Expert testimony figures in recent debates over how best to understand the norm of assertion and the domain-specific epistemic expectations placed on testifiers. Cases of experts asserting with only isolated second-hand knowledge (Lackey 2011, 2013) have been used to shed light on whether knowledge is sufficient for epistemically permissible assertion. I argue that relying on such cases of expert testimony introduces several problems concerning how we understand expert knowledge, and the sharing of such (...) class='Hi'>knowledge through testimony. Refinements are needed to clarify exactly what principles are being tested by such cases; but once refined, such cases raise more questions than they answer. (shrink)

We citizens of the 21st century live in a world where division of epistemic labour rules. Most of what we know we learned from the spoken or written word of others, and we depend in endless practical ways on the technological fruits of the dispersed knowledge of others—of which we often know almost nothing—in virtually every moment of our lives. Interest has been growing in recent years amongst philosophers, in the issues in epistemology raised by this fact. One issue (...) concerns the depth and extent of our epistemic dependence on testimony, as we may label this broad epistemic source: Do we have any knowledge at all that is free of epistemic dependence on what we have learned from others? A related question is whether our entitlement to believe what we have learned from others can be explained without invoking any epistemic principles special to testimony. These questions concern, as it were, the macro-epistemology of testimony. In the present discussion I shall focus instead on the micro foundations. Testimony, in our broad sense, can occur through an extensive range of types of spoken and written means of purportedly factual communication, including telephone calls, e-mails and personal letters, lectures and radio broadcasts, newspapers, textbooks and encyclopaedias, personal diaries, and public records of all kinds. But the central paradigm—what started the whole communication thing off—is surely that of face-to-face spoken encounter, when one person tells something to another, thereby intending and hoping to share her knowledge with her audience. I begin by describing the speech act of telling, identifying what takes place in a felicitous act of telling. From the nature of the speech act of telling, we see precisely how it is that knowledge is, when all goes as it should, acquired from teller by trusting hearer, in such an act, and in acts of testimony more broadly. (shrink)

This fascinating monograph tackles a well-established problem in the philosophy of education. The problem is the threat posed to the logical possibility of non-confessional religious education by the claim that religion constitutes an autonomous language-game or form of knowledge. Defenders of this claim argue that religion cannot be understood from the outside: it is impossible to impart religious understanding unless one is also prepared to impart religious belief. Michael Hand argues for two central points: first, that non-confessional religious (...) education would indeed be impossible if it were true that religion constitutes a distinct form of knowledge; and, second, that religion does not in fact constitute a distinct form of knowledge. >. (shrink)

We citizens of the 21st century live in a world where division of epistemic labour rules. Most of what we know we learned from the spoken or written word of others, and we depend in endless practical ways on the technological fruits of the dispersed knowledge of others—of which we often know almost nothing—in virtually every moment of our lives. Interest has been growing in recent years amongst philosophers, in the issues in epistemology raised by this fact. One issue (...) concerns the depth and extent of our epistemic dependence on testimony, as we may label this broad epistemic source: Do we have any knowledge at all that is free of epistemic dependence on what we have learned from others? A related question is whether our entitlement to believe what we have learned from others can be explained without invoking any epistemic principles special to testimony. These questions concern, as it were, the macro-epistemology of testimony. In the present discussion I shall focus instead on the micro foundations. Testimony, in our broad sense, can occur through an extensive range of types of spoken and written means of purportedly factual communication, including telephone calls, e-mails and personal letters, lectures and radio broadcasts, newspapers, textbooks and encyclopaedias, personal diaries, and public records of all kinds. But the central paradigm—what started the whole communication thing off—is surely that of face-to-face spoken encounter, when one person tells something to another, thereby intending and hoping to share her knowledge with her audience. I begin by describing the speech act of telling, identifying what takes place in a felicitous act of telling. From the nature of the speech act of telling, we see precisely how it is that knowledge is, when all goes as it should, acquired from teller by trusting hearer, in such an act, and in acts of testimony more broadly. (shrink)

The author uses social epistemology to develop the cognitive authority theory. The fundamental concept of cognitive authority is that people construct knowledge in two different ways: based on their first-hand experience or on what they have learned second-hand from others. What people learn first-hand depends on the stock of ideas they bring to the interpretation and understanding of their encounters with the world. People primarily depend on others for ideas as well as for information outside (...) the range of direct experience. Much of what they think of the world is what they have gained second-hand. All that people know of the world beyond the narrow range of their own lives is what others have told them. However, people do not count all hearsay as equally reliable; only those who are deemed to “know what they are talking about” become cognitive authorities. --. (shrink)

It is increasingly argued that there is a single unified constitutive norm of both assertion and practical reasoning. The most common suggestion is that knowledge is this norm. If this is correct, then we would expect that a diagnosis of problematic assertions should manifest as problematic reasons for acting. Jennifer Lackey has recently argued that assertions epistemically grounded in isolated second-hand knowledge (ISHK) are unwarranted. I argue that decisions epistemically grounded in premises based on ISHK (...) also seem inappropriate. I finish by suggesting that this finding has important implications for the debates regarding the norms of assertion and practical reasoning. (shrink)

