Avicenna, beside his theoretical discussions about experimentation, practically applied his experimental method to natural sciences studies such as medicine, biology, and meteorology. His theoretical discussions subsume propositions concerning the conditions under which experimental knowledge is attained, the components of this knowledge and its functions. Some of these propositions are as follows: necessity of recurrent observations for acquiring experimental knowledge, certainty plus conditional universality of such knowledge, and its role as demonstrative premises. Investigating the (...) application of his theory in natural sciences propound two new features which were not elaborated in the theoretical discussions: fallibility of experimental knowledge and necessity of systematic observation. This research, using the analytic method and referring to both philosophical and scientific works of Avicenna, clarifies that a comprehensive definition of experimentation is dependent on considering extracted points from practical application of experimental knowledge, beside its theoretical components. (shrink)

To demarcate the limits of experimental knowledge, we probe the limits of what might be called an experiment. By appeal to examples of scientific practice from astrophysics and analogue gravity, we demonstrate that the reliability of knowledge regarding certain phenomena gained from an experiment is not circumscribed by the manipulability or accessibility of the target phenomena. Rather, the limits of experimental knowledge are set by the extent to which strategies for what we call ‘inductive triangulation’ (...) are available: that is, the validation of the mode of inductive reasoning involved in the source-target inference via appeal to one or more distinct and independent modes of inductive reasoning. When such strategies are able to partially mitigate reasonable doubt, we can take a theory regarding the phenomena to be well supported by experiment. When such strategies are able to fully mitigate reasonable doubt, we can take a theory regarding the phenomena to be established by experiment. There are good reasons to expect the next generation of analogue experiments to provide genuine knowledge of unmanipulable and inaccessible phenomena such that the relevant theories can be understood as well supported. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The next generation of analogue gravity experiments’. (shrink)

This text provides a critique of the subjective Bayesian view of statistical inference, and proposes the author's own error-statistical approach as an alternative framework for the epistemology of experiment. It seeks to address the needs of researchers who work with statistical analysis.

I develop an epistemic focal bias account of certain patterns of judgments about knowledge ascriptions by integrating it with a general dual process framework of human cognition. According to the focal bias account, judgments about knowledge ascriptions are generally reliable but systematically fallible because the cognitive processes that generate them are affected by what is in focus. I begin by considering some puzzling patters of judgments about knowledge ascriptions and sketch how a basic focal bias account seeks (...) to account for them. In doing so, I argue that the basic focal bias account should be integrated in a more general framework of human cognition. Consequently, I present some central aspects of a prominent general dual process theory of human cognition and discuss how focal bias may figure at various levels of processing. On the basis of this discussion, I attempt to categorize the relevant judgments about knowledge ascriptions. Given this categorization, I argue that the basic epistemic focal bias account of certain contrast effects and salient alternatives effects can be plausibly integrated with the dual process framework. Likewise, I try to explain the absence of strong intuitions in cases of far-fetched salient alternatives. As a manner of conclusion, I consider some methodological issues concerning the relationship between cognitive psychology, experimental data and epistemological theorizing. -/- . (shrink)

After years of relative neglect, experimental science has once again become an object of scrutiny. Philosophers such as Hacking and Cartwright have examined contemporary science in an attempt to display the epistemic status of experimental results, while sociologists such as Shapin and Schaffer have focussed on historical cases in an attempt to display the conventional basis of experimentation. In this study I am concerned with the epistemological question: How can one justify the claim that it is rational to (...) believe that the methods of experimental science yield knowledge about the unobserved causal structures of our world? My answer to this question is produced by way of an historical analysis and philosophical retrieval of Robert Boyle's epistemological defense of experimental science. ;The first two chapters examine contemporary issues surrounding experimental science, particularly those challenges posed to its knowledge-producing ability by philosophical instrumentalists and sociological constructionists. I then turn to an examination of Boyle's version of experimental philosophy, which includes a detailed discussion of the background traditions from which he drew in its formulation, and his response to critics of experimentation, such as Hobbes and Spinoza. ;Boyle's work is not only historically important, but is philosophically significant in light of the fact that he developed epistemological strategies in defense of experimental techniques at a time when it was not clear that experimentation would become the standard of modern science. His philosophy is characterized as a sophisticated and complex method that employs the elements of inductive, retroductive, and hypothetico-deductive reasoning. This combination, he argues, yields a system of checks and balances on sense, reason, and ideology that, while fallible, offers us the best assurance that we have of coming closer to the truth about the processes operative in our world. ;In a concluding chapter it is argued that Boyle's philosophy of science, by virtue of its richness and complexity, is sufficient to respond to the general challenges to scientific objectivity posed by sociologists of knowledge, and the more specific challenges to the realist import of the theoretical claims of experimental science posed by philosophers such as Laudan and van Fraassen. (shrink)

