Discussions of group knowledge typically focus on whether a group’s knowledge that p reduces to group members’ knowledge that p. Drawing on the cumulative reading of collective knowledge ascriptions and considerations about the importance of the division of epistemic labour, I argue what I call the Fragmented Knowledge account, which allows for more complex relations between individual and collective knowledge. According to this account, a group can know an answer to a question in virtue (...) of members of the group knowing parts of that answer, when the whole answer is available to group-level action. I argue that this account explains a swathe of central cases of group knowledge, as well as explaining some central features of group knowledge. (shrink)

The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to those that comprise the natural and social sciences. Seven studies explored an emerging sense of these discipline‐based ways of clustering of knowledge. Even 5‐year‐olds (...) could cluster knowledge in a manner roughly corresponding to the departments of natural and social sciences in a university, doing so without any explicit awareness of those academic disciplines. But this awareness is fragile early on and competes with other ways of clustering knowledge. Over the next few years, children come to see discipline‐based clusters as having a privileged status, one that may be linked to increasingly sophisticated assumptions about essences for natural kinds. Possible mechanisms for this developmental shift are examined. (shrink)

Markets allow for the processing of decentralized information through the price mechanism. But in addition, many markets rely on other mechanisms in markets, or non-market institutions, that provide and manage other forms of knowledge. Within national economies, these institutions form an ‘epistemic infrastructure’ for markets. In global markets, in contrast, this epistemic infrastructure is very patchy, undermining the preconditions for morally responsible agency. New technologies might help to improve the epistemic infrastructure of global markets, but they require conceptualizing (...) class='Hi'>knowledge not only as a tradable good, but also as a precondition of morally responsible agency. (shrink)

The role tradition played in preindustrial societies has been supplanted by the decisions of countless specialists organized by means of an intellectual and professional division of labor shaping a knowledge infrastructure that sustains these decisions. Three limitations of this knowledge system are discussed: (a) on the macrolevel, it imposes an end-of-pipe approach for dealing with the undesired consequences of decision making, rarely getting to the root of any problem; (b) on the microlevel, individual practitioners of a specialty are (...) trapped in a triple abstraction, leading to a poor ratio of desired to undesired effects of their decision making; and (c) on the intermediate level, it bars the road to genuine solutions to many difficulties faced by contemporary civilization. In this first of four articles, the beginning of a response is developed for the profession of engineering, which will be paradigmatic for other professions, the social sciences, and the university as a whole. (shrink)

How do scientists generate knowledge in groups, and how have they done so in the past? How do epistemically motivated social interactions influence or even drive this process? These questions speak to core interests of both history and philosophy of science. Idealised models and formal arguments have been suggested to illuminate the social epistemology of science, but their conclusions are not directly applicable to scientific practice. This paper uses one of these models as a lens and historiographical tool in (...) the examination of actual scientific collectives. It centres on the analysis of two episodes from the history of photosynthesis research of the late nineteenth- to mid-twentieth centuries, which display a wide and coordinated intellectual diversity similar to Kitcher’s “division of cognitive labour”. The concept, I argue, captures important aspects of the photosynthesis research communities, but the underlying process unfolded in ways that differ from the model’s assumption in interesting ways. The paper unravels how the self-organised interplay of cooperation and competition, and the dynamics of individual and collective goals within scientific communities were influential factors in the generation of knowledge. From there, some thoughts are developed on how historical and philosophical approaches in the analysis of science can productively interact. (shrink)

Aristotle proposed in the famous part of his 6th Book of Metaphysics a triple categorization of speculative sciences (physics, mathematics, first philosophy). Some scholars have considered this classical division as an unlawful and inconsistent Platonic residue of the parallelism between knowledge and reality. Others have numbered Aristotle among the upholders of the scholastic doctrine of the so-called degrees of abstraction. After having profoundly examined texts of the Corpus Aristotelicum (Metaphysics E 1, 1025b 1 - 1026a 32; On the soul (...) A 1, 403a 27 - 403b 19) not only we can refute the accusation of Platonism and the unlawful and anachronistic attribution of degrees of abstraction doctrine to the Stagirite, but principally understand the real importance of Aristotle's proposition. That is to say: its role in determining the epistemic character of the science on which all this deep inquiry takes place: the "filosofia prima". (shrink)

In this paper I formulate the thesis of the Division of Epistemic Labor as a thesis of epistemic dependence, illustrate several ways in which individual subjects are epistemically dependent on one or more of the members of their community in the process of knowledge acquisition, and draw conclusions about the cognitively distributed nature of some knowledge acquisition.