Fricker has proposed that a hearer’s knowledge that p acquired through trusting a speaker requires the speaker to know that p, and that therefore testimonial knowledge through trust is necessarily second-hand knowledge. In this paper, I argue that Fricker’s view is problematic for four reasons: firstly, Fricker’s dismissal of a central challenge to the second-handedness of testimonial knowledge is based on a significant misrepresentation of this challenge; secondly, on closer scrutiny an important distinction (...) Fricker wants to draw is compromised by her account of trust; thirdly, Fricker’s conception of trust is at odds with our natural understanding of this notion; fourthly, the reasons Fricker cites in support of her view are not sufficient to single out her view as the correct one, since rival views can also accommodate the relevant data. (shrink)

Trust enters into the making of a virtuous person in at least two ways. First, unless a child has a sufficiently trusting relationship with at least one adult, it is doubtful that she will be able to become the kind of person who can form ethically responsible relationships with others. Infant trust, as Annette Baier has reminded us, is the foundation on which future trust relationships will be built; and when such trust is irreparably shaken, the adult into whom the (...) child grows may be forever cut off from intimacy. Second, a moral beginner must trust other people's moral judgment while she learns to be good. A child does not learn how to be good on her own. She follows the precepts and examples of others, absorbs the moral values of the community into which she has been born, and relies on others who, with luck, will not lead her astray but will turn out to be trustworthy in offering her guidance and correction. While there is some empirical evidence that children learn about morality better when given reasons in support of what they are being taught, part of what a child is being taught is what counts as a good reason. Thus, no moral beginner could be in a position to assess adequately the cogency of the reasons she given until she has progressed some distance in her education. Until that time, the beginner must rely on other people's judgment. That thrust enters into the making of a morally good person should thus be uncontroversial. I want to defend a much more controversial thesis: needing to trust other people's moral judgment is not just a stage we go through on the way to becoming morally virtuous. If the world of value is complex, and if our access to it is shaped by our experiences, then even among the morally mature there will continue to be a significant role for moral testimony and thus for trust. (shrink)

A reply to Matthew A. Benton, "Expert Opinion and Second‐Hand Knowledge," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (2016): 492-508.

Participants on both sides of the contemporary debate between reductionism and anti-reductionism about testimony commonly describe testimonial knowledge as knowledge acquired at second hand. I argue that fully appreciating the distinctive sense in which testimonial knowledge is secondhand supports anti-reductionism over reductionism but also that it supports a particular kind of anti-reductionism very different from that typically offered in the literature. Testimonial knowledge is secondhand in the demanding sense of being justified by the authority (...) of a speaker where this requires that epistemic responsibility for meeting challenges to the audience's testimonial knowledge is shared between speaker and audience. The epistemic credentials of testimonial knowledge are in this sense importantly interpersonal. (shrink)

We show that the contemporary debate surrounding the question “What is the norm of assertion?” presupposes what we call the quantitative view, i.e. the view that this question is best answered by determining how much epistemic support is required to warrant assertion. We consider what Jennifer Lackey ( 2010 ) has called cases of isolated second-hand knowledge and show—beyond what Lackey has suggested herself—that these cases are best understood as ones where a certain type of understanding (...) , rather than knowledge, constitutes the required epistemic credential to warrant assertion. If we are right that understanding (and not just knowledge) is the epistemic norm for a restricted class of assertions, then this straightforwardly undercuts not only the widely supposed quantitative view, but also a more general presupposition concerning the universalisability of some norm governing assertion—the presumption (almost entirely unchallenged since Williamson’s 1996 paper) that any epistemic norm that governs some assertions should govern assertions—as a class of speech act—uniformly. (shrink)

What is the relationship between the epistemic norms of assertion and the epistemic norms of action/practical reasoning? Brown argues that the standards for practical reasoning and assertion are distinct (Brown 2012). In contrast, Montminy argues that practical reasoning and assertion must be governed by the same norm (Montminy 2012). Likewise, McKinnon has articulated an argument for a unified account from cases of isolated second-hand knowledge (McKinnon 2012). To clarify the issue, I articulate a distinction between Equivalence (...) Commonality and Structural Commonality. I then argue against the former by counterexamples that doubly dissociate the standards for assertion and action. Furthermore, I argue that such a double dissociation compromises knowledge accounts of both assertion and action/practical reasoning. To provide a more accurate diagnosis, I consider speech act theory and argue that principled differences between the norms of action and assertion compromise Equivalence Commonality. In contrast, a qualified version of Structural Commonality may be preserved. (shrink)

Adopting the methods of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, this article aims to add to our knowledge of the dynamics and resistance in professional-client encounters. It does this by examining the argumentative function of second-hand assessments in the setting of vocational rehabilitation. In the situated negotiation of appropriate work-targeted initiatives, the practice of reporting second-hand assessments functions either as ‘opposing’ the professional’s investigations, or, when used in initiating turns, as ‘promoting’ the client’s case. Regarding the first, (...) second-hand assessments provide opportunities to oppose and redirect the institutional agenda. That is, the issue introduced by the professional is fended off more or less openly through second-hand accounts, which provide a presumptive better grasp on the matter at hand. (shrink)