This paper defends the epistemological doctrine of fallibilism from recent objections. In “The Myth of Knowledge” Laurence BonJour argues that we should reject fallibilism for two main reasons: first, there is no adequate way to specify what level of justification is required for fallible knowledge; second, we cannot explain why any level of justification that is less than fully conclusive should have the significance that makes knowledge valuable. I will reply to these challenges in a way that (...) allows me to make progress on a number of important issues in contemporary epistemology: epistemic value, the functional roles of knowledge attributions, experimental epistemology, skepticism, the Gettier problem, and the lottery paradox. My argument is motivated by appealing to various insights derived from the method of ‘practical explication’, particularly the idea that a central purpose of the concept of knowledge is to flag reliable informants. My conclusion is that various practical and theoretical considerations derived from the method of practical explication support the fallibilist conception of knowledge. (shrink)

Helmholtz's public reflection about the nature of the experiment and its role in the sciences is a historically important description, which also helps to analyze his own works. It is a part of his conception of science and nature, which can be seen as an ideal type of science and its goals. But its historical reach seems to be limited in an important respect. Helmholtz's understanding of experiments is based on the idea that their planning, realization and evaluation lies in (...) the hands of a person or group acting according to decisions of free will. In my opinion this idea is characteristic for the foundation of the experimental method in early modern times, not however for several forms of its present structures. Above all, the increasing technization of producing knowledge reduces the roIe of the subject in conducting experiments. My lecture consists of three parts. In its first part I would like to present a summary of Helmholtz's own theory of experiment and the change of his conception of science and nature. In the second part I would like to discuss three examples of his experimental practice, which were taken in chronological order from three different periods of his work; in the third part I would like to compare the examples with the change of his conception of science and nature. (shrink)

Once upon a time, logic was the philosopher’s tool for analyzing scientific reasoning. Nowadays, probability and statistics have largely replaced logic, and their most popular application—Bayesianism—has replaced the qualitative deductive relationship between a hypothesis h and evidence e with a quantitative measure of h’s probability in light of e.

Over the last 20 years, biopolitics has become an established research field within the humanities and the social sciences. However, scholars agree that the academic status of biopolitics remains problematic due to the latter’s conceptual fuzziness, unmanageable scope and weak foundations. To address these issues, biopolitics theorists have engaged in reflexive efforts to convert biopolitics into a respectable discipline with a clear definition, research agenda and canon. In this article, I examine the reflexive biopolitics scholarship that has emerged in the (...) last decade and conclude that while biopolitics may not satisfy the criteria for achieving disciplinary respectability due to the chief aporia that both underpins and undermines the academic biopolitics project – namely, its seemingly infinite reach – the structure of biopolitics matches that of experimental knowledge, also known as counterscience, the university without condition and nomad science. (shrink)

Over the last 20 years, biopolitics has become an established research field within the humanities and the social sciences. However, scholars agree that the academic status of biopolitics remains problematic due to the latter’s conceptual fuzziness, unmanageable scope and weak foundations. To address these issues, biopolitics theorists have engaged in reflexive efforts to convert biopolitics into a respectable discipline with a clear definition, research agenda and canon. In this article, I examine the reflexive biopolitics scholarship that has emerged in the (...) last decade and conclude that while biopolitics may not satisfy the criteria for achieving disciplinary respectability due to the chief aporia that both underpins and undermines the academic biopolitics project – namely, its seemingly infinite reach – the structure of biopolitics matches that of experimental knowledge, also known as counterscience, the university without condition and nomad science. (shrink)

Over the last 20 years, biopolitics has become an established research field within the humanities and the social sciences. However, scholars agree that the academic status of biopolitics remains problematic due to the latter’s conceptual fuzziness, unmanageable scope and weak foundations. To address these issues, biopolitics theorists have engaged in reflexive efforts to convert biopolitics into a respectable discipline with a clear definition, research agenda and canon. In this article, I examine the reflexive biopolitics scholarship that has emerged in the (...) last decade and conclude that while biopolitics may not satisfy the criteria for achieving disciplinary respectability due to the chief aporia that both underpins and undermines the academic biopolitics project – namely, its seemingly infinite reach – the structure of biopolitics matches that of experimental knowledge, also known as counterscience, the university without condition and nomad science. (shrink)

