In a historical situation characterised by crisis, wars and widespread protests the question of the relationship between past Left-revolutionary endeavours and present political challenges is of utmost importance for the possibility of mounting an anti-systemic challenge to capitalism. T. J. Clark’s essay ‘For a Left with No Future’ argues that the future-oriented stance of the 19th and 20th Century Left turned the Left into a disastrous dobbel- gänger of capitalist modernity causing havoc and death instead of being a genuine opposition (...) to capitalism. The great refusals have to be replaced with a ‘modest’ and more ‘realistic’ approach, Clark argues, enabling the Left to understand the human propensity to violence and therefore engaging in a kind of anti-war activism. This article rejects Clark’s analysis and tries to save the revolutionary perspective Clark is trying to get rid of arguing that it is indeed the Left that we have to bury. Juxtaposing Clark’s argument with a reading of Michèle Bernstein’s ‘Victories of the Proletariat’ made as part of the 1963 Situationist exhibition ‘Destruction of RSG-6’ the article attempts to contribute to the re-formulation of a contemporary revolutionary position on the basis of the breakdown of the programmatic Left. (shrink)

The article analyses the relatively meager response of artists to the ‘war on terror’ compared to the response of American artists to the war in Vietnam, where artists organized both exhibitions and protests against the war in South East Asia in the late 1960s. This of course has to do with the transformations going in contemporary art and the broader political context characterized by the hegemony of neo-liberalism. The article juxtaposes an installation by the Retort collective with an installation by (...) Alfredo Jaar, analyzing two different ways of confronting the image war of the capitalist state machine with either a heave-handed use of art or a negative representation. (shrink)

This article is a discussion of Grant Kester’s notion of socially-engaged art criticism via a retrospective mapping of the four most important 1990s artistic practices: relational art, institutional critique, tactical media and socially-engaged art. While both relational, or participatory, art and institutional critique seem to have run out of steam, and have fused more or less seamlessly with the institution of art, socially-engaged art still seems to hold critical potential by making use of the relative autonomy of art beyond the (...) narrow confines of the art institution. The journal Field, founded and edited by Kester, is an attempt to develop a new art criticism that is able to account for this kind of practice. The turn to ethnography in order to analyse often open-ended community-based projects is relevant – and the. (shrink)

THE SUBJETCS OF THE ABSOLUTE WRONG AND ITS OPPSPRING The notion of the proletariat as the historical subject has disappeared in radical left-wing theory since the late 1960's. By comparing Guy Debord and the young Marx’s notion of the proletariat with the later notions of transgressive subjectivities, proposed by Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Antonio Negri respectively, the article analyses a split between ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ in contemporary Marxist and post-Marxist theory.

The article brings together three short texts by Giorgio Agamben: “What is a people?” from Means without Ends from 1996, the third chapter from The Time that Remains from 2000 and the oral presentation “What is a movement?” from 2005. It analyzes Agamben’s idea of the people as internally divided. Through a juxtaposition with Marx’ notion of the proletariat, the article discusses Agamben’s attempt to develop a inoperative, but nonetheless revolutionary counter-paradigm to the biopolitical power paradigm of the West.

This essay constitutes a response to Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen’s essay “A Note on Socially Engaged Art Criticism”. In particular, the essay focuses on the concept of an “exculpatory critique”. This term refers to a set of arguments in contemporary art criticism which contend that artistic practices that engage directly with processes of social or political change sacrifice their aesthetic validity while also providing an ideological justification for existing systems of domination. Kester seeks to demonstrate some of the shortcomings (...) involved in this critique by examining the underlying model of political transformation on which it is based and outlining an alternative account of art’s role in social action. (shrink)