The internet has considerably changed epistemic practices in science as well as in everyday life. Apparently, this technology allows more and more people to get access to a huge amount of information. Some people even claim that the internet leads to a democratization of knowledge. In the following text, we will analyze this statement. In particular, we will focus on a potential change in epistemic structure. Does the internet change our common epistemic practice to rely on expert opinions? Does (...) it alter or even undermine the division of epistemic labor? The epistemological framework of our investigation is a naturalist-pragmatist approach to knowledge. We take it that the internet generates a new environment to which people seeking information must adapt. How can they, and how should they, expand their repertory of social markers to continue the venture of filtering, and so make use of the possibilities the internet apparently provides? To find answers to these questions we will take a closer look at two case studies. The first example is about the internet platform WikiLeaks that allows so-called whistle-blowers to anonymously distribute their information. The second case study is about the search engine Google and the problem of personalized searches. Both instances confront a knowledge-seeking individual with particular difficulties which are based on the apparent anonymity of the information distributor. Are there ways for the individual to cope with this problem and to make use of her social markers in this context nonetheless? (shrink)

The aim of this article is twofold: first, to identify and address three central divisions in the field of authentic education that introduce ambiguity and at times inconsistencies within the field of authentic education. These divisions concern a) the relationship between autonomy and authenticity; b) the division between the two basic attitudes towards ‘care’ in the authenticity literature, and; c) the well-worn division between objective and subjective realms of knowledge and identity construction. Addressing these divisions through (...) Charles Taylor's distinction between active and passive aspects of authenticity, I believe, will lead to a better understanding of the main issues involved in conceptualising and applying authenticity-based education. Second, to present what I call The Postconventional Authentic Relation-to-Self as a basis for overcoming and reconciling the above divisions. I shall conclude by providing some examples of the way the perspective envisioned by PARTS can be applied to educational practices. (shrink)

The paper mobilizes Adam Smith’s treatment of the division of labour in relation to the production, consumption and exchange of knowledge. One aspect of this mobilization deals with the epistemic demands that exchange makes on its participants. The other deals with increasing returns in the provision of knowledge itself, treating knowledge creation as just another example of specialization and exchange. These two aspects come together in relation to the epistemic demands associated with assessing knowledge quality. These (...) demands differ according to whether the knowledge is embodied in products or whether the knowledge is an object for its own sake. It is argued that disciplines play a critical role as institutions for meeting the epistemic demands that the division of labour creates in the ‘knowledge’ case. (shrink)

This paper begins with a discussion the role of less-than-admirable epistemic emotions in our respectable, indeed admirable inquiries: nosiness, obsessiveness, wishful thinking, denial, partisanship. The explanation for their desirable effect is Mandevillian: because of the division of epistemic labour individual epistemic vices can lead to shared knowledge. In fact it is sometimes essential to it.

In this paper we address the question of how it can be possible for a non-expert to acquire justified true belief from expert testimony. We discuss reductionism and epistemic trust as theoretical approaches to answer this question and present a novel solution that avoids major problems of both theoretical options: Performative Expert Testimony (PET). PET draws on a functional account of expertise insofar as it takes the expert’s visibility as a good informant capable to satisfy informational needs as equally important (...) as her specific skills and knowledge. We explain how PET generates justification for testimonial belief, which is at once assessable for non-experts and maintains the division of epistemic labor between them and the experts. Thereafter we defend PET against two objections. First, we point out that the non-expert’s interest in acquiring widely assertable true beliefs and the expert’s interest in maintaining her status as a good informant counterbalances the relativist account of justification at work in PET. Second, we show that with regard to the interests at work in testimonial exchanges between experts and non-experts, PET yields a better explanation of knowledge-acquisition from expert testimony than externalist accounts of justification such as reliabilism. As our arguments ground in a conception of knowledge, which conceives of belief-justification as a declarative speech act, throughout the rearmost sections of this paper we also indicate to how such a conception is operationalized in PET. (shrink)

The existence and unity of a discipline called economics reside in the eye and mind of the beholder. The perception of economics's unity and disciplinarity itself arises in some, but not all, of the different schools of thought that we would loosely categorize as economic. Indeed, as we hope to show, the presumption of unity and disciplinarity—the idea that there is a center or “core” of propositions, procedures, and conclusions or a shared historical “object” of theory and practice—is suggested in (...) the concepts and methods of some schools of economic thought, but is opposed by others. Further, we argue that the portrayal of economics as a discipline with distinct boundaries is often a discursive strategy by one school or another to hegemonize the field of economic discourse. In this way, the issue of the existence of an economics discipline and its principles of unity or dispersion is in part a political question. Its effects are felt in the hiring and firing of economics professors and practitioners, the determination of what comprises an economics curriculum, the determination of what is a legitimate economic argument and what is not, the dispensation of public and private grant monies, and the differential entry into or exclusion from ideological, political, and economic centers of power and decision making.Our view is that no discipline of economics exists. Or, rather, no unified discipline exists. The “discipline” of economics is actually an agonistic and shifting field of fundamentally different and often conflicting discourses. The dispersion and divisions that exist between the schools of thought we discuss here as “economic” may have some regularities. But we do not see closer contiguity of these economic schools when placed on a horizontal scale than, to take just one example, among all of the many different "disciplinary" forms of Marxian thought. That is, in our view, Marxian economic thought shares more concepts, approaches, and methods—may have more discursive regularity—with Marxian literary theory than do Marxian economic thought and neoclassical economic theory. Jack Amariglio is associate professor of economics at Merrimack College and the editor of Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and Society. He is working on a book entitled Modernism and Postmodernism in Economics with Arjo Klamer. Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff are professors of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Their recent coauthored books are Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy and Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical. (shrink)