This is a work in the epistemology of functional neuroimaging (fNI) and it applies the error-statistical (ES) philosophy to inferential problems in fNI to formulate and address these problems. This gives us a clear, accurate, and more complete understanding of what we can learn from fNI and how we can learn it. I review the works in the epistemology of fNI which I group into two categories; the first category consists of discussions of the theoretical significance of fNI findings and (...) the second category discusses methodological difficulties of fNI. Both types of works have shortcomings; the first category has been too theory-centered in its approach and the second category has implicitly or explicitly adopted the assumption that methodological difficulties of fNI cannot be satisfactorily addressed. In this dissertation, I address these shortcomings and show how and what kind of experimental knowledge fNI can reliably produce which would be theoretically significant. I take fMRI as a representative fNI procedure and discuss the history of its development. Two independent trajectories of research in physics and physiology eventually converge to give rise to fMRI. Thus, fMRI findings are laden in the theories of physics and physiology and I propose how this creates a kind of useful theory-ladenness which allows for the representation of and intervention in the constructs of cognitive neuroscience. Duhemian challenges and problems of underdetermination are often raised to argue that fNI is of little, if any, epistemic value for psychology. I show how the ES notions of severe tests and error probabilities can be applied in epistemological analyses of fMRI. The result is that hemodynamic hypotheses can be severely tested in fMRI experiments and I demonstrate how these hypotheses are theoretically significant and fuel the growth of experimental knowledge in cognitive neuroscience. Throughout this dissertation, I put the emphasis on the experimental knowledge we obtain from fNI and argue that this is the fruitful approach that enables us to see how fNI can contribute to psychology. In doing so, I offer an error-statistical epistemology of fNI, which hopefully will be a significant contribution to the philosophy of psychology. (shrink)

The paper attempts to give an account of the fallibility of medical judgments without recourse to the incompleteness of scientific knowledge. It is argued that because of the inexactness of observations and thus the existence of borderline cases any theory applied for explanation and predicition will produce some false results. This state of affairs is independent of the nature of a theory, i.e., it applies both for non-probabilistic and for probabilistic theories. Some epistemological issues and consequences with regard (...) to a better understanding of clinical reasoning are discussed and the view is compared with the theory of medical fallibility of Gorovitz and MacIntyre.1. (shrink)

An ambitious new model of experimentation that will reorient our understanding of the key features of experimental practice. What is experimental knowledge, and how do we get it? While there is general agreement that experiment is a crucial source of scientific knowledge, how experiment generates that knowledge is far more contentious. In this book, philosopher of science James Mattingly explains how experiments function. Specifically, he discusses what it is about experimental practice that transforms observations (...) of what may be very localized, particular, isolated systems into what may be global, general, integrated empirical knowledge. Mattingly argues that the purpose of experimentation is the same as the purpose of any other knowledge-generating enterprise—to change the state of information of the knower. This trivial-seeming point has a non-trivial consequence: to understand a knowledge-generating enterprise, we should follow the flow of information. Therefore, the account of experimental knowledge Mattingly provides is based on understanding how information flows in experiments: what facilitates that flow, what hinders it, and what characteristics allow it to flow from system to system, into the heads of researchers, and finally into our store of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This essay is one of three published in response to Casper Bruun Jensen's article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science”, which concerns the “postcritical” work of Richard Rottenburg, Hirokazu Miyazaki, and Helen Verran. Rottenburg's response clarifies the key argument of his book Far-Fetched Facts, situates it in a biographical and political context of despair and hope, and extends it in ways stimulated by Jensen's article and by reading in the sociology of critique that Rottenburg has (...) done since writing the book. He here reformulates the main argument of his book as concerning the indispensable necessity of what Nietzsche calls “legislated language,” along with its performative effects and insurmountable fallibility. By situating that argument in a biographical and political context that the book does not emphasize, and by explaining the “plot” of the book, Rottenburg emphasizes that Far-Fetched Facts was intentionally and principally written from a perspective that does not allow the maintenance of a clear-cut distinction between fact and value and that, therefore, is a contribution toward a methodology of hope. This essay moreover indicates ways in which Far-Fetched Facts is linked to developments in the French pragmatist sociology of critique, which offers a compatible and, at the same time, well-established language to make similar points. This sociology starts from the assumption that practices of ordering depend on the establishment of forms for commensuration, classification, qualification, valuation, and calculation of equivalence that imply reference to realities “out there” and to perceived common goods. A convention is a temporarily established, dynamic, and reflexive material-semantic form that enables interpretation and evaluation. By raising expectations of how things must be done in order to pass as appropriate, valid, and legitimate, conventions facilitate cooperation, yet at some stage in their lives conventions become controversial and need to be replaced. In order to communicate and to coordinate actions, conventions and metacodes are as indispensable as they are fallible, Rottenburg argues, and instead of being replaced by “good faith” and “hope,” conventions and metacodes actually depend on them. (shrink)

