Epistemic dependence refers to our social mechanisms of reliance in practices of knowledge production. Epistemic oppression concerns persistent and unwarranted exclusions from those practices. This article examines the relationship between these two frameworks and demonstrates that attending to their relationship is a fruitful practice for applied epistemology. Paying attention to relations of epistemic dependence and how exclusive they are can help us track epistemically oppressive practices. In order to show this, I introduce a taxonomy of epistemic dependence. I argue that (...) this particular taxonomy is useful for tracking epistemically oppressive practices in institutional contexts. This is because, first, the forms of epistemic dependence in this taxonomy yield, what I call, diagnostic questions. These are questions that help us track how relations of epistemic dependence could become exclusive and that thus help reveal epistemic oppression in institutional contexts. Second, the forms of epistemic dependence in the taxonomy are interrelated. Paying attention not just to each of three forms of epistemic dependence but also to the way in which they are interrelated is useful for illuminating epistemically oppressive practices. I conclude by demonstrating how the diagnostic questions can be used in analyses of concrete institutional practices in asylum law and higher education. (shrink)

The human experience is shaped by information from different perceptual channels, but it is still debated whether and how differential experience influences language use. To address this, we compared congenitally blind, blindfolded, and sighted people's descriptions of the same motion events experienced auditorily by all participants (i.e., via sound alone) and conveyed in speech and gesture. Comparison of blind and sighted participants to blindfolded participants helped us disentangle the effects of a lifetime experience of being blind versus the task-specific effects (...) of experiencing a motion event by sound alone. Compared to sighted people, blind people's speech focused more on path and less on manner of motion, and encoded paths in a more segmented fashion using more landmarks and path verbs. Gestures followed the speech, such that blind people pointed to landmarks more and depicted manner less than sighted people. This suggests that visual experience affects how people express spatial events in the multimodal language and that blindness may enhance sensitivity to paths of motion due to changes in event construal. These findings have implications for the claims that language processes are deeply rooted in our sensory experiences. (shrink)

One of the recent attempts to explore epistemic dimensions of forced displacement focuses on the institution of gender-based asylum and hopes to detect forms of epistemic injustice within assessments of gender related asylum applications. Following this attempt, I aim in this paper to demonstrate how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. This structural limit becomes visible when we realize how the institution of asylum is (...) formed to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy. This institutional comfort afforded to migration boards and courts by the existing asylum regimes in the current order of nation-states leads to a systemic prioritization of state actors’ epistemic resources rather than that of applicants, which, in turn, results in epistemic injustice and impacts the determination of applicants’ refugee status. (shrink)

One of the recent attempts to explore epistemic dimensions of forced displacement focuses on the institution of gender-based asylum and hopes to detect forms of epistemic injustice within assessments of gender related asylum applications. Following this attempt, I aim in this paper to demonstrate how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. This structural limit becomes visible when we realize how the institution of asylum is (...) formed to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy. This institutional comfort afforded to migration boards and courts by the existing asylum regimes in the current order of nation-states leads to a systemic prioritization of state actors’ epistemic resources rather than that of applicants, which, in turn, results in epistemic injustice and impacts the determination of applicants’ refugee status. (shrink)

The fact that Sufi metaphysics is usually taken to be merely the writings of Islamic philosophers, like Ibn al-'Arabi, seems to underestimate the philosophical indications of literary texts in the Sufi tradition. When Sufi literary texts are examined for philosophical content, that content is sought within and through the traditional Sufist approach. However, there appears to be a lack of correspondence between the traditional approach on the main conceptions (of God, of the universe, etc.) in Sufism and what literary texts (...) can offer regarding those, when some literary texts are to be examined in a way in which an underlying philosophical system can be extracted from them. In this article, Ipresent a brief analysis of The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, one of the most significant works focusing on God and written in Sufi tradition. I suggest an alternative framework for Sufi metaphysics, which overlaps with the metaphysical connotations of The Conference of the Birds, via some Spinozistic ideas on God and on God's relationship to the rest of the universe. Since The Conference of the Birds represents a metaphysical doctrine that is apart from the traditional approach, I argue that we are not justified in thinking that Sufi metaphysics is only what Islamic philosophers have so far offered us. (shrink)