On Folk Epistemology explores how we ascribe knowledge to ourselves and others. Empirical evidence suggests that we do so early and often in thought as well as in talk. Since knowledge ascriptions are central to how we navigate social life, it is important to understand our basis for making them. -/- A central claim of the book is that factors that have nothing to do with knowledge may lead to systematic mistakes in everyday ascriptions of knowledge. These mistakes are explained (...) by an empirically informed account of how ordinary knowledge ascriptions are the product of cognitive heuristics that are associated with biases. In developing this account, Mikkel Gerken presents work in cognitive psychology and pragmatics, while also contributing to epistemology. For example, Gerken develops positive epistemic norms of action and assertion and moreover, critically assesses contextualism, knowledge-first methodology, pragmatic encroachment theories and more. Many of these approaches are argued to overestimate the epistemological significance of folk epistemology. In contrast, this volume develops an equilibristic methodology according to which intuitive judgments about knowledge cannot straightforwardly play a role as data for epistemological theorizing. Rather, critical epistemological theorizing is required to interpret empirical findings. Consequently, On Folk Epistemology helps to lay the foundation for an emerging sub-field that intersects philosophy and the cognitive sciences: The empirical study of folk epistemology. (shrink)

Outcome bias and hindsight bias are important in philosophical debates and have wide-ranging implications outside of philosophy. Recently, Hedden has articulated a novel line of argumnt that the empirical evidence for what he labels hindsight bias is largely misguided and that empirical researchers who postulate such a bias are engaged in a fallacy fallacy. In this paper, I articulate Hedden’s core insights in terms of two principles and argue that in the relevant empirical research, these principles are often (i) recognized, (...) (ii) invoked in theoretical explanation, and (iii) guiding study designs and interpretation of data. On this basis, I argue that there is ample empirical evidence for outcome and hindsight bias and that cognitive psychologists do not generally exhibit a fallacy fallacy of postulating such biases in cases where there are none. More constructively, the present paper articulates some general principles that help us to better understand when an empirical study provides evidence of these types of bias. Thus, the debate casts light on both the specific evidence for outcome and hindsight bias but also on the general division of labor between philosophy and psychology. (shrink)

Scientific Testimony concerns the roles of scientific testimony in science and society. The book develops a positive alternative to a tradition famously expressed by the slogan of the Royal Society Nullius in verba ("Take nobody's word for it"). This book argues that intra-scientific testimony—i.e., testimony between collaborating scientists—is not in conflict with the spirit of science or an add-on to scientific practice. On the contrary, intra-scientific testimony is a vital part of science. This is illustrated by articulating epistemic norms of (...) intra-scientific testimony and arguing that they are vital to scientific methodology on a par with other scientific norms governing scientific observation and data analysis. -/- The book also provides an account of public scientific testimony—i.e., scientific testimony to the lay population. This is done by integrating philosophical resources with empirical research on the science of science communication. For example, various misconceptions about science and folk epistemological biases are diagnosed as factors that contribute to science skepticism. This diagnosis provides the basis for developing novel norms for science communication that are sensitive to the psychological and social obstacles to laypersons' uptake of it. Finally, the volume discusses how public scientific testimony is best embedded in society and argues that it is critical for societies that pursue the ideals of deliberative democracy. Scientific Testimony draws on philosophy of science, social epistemology, and empirical research to provide a wide-ranging account of the roles of scientific testimony within scientific practice and within the wider society. (shrink)

Experimental studies investigating the contribution of conscious intention to the generation of a sense of agency for one’s own actions tend to rely upon a narrow definition of intention. Often it is operationalized as the conscious sensation of wanting to move right before movement. Existing results and discussion are therefore missing crucial aspects of intentions, namely intention as the conscious sensation of wanting to move in advance of the movement. In the present experiment we used an intentional binding paradigm, in (...) which we distinguished between immediate intention, as usually investigated, and longer standing intention. The results showed that the binding effect was significantly enhanced for distal intentions compared to proximal intentions, indicating that the former leads to stronger sense of agency. Our finding provides empirical support for a crucial distinction between at least two types of intention when addressing the efficacy of conscious intentions. (shrink)