The Renaissance perspective represents the three-dimensional space onto a bi-dimensional one. This cultural construction, which unifies real and virtual, like all simulations, has some limitations – the main one is that it only works from a precise viewpoint that rules the illusion. When moving away from this position the illusion becomes imperfect. Similar to physics, where reality depends on the observer’s position, perspective depends on the viewer’s position. Since perspective has been inherited by photography, cinema, video, computer images, virtual reality, (...) 3D videogames, we live in a perspective-based culture. In perception the boundaries between opposite qualities are often blurred and even indistinguishable. A screen is generally considered as rectangular, but it can be viewed as really rectangular only from its central perpendicular axis, at the crossing of the diagonals. When moving from this position it should appear as trapezoidal, but people still say it is rectangular: because they see it as rectangular or because they know it is rectangular? This threshold between vision and knowledge is imperceptible and obscure. Something similar happens with the senses. They are considered as separate entities: touch, hear, sight, smell and taste are described as distinct ways to detect the phenomenal world. But they are intermingled; the boundaries that are supposed to separate them are apparent: they are logically separable but not separate. The sensorial system is a cohesive and interrelated continuum where the senses act in synergy with each other. Continuity and discreteness, indistinguishability and distinction, inseparability and division are qualities to individuate, describe, classify and/or communicate the phenomena. These qualities are both theoretical and technical, since they depend on the general perspective of the analysis, on the goals to pursue, on the scale at which the phenomena are observed and on the accuracy of the instruments that are used. (shrink)

The new mythology for which the German Romantic period called was not envisioned as antithetical to empiricism or experiential/experimental knowledge, but rather as emerging in dialogue with it to form a cultural foundation for such inquiry. Central to the mytho-scientific project were problematic theories of sexual division and generativity that established cultural baselines. This article examines the mythological investments of two influential thinkers of the period—Goethe and Schelling. It then analyzes Goethe’s unique merger of mythological approaches to sex and (...) generation with empirical observation in The Metamorphosis of Plants. It next traces Schelling’s expansion of Goethe’s theories of nature beyond their empirical justifications to develop a metaphysics of sexual differentiation. Finally, the article illuminates Goethe’s final reply to the sexual dynamics of Naturphilosophie at the end of his life, through the analysis of a single poem, “Finding Again,” in the collection God and World. Ultimately and in spite of its empirical commitments, Goethe’s more flexible view of sexual correlations would lose ground to the powerful metaphysical mythology of sexual opposition as both scientific and cultural bedrock. (shrink)

In this paper we address the question of how it can be possible for a non-expert to acquire justified true belief from expert testimony. We discuss reductionism and epistemic trust as theoretical approaches to answer this question and present a novel solution that avoids major problems of both theoretical options: Performative Expert Testimony. PET draws on a functional account of expertise insofar as it takes the expert’s visibility as a good informant capable to satisfy informational needs as equally important as (...) her specific skills and knowledge. We explain how PET generates justification for testimonial belief, which is at once assessable for non-experts and maintains the division of epistemic labor between them and the experts. Thereafter we defend PET against two objections. First, we point out that the non-expert’s interest in acquiring widely assertable true beliefs and the expert’s interest in maintaining her status as a good informant counterbalances the relativist account of justification at work in PET. Second, we show that with regard to the interests at work in testimonial exchanges between experts and non-experts, PET yields a better explanation of knowledge-acquisition from expert testimony than externalist accounts of justification such as reliabilism. As our arguments ground in a conception of knowledge, which conceives of belief-justification as a declarative speech act, throughout the rearmost sections of this paper we also indicate to how such a conception is operationalized in PET. (shrink)

How should we account for the contextual variability of knowledge claims? Many philosophers favour an invariantist account on which such contextual variability is due entirely to pragmatic factors, leaving no interesting context-sensitivity in the semantic meaning of ‘know that.’ I reject this invariantist division of labor by arguing that pragmatic invariantists have no principled account of embedded occurrences of ‘S knows/doesn’t know that p’: Occurrences embedded within larger linguistic constructions such as conditional sentences, attitude verbs, expressions of probability, comparatives, (...) and many others, I argue, give rise to a threefold problem of embedded implicatures. (shrink)

Two studies with 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds (N 104) examined whether young children can differentiate expertise in the minds of others. Study 1 revealed that all children in the sample could correctly attribute observable knowledge to familiar experts (i.e., a doctor and a car mechanic). Further, 4- and 5-year-olds could correctly attribute knowledge of underlying scientific principles to the appropriate experts. In contrast, Study 2 demonstrated that 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds have difficulty making attributions of knowledge of (...) scientific principles to unfamiliar experts. A computational analysis in Study 3 indicated that 4- and 5-year-olds’ successes on the first two studies could not be attributed to the way in which words co-occur in discourse. Overall, these studies showed that young children have a sense of the division of cognitive labor, albeit fragile. (shrink)

This article examines two questions about scientists’ search for knowledge. First, which search strategies generate discoveries effectively? Second, is it advantageous to diversify search strategies? We argue pace Weisberg and Muldoon, “Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor”, that, on the first question, a search strategy that deliberately seeks novel research approaches need not be optimal. On the second question, we argue they have not shown epistemic reasons exist for the division of cognitive labor, identifying the errors that (...) led to their conclusions. Furthermore, we generalize the epistemic landscape model, showing that one should be skeptical about the benefits of social learning in epistemically complex environments. (shrink)

