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Refurbishing Epistemology

Author: Dominique Kuenzle

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2017-06-26

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 3110525453

Even though important developments within 20th and 21st century philosophy have widened the scope of epistemology, this has not yet resulted in a systematic meta-epistemological debate about epistemology’s aims, methods, and criteria of success. Ideas such as the methodology of reflective equilibrium, the proposal to "naturalize" epistemology, constructivist impulses fuelling the "sociology of scientific knowledge", pragmatist calls for taking into account the practical point of epistemic evaluations, as well as feminist criticism of the abstract and individualist assumptions built into traditional epistemology are widely discussed, but they have not typically resulted in the call for, let alone the construction of, a suitable meta-epistemological framework. This book motivates and elaborates such a new meta-epistemology. It provides a pragmatist, social and functionalist account of epistemic states that offers the conceptual space for revised or even replaced epistemic concepts. This is what it means to "refurbish epistemology": The book assesses conceptual tools in relation to epistemology’s functionally defined conceptual space, responsive to both intra-epistemic considerations and political and moral values.

Public Epistemic Authority

Author: Johann Moritz Laux

Publisher: Mohr Siebeck

Published: 2022-06-29

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 316160069X

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Inter- and supranational courts derive their legitimacy partly from an institutional comparison: judges' legal expertise and the quality of judicial procedures justify a court's claim to authority towards other branches of government and other courts with overlapping jurisdiction. To provide a benchmark for assessing judicial outcomes that is compatible with democratic commitments, Johann Laux suggests a new normative category, Public Epistemic Authority (PEA). It builds on the mechanisms behind theories of collective intelligence and empirical research on judicial decision-making. PEA tracks judges' collective ability to reliably identify breaches of law. It focuses on cognitive tasks in adjudication. The author applies PEA to the Court of Justice of the European Union and offers suggestions for improving its institutional design.

Restoring the Foundations of Epistemic Justification

Author: Steven Porter

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2006-11-06

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 0739160265

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Foundationalism, as a theory of justification and knowledge, is often associated with Enlightenment rationality, the Cartesian thirst for certainty, and the modern assumption of the objectivity and universality of reason. Because of these associations, scholars in various fields have disdained foundationalism in favor of some sort of non-foundationalist/post-modern approach to knowledge and justification. This present book is one piece of a much wider conversation that hopes to motivate a renewed look at foundationalism. Of course, the foundationalism on offer has settled down quite a bit from its surly forbears. This more mild-mannered foundationalism suggests that our beliefs about reality can be held with confidence and yet these beliefs remain open to criticism and revision. It is this type of epistemology that provides a constructive basis for investigation and research while nevertheless encouraging a cognitive humility about our claims to possess truth.

Pleasure

Author: Lisa Shapiro

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0190225122

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For many, the word 'pleasure' conjures associations with hedonism, indulgence, and escape from the life of the mind. However little we talk about it, though, pleasure also plays an integral role in cognitive life, in both our sensory perception of the world and our intellectual understanding. This previously important but now neglected philosophical understanding of pleasure is the focus of the essays in this volume, which challenges received views that pleasure is principally motivating of action, unanalyzable, and caused, rather than responsive to reason. Like other books in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series, it traces the development of the focal idea from ancient times through the 20th century. The essays highlight points of departure for new lines of inquiry rather than attempting to provide a full picture of how the idea of pleasure has been explored in philosophy. The volume begins by showing how Plato, Aristotle, early Islamic philosophers, and philosophers in the Medieval Latin tradition, such as Aquinas, honed in on the challenge of unifying the variety of pleasures so that they fall under one concept. In the early modern period, philosophers shifted from understanding the logic of pleasure to treating pleasure as a mental state. As the studies of Malebranche, Berkeley and Kant show, the central problem becomes understanding the relation of pleasure to other sensory experiences, and the role of pleasure in human cognition and knowledge. Short interdisciplinary reflections interspersed between essays focus on art of 16th and 17th century textbooks and the difficult music of composers like Bach, which demonstrate translation of these concerns to cultural production in the period. As the essay on Mill shows, the 19th century development of scientific psychology narrowed the definition of pleasure, and so its philosophical focus. Contemporary accounts of pleasure, however, in both philosophy and psychology, are now recognizing the limitations of this narrow focus, and are once again recognizing the complexity of pleasure and its role in human life.

