Although debates continue, studies of cognition in infancy suggest that knowledge begins to emerge early in life and constitutes part of humans' innate endowment. Early-developing knowledge appears to be both domain-specific and task-specific, it appears to capture fundamental constraints on ecologically important classes of entities in the child's environment, and it appears to remain central to the commonsense knowledge systems of adults.

Knowledge is a social institution, a social activity, as well as the product of that social activity. All known societies incorporate several modes of hierarchical knowledge. Three styles of knowledge co-exist in the transitional societies of the third world in general and of contemporary Africa in particular (even though in each of the latter, only one style tends to predominate). The first are initiation societies - where power is conferred on the initiated; the second are learned societies (...) (or academies) - which handle science and technologies; and the third are industrial societies - whose enterprises apply the technologies in order to improve humankind’s material and cultural condition. The initiation, learned and industrial societies were developed in a pre-modern, pre-industrial context which was monarchic, sacred, anti-democratic or endowed with a tribal democracy. A gradual opening can be seen in the passage of initiation societies (where power is the perquisite of the initiated) towards learned societies and then, later, to industrial ones. Here, the problem is knowing whether and how to bring into play a fourth style of society - cognitive society - which requires relatively advanced conditions of democracy. (shrink)

Peer interaction has been found to be conducive to learning in many settings. Knowledge co-construction has been proposed as one explanatory mechanism. However, KCC is a theoretical construct that is too abstract to guide the development of instructional software that can support peer interaction. In this study, we present an extensive analysis of a corpus of peer dialogs that we collected in the domain of introductory Computer Science. We show that the notion of task initiative shifts correlates with both (...) KCC and learning. Speakers take task initiative when they contribute new content that advances problem solving and that is not invited by their partner; if initiative shifts between the partners, it indicates they both contribute to problem solving. We found that task initiative shifts occur more frequently within KCC episodes than outside. In addition, task initiative shifts within KCC episodes correlate with learning for low pre-testers, and total task initiative shifts correlate with learning for high pre-testers. As recognizing task initiative shifts does not require as much deep knowledge as recognizing KCC, task initiative shifts as an indicator of productive collaboration are potentially easier to model in instructional software that simulates a peer. (shrink)

There is an apparent contradiction between the widespread moves towards a uniform and instrumentalist standards‐based approach to teaching on the one hand and recent research‐based insights into the complexity of effective pedagogies. The former tendency reflects a politically driven agenda, the latter is more professionally driven. Tensions reflecting such a contradiction are evident in the debates over initial teacher education policy and practice in many parts of the world. This article examines aspects of ITE policy in two contiguous parts of (...) the United Kingdom, England and Scotland. The authors draw on a comparative study carried out during 2002–2004, particularly on an analysis of key contemporary policy documents, in order to consider some of the similarities and differences that are apparent in these two countries. It is argued that while features of national culture, tradition and institutional politics have a significant role to play in the detail of the approaches taken, there is nevertheless evidence of significant convergence between both countries in one aspect of the determination of initial teacher education, the definition of teaching through the prescription of standards, which set official parameters on professional knowledge required for entry into the profession. This, it is suggested, reflects trends associated with neoliberal ‘globalisation’. (shrink)

The study explores the degree to which readers can use their previous linguistic knowledge, which goes beyond the immediate evidence in the input, to create mental representations of new words and how the employment of this knowledge may reduce the fuzziness of the new representations. Using self-paced reading, initial representations of novel identical forms with different grammatical functions were compared in native German speakers and advanced L2 German learners with L1 Czech. The results reveal that although both groups (...) can employ general knowledge about German grammar when establishing new representations, the L1 native speakers outperform the L2 learners: Their new representations have more precise structure and are better differentiated from related representations with respect to their grammatical information. Modeling consequences of these findings are discussed in the context of the Ontogenesis Model of the L2 Lexical Representation and the Fuzzy Lexical Representation Hypothesis. (shrink)

Initial Teacher Education quality is often judged through the auspices of audit-style mechanisms designed to facilitate the identification of matters pertaining to the ‘readiness’ of student teachers to enter the world of the classroom as fully qualified. In this regard, quality of programmes is often determined by the knowledge and skills student teachers demonstrate. Whilst ontological aspects are not necessarily elided, they are often ignored in favour of such epistemological matters. While such knowledge-based positions do not describe the (...) totality of ITE quality evaluation they do predominate. This paper identifies a tripartite heuristic for the identification of ITE epistemology that explicitly refers to, and is requiring of, ontological matters in the development of student teachers: identifying teaching, doing teaching, knowing teaching. Whilst it is the result of a Scottish project, Measuring the Quality of Initial Teacher Education (MQuITE), its emphasis is notable for other countries. (shrink)