I argue that technological functions warrant specific epistemological attention, which they have not received thus far. From a user’s perspective, knowledge about the possible functions of an artefact is not provided exclusively by beliefs about its physical characteristics; it is primarily provided by know-how related to its use. Analysing the latter shows that standards of practical and not just theoretical reasoning are involved. Moreover, knowledge of the function of artefacts is primarily based on testimony and a social division (...) of labour with respect to rational artefact use. Combining these two features, knowledge of functions can be shown to create a rich normative context, manifest in notions such as ‘improper’ use: designers inform users about how they ought to use artefacts. This normativity in knowledge of functions, which takes a different shape for possible and proper functions, is lacking in standard, descriptive knowledge.Keywords: Epistemology; Function; Knowing-how; Testimony; Artefact; Practical rationality. (shrink)

In what follows, I appeal to Charles Babbage’s discussion of the division of mental labor to provide evidence that—at least with respect to the social acquisition, storage, retrieval, and transmission of knowledge—epistemologists have, for a broad range of phenomena of crucial importance to actual knowers in their epistemic practices in everyday life, failed adequately to appreciate the significance of socially distributed cognition. If the discussion here is successful, I will have demonstrated that a particular presumption widely held within the (...) contemporary discussion of the epistemology of testimony—a presumption that I will term the personalist requirement—fails to account for those very practices of knowers that I detail here. I will then conclude by suggesting that an alternate account of testimonial warrant, one that has heretofore been underappreciated, ought to be given more serious consideration—in particular because it is well suited to account for those actual practices of knowers that the personalist requirement leaves unrecognized. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Historians of science, inasmuch as they are concerned with knowledges and practices rather than institutions, have tended of late to focus on case studies of common processes such as experiment and publication. In so doing, they tend to treat science as a single category, with various local instantiations. Or, alternatively, they relate cases to their specific local contexts. In neither approach do the cases or their contexts build easily into broader histories, reconstructing changing knowledge practices across time and (...) space. This essay argues that by systematically deconstructing the practices of science and technology and medicine (STM) into common, recurrent elements, we can gain usefully “configurational” views, not just of particular cases and contexts but of synchronic variety and diachronic changes, both short term and long. To this end, we can begin with the customary actors’ disciplines of early modern knowledge (natural philosophy, natural history, mixed mathematics, and experimental philosophy), which can be understood as elemental “ways of knowing and working,” variously combined and disputed. I argue that these same working knowledges, together with a later mode—synthetic experimentation and systematic invention—may also serve for the analysis of STM from the late eighteenth century to the present. The old divisions continued explicitly and importantly after circa 1800, but they were also “built into” an array of new sciences. This historiographic analysis can help clarify a number of common problems: about the multiplicity of the sciences, the importance of various styles in science, and the relations between science and technology and medicine. It suggests new readings of major changes in STM, including the first and second scientific revolutions and the transformations of biomedicine from the later twentieth century. It offers ways of recasting both microhistories and macrohistories, so reducing the apparent distance between them. And it may thus facilitate both more constructive uses of case studies and more innovative and acceptable longer histories. (shrink)

This work analyzes two perspectives, Atomism and Infinite Divisibility, in the light of modern mathematical knowledge and recent developments in computer graphics. A developmental perspective is taken which relates ideas leading to atomism and infinite divisibility. A detailed analysis of and a new resolution for Zeno's paradoxes are presented. Aristotle's arguments are analyzed. The arguments of some other philosophers are also presented and discussed. All arguments purporting to prove one position over the other are shown to be faulty, mostly (...) by question begging. Included is a sketch of the consistency of infinite divisibility and a development of the atomic perspective modeled on computer graphics screen displays. The Pythagorean theorem is shown to depend upon the assumption of infinite divisibility. The work concludes that Atomism and infinite divisibility are independantly consistent, though mutually incompatible, not unlike the wave/particle distinction in physics. (shrink)