The ‘new school system’ described in the Schools White Paper (DfE, 2010) presents religious organisations with two interesting opportunities. The first is an opportunity to play a significantly enhanced role in the management of faith‐based schools. The second is an opportunity to rethink quite radically the content of their curricula. In this article I advance a proposal for the consideration of religious organisations: that they take up the opportunity to develop innovative, religiously distinctive curricula whilst eschewing the activity of (...) confessional religious education. I show how non‐confessional, faith‐based curricula are possible and offer some suggestions about what they might include. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that Immanuel Kant was one of Karl Barth's most important intellectual influences, but how and to what extent this is the case remains an open question. In Presupposing God, Robert Hand demonstrates a deep consistency between Kant's and Barth's theological epistemologies, with this issue in mind. After arguing for a number of positive emphases in Kant's critical philosophy and religious epistemology in conversation with modern Kant scholarship, Presupposing God demonstrates how these emphases were obscured in (...) Kant's reception in the decades between Kant and Barth, and then explores the intellectual conditions under which Barth first encountered Kant. The argument proceeds to show how Barth wrestled with these varying interpretations and continued to utilize Kant with increased sophistication as his thought developed across the Romans commentaries, Anselm, and the Church Dogmatics. Presupposing God suggests that Kant can be an asset to theology, rather than the liability he is often taken to be, and that Barth is one of the better available examples of this in practice. (shrink)

Discussions of Karl Popper's falsificationist philosophy of science appear regularly in the recent literature on economic methodology. In this literature, there seem to be two fundamental points of agreement about Popper. First, most economists take Popper's falsificationist method of bold conjecture and severe test to be the correct characterization of scientific conduct in the physical sciences. Second, most economists admit that economic theory fails miserably when judged by these same falsificationist standards. As Latsis states, “the development of economic analysis (...) would look a dismal affair through falsificationist spectacles.”. (shrink)

This paper examines methodological issues raised by revealed preference theory in economics: particularly contemporary revealed preference theory. The paper has three goals. First, to make the case that revealed preference theory is a broad research program in choice theory—not a single theory—and understanding this diversity is essential to any methodological analysis of the program. Second, to explore some of the existing criticisms of revealed preference theory in a way that emphasizes how the effectiveness of the critique depends on the (...) particular version of revealed preference under consideration. Finally, three additional criticisms are presented that are aimed specifically at contemporary revealed preference theory. (shrink)

The relationship between economics and the philosophy of natural science has changed substantially during the last few years. What was once exclusively a one-way relationship from philosophy to economics now seems to be much closer to bilateral exchange. The purpose of this paper is to examine this new relationship. First, I document the change. Second, I examine the situation within contemporary philosophy of science in order to explain why economics might have its current appeal. Third, I consider some of (...) the issues that might jeopardize the success of this philosophical project. (shrink)

In this inaugural lecture, delivered at the University of Birmingham in January 2014, I sketch the outline of a theory of moral education. The theory is an attempt to resolve the tension between two thoughts widely entertained by teachers, policy-makers and the general public. The first thought is that morality must be learned: children must come to see what morality requires of them and acquire the motivation to submit to its authority. The second thought is that morality is controversial: (...) there is deep uncertainty about both the requirements of morality and the reasons to comply with them. I draw distinctions between two kinds of moral education and between two kinds of moral inquiry . I argue that some basic moral standards are robustly justified and that schools should promote subscription to these standards by means of both moral formation and directive moral inquiry. (shrink)

Discussions of Karl Popper's falsificationist philosophy of science appear regularly in the recent literature on economic methodology. In this literature, there seem to be two fundamental points of agreement about Popper. First, most economists take Popper's falsificationist method of bold conjecture and severe test to be the correct characterization of scientific conduct in the physical sciences. Second, most economists admit that economic theory fails miserably when judged by these same falsificationist standards. As Latsis states, “the development of economic analysis (...) would look a dismal affair through falsificationist spectacles.”. (shrink)

In this brief comment on Educational Goods, I raise two worries about the authors' proposed normative framework for educational decision-makers. The first concerns the omission of rationality, or responsiveness to reasons, from the list of educational goods; the second concerns the inclusion of parental interests in the list of independent values.

Jennifer Lackey challenges the sufficiency version of the knowledge-action principle, viz., that knowledge that p is sufficient to rationally act on p, by proposing a set of alleged counterexamples. Her aim is not only to attack the knowledge-action principle, but also to undermine an argument for subject-sensitive invariantism. Lackey holds that her examples are counterexamples to the sufficiency version of the knowledge-action principle because (a) S knows the proposition in question, but (b) it is not rational (...) for S to act on it. In this paper, first, I argue against (a) on intuitive and on theoretical grounds. Second, I point out that (b), even if combined with (a), is not sufficient to make for counterexamples to the knowledge-action principle of the relevant kind. Third, I offer two alternative explanations of the intuition Lackey relies on. If either one of them is right, (b) may not be satisfied in her examples. (shrink)

The ‘new school system’ described in the Schools White Paper (DfE, ) presents religious organisations with two interesting opportunities. The first is an opportunity to play a significantly enhanced role in the management of faith-based schools. The second is an opportunity to rethink quite radically the content of their curricula. In this article I advance a proposal for the consideration of religious organisations: that they take up the opportunity to develop innovative, religiously distinctive curricula whilst eschewing the activity of (...) confessional religious education. I show how non-confessional, faith-based curricula are possible and offer some suggestions about what they might include. (shrink)

InStabilizing Dynamics Roy Weintraub provides a history of stability theory from the work of Hicks and Samuelson in the late 1930s to the Gale and Scarf counterexamples in the 1960s. Unlike his earlier work in the history of general equilibrium theory this recent contribution is not an attempt to fit the Walrasian program into the narrow framework of some particular philosophy of natural science. Rather, the theme inStabilizing Dynamicsis broadly social constructivist. Simply put, the constructivist view of science is “that (...) scientific knowledge itself is constructed socially, in communities of scientists: Knowledge is constructed, not found”. (shrink)