The paper attempts to give an account of the fallibility of medical judgments without recourse to the incompleteness of scientific knowledge. It is argued that because of the inexactness of observations and thus the existence of borderline cases any theory applied for explanation and predicition will produce some false results. This state of affairs is independent of the nature of a theory, i.e., it applies both for non-probabilistic and for probabilistic theories. Some epistemological issues and consequences with regard (...) to a better understanding of clinical reasoning are discussed and the view is compared with the theory of medical fallibility of Gorovitz and MacIntyre.1. (shrink)

The following text is a voice in the discussion around normative problems of innovative therapies. It particularly refers to problems related to the contribution of experimental therapies to the development of medical knowledge, also discussed in this issue in the article by Olga Dryla "Expanded access programs as a source of cognitive data.".

Many epistemologists use intuitive responses to particular cases as evidence for their theories. Recently, experimental philosophers have challenged the evidential value of intuitions, suggesting that our responses to particular cases are unstable, inconsistent with the responses of the untrained, and swayed by factors such as ethnicity and gender. This paper presents evidence that neither gender nor ethnicity influence epistemic intuitions, and that the standard responses to Gettier cases and the like are widely shared. It argues that epistemic intuitions are (...) produced by the natural ‘mindreading’ capacity that underpins ordinary attributions of belief and knowledge in everyday social interaction. Although this capacity is fallible, its weaknesses are similar to the weaknesses of natural capacities such as sensory perception. Experimentalists who do not wish to be skeptical about ordinary empirical methods have no good reason to be skeptical about epistemic intuitions. (shrink)

This paper revisits the debate between Harry Collins and Allan Franklin, concerning the experimenters’ regress. Focusing my attention on a case study from recent psychology (regarding experimental evidence for the existence of a Mozart Effect), I argue that Franklin is right to highlight the role of epistemological strategies in scientific practice, but that his account does not sufficiently appreciate Collins’s point about the importance of tacit knowledge in experimental practice. In turn, Collins rightly highlights the epistemic uncertainty (...) (and skepticism) surrounding much experimental research. However, I will argue that his analysis of tacit knowledge fails to elucidate the reasons why scientists often are (and should be) skeptical of other researchers’ experimental results. I will present an analysis of tacit knowledge in experimental research that not only answers to this desideratum, but also shows how such skepticism can in fact be a vital enabling factor for the dynamic processes of experimental knowledge generation. (shrink)

This article presents a new framework for the analysis of experimental control. The framework highlights different functions for experimental controls in the realization of an experiment: experimental controls that serve as tests and experimental controls that serve as probes. The approach to experimental control proposed here can illuminate the constitutive role of controls in knowledge production, and it sheds new light on the notion of exploratory experimentation. It also clarifies what can and what cannot (...) be expected from reviewers of scientific journal articles giving feedback on experimental controls. (shrink)

Traditionally it has been thought that the moral valence of a proposition is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to whether someone knows that the proposition is true, and thus irrelevant to the truth-value of a knowledge ascription. On this view, it’s no easier to know, for example, that a bad thing will happen than that a good thing will happen (other things being equal). But a series of very surprising recent experiments suggest that this is actually not how we view (...) class='Hi'>knowledge. On the contrary, people are much more willing to ascribe knowledge of a bad outcome. This is known as the epistemic side-effect effect (ESEE), and is a specific instance of a widely documented phenomenon, the side-effect effect (a.k.a. “the Knobe effect”), which is the most famous finding in experimental philosophy. In this paper, I report a new series of five experiments on ESEE, and in the process accomplish three things. First, I confirm earlier findings on the effect. Second, I show that the effect is virtually unlimited. Third, I introduce a new technique for detecting the effect, which potentially enhances its theoretical significance. In particular, my findings make it more likely that the effect genuinely reflects the way we think about and ascribe knowledge, rather than being the result of a performance error. (shrink)

Any experimental field consists of preparing special conditions for examining interesting objects for research. So naturally, the particular ways in which scientists prepare their objects determine the kind and the content of knowledge produced. This book provides a framework for the analysis of experimental practices - the Social Epistemology of Experiment - that incorporates both the ‘material’ and the ‘social’ dimensions of knowledge production. The Social Epistemology of Experiment is applied to experimental economics and in (...) so doing, it introduces the epistemic role of the participation of human subjects in experiments and the causal efficacy of institutions in constraining and enabling human behaviour. It also develops the role of the social and socially established practices in overcoming the methodological difficulties associated with experimenting with humans subjects in the social sciences as well as the effect of scientists’ interventions in the laboratory worlds. This book provides an historical and contextualized account of the emergence of experimental economics, the methodological discussions that have informed and constituted it, its main research programmes, and stylized facts. The analysis of its three main research programmes – market experiments, game theory experiments and individual decision-making experiments – shows how economics experiments are particularly tailored to produce knowledge about market institutions and individual behaviour in contexts where there might be conflicts of individual and social goals, and also about the processes of individual decision-making. (shrink)