Initial Teacher Education quality is often judged through the auspices of audit-style mechanisms designed to facilitate the identification of matters pertaining to the ‘readiness’ of student teachers to enter the world of the classroom as fully qualified. In this regard, quality of programmes is often determined by the knowledge and skills student teachers demonstrate. Whilst ontological aspects are not necessarily elided, they are often ignored in favour of such epistemological matters. While such knowledge-based positions do not describe the (...) totality of ITE quality evaluation they do predominate. This paper identifies a tripartite heuristic for the identification of ITE epistemology that explicitly refers to, and is requiring of, ontological matters in the development of student teachers: identifying teaching, doing teaching, knowing teaching. Whilst it is the result of a Scottish project, Measuring the Quality of Initial Teacher Education, its emphasis is notable for other countries. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to differentiate initiation from indoctrination, and to return a positive significance to the notion of initiation, as a pedagogy that contributes not only to the perpetuation of a particular form of life or community, but that provides the next generation with means to advance that knowledge beyond its existing boundaries. When we conflate the terms ‘initiation’ and ‘indoctrination’ or only mark a minor difference between the two, we lose meaning. The explanatory and predictive (...) power of our statements is weakened by this failure to take seriously the difference between these two terms. By ignoring the progressive potential in initiation, and condemning that pedagogy as uncritical, educational theorists fail to recognize the intermediate steps that need to be taken in educating a student to be a creative and responsive thinker within a cultural, i.e. symbolic, context. Within the pedagogy of initiation crucial methods for teaching students to engage existing representations of truth, rules of practice, and principles of meaning-making are employed. This article draws upon case studies and theorists in anthropology to offer a description of initiation that holds progressive potential, and explains the possible relevance of initiatory pedagogy for multicultural education. (shrink)

Initiation into yoga.--Symbolism and knowledge.--The sacred marriage.--The forgotten land.--Doubts and their removal.--Past, present and future.--Superstition.--The violence of war.--Religion and philosophy.

We argue that any strong version of a knowledge condition on intentional action, the practical knowledge principle, on which knowledge of what I am doing (under some description: call it A-ing) is necessary for that A-ing to qualify as an intentional action, is false. Our argument involves a new kind of case, one that centers the agent’s control appropriately and thus improves upon Davidson’s well-known carbon copier case. After discussing this case, offering an initial argument against the (...) knowledge condition, and discussing recent treatments that cover nearby ground, we consider several objections. One we consider at some length maintains that although contemplative knowledge may be disconnected from intentional action, specifically practical knowledge of the sort Anscombe elucidated escapes our argument. We demonstrate that this is not so. Our argument illuminates an important truth, often overlooked in discussions of the knowledge-intentional action relationship: intentional action and knowledge have different levels of permissiveness regarding failure in similar circumstances. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell’s epistemology had the interesting structural feature that it made propositional knowledge (“S knows that p”) asymmetrically dependent upon what Russell called knowledge by acquaintance. On this view, a subject lacking any knowledge by acquaintance would be unable to know that p for any p. This is something that virtually nobody has defended since Russell, and in this paper I initiate a sympathetic reconsideration.

BackgroundDecision-making in initiating life-sustaining health technology is complex and often conducted at time-critical junctures in clinical care. Many of these decisions have profound, often irreversible, consequences for the child and family, as well as potential benefits for functioning, health and quality of life. Yet little is known about what influences these decisions. A systematic review of reasoning identified the range of reasons clinicians give in the literature when initiating technology dependence in a child, and as a result helps (...) determine the range of influences on these decisions.MethodsMedline, EMBASE, CINAHL, PsychINFO, Web of Science, ASSIA and Global Health Library databases were searched to identify all reasons given for the initiation of technology dependence in a child. Each reason was coded as a broad and narrow reason type, and whether it supported or rejected technology dependence.Results53 relevant papers were retained from 1604 publications, containing 116 broad reason types and 383 narrow reason types. These were grouped into broad thematic categories: clinical factors, quality of life factors, moral imperatives and duty and personal values; and whether they supported, rejected or described the initiation of technology dependence. The majority were conceptual or discussion papers, less than a third were empirical studies. Most discussed neonates and focused on end-of-life care.ConclusionsThere is a lack of empirical studies on this topic, scant knowledge about the experience of older children and their families in particular; and little written on choices made outside ‘end-of-life’ care. This review provides a sound basis for empirical research into the important influences on a child’s potential technology dependence. (shrink)

Knowledge, like other things of value, can be faked. According to Hawley (2011), know-how is harder to fake than knowledge-that, given that merely apparent propositional knowledge is in general more resilient to our attempts at successful detection than are corresponding attempts to fake know-how. While Hawley’s reasoning for a kind of detection resilience asymmetry between know-how and know-that looks initially plausible, it should ultimately be resisted. In showing why, we outline different ways in which know-how can be (...) faked even when a given performance is successful; and in doing so, we distinguish how know-how can be faked (no less than know-that) via upstream and downstream indicators of its presence, and within each of these categories, we’ll distinguish (in connection with detection resilience) both faking symptoms and (various kinds of) criteria. The unappreciated resilience of faked knowledge-how to successful detection highlights a largely overlooked dimension of social-epistemic risk – risk we face not just in our capacity as recipients of testimony, but in our capacity as both (would-be) apprentices and clients of knowledge-how. (shrink)