University philosophy outreach programs are proliferating. On campuses across the world, students and staff are taking philosophy out to the wider community, and especially to children and young people in schools. Their mission is to engage the public in philosophical discussion and to make a notoriously abstract and arcane subject accessible, meaningful and useful. As yet, there is little published research on these programs. They give rise to two clusters of questions deserving of scholarly attention. First, there are questions about (...) the rationale for philosophy outreach. What is the purpose of taking philosophy into the community? What are the intended benefits of these programs, to the children and young people who participate in them, to the students and staff who lead them, to society at large, or to the discipline of philosophy itself? How do these aims inform the selection of philosophical topics, texts, tools and techniques? The second group of questions have to do with the success of philosophy outreach. What attempts have been made to evaluate these programs and their outcomes? Do they, in fact, yield the benefits intended by those who design and deliver them? Are there any drawbacks to participation, or benefits other than the intended ones? What challenges (financial, institutional, pedagogical, psychological) have been encountered by those engaged in philosophy outreach and how have they been overcome? These are the questions that animate this double special issue on university philosophy outreach programs. The tremendously positive response we received to our call for papers, from contributors in Europe, North America and Australasia, confirms our impression that these questions are ripe for scholarly attention. Here, in Issue 10(1) we present the first tranche of papers; the next tranche will follow later this year, in Issue 10(2). (shrink)

In Moral Education in a Secular Society, Paul Hirst offers accounts of the content and justification of morality and the aims and methods of moral education. My own recent book, A Theory of Moral Education, does the same. Here I explore the similarities and differences between our theories. In the first part of the paper, I outline what Hirst calls the ‘sophisticated view of education’, which I wholeheartedly endorse, and highlight his attention to the noncognitive as well as the cognitive (...) aspects of morality. In the second part, I explain how Hirst’s transcendental justification of morality differs from my contractarian justification and trace the implications of this difference for our respective accounts of moral education. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas's Totality and Infinity is explicitly con cerned with the suppression of the voice of the Other by the synoptic totalizations of the voice of western philosophy. Levinas contests this emergence of Being and the systems of totality it indicates with the irruption of the face of the other, which signifies through contact and sensibility the presence of infinity within the human situation. Derrida's reading of this fundamental testing of western ontology rests on the accusation that western philosophy already (...) has a term for this: empiricism. That is, Derrida exposes an alien voice within Levinas's exposure of the voice alienated from ontological formulations. In the later Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence Levinas implic itly recognizes the truth of Derrida's demonstration of a residual con ceptualism, and shifts from the thematization of infinite exteriority given by the Other, alterity and the face-to-face relation, to the search for a signifyingness that will breach the noema's identificational closure, that is, to the direct and exposed gesture of saying. Both the limit terms of Totality and Infinity and the response they produced in Derrida have become the starting-point of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence: the testimony that is irreducible to a thematizing knowledge. What saves this saying from becoming in its turn another theme is that, in addition to its acting in the text, it acts upon and as HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 10 No. 3 © 1997 SAGE Publications [0952-695110:3] the text. The vocabulary, form of composition and mode of address of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence strain against their inherited limits. And the work this obliges the reader to undergo is, of course, an ethical necessity, given the work's message. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher has proposed an account of mathematical truth which he hopes avoids platonistic commitment to abstract mathematical objects. His idea is that the truth-conditions of mathematical statements consist in certain general structural features of physical reality. He codifies these structural features by reference to various operations which are performable on objects: the world is structured in such a way that these operations are possible. Which operations are performable cannot be known a priori; rather, we hypothesize, conjecture, idealize, and eventually (...) wind up with theories which are true of the world, just as we do in the sciences. Kitcher argues that mathematical and physical knowledge are continuous, in that they concern the same subject matter and are subject to the same epistemological and methodological constraints. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas's Totality and Infinity (1961) is explicitly con cerned with the suppression of the voice of the Other by the synoptic totalizations of the voice of western philosophy. Levinas contests this emergence of Being and the systems of totality it indicates with the irruption of the face of the other, which signifies through contact and sensibility the presence of infinity within the human situation. Derrida's reading of this fundamental testing of western ontology rests on the accusation that western philosophy (...) already has a term for this: empiricism. That is, Derrida exposes an alien voice within Levinas's exposure of the voice alienated from ontological formulations. In the later Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974) Levinas implic itly recognizes the truth of Derrida's demonstration of a residual con ceptualism, and shifts from the thematization of infinite exteriority given by the Other, alterity and the face-to-face relation, to the search for a signifyingness that will breach the noema's identificational closure, that is, to the direct and exposed gesture of saying. Both the limit terms of Totality and Infinity and the response they produced in Derrida have become the starting-point of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence: the testimony that is irreducible to a thematizing knowledge. What saves this saying from becoming in its turn another theme is that, in addition to its acting in the text, it acts upon and as HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 10 No. 3 © 1997 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) [0952-6951(199708)10:3] the text. The vocabulary, form of composition and mode of address of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence strain against their inherited limits. And the work this obliges the reader to undergo is, of course, an ethical necessity, given the work's message. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Baumgarten's Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives ed. by J. Colin McQuillanEmine Hande TunaJ. Colin McQuillan, editor. Baumgarten's Aesthetics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Pp. viii + 364. Hardcover, $130.00.Contemporary philosophers have often overlooked the originality and impact of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's views on aesthetics, and his contribution to the field is often reduced to his introduction of the term 'aesthetics' into the philosophical (...) lexicon. By illuminating the seminal character of Baumgarten's aesthetics and its enduring significance, J. Colin McQuillan's collection of twelve essays endeavors to rectify this neglect, particularly within the anglophone philosophical community. The collection aims to make recent scholarship on Baumgarten's aesthetics more accessible, with translated works from German scholars and their English counterparts presented in a single volume to entice anglophone readers. It stands as the first collection of essays devoted to Baumgarten's aesthetics to be published in English. Through the essays contained in this volume, readers are offered a comprehensive overview of Baumgarten's aesthetic theory and its progression as well as a deeper understanding of his substantial and influential contributions to the field.The collection begins with a comprehensive introduction by McQuillan, which provides insightful analysis of the reasons behind Baumgarten's neglected status and a concise biography of the philosopher. McQuillan lucidly summarizes Baumgarten's goals for his new science of aesthetics, the extent to which he was able to accomplish these goals, and what remained unfinished. McQuillan highlights Baumgarten's view that his aesthetics was not just a theoretical exercise, but rather had practical implications, such as the potential to enhance poetry, rhetoric, and other arts, and more generally all sensible cognition.The opening two essays of the collection offer dual perspectives on Baumgarten's aesthetics, one exploring the connection of his theories to the pursuit of establishing art as the presentation or representation of the absolute and the other presenting his aesthetics as modeled on the "art of invention" (ars inveniendi). Ursula Franke's essay contextualizes [End Page 711] Baumgarten's ideas within the historical framework and demonstrates his impact on the development of German idealist aesthetics, but it also serves as a valuable guide for further research on Baumgarten by providing an overview of contemporary research and avenues for engagement with his work. In the second essay, Stefanie Buchenau offers an insightful examination of the relationship between Baumgarten and Cicero, illuminating how the former crafted aesthetics as a new method of invention.The third and fourth essays of the collection have a narrower focus. In his analysis, Matthew McAndrew, following George Friedrich Meier, posits that Baumgarten, despite seemingly presenting two conflicting definitions of beauty—one attributing beauty to the object of cognition, and the other to the cognition itself—only held the former definition. Departing from previous interpretations that attempted to reconcile both definitions, McAndrew rejects the definition of beauty as the perfection of sensible cognition. Angelica Nuzzo argues that Baumgarten had a pluralistic understanding of truth and distinguished between aesthetic truth and logical truth. She examines Baumgarten's conception of aesthetic truth and contends that it is imperative to comprehend how poetry embodies and incorporates aesthetic truth. According to Nuzzo, Baumgarten believed that aesthetic truth is embodied.In the fifth essay, Simon Grote delves into the theological sources of Baumgarten's aesthetics. Grote claims that Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics was influenced by the definition of aisthēsis put forth by Halle Pietists. Indeed, he claims that seeing this connection between the Pietists and Baumgarten is vital to fully grasp the ethical dimensions of Baumgarten's early aesthetic theory. Like many Halle Pietists, Baumgarten was advancing a conception of moral education as involving the improvement of the human affects through the proper use of the sensible faculties. In the following essay, McQuillan examines the aspects of Baumgarten's aesthetics that set him apart from his rationalist predecessor Christian Wolff. Challenging the orthodox view that portrays Baumgarten as a Wolffian rationalist, McQuillan argues that Baumgarten limited the application of Wolff's mathematical method, circumscribed the scope of logic, and distinguished between sensible and intellectual perfection, separating what Wolff aimed to unite. In his contribution, Alessandro... (shrink)