In disputes about conceptual analysis, each side typically appeals to pre-theoretical 'intuitions' about particular cases. Recently, many naturalistically oriented philosophers have suggested that these appeals should be understood as empirical hypotheses about what people would say when presented with descriptions of situations, and have consequently conducted surveys on non-specialists. I argue that this philosophical research programme, a key branch of what is known as 'experimental philosophy', rests on mistaken assumptions about the relation between people's concepts and their linguistic behaviour. (...) The conceptual claims that philosophers make imply predictions about the folk's responses only under certain demanding, counterfactual conditions. Because of the nature of these conditions, the claims cannot be tested with methods of positivist social science. We are, however, entitled to appeal to intuitions about folk concepts in virtue of possessing implicit normative knowledge acquired through reflective participation in everyday linguistic practices. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to propose a way to study the role of perspectives in both the production and justification of experimental knowledge claims. My starting point for this will be Anjan Chakravartty’s claim that Ronald Giere’s perspectival account of the role of instruments in the production of such claims entails relativism in the form of irreducibly incompatible truths. This led Michela Massimi to argue that perspectivism, insofar as it wants to form a realist position, is (...) only concerned with the justification of such claims: whether they are produced reliably is, on her view, a perspective-independent fact of the matter. Following a suggestion by Giere on how scientists handle incompatible experimental results, I will then argue that Massimi’s perspectivism can be extended to also cover the production of such claims, without falling into relativism. I will elaborate this suggestion by means of Uljana Feest’s work on how scientists handle incompatible experimental results. I will argue that, if we reconceptualize perspectives as embodied and situated ways of going about in experimentation that can be made explicit through interpretation, we can obtain a fruitful understanding of the role of perspectives in both the production and justification of experimental knowledge. While this role is primarily exploratory, it can still allow for a substantial form of realism. (shrink)

The fallibility of deduction is the thesis that a thoughtful speaker-reasoner can wrongly believe that an inference is deductively valid. The author presents an argument to the effect that the fallibility of deduction is incompatible with the widespread view that deduction is epistemically unfruitful (the conclusion is contained in the premises, and the transition from premises to conclusion never extends knowledge). If the fallibility of deduction is a fact, the argument presented is a refutation of the (...) doctrine of the unfruitfulness of deduction. But its relevance goes further, because the argument reveals a connection between two different problems: a solution to the problem of fruitfulness (how can deductive inferences increase our knowledge?) is a starting point for a solution to the problem of fallibility (how can deductive inferences be wrong?). To solve the problem of fruitfulness, Michael Dummett proposed some general ideas concerning meaning and inference. Starting from these meaning-theoretical ideas, one can develop an explanation of the fallibility of deduction. The general explanatory strategy does not depend on the choice between a theory of meaning centered on truth, verification, inferential role, or on other key notions. (shrink)

In this paper, I show that Turri’s (2015a) experimental study concerning selfless assertions is defective and should therefore be rejected. One performs a selfless assertion when one states something that one does not believe, and hence does not know, despite possessing well supported evidence to the contrary. Following his experimental study, Turri argues that agents in fact both believe and know the content of their selfless assertions. In response to this claim, I demonstrate that the conclusions he draws (...) are premature in this regard. More specifically, I criticize his methodology, showing that his study is not only incomplete but also yields contradictory results. In closing, I propose how such a study should be conducted in order to receive comprehensive results. (shrink)