State patronage and the role of central government in modernization are often cited as the key factors that underpin the development of science in Russia. This paper argues that the development of Russian agricultural science had predominantly local and non-governmental sources of support. Historically Russian agricultural research was funded and promoted through private patronage, but from the middle of the 19th century agricultural societies and community administrations began to sponsor research and promotion of new ideas in the agricultural sector. At (...) the end of the 19th century the majority of initiatives to set up agricultural experiment stations were undertaken on behalf of provincial agricultural societies, supported by local community administrations independent of the state bureaucratic apparatus (zemstvos). During the last two decades of the Russian Empire, agricultural societies and zemstvos became leaders in the modernization of Russian agriculture. Establishing regional experiment stations, and thus promoting development of local knowledge, they provided models for the subsequent governmental activity in this field. In the case of supporting agricultural research and institutionalizing the new discipline of scientific plant breeding, the Russian public led the state, rather than the reverse. (shrink)

Why do our intuitive knowledge ascriptions shift when a subject's practical interests are mentioned? Many efforts to answer this question have focused on empirical linguistic evidence for context sensitivity in knowledge claims, but the empirical psychology of belief formation and attribution also merits attention. The present paper examines a major psychological factor (called ?need-for-closure?) relevant to ascriptions involving practical interests. Need-for-closure plays an important role in determining whether one has a settled belief; it also influences the accuracy of (...) one's cognition. Given these effects, it is a mistake to assume that high- and low-stakes subjects provided with the same initial evidence are perceived to enjoy belief formation that is the same as far as truth-conducive factors are concerned. This mistaken assumption has underpinned contextualist and interest-relative invariantist treatments of cases in which contrasting knowledge ascriptions are elicited by descriptions of subjects with the same initial information and different stakes. The paper argues that intellectualist invariantism can easily accommodate such cases. (shrink)

This article explores an approach to initial teacher education which emphasises the process of 'practical theorising' as the context in which educational theory can contribute to this professional education. The practical theorising approach is exemplified by reference to the Oxford Internship Scheme, and the article focusses especially on arguments against a practical theorising approach presented by Paul Hirst in a commentary on the Oxford scheme. These arguments are concerned with: the need for a public rationally defended consensual body of professional (...) knowledge; the unreasonable demands which a practical theorising approach makes of student-teachers; and the perceived failure of a practical theorising approach, at least in the Oxford context, to differentiate adequately among different kinds of theory and their place in initial teacher education. (shrink)

These days CSIRO is focusing on providing holistic solutions to Australia's major problems. For example, the organisation hopes to address significant natural resource management problems of Australia by combining the wisdom of a wide array of disciplines. A number of recent measures have been initiated towards this end, which are described in this paper. Implicitly, CSIRO has recognised that cultural change is needed if the organisation is to contribute to the resolution of long-standing "wicked" problems. Innovations to achieve a more (...) integrated approach are described and assessed in terms of their ability to meet recommendations derived from a formal review of past attempts to conduct multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary research. Much of the interpretation however is personal, reflecting changes observed in thirty years of service within CSIRO. The discussion concentrates on the pragmatics of the creation and performance of teams with differing disciplinary backgrounds in natural resource management. In addition the paper discusses the wider ongoing changes to the roles of scientists as society evolves. It outlines the issues of defining the appropriate questions for research and the changing interaction between scientific and community knowledge. The potential contribution of complex systems theory to assist in creating productive integrated research is discussed. It is concluded that the CSIRO case study provides compatible findings with other analyses of integrated research performance and also other descriptions of the evolving role of scientists within wider society. (shrink)

How do rational agents coordinate in a single-stage, noncooperative game? Common knowledge of the payoff matrix and of each player's utility maximization among his strategies does not suffice. This paper argues that utility maximization among intentions and then acts generates coordination yielding a payoff-dominant Nash equilibrium. ‡I thank the audience at my paper's presentation at the 2006 PSA meeting for many insightful points. †To contact the author, please write to: Philosophy Department, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211; e-mail: [email protected].

Cases of inexact observations have been used extensively in the recent literature on higher-order evidence and higher-order knowledge. I argue that the received understanding of inexact observations is mistaken. Although it is convenient to assume that such cases can be modeled statically, they should be analyzed as dynamic cases that involve change of knowledge. Consequently, the underlying logic should be dynamic epistemic logic, not its static counterpart. When reasoning about inexact knowledge, it is easy to confuse the (...) initial situation, the observation process, and the result of the observation; I analyze the three separately. This dynamic approach has far reaching implications: Williamson’s influential argument against the KK principle loses its force, and new insights can be gained regarding synchronic and diachronic introspection principles. (shrink)

Self-Knowledge and Self-Reference is a defense and reconciliation of the two apparently conflicting theses that the self is peculiarly elusive and that our basic, cogito-judgments are certain. On the one hand, Descartes seems to be correct that nothing is more certain than basic statements of self-knowledge, such as "I am thinking." On the other hand, there is the compelling Humean observation that when we introspect, nothing is found except for various "impressions." The problem, then, is that the Humean (...) and Cartesian insights are both initially appealing, yet they appear to be in tension with one another. In this paper I attempt to satisfy both intuitions by developing a roughly descriptivist account of self-reference according to which our certainty in basic beliefs stems precisely from our needing to know so little in order to have them. (shrink)