Children bring intuitive arithmetic knowledge to the classroom before formal instruction in mathematics begins. For example, children can use their number sense to add, subtract, compare ratios, and even perform scaling operations that increase or decrease a set of dots by a factor of 2 or 4. However, it is currently unknown whether children can engage in a true division operation before formal mathematical instruction. Here we examined the ability of 6- to 9-year-old children and college students to perform (...) symbolic and non-symbolic approximate division. Subjects were presented with non-symbolic or symbolic dividends ranging from 32 to 185, and non-symbolic divisors ranging from 2 to 8. Subjects compared their imagined quotient to a visible target quantity. Both children and adults were successful at the approximate division tasks in both dots and numeral formats. This was true even among the subset of children that could not recognize the division symbol or solve simple division equations, suggesting intuitive division ability precedes formal division instruction. For both children and adults, the ability to divide non-symbolically mediated the relation between Approximate Number System acuity and symbolic math performance, suggesting that the ability to calculate non-symbolically may be a mechanism of the relation between ANS acuity and symbolic math. Our findings highlight the intuitive arithmetic abilities children possess before formal math instruction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Clear Division of Labor Within Environmental Philosophy?William M. Throop (bio)In discussions about the future of environmental philosophy, I have found myself supporting two positions that are in tension with one another. The first, which has been well explored in the last decade, is that environmental philosophy should have a more dramatic impact outside of academic circles. It should affect policy and guide the behavior of non-philosophers, which usually (...) requires that it deeply engage the empirical details of problems it addresses. The second is that environmental philosophy needs to improve its status within the larger philosophical community, which requires its practitioners to use methods that dominate mainstream philosophy and to be conversant with contemporary work in ethical theory, epistemology, metaphysics, and continental philosophy. Some have argued that this tension places a double burden on those training to be environmental philosophers; they must demonstrate both theoretical and practical excellence. I fear that such a standard will limit [End Page 147] the growth of environmental philosophy. It will be daunting to new environmental philosophers and achieved by only a few.With respect to this tension, I suggest that environmental philosophy should support a robust division of labor. Many new environmental philosophers should be recruited from cohorts trained primarily in core areas of philosophy. Most of these thinkers will probably focus on highly theoretical issues—issues that anyone in the field would recognize as philosophical.Their knowledge of environmental problems may be superficial and their audience likely will consist primarily of other philosophers. Their impact beyond philosophy may be quite limited (except for their students). I come from this tradition, and I am still delighted by the purely intellectual puzzles that our field generates. Work of this sort should be honored, but our field will be sterile if it is dominated by this kind of thought.I hope that many other new environmental philosophers will be trained in interdisciplinary environmental graduate programs or "applied" philosophy Ph.D. programs where they will acquire the interdisciplinary expertise necessary to address practical problems and to effectively engage non-philosophical audiences. This group of "practical" environmental philosophers should also include a host of practitioners in other fields who contribute to philosophical dialogue. I suspect that much work in this area will be case-based, empirically sophisticated and, where it addresses non-philosophical audiences, more reliant on compelling metaphors than on tight arguments. I doubt that it is fruitful to view this group as applying the work of the former group. The aims, the sources of insight and the standards of quality for the two groups are categorically different. For practical philosophers, the political feasibility of a proposal matters, and the arguments must have the capacity to move relevant stakeholders. The results of this work may appear to be philosophy-lite to those in the first group, but only if judged by standards that are inappropriate if we accept a division of labor in the field.This division of labor cannot be an apartheid. Many promising innovations in environmental philosophy will come from the interface between these groups. And unfortunately, a good bit of questionable work done in each group may result from a failure to understand progress that has been made by the other group. For example, philosophers focused only on theory may draw implications for action that fail to accord with current empirical information. Practical philosophers may [End Page 148] critique simplified metaethical positions that have long been abandoned in favor of more sophisticated versions. A healthy dialogue and a mutual respect should diminish these dangers. Such a division of labor has significant implications for graduate education, hiring and evaluation of faculty, and allocation of prestige within the field. The health and growth of environmental philosophy will depend on part on how we address these implications.William M. Throop Bill Throop is provost and professor of philosophy at Green Mountain College, an environmental liberal arts college in Poultney, VT. His background is in epistemology and philosophy of science, but in the last decade his work has focused on conceptual and ethical issues in ecological restoration and wilderness preservation. E-mail: [email protected] © 2007 Indiana University Press... (shrink)

As architecture intersects with computer science to engage with large-scale data sets and informational systems, this demands new skills, competencies and commitments. Informed by the findings of an online survey, this article explores how, who and to what extent those in the profession of architecture are investing in technology knowledge and skills, and under what material conditions this occurs. Survey data collected from five large-scale architecture practices in Sydney, Australia finds that while technology-related skills are highly valued in the (...) profession, more men than women are engaging with computationally intensive software and technology skills building remains a largely unstructured and often self-directed enterprise. Drawing on feminist technology studies and digital labour perspectives, it is argued that the drive to computationalise the profession of architecture rests heavily on discretionary, aspirational and invisible labour practices that disadvantage employees with lesser reserves of economic and social capital, and particularly women. This further contributes to revealing neo-liberalism’s influence on the concrete practices of the architecture workplace and highlights how the diminished structural role of employers breeds uneven opportunities and inequitable working conditions. (shrink)

Early embryogenesis is marked by a frail Spindle Assembly Checkpoint (SAC). The time of SAC acquisition varies depending on the species, cell size or a yet to be uncovered developmental timer. This means that for a specific number of divisions, biorientation of sister chromatids occurs unsupervised. When error‐prone segregation is an issue, an aneuploidy‐selective apoptosis system can come into play to eliminate chromosomally unbalanced cells resulting in healthy newborns. However, aneuploidy content can be too great to overcome, endangering viability.SAC (...) generates a diffusible signal to lengthen time spent in mitosis if needed, ensuring correct chromosome segregation, a fundamental factor in the generation of euploid cells. Thus, it remains puzzling what benefit could come from delaying SAC acquisition till later in the development. In this review, we describe what is known on SAC acquisition in distinct species and highlight pending research as well as potential applications for such knowledge. (shrink)

One of the main features of the contemporary environmental crisis is that no one has a clear picture of what is taking place. Environmental problems are real enough but they bring home the inadequacy of our knowledge. How does the natural world relate to the social world? Why do we continue to have such a poor understanding? How can ecological knowledge be made to relate to our understanding of human society? Reconstructing Nature argues that the division of labor (...) is a key but neglected factor underlying people's inability to adequately understand and relate to the natural world. The argument extends Marx's theory of alienation to account for inadequate knowledge and therefore inadequate concern for nature. Using recent developments in "critical realist" philosophy, the book aims to find ways of reorganizing knowledge in the light of ecological consciousness. It also corrects the emphasis of much environmental literature by focusing on production rather than consumption. (shrink)

What language devises, it might divide. By exploring the relations among the core geometries of the physical world, the abstract geometry of Euclid, and language, I give new insight into both the persistence of core knowledge into adulthood and our access to it through language. My extension of Spelke's language argument has implications for pedagogy, philosophy, and artificial intelligence.