In this thesis I propose an account of knowledge of one’s own mental states. My goal is set on a unified transparency account of self-knowledge. It is unified, because the proposal will account for the generation of beliefs about mental states of all types, regardless of whether they are propositional, non-propositional, experiential or non-experiential. My account will thereby be applicable to knowledge of any mental state, from beliefs and desires to fears, hopes, and sensations such as pain. (...) Moreover, it will be a transparency account because it holds on to Gareth Evans’s observation that self-ascribing mental states is done by attending outwards instead of inwards. There is a sense in which we attend to the world when we find out whether we believe something, and my proposal aims to capture this intuition. The core idea I am exploring is the following: generally, when one produces a first-order mental state, one also forms a corresponding, dispositional second-order belief about that state. Both attitudes share elements of their production, which ensures reliability while retaining fallibility. For instance, when you form a belief ‘there is a red car’ by perceiving a red car, you also generate the dispositional belief ‘I believe that there is a red car,’ if everything goes right. I argue that almost all features that make self-knowledge special can be explained with this basic idea. The assumption that the production of a first-order mental state and a second-order belief about the state go hand in hand has surprising explanatory power. Moreover, there are at least no obvious reasons why the assumption should be ruled out. The upshot will be a view that we should take seriously as a contender for an explanation of self-knowledge. I will not be able to conclusively show that it is the best explanation, but I argue that it is one worth thinking about. The thesis is structured in three parts. The first part focuses on the phenomenon of self-knowledge and the transparency idea. These chapters serve as the setup for my later proposed view. Chapter 1 and 2 discuss what exactly we want to explain when we say that we aim to explain self-knowledge. I thereby provide an overview of the conceptual landscape of self-knowledge and argue that we should understand the peculiarity of self-knowledge in terms of features of belief and belief-formation. Moreover, I commit myself to the view that the peculiarity has something to do with our cognitive access to mental states and relate that to the goal of a unified account of self-knowledge. Chapter 3 discusses how we ought to understand the other qualification of my goal: a transparency account of self-knowledge. I provide an overview of transparency accounts in the literature and lay out the path to avoid common problems of transparency accounts. In the second part I propose the single process model of self-knowledge as a unified, transparency account of self-knowledge. I provide the core principles of the view and show how it explains the features of self-knowledge I aim to explain. Chapter 4 focuses on attitudes, both propositional and non-propositional. Chapter 5 expands the view to phenomenal states, such as being in pain. The third part connects the epistemological discussion of the single process model to research on cognition. Chapter 6 proposes a cognitive story of predictive processing that is compatible with the single process model. I thereby discuss the plausibility of the predictive processing idea and its empirical support. I provide a predictive processing story of self-knowledge that fits with the single process model of self-knowledge. In chapter 7 I discuss extended mental states. Clark & Chalmers propose that at least some mental states, such as beliefs, can be extended to external devices. Given that my aim is a unified account, I ought to say something about knowledge of these extended beliefs. I argue that they cannot be known by the same processes as non-extended mental states because beliefs about extended beliefs show different features than beliefs about our non-extended states that we formed by introspection. Hence, even if my view cannot account for them this is not a problem, because they are not formed by genuine introspection. Instead, we come to know extended mental states by a distinct process that we might call extended introspection. Finally, chapter 8 provides a brief conclusion of the thesis for and points out some placed that require further development. The account is promising as an explanation of self-belief and self-knowledge, but whether it is correct also depends on future research outside the scope of philosophy. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 301-305, September 2022.

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 301-305, September 2022.

Two experiments are reported that evaluated survey learning of youth with DS and typically developing children (TD) matched on Mental Age (MA). In Experiment 1, the experimenter navigated participants through a novel virtual environment along a circuitous path, beginning and ending at a target landmark (i.e., a door). Then, the participants were placed at a pre-specified location in the environment and instructed to navigate to the same door using the shortest possible path from their current location. They completed the task (...) three times: once after being shown the environment one time, once after three exposures, and once after five exposures. Results indicated that the participants with DS exhibited significantly less skill at identifying the shortcut than did the TD participants. In Experiment 2, participants learned two overlapping routes through a simple environment. Following acquisition, they were tested on several measures of survey knowledge: finding a shortcut, identifying the direction of landmarks not currently visible from their location in the environment, and recognizing a bird’s-eye representation of the overall environment. The results of Experiment2 indicated that the participants with DS were at least as good as the TD participants on all of our measures of survey learning. Hence, we concluded that people with DS can acquire some survey knowledge when they learn a simple environment. However, the performance of both groups was relatively poor in Experiment 2, indicating a need to consider identifying the mechanisms underlying the poor performance on wayfinding of people with DS. Identifying the underlying mechanisms, is a logical first step in devising methods of enhancing environmental learning of people with DS. (shrink)