The Theaetetus is one of the most widely studied of any of the Platonic dialogues because its dominant theme concerns the significant philosophical question, what is knowledge? In this book Paul Stern provides a full-length treatment of its political character in relationship to this dominant theme. He argues that this approach sheds significant light on the distinctiveness of the Socratic way of life, with respect to both its initial justification and its ultimate character. More specifically, he argues that Socrates' (...) revolutionary decision to subject political life to philosophic reflection, the decision that leads directly to his trial and execution, is based on his awareness of the elusiveness of comprehensive knowledge and the implications of that elusiveness for the validity of philosophic inquiry. This view of Socrates' rationale has important consequences for our understanding of political philosophy and of the validity of the life of reason itself. (shrink)

kk states that knowing entails knowing that one knows, and K¬K states that not knowing entails knowing that one does not know. In light of the arguments against kk and K¬K⁠, one might consider modally qualified variants of those principles. According to weak kk, knowing entails the possibility of knowing that one knows. And according to weakK¬K⁠, not knowing entails the possibility of knowing that one does not know. This paper shows that weak kk and weakK¬K are much stronger than (...) they initially appear. Jointly, they entail kk and K¬K⁠. And they are susceptible to variants of the standard arguments against kk and K¬K⁠. This has interesting implications for the debate on positive introspection and for deeper issues concerning the structure and limits of knowability. (shrink)

Antirealists who hold the knowability thesis, namely that all truths are knowable, have been put on the defensive by the Church-Fitch paradox of knowability. Rejecting the non-factivity of the concept of knowability used in that paradox, Edgington has adopted a factive notion of knowability, according to which only actual truths are knowable. She has used this new notion to reformulate the knowability thesis. The result has been argued to be immune against the Church-Fitch paradox, but it has encountered several other (...) triviality objections. Schlöder in a forthcoming paper defends the general approach taken by Edgington, but amends it to save it in turn from the triviality objections. In this paper I will argue, first, that Schlöder's justification for the factivity of his version of the concept of knowability is vulnerable to criticism, but I will also offer an improved justification that is in the same spirit as his. To the extent that some philosophers are right about our intuitive concept of knowability being a factive one, it is important to explore factive concepts of knowability that are made formally precise. I will subsequently argue that Schlöder's version of the knowability thesis overgenerates knowledge or, in other words, it leads to attributions of knowledge where there is ignorance. This fits a general pattern for the research programme initiated by Edgington. This paper also contains preliminary investigations into the internal and logical structure of lines of inquiries, which raise interesting research questions. (shrink)

Analytic theories of knowledge have traditionally maintained that the provenance of a true belief is critically important to deciding whether it is knowledge. However, a comparably widespread view is that it is our beliefs alone, regardless of their (potentially dubious) provenance which feature in psychological explanation, including the explanation of action: thus, that knowledge itself and as such is irrelevant in psychological explanation. The paper gives initial reasons why the ‘beliefs alone’ view of explanation should be resisted—arguments (...) deriving ultimately from the Meno indicate that the provenance of a true belief may be relevant to the explanation of action. However, closer scrutiny of these arguments shows that they are incapable of according provenance anything like as central a role in action explanation as provenance has traditionally been given in the theory of knowledge. A consideration of the history of science suggests anyway that all knowledge has a compromised provenance if one looks back any significant distance. It is concluded that the importance of the provenance of our beliefs is something that has been seriously over-emphasised in epistemology. (shrink)

The first obstacle that confronts the student of induction is that of defining the subject matter. One initial point is to note that much of the relevant subject matter goes under the description ‘the theory of confirmation’. The distinction is primarily that the study of induction concerns inference, i.e. cases where one takes the conclusion to be established by the evidence, whereas confirmation concerns the weight of evidence, which one may take to be something like the credibility of a hypothesis (...) in the light of the evidence. Discussions of confirmation often concern incremental confirmation, i.e. cases where the evidence is taken to increase the credibility of some hypothesis, even if not sufficiently to warrant inferring the truth of that hypothesis. However, some uses of ‘confirmation’ clearly refer to absolute confirmation, cases where the credibility of the hypothesis in the light of the evidence exceeds some (high) threshold. One may ask whether inductive inference corresponds to the case of absolute confirmation for some suitable threshold. I shall discuss inference and confirmation together, though it should be noted that some approaches eschew inference altogether. For example, the Bayesian takes scientific reasoning to be a matter of adjusting credences in propositions in the light of evidence, and says nothing about unqualified belief in a proposition. However, if we are interested in inductive knowledge then we must consider inference, since only then do we have a detached proposition that is the possible content of a mental state of knowing. A more pressing question concerns which inferences (or allegedly confirmatory relations) should be classed as inductive. A natural and straightforward approach is to define induction as encompassing any form of reasoning that extrapolates from one population to another, usually from a sample of a population to the whole population. For example, one might note that all observations of the position of some planet fall on an ellipse that has the Sun at one of its foci; from this one concludes that all the positions that planet takes fall on this ellipse (i.e.. (shrink)