I begin by criticizing reductionist knowledge-first epistemology according to which knowledge can be used to reductively analyze other epistemic phenomena. My central concern is that proponents of such an approach commit a similar mistake to the one that they charge their opponents with. This is the mistake of seeking to reductively analyze basic epistemic phenomena in terms of other allegedly more fundamental phenomena. I then turn to non-reductionist brands of knowledge-first epistemology. Specifically, I consider the knowledge norms of assertion and (...) contrast them with an alternative that I have developed elsewhere (Gerken 2011, 2012a, 2013b, 2014, 2015a, 2015c, MS). On the basis of the critical discussion, I question whether a knowledge-first program that is both plausible and distinctive has been identified. On a more positive note, I sketch the contours of an alternative that I label ‘equilibristic epistemology.’ According to this approach, there isn’t a single epistemic phenomenon or concept that is “first.” Rather, there are a number of basic epistemic phenomena that are not reductively analyzable although they may be co-elucidated in a non-reductive manner. This approach preserves some grains of truth in knowledge-first epistemology. For example, it preserves the idea that knowledge can be taken to be explanatorily basic and unanalyzable. However, since no single epistemic phenomenon is first, knowledge is not first. (shrink)

What is the epistemic position that a scientist must be in vis-à-vis a proposition, p, to be in a good enough epistemic position to assert that p to a fellow scientist within the scientific process? My aim is to provide an answer to this question and, more generally, to connect the epistemological debates about the epistemic norms of assertion to the debates about the nature of the scientific process. The question is important because science is a collaborative enterprise based on (...) a division of labor. It has even been suggested that such collaboration is a part of the scientific method. However, scientific collaboration depends upon communication between scientists—that is, intra-scientific testimony. After distinguishing some different kinds of intra-scientific testimony, I provide a specific proposal for an epistemic norm of assertion that generally governs such testimony. I argue that the proposal aligns with the requirements of three scientific virtues—replicability, revisability, and accountability. The discussion of replicability considers a prominent debate in the social and cognitive sciences. In conclusion, I consider some of the wider questions raised by characterizing scientific collaboration, division of labor, and more generally, scientific method via intra-scientific testimony. (shrink)

I discuss Lawlor’s Austinian account of knowledge ascriptions and argue that it is a brand of pragmatic encroachment. I then criticize the motivation for pragmatic encroachment theories that derives from assumptions about the functional role of knowledge ascriptions. I argue that this criticism also apply to contextualist followers of Craig. Finally, I suggest that the central lesson from reflection on the communicative functions of knowledge ascriptions is that they, upon reflection, motivate traditional invariantism.

This paper investigates the notion of semiotic scaffolding in relation to mathematics by considering its influence on mathematical activities, and on the evolution of mathematics as a research field. We will do this by analyzing the role different representational forms play in mathematical cognition, and more broadly on mathematical activities. In the main part of the paper, we will present and analyze three different cases. For the first case, we investigate the semiotic scaffolding involved in pencil and paper multiplication. For (...) the second case, we investigate how the development of new representational forms influenced the development of the theory of exponentiation. For the third case, we analyze the connection between the development of commutative diagrams and the development of both algebraic topology and category theory. Our main conclusions are that semiotic scaffolding indeed plays a role in both mathematical cognition and in the development of mathematics itself, but mathematical cognition cannot itself be reduced to the use of semiotic scaffolding. (shrink)

The term ‘epistemic trespassing’ has recently been coined to denote a person’s judgments regarding a domain where they are not epistemic experts. In this paper, I focus on expert trespassing testimony – that is, testimony by an expert in a domain of expertise other than his own. More specifically, I focus on intra-scientific trespassing testimony between scientific collaborators. By developing a number of distinctions, I argue that while intra-scientific trespassing testimony may seriously hamper scientific collaboration, it does not invariably do (...) so and may even be beneficial to it. (shrink)

I will argue that cases of massive deception, such as New Evil Demon cases, as well as one-off cases of local deception present challenges to views according to which epistemic reasons, epistemic warrant, epistemic rationality or epistemic norms are factive. In doing so, I will argue is that proponents of a factive turn in epistemology should observe important distinctions between what are often simply referred to as ‘bad cases.’ Recognizing epistemologically significant differences between deception cases raises serious challenges for those (...) who deny a central role for non-factive aspects of epistemology. (shrink)

I consider a number of questions for foundational epistemology that arise from further reflection on salience of alternatives and epistemic position. On this basis, I turn to more applied issues. First, I will consider work in social psychology to motivate the working-hypothesis that social stereotypes will make some alternatives more, and some less, salient. A related working-hypothesis is that social stereotypes may lead to both overestimation and underestimation of a subject’s epistemic position. If these working-hypotheses are true, the outcome may (...) be a distinctive route to epistemic injustice. (shrink)

This is the Introduction and Chapter 1.1 of the book ‘Scientific Testimony. Its roles in science and society’ (OUP 2022). The introduction contains a brief survey of the book’s chapters and main conclusions, which I hope will be useful to the curious ones.

Neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), such as autism and ADHD, are behaviorally defined adaptive functioning difficulties arising from variations, alterations and atypical maturation of the brain. While it is widely agreed that NDDs are complex conditions with their presentation and functional impact underpinned by diverse genetic and environmental factors, contemporary and polarizing debate has focused on the appropriateness of the biomedical as opposed to the neurodiverse paradigm in framing conceptions of these conditions. Despite being largely overlooked by both research and practice, the (...) International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (ICF) endorsed by the World Health Organization in 2001 views functioning dynamically, offering a framework for investigating, assessing and treating NDDs holistically. Exemplified by autism and ADHD, we argue that the ICF provides not only a multitude of opportunities in accounting for the environmental determinants in researching and clinically managing NDDs, but opportunities for harmonizing the seemingly irreconcilable biomedical and neurodiverse paradigms. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/YwuWPDUOs5k. (shrink)

The starting point of this article is the concept of civil war in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer-series. In spite of its relative obscurity, Agamben insists that civil war is the fundamental political structure, which has characterized all of Western history since Ancient Greece. As such it constitutes a privileged vantage point from whence it is possible to discern the limitations of his political thought. These limitations originate in his deployment of Carl Schmitt’s state of exception, which serves to include civil (...) war in the sovereign order – this entails that classical modes of political contestation and conflict e.g. revolution, are always already internal to the sovereign state, and can therefore only serve to reaffirm it. The state of exception thus produces an inherent incapacity to think or move beyond the sovereign state. Agamben subsequently attempts to challenge the state of exception albeit with varying degrees of success. This suggest the necessity of taking exception to the exception and explode the conceptual coupling of civil war and sovereign power, in order to create a space where it is possible to think political contestation within or beyond the works of Agamben. (shrink)

The article develops the notion of the ‘hyperabject’ – coined by Danish poet Theis Ørntoft – into a proper theoretical concept. The term hyperabject is a synthesis of Timothy Morton's concept of hyperobjects and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, and in the article we argue that the concept of the hyperabject entails a necessary critique of and correction to Morton's ecological thought, as well as various other versions of speculative realism, new materialism and object-oriented ontology.

Over the last century, there have been considerable variations in the frequency of use and types of diagrams used in mathematical publications. In order to track these changes, we developed a method enabling large-scale quantitative analysis of mathematical publications to investigate the number and types of diagrams published in three leading mathematical journals in the period from 1885 to 2015. The results show that diagrams were relatively common at the beginning of the period under investigation. However, beginning in 1910, they (...) were almost completely unused for about four decades before reappearing in the 1950s. The diagrams from the 1950s, however, were of a different type than those used earlier in the century. We see this change in publication practice as a clear indication that the formalist ideology has influenced mathematicians’ choice of representations. Although this could be seen as a minor stylistic aspect of mathematics, we argue that mathematicians’ representational practice is deeply connected to their cognitive practice and to the contentual development of the discipline. These changes in publication style therefore indicate more fundamental changes in the period under consideration. (shrink)

I ask three questions related to the claims made within the staying alive theory : Is survival more fitness-enhancing for females than for males? Does the historical record on sex differences in mortality support the SAT? Is it possible to talk about “independent selective pressures on both male and female traits” when all we have are sex/gender comparisons?