In recent decades many sociologists and philosophers of science, especially the so-called ‘new experimentalists’, have stressed the need for detailed studies of real, ongoing experimental practices, and have claimed that a new image of science results from such an approach. Among the new objects of interest that have emerged from laboratory studies, an important one is the tacit dimension of scientific practices. Harry Collins, in particular, has insisted that irreducibly tacit presuppositions and skills are inevitably involved in experimental (...) practices, and that these tacit resources play an essential role in the stabilization of successful scientific achievements. What I will call the ‘opacity of experimental practices’ has been analyzed in different ways, but on the whole, it has been claimed to have harmful epistemological consequences with respect to crucial issues such as the nature of experimental facts, scientific realism, scientific rationality, and the contingency of what acquires the status of an established scientific result in practitioners’ eyes. Such claims remain highly controversial. The aim of this paper is to discuss the epistemological implications of the involvement of tacit resources in experimental practices and to provide helpful conceptual tools with respect to the issue of tacit resources in science. Specifically, the paper provides an analytical clarification of the relation between the opacity of experimental practices and the principle of experimenters substitutability, the latter being a principle commonly viewed as a necessary feature of any good science. Serious doubts are finally raised about the validity of the experimenters substitutability principle, and the impact of these doubts with respect to the contingency of scientific facts and results is considered. (shrink)

Although the fallible/infallible distinction in the theory of knowledge has traditionally been upheld by most epistemologists, almost all contemporary theories of knowledge claim to be fallibilist. Fallibilists have, however, been forced to accommodate knowledge of necessary truths. This has proved to be a daunting task, not least because there is as yet no consensus on how the fallible/infallible divide is to be understood. In this article, after examining and rejecting a number of representative accounts of the notion (...) of fallible knowledge, I argue that the main problems with these accounts actually stem from the very coherence of that notion. I then claim that the distinction is best understood in terms of the externalist/internalist conceptions of knowledge. Finally, I seek to garner some independent support for the proposal by highlighting some of its consequences, including its surprising bearing on certain recent and seemingly distant controversies involving issues in epistemology and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The relevance of inner speech for human psychology, especially for higher-order cognitive functions, is widely recognized. However, the study of the phenomenology of inner speech, that is, what it is like for a subject to experience internally speaking his/her voice, has received much less attention. This study explores the subjective experience of inner speech through empathy for pain paradigm. To this end, an experimental phenomenological method was implemented. Sixteen healthy subjects were exposed to videos of sportswomen/sportsmen having physical accidents (...) practicing extreme sports. Immediately after the exposure to the stimuli, a phenomenological interview was conducted to gather data about bodily sensations, emotions, motivations, and inner speech of watching other people’s accidents. Participant’s inner speech expresses concern about the consequences the accident could generate to the sportswomen/sportsmen or about the participants themselves. Simultaneously, participants’ inner speech happened with negative emotional feelings, many sensations distributed throughout their bodies, and a felt knowledge coming from a meaningful but pre-reflective and pre-verbal bodily dimension. Our findings show that inner speech in empathy is not merely a psycholinguistic process or high-order cognitive function, but rather it is a complex experience that occurs deeply related to meaningful emotions, bodily sensations, and an implicit, somatically felt knowledge. (shrink)

When philosophers try to understand the nature of knowledge, they have to confront the Gettier problem. This problem, set out in Edmund Gettier's famous paper of 1963, has yet to be solved, and has challenged our best attempts to define what knowledge is. This volume offers an organised sequence of accessible and distinctive chapters explaining the history of debate surrounding Gettier's challenge, and where that debate should take us next. The chapters describe and evaluate a wide range of (...) ideas about knowledge that have been sparked by philosophical engagements with the Gettier problem, including such phenomena as fallibility, reasoning, evidence, reliability, truth-tracking, context, luck, intellectual virtue, wisdom, conceptual analysis, intuition, experimental philosophy, and explication. The result is an authoritative survey of fifty-plus years of epistemological research - along with provocative ideas for future research – into the nature of knowledge. (shrink)

One of contemporary epistemology's more important conceptual challenges is that of understanding the nature of fallibility. Part of why this matters is that it would contribute to our understanding the natures of fallible warrant and fallible knowledge. This article evaluates two candidates – and describes a shared form of failing. Each is concealedly infallibilist. This failing is all-too-representative of the difficulty of doing justice to the notion of fallibility within the notions of fallible warrant and fallible (...) class='Hi'>knowledge. The article ends with a proposal for an improved form of conception of fallible warrant and fallible knowledge. (shrink)

Hegel's Science of Logic makes the just not low claim to be an absolute, ultimate-grounded knowledge. This project, which could not be more ambitious, has no good press in our post-metaphysical age. However: That absolute knowledge absolutely cannot exist, cannot be claimed without self-contradiction. On the other hand, there can be no doubt about the fundamental finiteness of knowledge. But can absolute knowledge be finite knowledge? This leads to the problem of a self-explication of logic (...) (in the sense of Hegel) and further, as will be shown, to a new definition of the dialectical procedure. The stringency of which results from the fact that always exactly that implicit content is explicated that was generated by the preceding explication step itself and is thus concretely comprehensible. At the same time, a new implicit content is generated by this act of explication, which requires a new explication step, and so forth. In the dialectical procedure reinterpreted in this way, dialectical arguments are not beheld, guessed at or even surreptitiously obtained, but are methodically accountable. Thereby dialectics is understood as a self-explication of logic by logical means and thus as a proof of the possibility of ultimate-grounding in the form of absolute and nevertheless finite – and thus also fallible – knowledge. (shrink)