This book seeks to advance social economic analysis, economic methodology, and the history of economic thought in the context of twenty-first century scholarship and socio-economic concerns. Bringing together carefully selected chapters by leading scholars it examines the central contributions that John Davis has made to various areas of scholarship. In recent decades, criticisms of mainstream economics have rekindled interest in a number of areas of scholarly inquiry that were frequently ignored by mainstream economic theory and practice during the second (...) half of the twentieth century, including social economics, economic methodology and history of economic thought. This book contributes to a growing literature on the revival of these areas of scholarship and highlights the pivotal role that John Davis's work has played in the ongoing revival. Together, the international panel of contributors show how Davis's insights in complexity theory, identity, and stratification are key to understanding a reconfigured economic methodology. They also reveal that Davis' willingness to draw from multiple academic disciplines gives us a platform for interrogating mainstream economics and provides the basis for a humane yet scientific alternative. This unique volume will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers across social economics, history of economic thought, economic methodology, political economy and philosophy of social science. understanding a reconfigured economic methodology. They also reveal that Davis' willingness to draw from multiple academic disciplines gives us a platform for interrogating mainstream economics and provides the basis for a humane yet scientific alternative. This unique volume will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers across social economics, history of economic thought, economic methodology, political economy and philosophy of social science. (shrink)

