself from its historical constraints because it has been bound to a human sense of temporality. By evolving along patterns different from print, the apparatus of the cinema developed in a way where it was not bound to illustrating …

Fideism, Evidentialism, And The Epistemology Of Religious Belief, Matthew P. Butcher

Dissertations

Fideism is the theory that certain propositions can be held by faith without regard to evidence. Its epistemological underpinnings are often contrasted with evidentialism - the view that one is justified in holding a belief if and only if that belief is based on sufficient undefeated evidence. Recently, John Bishop and C. Stephen Evans have each forwarded new theories of fideism that oppose evidentialism. This dissertation examines these two theories, raising problems that threaten to undermine the epistemological claims of the fideist. A version of evidentialism is then advanced that addresses the problems identified by Evans and Bishop. Particularly important …

Carruthers And Constitutive Self-Knowledge, John C. Hill

Student Publications

In his recent book, The Opacity of Mind, Peter Carruthers advances a skeptical theory of self-knowledge, integrating results from experimental psychology and cognitive science. In this essay, I want to suggest that the situation is not quite as dire as Carruthers makes it out to be. I respond to Carruthers by advancing a constitutive theory of self-knowledge. I argue that self-knowledge, so understood, is not only compatible with the empirical research that Carruthers utilizes, but also helps to make sense of these results.

The I Think, Self-Awareness And Reflexivity : A Reconstructed Kantian Model Of Self-Awareness, Jie Yin

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

I aim to explore, in this dissertation, whether Kant has a plausible view on self-awareness in his Critique of Pure Reason, and that if the answer is positive, then in what way one could best appreciate his insight; and besides that, I also want to explore how Kant's view sheds light on contemporary debate on self-awareness. I aim to consider two questions addressed by Howell (2006) as below: (A) how exactly the I think functions, designatively, to represent the self and bring it to our thought-awareness, and (B) how, theI thinK orI, a simple representation and a mere designation of …

How A Skeptical Foundationalist Might Respond To Peter Klein, Maximillian M. Muller

Global Tides

In this article I attack Peter Klein's argument for epistemic infinitism by showing that there is at least one foundational belief, and by rejecting his principle of avoiding arbitrariness.

The Cognitive Demands Of Intellectual Virtue, Jason Baehr

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Virtue Epistemology, Jason Baehr

Philosophy Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Further Reflection On True Successors And Traditions, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Melungeon Portraits: Lived Experience And Identity, Tamara L. Stachowicz

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The desire to claim an ethnicity may be in response to an institutional and systemic political movement towards multiculturalism where ethnic difference is something to be recognized and celebrated (Jimenez, 2010; Tatum, 1997). Those who were a member of a dominant or advantaged group took that element of their identity for granted (Tatum, 1997). Identity work has included reflections and congruence between how individuals see themselves and how they perceive others to see them, including Optimal Distinctiveness Theory where one determines the optimal amount of individual distinctiveness needed to feel a healthy group and personal identity (Brewer, 2012). When most …

Embodying Social Practice: Dynamically Co-Constituting Social Agency, Brian W. Dunst

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Theories of cognition and theories of social practices and institutions have often each separately acknowledged the relevance of the other; but seldom have there been consistent and sustained attempts to synthesize these two areas within one explanatory framework. This is precisely what my dissertation aims to remedy. I propose that certain recent developments and themes in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, when understood in the right way, can explain the emergence and dynamics of social practices and institutions. Likewise, the view I construct explains how social practices and institutions shape the character of cognition of their constituent agents. Moreover, …

Sites Of Passage: Art As Action In Egypt And The Us-- Creating An Autoethnography Through Performance Writing, Revolution, And Social Practice, Tavia La Follette

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

As a performance artist and arts activist I present my research project to the audience in performative writing, a postmodern research style that advocates the integration of the artist/researcher identity. In the summer of 2010, I left for Egypt to teach a performance and installation art workshop at Artist Residency Egypt, the first step of the Firefly Tunnels Project, a virtual and tangible exchange between artists in the United States and Egypt. This venture began with the awareness that the 10th anniversary of 9/11 was approaching. What I could not have foreseen were the other world events that would have …