The paper tries to show that an evolutionary perspective helps us to address what is called the adaptation problem, that is, the remarkable coherence, and seemingly successful design, existing between our cognitive tools and the phenomena of the material world. It argues that a fine-grained description of the structure and function of experimental techniques—as a special type amongst evolving scientific practices—is a condition for a better understanding and, ultimately, an explanation of how adaptation among the heterogeneous elements of (...) class='Hi'>experimental knowledge is attained. Some apparently contradictory features of techniques, such as their high context-dependency and their capabilities to reproduce and diversify outside their original contexts, are addressed with the help of the concepts of technical variation and the historical entrenchment of phenomena in techniques. In order to do so, a case-study on the construction of satellite-DNA and the evolution of nucleic acid hybridization, a research project carried out by Roy J. Britten and his colleagues in the 1960s, is presented in detail. This case illustrates the close relationship existing between the evolution of techniques and the stabilization of phenomena in experimental biology. (shrink)

Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge takes the reader on tour of the nature, value, and limits of self-knowledge. Mitchell S. Green calls on classical sources like Plato and Descartes, 20th-century thinkers like Freud, recent developments in neuroscience and experimental psychology, and even Buddhist philosophy to explore topics at the heart of who we are. The result is an unvarnished look at both the achievements and drawbacks of the many attempts to better know one's own (...) self. Key topics in this volume include: Knowledge - what it means to know, the link between wisdom and knowledge, and the value of living an "examined life" Personal identity - questions of dualism, bodily continuity, and personhood The unconscious - including the kind posited by psychoanalysis as well as the form proposed by recent research on the so-called adaptive unconscious Free will - if we have it, and the recent arguments from neuroscience challenging it Self-misleading - the ways we willfully deceive ourselves, and how this relates to empathy, peer disagreement, implicit bias, and intellectual humility Experimental psychology - considerations on the automaticity of emotion and other cognitive processes, and how they shape us This book is designed to be used in conjunction with the free 'Know Thyself' MOOC created through collaboration of the University of Connecticut's Project on Humility and Conviction in Public Life, and the University of Edinburgh's Eidyn research centre, and hosted on the Coursera platform. The book is also suitable as a text for interdisciplinary courses in the philosophy of mind or self-knowledge, and is highly recommended for anyone looking for a short overview of this fascinating topic. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper is an account of Kepler's explicit awareness of the problem of experimental error. As a study of the Astronomia nova shows, Kepler exploited his awareness of the occurrences of experimental errors to guide him to the right conclusion. Errors were thus employed, so to speak, perhaps for the first time, to bring about a major physical discovery: Kepler's laws of planetary motion. ‘Know then’, to use Kepler's own words, ‘that errors show us the way to truth.’ (...) With a survey of Kepler's revolutionary contribution to optics, the paper demonstrates that Kepler's awareness of the problem of experimental error extended beyond discrepancies between calculations and observations to types of error which pertain to observations and instruments. It emerges that Kepler's belief in the unity of knowledge and physical realism, facilitated—indeed created—the right philosophical posture for comprehending the problem of error in an entirely novel way. (shrink)

Reductive intellectualists about knowledge-how hold, contra Ryle, that knowing how to do something is just a kind of propositional knowledge. In a similar vein, traditional reductivists about understanding-why insist, in accordance with a tradition beginning with Aristotle, that the epistemic standing one attains when one understands why something is so is itself just a kind of propositional knowledge—viz., propositional knowledge of causes. A point that has been granted on both sides of these debates is that if (...) these reductive proposals are right, then knowledge-how and understanding-why should be susceptible to the same extent as knowledge-that is to being undermined by epistemic luck. This paper reports experimental results that test these luck-based predictions. Interestingly, these results suggest a striking positive correlation between self-reported philosophical expertise and attributions of knowledge-how, understanding-why and knowledge-that which run contrary to reductive proposals. We contextualize these results by showing how they align very well with a particular kind of overarching non-reductive proposal, one that two of the authors have defended elsewhere according to which knowledge-how and understanding-why, but not knowledge-that, essentially involve cognitive achievement. We conclude by situating the interpretive narrative advanced within contemporary discussions about the role of expertise in philosophical judgment. (shrink)