Epistemology of the Human Sciences

Author: Walter B. Weimer

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-11-16

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 303117173X

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This book argues for evolutionary epistemology and distinguishing functionality from physicality in the social sciences. It explores the implications for this approach to understanding in biology, economics, psychology and political science. Presenting a comprehensive overview of philosophical topics in the social sciences, the book emphasizes how all human cognition and behavior is characterized by functionality and complexity, and thus cannot be explained by the point predictions and exact laws found in the physical sciences. Realms of functional complexity – such as the market order in economics, the social rules of conduct, and the human CNS – require a focus on explanations of the principles involved rather than predicting exact outcomes. This requires study of the historical context to understand behavior and cognition. This approach notes that functional complexity is central to classical liberal ideas such as division of labour and knowledge, and how this is a far more powerful and adequate account of social organization than central planning. Through comparison of these approaches, as well as its interdisciplinary scope, this book will interest both academics and students in philosophy, biology, economics, psychology and all other social sciences.

Play Among Books

Author: Miro Roman

Publisher: Birkhäuser

Published: 2021-12-06

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 3035624054

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How does coding change the way we think about architecture? This question opens up an important research perspective. In this book, Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books. Focusing on the intersection of information technology and architectural formulation, the authors create an evolving intellectual reflection on digital architecture and computer science.

Pragmatism

Author: Nicholas Rescher

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-28

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 135149726X

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Pragmatism is rooted in the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice. Pragmatism was intended, by Charles S. Peirce, its founder, as a doctrine for the rational substantiation of knowledge claims. For Peirce, what mattered was successful prediction and control. Practice was to serve as the arbiter of theory. Objective efficacy, not personal satisfaction, is what matters for fixing opinion in a community of rational inquirers.According to Nicholas Rescher, later pragmatists saw the matter differently. They envisioned subjective satisfactions, rather than objectively determinable functional effectiveness, as being the aim of the enterprise. Rescher notes that William James, in particular, had an agenda different from that of Peirce.The two pragmatisms are complete opposites, Rescher argues, in terms of claims and intentions. James's soft pragmatism abandons the classical idea of inquiry as the paramount of truth; it believes that truth is an illusion, an unrealizable figment of the imagination. By contrast, Peirce's hard pragmatism believes that the classic idea of truth remains valid. Rescher seeks to examine and explore pragmatism dialectically, with a conviction that brings pragmatism to life for specialist and generalist alike.

Repairing Bertrand Russell’s 1913 Theory of Knowledge

Author: Gregory Landini

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-01-22

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 3030663566

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This book repairs and revives the Theory of Knowledge research program of Russell’s Principia era. Chapter 1, 'Introduction and Overview', explains the program’s agenda. Inspired by the non-Fregean logicism of Principia Mathematica, it endorses the revolution within mathematics presenting it as a study of relations. The synthetic a priori logic of Principia is the essence of philosophy considered as a science which exposes the dogmatisms about abstract particulars and metaphysical necessities that create prisons that fetter the mind. Incipient in The Problems of Philosophy, the program’s acquaintance epistemology embraced a multiple-relation theory of belief. It reached an impasse in 1913, having been itself retrofitted with abstract particular logical forms to address problems of direction and compositionality. With its acquaintance epistemology in limbo, Scientific Method in Philosophy became the sequel to Problems. Chapter 2 explains Russell’s feeling intellectually dishonest. Wittgenstein’s demand that logic exclude nonsense belief played no role. The 1919 neutral monist era ensued, but Russell found no epistemology for the logic essential to philosophy. Repairing, Chapters 4–6 solve the impasse. Reviving, Chapters 3 and 7 vigorously defend the facts about Principia. Studies of modality and entailment are viable while Principia remains a universal logic above the civil wars of the metaphysicians.

Education, Culture and Epistemological Diversity

Author: Claudia W. Ruitenberg

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2011-09-24

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 9400720661

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In the recent educational research literature, it has been asserted that ethnic or cultural groups have their own distinctive epistemologies, and that these have been given short shrift by the dominant social group. Educational research, then, is pursued within a framework that embodies assumptions about knowledge and knowledge production that reflect the interests and historical traditions of this dominant group. In such arguments, however, some relevant philosophical issues remain unresolved, such as what claims about culturally distinctive epistemologies mean, precisely, and how they relate to traditional epistemological distinctions between beliefs and knowledge. Furthermore, can these ways of establishing knowledge stand up to critical scrutiny? This volume marshals a variety of resources to pursue such open questions in a lively and accessible way: a critical literature review, analyses from philosophers of education who have different positions on the key issues, a roundtable discussion, and interactions between the two editors, who sometimes disagree. It also employs the work of prominent feminist epistemologists who have investigated parallel issues with sophistication. This volume does not settle the question of culturally distinctive epistemologies, but teases out the various philosophical, sociological and political aspects of the issue so that the debate can continue with greater clarity.