I argue that Kant’s aesthetic theory yields a fruitful theory of art criticism and that this theory presents an alternative both to the existing theories of his time and to contemporary theories. In this regard, my dissertation offers an examination of a neglected area in Kant scholarship since it is standardly assumed that a theory of criticism flies in the face of some of Kant’s most central aesthetic tenets, such as his rejection of aesthetic testimony and general objective principles of (...) taste. If art criticism is an enterprise of providing evaluations of artworks supported by reasons, then it is hard to see what the Kantian art critic can do for us. If I cannot defer to the critic’s judgment that she loved Blade Runner and there are no feasible general principles linking the depiction of futuristic cityscapes, or the accompaniment of a haunting minimalist soundtrack to the goodness of a film, then it does not seem to matter whether the critic communicates to me her evaluation of Blade Runner or supports her evaluation with descriptions of Blade Runner scenes. Nevertheless, the assumption that these Kantian tenets preclude the possibility of art criticism is mistaken and it is my aim to show how this can be. The project has two phases. In the first phase I develop a new interpretation of Kant’s theory of artistic beauty. In the second phase I make use of this interpretation to put forward a Kantian account of art criticism. Central to my interpretation is the notion that judgments of perfection, e.g., Blade Runner is an excellent neo-noir science fiction film, inform our aesthetic evaluations and receive support from descriptions of non-aesthetic properties of the film. It is precisely this underappreciated role of judgments of perception that I exploit in making room for Kantian art criticism. (shrink)

It is widely believed that democracies require knowledgeable citizens to function well. But the most politically knowledgeable individuals also tend to be the most partisan, and the strength of partisan identity tends to corrupt political thinking. This creates a conundrum. On the one hand, an informed citizenry is allegedly necessary for a democracy to flourish. On the other hand, the most knowledgeable and passionate voters are also the most likely to think in corrupted, biased ways. What to do? (...) This paper examines this tension and draws out several lessons. First, it is not obvious that more knowledgeable voters will make better political decisions. Second, attempts to remedy voter ignorance are problematic because partisans tend to become more polarized when they acquire more information. Third, solutions to citizen incompetence must focus on the intellectual virtue of objectivity. Fourth, some forms of epistocracy are troubling, in part, because they would increase the political power of the most dogmatic and biased individuals. Fifth, a highly restrictive form of epistocracy may escape the problem of political dogmatism, but epistocrats may face a steeper tradeoff between inclusivity and epistemic virtue than many would like. (shrink)

Although the concept of judgment has been replaced by the concept of belief in many philosophical subdisciplines, it has retained its central role in aesthetics. This paper discusses the following explanation for this: In contrast to the concept of belief, the concept of judgment presupposes conscious and first-personal engagement with the object about which the judgment is being made, and this conscious and first-personal engagement with the object in question plays a more important role in aesthetics than in other domains.

In this book Haridimos Tsoukas, one of the most imaginative organization theorists of our time, examines the nature of knowledge in organizations, and how individuals and scholars approach the concept of knowledge. -/- Tsoukas firstly looks at organizational knowledge and its embeddedness in social contexts and forms of life. He shows that knowledge is not just a collection of free floating representations of the world to be used at will, but an activity constitutive of the world. (...) On the one hand the organization as an institutionalized system does produce regularities that can can be captured via propositional forms of knowledge. On the other, the organization as practice, as a lifeworld, or as an open-ended system produce stories, values, and shared traditions which can only be captured by narrative forms of knowledge. -/- Secondly, Tsoukas looks at the issue of how individuals deal with the notion of complexity in organizations: Our inability to reduce the behaviour of complex organizations to their constituent parts. Drawing on concepts such as discourse, narrativity, and reflexivity, he adopts a hermeneutical approach to the issue. -/- Finally Tsoukas examines the concept of meta-knowledge, and how we know what we know. Arguing that the underlying representationalist epistemology of much of mainstream management causes many problems, he advocates adopting a more discursive approach. He describes what such an epistemology might be, and illustrates it with examples from organization studies and strategic management. -/- An ideal introduction to the thinking of a leading organizational theorist, this book will be essential reading for academics, researchers, and students of Knowledge Management, Organization Studies, Management Studies, Business Strategy, and Applied Epistemology. (shrink)