The question of death accompanies a person throughout his life, is his antonym. The problem of the mortality of human beings always raises an eerie interest, the basis of which is, without doubt, the question: what about beyond death? - whether continued existence, or immersion in nothingness. Confirmation of interest in this problem is observed in all societies at different levels of their development, and expressed this interest primarily in the religious outlook of peoples, ethnic groups, etc. At the same (...) time, the level of scientific knowledge of a society is irrelevant, since science can only partially try to outline the problem of death. (shrink)

Beginning farmer initiatives like the USDA’s Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program, farm incubators, and small-scale marketing innovations offer new entrant farmers agricultural training, marketing and business assistance, and farmland loans. These programs align with alternative food movement goals to revitalize the anemic U.S. small farm sector and repopulate landscapes with socially and environmentally diversified farms. Yet even as these initiatives seek to support prospective farmers with tools for success through a knowledge dissemination model, they remain mostly individualistic and (...) entrepreneurial measures that overlook structural barriers to productive and economic success within U.S. agriculture. Analysis of the BFRDP’s funding history and discourse reveals a “knowledge deficit” based program focused on the technical rather than the structural aspects of beginning farming. This is contrasted with qualitative analysis of beginning farmer experiences in California’s Central Coast region. The discrepancies between the farmer experiences and national structure of the BFRDP program ultimately reveal a policy mismatch between the needs of some beginning farmers and the programs intended to support them. (shrink)

This paper carries forward the discussion initiated by the publication in 1986 of “A Refutation of Middle Knowledge.” Answers are given to two objections that have been raised against the original argument. Next, an alternative argument by Robert Adams is discussed; this argument has the advantage of avoiding reliance on one of the most controversial premises of the original argument. Finally, a definition is given for “S brings it about that Y,” and this definition is used to construct a (...) proof of the “power entailment principle.”. (shrink)

This paper carries forward the discussion initiated by the publication in 1986 of “A Refutation of Middle Knowledge.” Answers are given to two objections that have been raised against the original argument. Next, an alternative argument by Robert Adams is discussed; this argument has the advantage of avoiding reliance on one of the most controversial premises of the original argument. Finally, a definition is given for “S brings it about that Y,” and this definition is used to construct a (...) proof of the “power entailment principle.”. (shrink)

I argue that scientific realism, insofar as it is only committed to those scientific posits of which we have causal knowledge, is immune to Kyle Stanford’s argument from unconceived alternatives. This causal strategy is shown not to repeat the shortcomings of previous realist responses to Stanford’s argument. Furthermore, I show that the notion of causal knowledge underlying it can be made sufficiently precise by means of conceptual tools recently introduced into the debate on scientific realism. Finally, I apply (...) this strategy to the case of Jean Perrin’s experimental work on the atomic hypothesis, disputing Stanford’s claim that the problem of unconceived alternatives invalidates a realist interpretation of this historical episode. 1 Stanford’s Argument from Unconceived Alternatives2 Previous Attempts to Undermine the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives2.1 The plausibility of unconceived alternatives2.2 The distinctness of unconceived alternatives2.3 The induction from past to present3 Causal Knowledge as a Criterion for the Realist3.1 How Chakravartty’s proposal differs from earlier causal strategies3.2 Causal realism and the detection/auxiliary distinction4 Causal Realism, Unconceived Alternatives, and the Atomic Hypothesis4.1 Perrin and the philosophers: some initial observations4.2 Roush and Stanford on Perrin4.3 From Brownian motion to the reality of atoms4.4 What we know about atoms5 Conclusion. (shrink)

From an informal group of a dozen faculty and graduate students at Temple University, the Jean Piaget Society grew in seven years to 500 members who have interests in the application of genetic epistemology to their own disciplines and professions. At the outset Piaget endorsed the concept of a society which bore his name and presented a major address on equilibration at the society's first symposium in May, 1971. Had he not done so the society would no doubt have remained (...) a small parochial group, like so many others throughout the country, interested in Piaget and his theory. With the encouragement of Genevans and the leadership of its first four presidents, Lois Macomber, Barbara Press eisen, Marilyn Appel, and John Mickelson, the society undertook a number of programs to collect and disseminate the results of scholarly work in genetic epistemology. Particular emphasis was placed upon applications of Piaget's theory to developmental psychology, philos ophy, and education. One of these programs was the publication of an annual series on the development of knowing, of which this volume is the first. In 1973, the society asked Hans Furth with the assistance of Willis Overton and Jeanette Gallagher to initiate and plan a series of yearbooks with the result that in addition to this volume, a second volume on education was commissioned, and a third one on the decalage issue was planned. (shrink)

Inspired by recent advances in research on transformative agency development, and applying relevant conceptual and analytical tools, the paper explores a teacher’s enactment of transformative pedagogy unfolding in the first decade of South Africa’s post-apartheid political transformation. The paper explores the teacher’s struggles for social transformation and self-realization, waged through classroom teaching and learning, blended with culturally situated knowledge practices. That is, the teacher creatively brings together two initially contradictory knowledge practices of schooling vis-à-vis non-school knowledge practices. (...) In this, the teacher challenges assumptions of immanent discontinuities between formal school knowledge on the one hand, and the non-school, culturally situated knowledge traditions and community practices on the other hand. The teacher therefore purposefully connects school knowledge—meaningfully, with culturally situated knowledge practices. Consequently, the teacher enables learners to reflect on personal experiences and culturally situated practices while simultaneously subjecting concepts and ideas to reflection, from the standpoint of learners’ culturally situated knowledge—including community practices. (shrink)