What do the technical practices, procedures, and systems that have shaped institutions of higher learning in the United States, from the Ivy League and women's colleges to historically black colleges and land-grant universities, teach us about the production and distribution of knowledge? Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds reconceives the university as a media complex comprising a network of infrastructures and operations through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld. Reinhold Martin (...) argues that the material infrastructures of the modern university-the architecture of academic buildings, the configuration of seminar tables, the organization of campus plans-reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions. He reconstructs changes in aesthetic strategies, pedagogical techniques, and political economy to show how the boundaries that govern higher education have shifted over the past two centuries. From colleges chartered as rights-bearing corporations to research universities conceived as knowledge factories, educating some has always depended upon excluding others. Knowledge Worlds shows how the division of intellectual labor was redrawn as new students entered, expertise circulated, science repurposed old myths, and humanists cultivated new forms of social and intellectual capital. Combining histories of architecture, technology, knowledge, and institutions into a critical media history, Martin traces the uneven movement in the academy from liberal to neoliberal reason. (shrink)

The evolution of contemporary cities into solar cities will be affected by the decisions of countless specialists according to an established intellectual and professional division of labor. These specialists belong to groups responsible for advancing and applying a body of knowledge, and jointly, these bodies of knowledge make up a knowledge infrastructure. Some characteristics of these knowledge infrastructures are examined insofar as they inhibit the evolution toward solar cities. The article concludes with suggestions as to how (...) these knowledge infrastructures could be changed. (shrink)

The notion of indivisibles and atoms arose in ancient Greece. The continuum—that is, the collection of points in a straight line segment, appeared to have paradoxical properties, arising from the ‘indivisibles’ that remain after a process of division has been carried out throughout the continuum. In the seventeenth century, Italian mathematicians were using new methods involving the notion of indivisibles, and the paradoxes of the continuum appeared in a new context. This cast doubt on the validity of the methods and (...) the reliability of mathematical knowledge which had been regarded as established by the axiomatic method in geometry expounded by Aristotle’s younger contemporary Euclid. The teaching of indivisibles was banned within the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. In England, indivisibles were used by the mathematician John Wallis, and there was an acrimonious and extended feud between Wallis and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes over legitimate methods of argument in mathematics. Notions of the infinitesimal were used by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, and were attacked by Bishop Berkeley for the vagueness of the concept and the illegitimate reasoning applied to it. This article discusses aspects of these events with reference to the book Infinitesimal by Amir Alexander and to other sources. Also discussed are wider issues arising from Alexander’s book including: the changes in cultural sensibility associated with the growth of new mathematical and scientific knowledge in the seventeenth century, the changes in language concomitant with these changes, what constitutes valid methods of enquiry in various contexts, and the question of authoritarianism in knowledge. More general aims of this article are to widen the immediate mathematical and historical contexts in Alexander’s book, to bridge a gap in conversations between mathematics and the humanities, and to relate mathematical ideas to wider human and contemporary issues. (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)

Republics of Knowledge tells the story of how the circulation of knowledge shaped the formation of nation-states in Latin America, and particularly in Argentina, Peru and Chile, during the century after Iberian rule was defeated in the 1820s. Most immediately, the author has sought to provide a cross-disciplinary approach to the history of knowledge, combining the methods of global intellectual history with a new way of thinking about nations as experienced and enacted as well as how they (...) are imagined, and in so doing offer a new interpretation of the history of independent Latin America to illustrate its wider significance in the making of the modern world. By bringing these lines of inquiry together within a transnational framework, Nicola Miller shows how evidence from the pioneering nations of Latin America can invite historians to rethink many of their general theories about how knowledge travels and how a sense of nationhood is created. The book is designed to stimulate debate about the significance of knowledge not only in Latin America but in all modern societies. As Miller explains, Latin America is usually regarded as an exception to general theories, notably of colonialism, nationalism and liberalism; and yet it was in that part of the world, not in Europe, that the Age of Revolution brought the founding of a second wave of modern republics, and it was in Latin America that pioneering attempts were made to apply liberal principles in societies with inherited caste divisions and corporate institutions. It was there that some of the richest debates about the vexed relationship between collective identities and individualism took place. (shrink)

Radical uncertainty plays a major role in the transformation of the social production of knowledge by questioning the centrality of scientific-technical expertise. Important changes are occurring in the discursive and social divisions characterizing the production and management of knowledge, but the ability of these innovations to cope with the challenge of radical uncertainty is doubtful. This seems to call for a reassessment of the forms of knowledge-related social cooperation, but the late modern public sphere does not (...) provide favourable conditions for this endeavour. Is there a way out of this impasse? The answer is difficult and conditional on many factors. However, Dewey's theory of inquiry and of the public sphere may offer a useful standpoint for further investigation. (shrink)