What’S Right About The Medical Model In Human Subjects Research Regulation, Heidi Li Feldman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Critics of Institutional Review Board (IRB) practices often base their charges on the claim that IRB review began with and is premised upon a "medical model" of research, and hence a "medical model" of risk. Based on this claim, they charge that IRB review, especially in the social and behavioral sciences, has experienced "mission creep". This paper argues that this line of critique is fundamentally misguided. While it remains unclear what critics mean by "medical model", the point of contemporary human research subjects regulation remains the same across all domains of research. That point is to protect the autonomy of …

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 …

Disciplinary Permeations: Complicating The "Public" And The "Private" Dualism In Composition And Rhetoric, Erica E. Rogers

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As Composition and Rhetoric rose in disciplinary status and academic legitimacy the discourse practice of negation, the positioning of texts in oppositional binaries that set the “new” over the “old,” the “novel” over the “familiar,” became embedded in academic tradition, seeming to be an inherited part of scholarship instead of an individual’s rhetorical choice and deliberate ethos strategy. Negation, when one idea or set of ideas constructed by another is critiqued, advocated, and/or redeveloped by another scholar, is a discourse practice firmly established in the Rhetorical Tradition as part of Socratic dialogues, reappears in “modern rhetoric”, and remains today as …

Epistemic Two-Dimensionalism And Arguments From Epistemic Misclassification, Edward Elliott, Kelvin J. Mcqueen, Clas Weber

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

Epistemic Two-Dimensional Semantics (E2D) claims that expressions have a counterfactual intension and an epistemic intension. Epistemic intensions reflect cognitive significance such that sentences with necessary epistemic intensions are a priori. We defend E2D against an influential line of criticism: arguments from epistemic misclassification. We focus in particular on the arguments of Speaks [2010] and Schroeter [2005]. Such arguments conclude that E2D is mistaken from (i) the claim that E2D is committed to classifying certain sentences as a priori and (ii) the claim that such sentences are a posteriori. We aim to show that these arguments are unsuccessful as (i) and …

Divine Hiddenness And The Challenge Of Inculpable Nonbelief, Matthew R. Sokoloski

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Divine hiddenness is the idea that God is in some sense hidden or obscure. This dissertation responds to J.L. Schellenberg's argument, based on divine hiddenness and human reason, against the existence of God. Schellenberg argues that if a perfectly loving God exists, we would not expect to find such widespread nonbelief in God's existence. Given the amount of reasonable nonbelief in the world, Schellenberg argues that an agnostic ought to conclude that God does not exist rather than conclude that God is hidden. Schellenberg's argument has three major premises: (1) If there is a God, he is perfectly loving; (2) …

Steadfastness And The Epistemology Of Disagreement, Chad Andrew Bogosian

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Suppose that you and an intellectual peer disagree about some proposition P in a field like philosophy, ethics, science, religion, politics, etc. As intellectual peers, they are roughly of equal intelligence and equally virtuous with respect to evaluating the evidence E in support of P. What is the epistemic significance of you and an intellectual `peer' disagreeing about whether some body of evidence E supports a given proposition P? Can two epistemic peers reasonably disagree? In Chapter 1, I consider the Equal Weight View according to which rationality requires you to give equal weight to you peer's response to the …

Parsimony And Quantum Mechanics: An Analysis Of The Copenhagen And Bohmian Interpretations, Jhenna Voorhis

Scripps Senior Theses

Parsimony, sometime referred to as simplicity, is an effective criterion of theory choice in the case of Quantum Mechanics. The Copenhagen and Bohmian interpretations are rival theories, with the Bohmian interpretation being more parsimonious. More parsimonious theories have a higher probability of being true than less parsimonious rivals. The Bohmian interpretation should thus be preferred on these grounds.

The Sociology Of Harriet Martineau In Eastern Life, Present And Past: The Foundations Of The Islamic Sociology Of Religion, Deborah A. Ruigh

Department of Sociology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This paper is a critical analysis of Harriet Martineau’s philosophical stance and epistemological modes, her systematic sociological methodology, her use of this methodology, and her sociology of religion. How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848), and other relevant works will be used to examine Martineau’s evolving epistemological modes as well as her sociology of religion. How to Observe, Martineau’s treatise on systematic sociological methodology and cultural relativism, will serve as an exemplar for analysis of Martineau’s methodological practice as evidenced in Eastern Life. The research problem herein is three-fold: (1) to examine …