This study investigates interpretations of the Japanese initial mora-based minimizer “X.Y...”-_no_ “X”-_no ji-mo_ ‘lit. even the letter “X” of “X.Y...”.’ Although initial mora-based minimizers have a literal interpretation of _ji_ ‘letter’, they have a non-literal interpretation as well. The non-literal interpretation has several distinctive features that are not present in ordinary minimizers. First, it is highly productive in that various expressions can appear in the form “X.Y...”-_no_ “X”-_no ji_. Second, non-literal minimizers typically co-occur with predicates that relate to knowledge, (...) information, concepts, thought, and habituality, as seen in the corpus data (Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese [BCCWJ]). I argue that in the non-literal use, X refers to the minimum on the scale of the main predicate concerning “X.Y...”. I suggest that the non-literal use was developed as a result of the conventionalization of the pragmatic inference derived from the literal reading, and that the co-occurrence with predicates related to knowledge, information, knowledge, concepts, thought, or habituality is due to the interpretation of “X.Y...”, which were originally interpreted as letters as an abstract concept. The theoretical implication of this study is that, in addition to a non-compositional (lexically specified) minimizer whose scale is lexically fixed (e.g., _give a damn_, _lift a finger_), there also exists a compositional (lexically unspecified) minimizer in natural language, whose scale is specified via the predicate with which the minimizer co-occurs. The last section of this paper briefly discusses similar/related phenomena in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Korean, and English from a cross-linguistic perspective. (shrink)

Several, seemingly unrelated problems of empirical research in the 'sociology of scientific knowledge' can be analyzed as following from initial assumptions with respect to the status of the knowledge content of science. These problems involve: (1) the relation between the level of the scientific field and the group level; (2) the boundaries and the status of 'contexts', and (3) the emergence of so-called 'asymmetry' in discourse analysis. It is suggested that these problems can be clarified by allowing for (...) cognitive factors as independent ('heterogeneous') variables, in addition to and in interaction with (i.e., not only as attributes of) social factors. In the 'sociology of translation', 'heterogeneity' among scientists, cognitions and textual elements has been made a basic assumption. This heterogeneity is bound together in an 'actor network'. However, since the 'actor network' is an empirical category, the methodological problems remain unresolved. This has consequences for the relation between empirical data and theoretical inferences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ignorance, Knowledge, and Omniscience: At and Beyond the Limits of Faith and Reason after Shinran:Reflections on The Boundaries of Knowledge in Buddhism, Christianity, and Science, with Special Attention to Dennis HirotaAmos YongAlthough published in the series Religion, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, Paul Numrich's edited volume is really about epistemology in religion and science, in particular about human knowing in Buddhist and Christian traditions shaped by the world of (...) science on the one hand, and how such knowing might also inform scientific knowledge on the other hand.1 The panoply of positions is presented by both Buddhist and Christian thinkers.From the Buddhist side, the following arguments are sketched:• that religion and science are complementary modes of knowing and that "understanding the true nature of the physical world" opens up "the way to enlightenment" (Trinh Xuan Thuan).2• that Buddhism is both continuous with (and hence deserving of serious consideration amidst) the epistemic discourses of modernity in many respects and yet also discontinuous with (and hence capable for critically interrogating) modernity's epistemology in other respects as well (David L. McMahan).3• that a Shin Buddhist approach to human knowledge—which in this chapter is brought into dialogue with Martin Heidegger's (1889-1976) notion of truth—opens up to a Kuhnian philosophy of science that emphasizes how paradigmatic shifts occur when new perspectives replace older frameworks (Dennis Hirota).4• that the questions raised by theoretical and quantum physics provide a scientific framework for discussing fundamental epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical questions that Buddhists and Christians might otherwise disagree about (Mark T. Unno).5From the Christian side, the following theses are explored: [End Page 201]• that boundary constraints confront not only working scientists but also Buddhists and Christians, and that these constraints can thus serve as a springboard for a science and religion "trilogue" (Paul O. Ingram).6• that the mystery of creative becoming (God, in traditional Christian terms) is the dynamic backdrop to the ongoing human quest for knowledge (Gordon D. Kaufman).7• that it is at the boundaries of knowledge that genuine creativity occurs (not only scientific creativity but also theological creativity emerges, i.e., the apophatic tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy or the theory of coincidentia oppositorum of Nicholas of Cusa [1401-1464]), and where, as a result of such creative approaches, distinct fields of inquiry open up and different domains of knowledge emerge (Antje Jackelén).8• that theological discourse is paradoxical precisely because such discourse marks the fluid boundaries demarcating sense and nonsense (Tom Christenson).9And, befitting a volume on the encounter between religion (i.e., Buddhism and Christianity) and science, there is a concluding chapter from a physicist on the limits of scientific knowledge that both is encouraged by the gains made by science (presuming a critical realist approach to science's modeling of reality) and yet also is honest about there being much more to learn on small and big questions (John R. Albright).10The foregoing summaries do not do justice to the complexity and sophistication of the chapters in the book. However, they provide a broader context for my interactions with Dennis Hirota's chapter on Shinran's (1173-1263) epistemology and its implications for both religious and scientific knowledge. As an evangelical Christian, I am particularly intrigued by the challenges confronting a Shin Buddhist approach to the sciences, even as I am hopeful that such a consideration will precipitate creative insights both for the Buddhist-Christian encounter and for the religion-science dialogue. I am all the more motivated since I have long been convinced that the religion-science dialogue has been dominated by generically religious approaches and that it is time for more particularistic or even confessional positions to be registered in the discussion.11 I am optimistic that the specificity of the Shin tradition will provide both complementary and contrasting perspectives to the contemporary Buddhist encounter with science that has so far been dominated by the broadly Tibetan approaches of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (1935-) and those in his circle of dialogue partners,12 and that this will in turn open up new trajectories—even initiate new paradigms, as Hirota suggests—for the Buddhist... (shrink)