In “Being Judgement Possibility,” Hölderlin posits that the division between subject and object produced in conscious knowledge requires admitting a being as the ground of that knowledge’s unity. Commentators argue over the way to access such being according to Hölderlin. For Dieter Henrich, being is a presupposition recognized reflexively. Manfred Frank, by contrast, maintains that Hölderlin grants direct access to it in an “intellectual intuition.” This article addresses the respective interpretations of both authors. It shows that Frank’s interpretation (...) is closer to the textual evidence than Henrich’s interpretation. Frank’s interpretation also allows one to explain better the way in which the division between subject and object avoids leading to dispersal. Finally, this article considers the insufficiency of Frank’s interpretation so as to clarify an issue that he himself advances in the course of his argument: how the I manages to distinguish itself in the sphere of intuitable objects. (shrink)

All scientific knowledge is in some way unified; the scheme of the speculative sciences is not just a method of arrangement that is casual and artificial. There is a true hierarchy of the sciences. In popular thought to-day the empirical sciences have gained the ascendancy; there are those who are confident that science will not only unlock the mysteries of nature but will solve eventually all our problems. There is no mistake about its success, for its practical benefit to (...) mankind is immense. The modern mind is so impressed by utility that it refuses to be concerned with anything else. (shrink)

In this article, I revisit Landau and Jackendoff's () paper, “What and where in spatial language and spatial cognition,” proposing a friendly amendment and reformulation. The original paper emphasized the distinct geometries that are engaged when objects are represented as members of object kinds, versus when they are represented as figure and ground in spatial expressions. We provided empirical and theoretical arguments for the link between these distinct representations in spatial language and their accompanying nonlinguistic neural representations, emphasizing the “what” (...) and “where” systems of the visual system. In the present paper, I propose a second division of labor between two classes of spatial prepositions in English that appear to be quite distinct. One class includes prepositions such as in and on, whose core meanings engage force-dynamic, functional relationships between objects, with geometry only a marginal player. The second class includes prepositions such as above/below and right/left, whose core meanings engage geometry, with force-dynamic relationships a passing or irrelevant variable. The insight that objects’ force-dynamic relationships matter to spatial terms’ uses is not new; but thinking of these terms as a distinct set within spatial language has theoretical and empirical consequences that are new. I propose three such consequences, rooted in the fact that geometric knowledge is highly constrained and early-emerging in life, while force-dynamic knowledge of objects and their interactions is relatively unconstrained and needs to be learned piecemeal over a lengthy timeline. First, the two classes will engage different learning problems, with different developmental trajectories for both first and second language learners; second, the classes will naturally lead to different degrees of cross-linguistic variation; and third, they may be rooted in different neural representations. (shrink)

This volume sheds new light on Immanuel Kant’s conception of anthropology. Neither a careful and widespread search of the sources nor a merely theoretical speculation about Kant’s critical path can fully reveal the necessarily wider horizon of his anthropology. This only comes to light by overcoming all traditional schemes within Kantian studies, and consequently reconsidering the traditional divisions within Kant’s thought. The goal of this book is to highlight an alternative, yet complementary path followed by Kantian anthropology with regard (...) to transcendental philosophy. The present volume intends to develop this path in order to demonstrate how irreducible it is in what concerns some crucial claims of Kant’s philosophy, such as the critical defense of the unity of reason, the search for a new method in metaphysics and the moral outcome of Kant’s thought. (shrink)

Current debates about the integration of traditional and academic ecological knowledge struggle with a dilemma of division and assimilation. On the one hand, the emphasis on differences between traditional and academic perspectives has been criticized as creating an artificial divide that brands TEK as “non-scientific” and contributes to its marginalization. On the other hand, there has been increased concern about inadequate assimilation of Indigenous and other traditional perspectives into scientific practices that disregards the holistic nature and values of TEK. (...) The aim of this article is to develop a practice-based account of the epistemic relations between TEK and AEK that avoids both horns of the dilemma. While relations between TEK and AEK are often described in terms of the “holistic” nature of the former and the “mechanistic” character of the latter, we argue that a simple holism–mechanism divide misrepresents the epistemic resources of both TEK and AEK. Based on the literature on mechanistic explanations in philosophy of science, we argue that holders of TEK are perfectly capable of identifying mechanisms that underlie ecological phenomena while AEK often relies on non-mechanistic strategies of dealing with ecological complexity. Instead of generic characterizations of knowledge systems as either mechanistic or holistic, we propose to approach epistemic relations between knowledge systems by analyzing their heuristics in practice. (shrink)

This article investigates the media lives of a particular class taxonomy in the Swedish press from 1945 to 1976. Invented by the Central Bureau of Statistics in 1911, the ‘social group division’ system was abandoned in the early post-war period. Around the same time, however, it gained popularity in Swedish culture and political debate. While earlier research has noted that such bureaucratic class taxonomies – as in several other Western countries – conditioned how actors understood and created new knowledge (...) about the population, this process of wider circulation remains understudied. Using insights from literature on ‘the social life of methods’ and the history of knowledge, which underline that knowledge is transformed by and transforms the contexts it circulates in, I show that print media was an arena for circulating and producing new meaning around class taxonomies. Although editorials shunned the social group division for incorrectly representing Swedish society and creating artificial class boundaries, journalists used the taxonomy to explain social structures. Furthermore, by interviewing ‘typical’ members of the different social groups, journalists made the system relatable and personal for their readers. In this context, the social groups were imagined as cultural communities, sharing cultural behaviours and preferences. Lastly, I analyse usages of the social group division in letters to the editor, which reveal that people felt they were being classified and wanted to offer their views of society, using the taxonomy in ways the experts had not intended. This study thereby contributes to the history of social taxonomies and class languages in the post-war period. (shrink)