The idea of is explored. It is claimed that there is something epistemically important about acquiring one's knowledge first-hand via active perception rather than second-hand via testimony. Moreover, it is claimed that this kind of active perceptual seeing it for oneself is importantly related to the kind of understanding that is acquired when one possesses a correct and appropriately detailed explanation of how cause and effect are related. In both cases we have a kind of seeing (...) it for oneself which serves what is claimed to be a fundamental good: intellectual autonomy. It is argued that this proposal leads to a distinctive view about the goal of inquiry as often being a certain kind of knowledge rather than knowledge simpliciter. Finally, it is claimed that treating intellectual autonomy as a fundamental good is entirely compatible with granting that there is an important social dimension to our epistemic practices. (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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Second GuessingAnonymous OneThis is difficult for me to write because I have tremendous respect for every doctor that has been involved in my son’s care. I firmly believe that they chose and administered the highest level of care that they assessed as appropriate; that they cared for him both personally and professionally as if he were their own child; and that he was in the care of acknowledged (...) giants in their fields. I write this knowing that I will share this narrative with these doctors, in order that they can better understand the decisions I was faced with and the guilt I must live with feeling that I may not have made the best possible informed choice for my son, because of this trust and relationship.Let me describe my oncologist. I say “my” instead of my son’s whose doctor he really is, because he is mine too in every sense of the word. He cares passionately about his work and about my son specifically; he engenders my trust because he is compassionate, brilliant, and available to me for concerns both great and small. His accomplishments have saved lives and will continue to impact his field. He became the narrow bridge I walk, that is the only thing between me and dangerous water and rocks waiting below; the balancing bar on the tightrope that is the only thing that stands to keep me from falling into the abyss and breaking my neck. And this made it difficult for me to disagree with him and seek a second opinion. Because his unspoken words were, “Don’t you trust me that I will do the best for your child?” and I could not answer then what I would answer now, “Nobody is infallible and sometimes we may miss something that someone else can see despite how much we know or care.”It is ironic, I think, that sometimes a layperson, because of her limited knowledge, can see more clearly where a professional may not.My son was diagnosed at age six with Grade II ependymoma in 2006. He was treated with surgery, a complete resection, and then 33 rounds of conformal radiation. He recurred in 2012, and was diagnosed with anaplastic ependymoma Grade III. He had another surgery, with the same surgeons, who pronounced it another successful total resection. This is where my story begins.The MRI taken the next day showed a sliver of something there. My oncologist, much sought after for his diagnostic abilities in reading MRI’s showed slight concern that it may be residual tumor, but both the surgeons and the MRI report came back negative, identifying the sliver as inflammation. Six [End Page 9] weeks later, 3 days before we were scheduled to leave out of town to receive proton beam radiation, I insisted on another MRI. The sliver was enlarged from the post–op MRI. My oncologist said it was tumor; one surgeon said it was inflammation and the other surgeon abstained from speculation. The MRI report stated it appeared to be recurrent tumor.Now here was my dilemma as a parent. The prognosis today of radiation on residual tumor for ependymomas is very bad, especially with a residual tumor of his size. On the other hand, my oncologist felt that going in for surgery with no guarantee of a total resection anyway, was incurring a risk of damage to my child that may impact severely on his quality of life.My oncologist felt that for many medical reasons, inherent risks of surgery, uncertainty about status of the scan reading, quality versus quantity of life, and—I think—an understandably pessimistic view of the possibility of cure for recurrent anaplastic grade III ependymoma, he was against another surgery, and opted to continue with radiation with the tumor as is.I am part of two support groups on line, one for parents of children with any type of brain tumor and the other specific for ependymoma parents. The clinical and anecdotal knowledge of these groups as a whole is phenomenal because, unfortunately, we have parents who have experienced and researched almost everything about this illness, in all its stages. When I was faced... (shrink)

With increasing publication and data production, scientific knowledge presents not simply an achievement but also a challenge. Scientific publications and data are increasingly treated as resources that need to be digitally ‘managed.’ This gives rise to scientific Knowledge Management : second-order scientific work aiming to systematically collect, take care of and mobilise first-hand disciplinary knowledge and data in order to provide new first-order scientific knowledge. We follow the work of Leonelli, Efstathiou and Hislop in (...) our analysis of the use of KM in semantic systems biology. Through an empirical philosophical account of KM-enabled biological research, we argue that KM helps produce new first-order biological knowledge that did not exist before, and which could not have been produced by traditional means. KM work is enabled by conceiving of ‘knowledge’ as an object for computational science: as explicated in the text of biological articles and computable via appropriate data and metadata. However, these founded knowledge concepts enabling computational KM risk focusing on only computationally tractable data as knowledge, underestimating practice-based knowing and its significance in ensuring the validity of ‘manageable’ knowledge as knowledge. (shrink)