By contrasting rational knowledge with relational knowledge, this paper discusses the forming of agreements as the pursuit of knowledge. Knowledge as agreement is thus discussed in this paper via research methods including ‘autoethnography’ . Pursuing knowledge by virtue of agreements is subsequently valued after positioning the author as a non-Indigenous ‘dagay’, positioning the paper itself as a dissertation, and after assuming an initial relationship between the reader and author. The paper occurs within the cultural context (...) of ‘academia’. Once rational knowledge has been contrasted with relational knowledge, the paper then highlights how agreements may be effectively pursued via ‘dialogue’ and affected by one’s topology . These pursuits, says the paper, are pursuits of knowledge as agreement. This paper is written from within ‘academia’ for the academic reader of a philosophical ilk. It is an attempt at the coherent valuing of relational knowledge and discussion of the possibility of knowledge through the pursuit of agreements. Philosophically, this is a paper about epistemology. As a creative discussion, author and reader share via this paper their mutual pursuit of fresh knowledge. Thus the paper is offered as an invitation for the reader to join the author in creating something that has not existed before – new knowledge. (shrink)

The Knowledge Norm of Assertion claims that it is proper to assert that p only if one knows that p. Though supported by a wide range of evidence, it appears to generate incorrect verdicts when applied to utterances of “I don't know.” Instead of being an objection to KNA, I argue that this linguistic data shows that “I don't know” does not standardly function as a literal assertion about one's epistemic status; rather, it is an indirect speech act that (...) has the primary illocutionary force of opting out of the speaker's conversational responsibilities. This explanation both reveals that the opt-out is an under-appreciated type of illocutionary act with a wide range of applications, and shows that the initial data in fact supports KNA over its rivals. (shrink)

The current higher educational landscape in the UK is marked by complex sets of expectations, accompanied by efforts to encourage universities into diversifying and stratifying functions. Yet the picture is far from clear and a number of tensions and contradictions remain, such as in relation to incentivisation and reward structures which impact differentially on universities. For universities that attempt to translate these agendas into meaningful actions at the local level, the result is a mixture of enthusiasm, engagement, retreat and defence. (...) This article will demonstrate such processes in action through a discussion of the ongoing "Manchester--Knowledge Capital" initiative, which seeks to bring local and regional partners and universities together to create a critically acclaimed global pivot to the emerging knowledge economy. (shrink)

As there is a condition of mind which is characterized by invincible ignorance, so there is another which may be said to be possessed of invincible knowledge; and it would be paradoxical in me to deny to such a mental state the highest quality of religious faith,—I mean certitude . ‘She's an artist. She keeps saying the same thing without repeating herself. In being initiated into our life as human beings we are subject to causal influences; guiding, teaching, restraint, (...) compulsion, incentives, rewards, warnings, penalties. Until such influences have achieved their most important work we do not share the human understanding within which there can be ratiocination, evidence, argument. So there is and must be a causal story of how we come to acquire a human understanding; a causal story for the species as a whole and a causal story for each of us; and there is not and could not be any acceptable account, either for the species or for the individual, of how we reasoned or argued our way into our initial and fundamental understanding. I say the same thing without repeating myself if I call such knowledge and understanding invincible . It is not possible to Overthrow it by reasoning any more than it is possible to establish it by reasoning. (shrink)

With the rise of research impact as a ‘third’ space (next to research and teaching) within the universities in the United Kingdom and beyond, academics are increasingly expected to not only produce research but also engage in brokering knowledge beyond academia. And yet little is known about the ways in which academics shape their practices in order to respond to these new forms of institutionalised expectations and make sense of knowledge brokering as a form of academic practice. Drawing (...) on 51 qualitative interviews with researchers and research users involved in two large knowledge brokering initiatives in the UK, this study identifies four repertoires of co-production practices: (i) _Challenge_ to the existing policy framework, (ii) _Deliberation_ between diverse stakeholders, (iii) _Evidence intervention_ producing of actionable knowledge, and (iv) _Advocacy_ for specific evidence-based options. By exploring knowledge brokering as navigation of different knowledge production regimes – traditionally academic and policy-oriented – the paper contributes to the existing debates by providing insights into the nature of navigating science-policy interactions as a process of epistemological bricolage, requiring an assemblage of different meanings, values and practices into new repertoires of practice. Importantly, the choice of a repertoire is not limited to the individual choice of a researcher but rather, it is shaped by the broader institutional context of higher education, risking _instrumental bias_ in which practices oriented towards practical solutions are incentivised over critical or participatory forms of engagement. (shrink)