Much debate has surrounded “switching” scenarios in which a subject's reasoning is said to exhibit the fallacy of equivocation. Peter Ludlow has argued that such scenarios are “epistemically prevalent” and, therefore, epistemically relevant alternatives. Since a distinctive feature of the cases in question is that the subject blamelessly engages in conceptual equivocation, we may label them ‘equivocational switching cases’.Ludlow's influential argument occurs in a discussion about compatibilism with regards to anti‐individualism and self‐knowledge. However, the issue has wide‐reaching consequences for many (...) areas of epistemology. Arguably, the claim that equivocational switching cases are epistemically relevant may bear on the epistemology of inference, testimony, memory, group rationality and belief revision.Ludlow's argument proceeds from a now well‐known “down to Earth” switching‐case of a subject, Biff, who travels between the US and the UK. I argue that Ludlow's case‐based argument fails to support the general claim that conceptual equivocational switching cases are prevalent and epistemically relevant. Thus, the discussion addresses the basis of some poorly understood issues regarding the epistemological consequences of anti‐individualism. Simultaneously, the discussion is broadened from the narrow focus on self‐knowledge. Finally, the critical discussion serves as the basis for some general reflections on epistemic relevance and the epistemic risks associated with conceptual equivocation. Specifically, I suggest that philosophy is an area where the risk of conceptual equivocation is extraordinarily high. (shrink)

I present a challenge to epistemological pragmatic encroachment theories from epistemic injustice. The challenge invokes the idea that a knowing subject may be wronged by being regarded as lacking knowledge due to social identity prejudices. However, in an important class of such cases, pragmatic encroachers appear to be committed to the view that the subject does not know. Hence, pragmatic encroachment theories appear to be incapable of accounting for an important type of injustice – namely, discriminatory epistemic injustice. Consequently, pragmatic (...) encroachment theories run the risk of obscuring or even sanctioning epistemically unjust judgments that arise due to problematic social stereotypes or unjust folk epistemological biases. In contrast, the epistemological view that rejects pragmatic encroachment – namely, strict purist invariantism – is capable of straightforwardly diagnosing the cases of discriminatory epistemic injustice as such. While the challenge is not a conclusive one, it calls for a response. Moreover, it illuminates very different conceptions of epistemology’s role in mitigating epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Recent developments in technologically enabled social cognition call for a rethinking of many aspects of human cognition. According to the hypothesis of extended cognition, we must revise our psychological categories by eliminating allegedly superficial distinctions between internal cognition and external processes. As an alternative to this proposal, I outline a hypothesis of outsourced cognition which seeks to respect distinctions that are operative in both folk psychology and the social and cognitive sciences. According to this hypothesis, the cognitive states and processes (...) of the individual are substantially and explanatorily distinct from the relevant external states and processes. In consequence, the individual remains a cognitive unit that is both central and indispensable in the explanations of cognitive science. As a case study, I consider the epistemology of testimony. I will argue that important epistemological categories may be preserved by adopting the hypothesis of outsourced cognition over the hypothesis of extended cognition. Moreover, I will argue that the outsourced cognition hypothesis deepens the problems that beset an extended epistemology of testimony. (shrink)

The purpose of the present chapter is to survey the work on epistemic norms of action, practical deliberation and assertion and to consider how these norms are interrelated. On a more constructive note, we will argue that if there are important similarities between the epistemic norms of action and assertion, it has important ramifications for the debates over speech acts and harm. Thus, we hope that the chapter will indicate how thinking about assertions as a speech act can benefit from (...) a broader action theoretic setting. We will proceed as follows. In Section 2, we provide a survey of epistemic norms of action and practical deliberation. In Section 3, we turn to the epistemic norms of assertion. In Section 4, we consider arguments for and against commonality of the epistemic norms of actions, practical deliberation and assertion. In Section 5, we discuss some of the ramifications of the debates over epistemic norms of assertion such as whether they may be extended to other linguistic phenomena such as Gricean implicature. In Section 6, we consider the consequences of the debate about the epistemic norms of action and practical deliberation for debates about speech and harm. (shrink)

The paper draws on philosophy of science to help resolve a tension between two central journalistic ideals: That of resenting diverse viewpoints (Balanced Reporting) and that of presenting the most reliable testimony (Reliable Reporting). While both of these ideals are valuable, they may be in tension. This is particularly so when it comes to scientific testimony and science reporting. Thus, we face a hard question: How should and be balanced in science reporting? The present paper contributes substantive proposals in a (...) manner that integrates philosophy of science with the recent empirical literature on science communication. Specifically, I articulate and evaluate strategies for balancing Balanced Reporting and Reliable Reporting. First, I provide a diagnosis of the conflict between them that is informed by philosophy of science. On this basis, I provide restrictions of both Balanced Reporting and Reliable Reporting. The restrictions are unified because they are inspired by similar reflections about the epistemic basis of science reporting—namely scientific justification. Moreover, I note some empirical work that supports the restrictions as well as some empirical work that indicates some limitations of them. Thus, the paper exemplifies how an empirically informed philosophy of science may bear on a question of societal concern. (shrink)