In today’s America the persistence of crushing poverty in the midst of staggering affluence no longer incites the righteous jeremiads it once did. Resigned acceptance of this paradox is fueled by a sense that poverty lies beyond the moral and technical scope of government remediation. The failure of experts to reach agreement on the causes of poverty merely exacerbates our despair. Are the causes internal to the poor – reflecting their more or less voluntary choices? Or do they emanate from (...) structures beyond their control? If both of these explanations are true, poverty experts will need to shift their focus to a hitherto under-theorized concept: coercion. I defend this claim by appealing to distinct areas of philosophical inquiry: social epistemology and moral theory. Poverty knowledge is directly related to both of these inquiries. The aim of poverty knowledge is clearly moral: to reduce suffering and to empower the weak. While the former aim is grounded in utilitarian thinking, the latter aim is grounded in the social contractarian insight that poverty is unjustly coercive, imposing excessive limits on the opportunities and choices of the poor that render them vulnerable to domination by others. Equally obvious is the social nature of poverty knowledge. All knowledge depends on the reliable testimony of others. Poverty knowledge not only ostensibly offers us the most reliable, scientific beliefs about the causes and effects of poverty, thereby determining how we morally judge the poor and their poverty, but it reciprocally bases its understanding of poverty on what the poor themselves have to say about it. What unites both social epistemology and moral theory – at least the social contract variants I will be examining here – is concern about the limits and possibilities of rational choice. As poverty knowledge came of age in the fifties and sixties, it absorbed the language of rational choice prevalent in economics, especially the Keynesian economics whose moral underpinnings can be found in Rawlsian social contract theory. Echoing a different economic theory supported by a different, more libertarian, brand of social contract theory, poverty expertise in the eighties continued to use an abstract model of rational choice. I submit that, in both early and later epochs of poverty expertise, reliance on rational choice reasoning prevented poverty experts from appreciating the coercive impact of poverty on the poor. Social epistemology explains this failure by demonstrating the poverty of rational choice thinking and its mistaken reliance on inflated commonsense expectations about the capacity of individuals to calculate their long-term interests, free from the distortions of social bias. Social epistemology not only exhibits the dangers of not relying on expert testimony, but it also exhibits the dangers of relying on an unreliable source of expert testimony that has removed itself from its human subject matter. In order for poverty experts to become more reliable educators about poverty’s coercive impact on the poor they must return to their discipline’s social epistemological roots. Only a more descriptive and explanatory sociology can narrate a comprehensive story about how the lived experience of poverty relates to the larger social system. The social contractarian model best suited to underwriting this kind of poverty knowledge, I submit, is the discourse theoretic model that has been championed by Jürgen Habermas. When applied as a pedagogical method of dialog and not as a social contractarian model of rational normative consent, discourse theory highlights the unique epistemological advantages of empathetic understanding that are so essential to dispelling stereotypes about the poor. Dispelling these stereotypes is the first step toward respecting the poor as free agents who are nonetheless forced to make suboptimal choices. My defense of these claims proceeds as follows: Part One argues that poverty expertise rightly deserves the opprobrium critics have heaped on it. The charge – leveled by progressives and conservatives alike - that such expertise is ideological is true to the extent that poverty knowledge has all-too-easily accommodated the political aims of the agency that has funded it: the federal government. The shift from the war on poverty to the war on the poor – and the resulting shift from blaming poverty on economic structures to blaming it on the culture of poverty – would not have been possible without an increased emphasis on data gathering aimed at measuring poverty rather than describing it. Part Two assesses the consequences of turning away from qualitative research to statistical analysis: the coercive nature of poverty becomes invisible beneath the surface of aggregate individual choices. The failure to grasp how voluntary choices, ostensibly based on rational, self-interested calculations, can be coerced by social structures - and thereby lead to sub-optimizing behavior – invites the conclusion that the poor have only themselves to blame for their misery. Part Three suggests that this pathologization of the poor directly controverts the major aim of poverty research: to empower the poor as free and equal parties to the social contract. I argue that the different varieties of social contract theory that have justified poverty expertise over the last forty years – the welfarist model pioneered by Rawls and the market-based model defended by Nozick – embrace the same rational choice models favored by poverty experts and so conspire with the latter in neglecting important dimensions of poverty-related coercion. While the welfarist model conceals the coercive nature of bureaucratically administered entitlement programs and top-down urban renewal policies, the market-based model conceals the coercive nature of economic class structures. The discourse-theoretic alternative proposed by Habermas endorses a populist, democratic response to the overly abstract rational choice assumptions embedded in these other models. Despite this advance over its counterparts, the chief advantage of discourse theory for poverty knowledge, I submit, resides less in its proposed procedure of rational collective choice than in its heuristic as a dialogical method of social learning. I demonstrate this claim in Part Four, where I turn to the social epistemological insights of Allen Buchanan. Social epistemology offers a much needed corrective to theories of knowledge that rely on the reasoning capacities of isolated individuals. By stressing the connection between moral response and social belief, on one hand, and the dependence of social belief on epistemic authorities, on the other, social epistemologists suggest ways in which we can learn to distinguish reliable from unreliable authorities and become aware of our own error-prone cognitive proclivities. Their insights need to be supplemented by moral epistemologists who stress the affective dimension of knowledge, above all, the role that empathy plays in understanding the plight of others. Drawing from victim narratives, Diana Meyers shows that switching between first-person experiences of one's own and third-person reconstructions of others' experiences is essential to appreciating the gravity of human rights violations and the seriousness of human rights claims. It goes without saying that such empathy is just as essential to understanding the plight of the poor. Meyers mainly has in mind empathetic understanding that has been facilitated by third-person observation and literary encounter, but the importance of visceral and corporeal representation suggests that face-to-face dialog may sometimes be a more effective way to facilitate empathetic understanding. (shrink)

Description logics refer to a family of formalisms concentrated around concepts, roles and individuals. They belong to the most frequently used knowledge representation formalisms and provide a logical basis to a variety of well known paradigms. The main reasoning tasks considered in the area of description logics are those reducible to subsumption. On the other hand, any knowledge representation system should be equipped with a more advanced reasoning machinery. Therefore in the current paper we make a step (...) towards integrating description logics with second-order reasoning. One of the important motivations behind introducing second-order formalism follows from the fact that many forms of commonsense and nonmonotonic reasoning used in AI can be modelled within the second-order logic. To achieve our goal we first extend description logics with a possibility to quantify over concepts. Since one of the main criticisms against the use of second-order formalisms is their complexity, we next propose second-order quantifier elimination techniques applicable to a large class of description logic formulas. Finally we show applications of the techniques, in particular in reasoning with circumscribed concepts and approximated terminological formulas. (shrink)

The epistemic and moral worth of empathy is deeply contested. Some doubt the possibility and sufficiency of empathic knowledge. Others question whether knowing how another feels is causally linked to moral actions. Though some have defended empathy as a form of knowing or an important epistemic endeavor, there is a gap in these responses that weakens their force against empathy’s skeptics. On the one hand, the epistemologists tend to focus on individuals. On the other hand, the moral (...) theorists and moral-epistemologists tend to focus on the social. Here, I contend that the first group could learn from the second and, together, form a stronger defense of empathy’s epistemic import. Namely, if, as epistemologists, we can begin from a conceptualization of empathy as a social epistemic practice within which knowledge is formed and confirmed with others, then we can better allow for possibility in understanding how another feels, reliability in empathic processes, and appropriate sensitivity to variance and degrees of empathic knowing. (shrink)