The paper uses the Offenders' Social Reintegration Project, run between 1988 and 1998 by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, to discuss the characteristics of new forms of action research and to reflect on the main debates within action research literature. Firstly, new forms of action research dealing with community issues tend to take place within complex systems, aiming to bring potential partners together and to facilitate the development of networks of organisations. Networking presupposes a more open-ended mode of research (...) and opens the question of participation of the social groups concerned. The varying and changing degrees of participation within the Project are described with reference to the role of the researchers and the discrepancy between formal and informal partnerships. Secondly, the relation between research and action is dealt with via a discussion of the different types of knowledge produced in the course of the Project and their appropriateness for informing and evaluating practice. The implications of these arguments for the scientific status of action research and the paradigm within which it can be located are also addressed. Thirdly, the paper discusses the role of the various institutional contexts in shaping and constraining possible types of research and action. Finally, the type of change pursued by action research projects is considered with reference to the ongoing debate within action research literature on the role of politics, leading to the acknowledgement of the inevitable implication of political negotiations and power in any initiative towards social change. (shrink)

Bossart (philosophy, U. of CA-Davis) discusses the alleged losses of faith and self in postmodernist thought in the light of the "triumph" and subsequent decline of the transcendental turn in philosophy initiated by Kant. He attacks the transcendental grounding of human experience at its source, showing why it is impossible to derive any categories a priori, and exposes the weaknesses of attempts by Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger to close the gap between transcendental subjectivity and the world. Annotation copyright by Book (...) News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

The engineering knowledge research program is part of the larger effort to articulate a philosophy of engineering and an engineering worldview. Engineering knowledge requires a more comprehensive conceptual framework than scientific knowledge. Engineering is not ‘merely’ applied science. Kuhn and Popper established the limits of scientific knowledge. In parallel, the embrace of complementarity and uncertainty in the new physics undermined the scientific concept of observer-independent knowledge. The paradigm shift from the scientific framework to the broader (...) participant engineering framework entails a problem shift. The detached scientific spectator seeks the ‘facts’ of ‘objective’ reality – out there. The participant, embodied in reality, seeks ‘methods’, about how to work in the world. The engineering knowledge research program is recursively enabling. Advances in engineering knowledge are involved in the unfolding of the nature of reality. Newly understood, quantum uncertainty entails that the participant is a natural inquirer. ‘Practical reason’ is concerned with ‘how we should live’– the defining question of morality. The engineering knowledge research program is selective seeking ‘important truths’, ‘important knowledge’, ‘important methods’ that manifest value, and serve the engineering agenda of ‘the construction of the good.’ The importance of engineering knowledge research program is clear in the new STEM curriculum where educators have been challenged to rethink the relation between science and engineering. A 2015 higher education initiative to integrate engineering colleges into liberal arts and sciences colleges has stalled due to the confusion and conflict between the engineering and scientific representations of knowledge. (shrink)

Documents the problems and possibilities for women's studies, and exposes the resistance to women's initiatives, authority and autonomy. Contributors offer insights into debates surrounding the nature of knowledge, the multiple realities of female experience, dominance and the politics of research.

This conversation analytic paper investigates how speakers self-position or are other-positioned as members of a certain social group through other-initiated repair. Findings illustrate the complexity of linguistic membership categories by demonstrating that they continually shift depending on local interactional goals and documenting how shifts are accomplished. The different levels and types of linguistic and cultural knowledge that are invoked in instances of repair on specific lexical items demonstrate the complexity of linguistic membership categorization, and this indicates a need to (...) problematize the use of a priori and overly-vague labels like ‘non-native speaker’. Findings contribute to our understanding of the functions of other-initiated repair and the mechanisms of co-constructing membership and thus social identity in interaction. They also raise questions about the relationship between amounts and types of knowledge and further our understanding of the construction of expert/novice categories via knowledge displays and negotiation. (shrink)

Now in its third edition, _Narration and Knowledge_ is a classic work exploring the nature of historical knowledge and its reliance on narrative. Analytical philosopher Arthur C. Danto introduces the concept of "narrative sentences," in which an event is described with reference to later events and discusses why such sentences cannot be understood until the later event happens. Danto compares narrative and scientific explanation and explores the legitimacy of historical laws. He also argues that history is an autonomous and (...) humanist discipline incapable of being reduced to scientific descriptions. Lydia Goehr's new introduction illustrates Danto's main arguments by questioning her very role, first, as an introducer of a book that has not yet been read by readers and, second, as an interpreter of a book written forty years ago. Frank Ankersmit's conclusion revisits the initial impact of the publication of _Narration and Knowledge_ and considers its enduring legacy. (shrink)