The primary aim of this essay is to explain the central elements of Locke's theory of knowledge. A secondary aim arises from the official definition of knowledge introduced in the opening lines of book IV. Though Locke's repeated statements of the definition are consistent with the initial formulation, the consensus view among commentators is that that official definition is in tension with other book IV doctrines. My broader interpretation involves an effort to render the various doctrines consistent with (...) the official definition. The order of discussion: Section 1 explicates the definition of knowledge. Section 2 explains two main divisions of knowledge – namely, its three degrees, and the four sorts of knowable truths. In Section 3, I consider whether Locke understands knowable truths on a model of analyticity. Section 4 addresses potential problems about the objectivity of knowledge, given Locke's account. Section 5 focuses on external world knowledge – Locke calls this "sensitive knowledge" and it poses special difficulties for the official definition of knowledge. (shrink)

Truth, adequacy and error, the Mind-Body relation and the meaning of "having" an idea are issues still at the center of philosophical debate. Spinoza belongs to those past masters whose work always inspires renewed insights on these as on other philosophical issues. This volume revolves around Part II of Spinoza's _opus magnum_, the _Ethics_ where he offers his theory of knowledge and the human mind. Stuart Hampshire writes about "Truth and Correspondence"; Alexandre Matheron discusses "Ideas of Ideas and Certainty"; (...) Alan Donagan writes on "Language, Ideas and Reasoning"; Jonathan Bennett tackles the difficult one substance — two attributes issue, and Yirmiyahu Yovel analyzes 'common notions' and error. Papers are also presented by Jean-Luc Marion, Pierre-François Moreau, Guttorm Fløistad, Wallace I. Matson, Wim Klever, Elhanan Yakira, Marcelo Dascal, Wolfgang Bartuschat, Amihud Gilead and Filippo Mignini. This book is based on the second Jerusalem Conference. Each conference in this series, and the ensuing volume, focuses on a specific 'family' of issues: the first five follow Spinoza's own division in his _Ethics_, and the other two deal with Spinoza's social and political theory and his life and sources. An outcome of a long-standing interest in Spinozistic thought by a group of first-rate scholars, this volume is sure to join the first one as indispensable reading for Spinoza students and scholars. (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 dissertation is an attempt to loosen what I see as a chokehold by which two paramount assumptions constrict our epistemic endeavors. These Enlightenment assumptions--that we accept or refute ideas as true based on transparently clear and orderly methods and criteria, and that individuals accept or refute truth claims--are still central in epistemology, despite their many critics . Thinking about gossip as an epistemologically productive concept provides us with the means to critique those assumptions, and further attempts to broaden our (...) notion of an epistemological foundation. ;Gossip at first appears to be an unlikely candidate for such a resurrection, mainly because its treatment by academics has been dismissive; this dismissal is in part due to Enlightenment conceptions about truth and falsehood. Chapter One surveys the social science literature on gossip and rumor, revealing that social scientists begin with such restrictive definitions of what gossip is that their conclusions amount to little more than tautology. Chapter Two shows that humanists have a slightly different approach to gossip, but with roughly similar results. ;The handful of philosophers who deal directly with gossip or rumor almost as a unit accept uncritically a division between "purposive" conversation and "idle" chatter. To do so, I think, perpetuates a limiting epistemic foundation on a linguistic level. In contrast, I argue in Chapter Three that the very existence of something like gossip proves the inadequacy of the foundationalist myth , and that to attempt to understand and use gossip with foundationalist tools is simply a wrong fit. My understanding of gossip is based on this central fact: we undertake the activity of gossip or rumor-spreading because we are trying to make sense out of something--we need to collect knowledge socially. Gossip originates from dissonance; it acts as a counterweight to more official information, and can't be considered apart from official knowledge. We use gossip and rumor, along with more orthodox sources of information, to formulate our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. The extent to which gossip and rumor are spread is the extent to which the analysis is shared, and not individualized. Gossip is both a genealogical tool and an speculative tool. (shrink)

Divisions of the sciences have been popular objects of study ever since antiquity. One reason for this esteem might be their potential to reveal in a succinct manner how scholars, schools or entire societies thought about the body of knowledge available at their time and its specific structure. However, what do classifications tell us about the pleasures of knowledge? Occasionally, quite a lot, particularly in a setting where the acquisition of knowledge is considered to be the (...) only path leading to the pleasures of ultimate happiness. This is the case for al-Fārābī, who is at the center of this paper. He is particularly interesting for a study such as this because he actually does believe that humanity’s final goal consists in the attainment of happiness through the acquisition of knowledge; and he wrote several treatises, not only on the classification of the sciences as such, but also on the underlying epistemological reasons for this division. Thus he offers excellent insight into a 10th-centu... (shrink)