Several studies have found a robust effect of truth on epistemic evaluation of belief, decision, action and assertion. Thus, truth has a significant effect on normative participant evaluations. Some theorists take this truth effect to motivate factive epistemic norms of belief, action, assertion etc. In contrast, I argue that the truth effect is best understood as an epistemic instance of the familiar and ubiquitous phenomenon of outcome bias. I support this diagnosis from three interrelating perspectives: (1) by epistemological theorizing, (2) (...) by considerations from cognitive psychology and (3) by methodological reflections on the relationship between folk epistemology and epistemological theorizing. (shrink)

Scientific expert testimony is crucial to public deliberation, but it is associated with many pitfalls. This article identifies one—namely, expert trespassing testimony—which may be characterized, crudely, as the phenomenon of experts testifying outside their domain of expertise. My agenda is to provide a more precise characterization of this phenomenon and consider its ramifications for the role of science in society. I argue that expert trespassing testimony is both epistemically problematic and morally problematic. Specifically, I will argue that scientific experts are (...) subject to a particular obligation. Roughly, this is the obligation to qualify their assertions when speaking outside their domain of scientific expertise in certain contexts. Thus, I argue that scientists who possess expert knowledge are confronted with hard questions about when and how to testify and, therefore, that being a scientific expert comes with great responsibility. Consequently, I provide a concrete “expert guideline” according to which scientific experts, in certain contexts, face an obligation to qualify their assertions when speaking outside their domain of expertise. Furthermore, I consider a number of the conditions in which the guideline is waived or overridden. On this basis, I consider the broader aspects of the roles of scientific experts in a society with a high division of cognitive labor that calls for trust in scientific expert testimony. (shrink)

This paper empirically investigates how perspective bears on putative salient alternative effects on knowledge ascriptions. Some theoretical accounts predict salient alternative effects in both fir...

Transparency is an increasingly prominent area of research that offers valuable insights for organizational studies. However, conceptualizations of transparency are rarely subject to critical scrutiny and thus their relevance remains unclear. In most accounts, transparency is associated with the sharing of information and the perceived quality of the information shared. This narrow focus on information and quality, however, overlooks the dynamics of organizational transparency. To provide a more structured conceptualization of organizational transparency, this article unpacks the assumptions that shape the (...) extant literature, with a focus on three dimensions: conceptualizations, conditions, and consequences. The contribution of the study is twofold: On a conceptual level, we provide a framework that articulates two paradigmatic positions underpinning discussions of transparency, verifiability approaches and performativity approaches; on an analytical level, we suggest a novel future research agenda for studying organizational transparency that pays attention to its dynamics, paradoxes, and performative characteristics. (shrink)

A phenomenon is that which appears. In his phenomenology, Jean-Luc Marion shows how a phenomenon that appears in and out of itself evades the metaphysical demand of grounding. Classical philosophy has acknowledged phenomena only in so far as they can be sanctioned by the concepts of the intellect. This holds good also of Husserl’s constitutive ego. Now, Marion distinguishes between such intuitively “poor phenomena” and the “saturated phenomena” that exceed the intentional consciousness; they are given not by the consciousness but (...) to the consciousness in an excess of intuition. This “gift of appearance” is Marion’s main concern, in the visible in general, and in painting in particular. But whereas idols only reflect our own desire to see and to be seen, icons surprise us by the gaze the saint directs on us. A picture is the scene of a possible revelation; and the revelation is nothing but the phenomenon taken in its fullest meaning: intuitive saturation at its maximum. A crucial question, nonetheless, remains: What is the relation between revelation as a phenomenological possibility, and Revelation as a theological dogma of the utmost importance? (shrink)