The 21st century, in which science and technology developed with great acceleration, made the physical and social distances between people more permeable with the effect of globalization inherited from the previous century. In such an age where everybody is aware of everything, not only positive developments but also all kinds of information, beliefs and actions that may be considered negative for humanity can instantly spread and become widespread all over the world. For example, the adoption of attitudes and behaviors that (...) do not correspond to human values such as consumption, selfishness, narcissism, vanity, arrogance, humiliation, mockery, especially among young people, is worrisome. It is a fact that the generation Z, who was born in the lap of technology, is vulnerable to technology and more susceptible to its damages. In today's world, which is also defined as the age of technology and information, young people can be exposed to all kinds of written and visual information pollution via the internet. Moreover, this situation paves the way for negative attitudes and behaviors such as waste of time and energy, consumption habits, addiction, estrangement from values, alienation, problem of belonging, dissatisfaction among young people. For this reason, this age is polluting the young people not only mentally but also spiritually. Not only the individual themself but also societies have to pay the bill for the inability to satisfy the material and spiritual dimension of the human in a healthy and appropriate manner. For this reason, the education of the new generation is a duty on the family, educators, non-governmental organizations and society as a whole. One of the first and most important steps to be taken in order to protect young people from all these adverse developments and to ensure their participation in the society as a healthy individual is undoubtedly their upbringing with moral values. Because values are the preconditions for a young person to exist as an adult with personality, morality, responsibility, sensitivity to the other and their environment, and who has discovered their own meaning and importance in the world. Therefore, knowing the spiritual-humanistic values of young people, who are the guarantors of the future, will give adults an idea about predicting today and the future and taking necessary measures. The aim of this study is; to determine the spiritual-humanistic value tendencies of high school students. The research was conducted on a total of 450 students studying at different types of high schools in the province of Sinop in the 2019-2020 academic year. The research data was collected through questionnaires and scales from quantitative research methods were analyzed according to age, gender, class, economic status, perception of success, family structure, family attitude perception, duration of social media use and social media usage purpose variables. According to the results of the research, the students got the highest average score (4.28) from moral values and the lowest average score (3.19) from respect value. There is a positive correlation between all dimensions of the spiritual-humanistic values disposition scale. Mann Witney U-Test and Kruskal Wallis H-Test, which are non-parametric tests, were used in the analysis of the scale that did not show normal distribution. According to the test results, there was no relationship between the sub-dimensions of the scale; moral values, love, respect and sensitivity mean scale score and gender, age, perception of success, family attitude perception, duration of social media use and social media use purpose variables, because p> 0.05. However, there was a significant correlation between the point average of moral tendency of the sample group and school type, mother education and father education; between the average score of love value and the school type variable; respect value average score and class, school type, perceived economic situation and mother education; between the mean score of sensitivity value and the variable of family structure (p <0.05). (shrink)

Din-bilim ilişkisi tarihsel süreçte olduğu gibi günümüzde de tartışılmaya devam etmektedir. Hristiyan Avrupa’sında ortaya çıkan tartışmaların İslam dünyasını da etkilediği bir vakıadır. İslam kelamcıları, İslam dini ile bilim arasında bir çatışmanın olmadığı genel kabulüyle hareket ederler. Özellikle bu noktada kelamın vesâil alanı, metafiziğin desteklendiği alan olarak kabul görmektedir. Modern dönemde vesâil alanında önemli bilimsel çalışmaların olduğu görülmektedir bunlardan biri de Nöroteolojidir. Nöroteoloji, davranışı nöral (sinirsel) temelde inceleyip açıklamaya çalışan bilim dalıdır. Bu noktada özellikle dindarlığın nörolojik temelleri ve evrimsel işlevi hakkında (...) önemli bilgiler sunmaktadır. Bu çalışmada kelamın en önemli tartışma konularından biri olan kesb nazariyesi, Nöroteolojik açıdan Benjamin libet deneyiyle değerlendirilmektedir. Deney sonuçları yayınlandığında o güne kadar felsefe ve bilim dünyasında tartışılagelen insanın irade özgürlüğü meselesine yeni bir tartışma zemini hazırlamıştır. Özellikle Eş’ârî’nin kesb anlayışının da ciddi tartışmalara sebebiyet verdiği bilinmektedir. Allah’ın mutlaklığı açısından ele alınan bu düşünce, insan özgürlüğü ve sorumluluğunu ortadan kaldırır düşüncesiyle eleştirilmiştir. Ancak Benjamin libet deneyinin, Eş’ârî’nin kesb anlayışına uygun veriler içermesi dikkat çeken bir husus olarak göze çarpmaktadır. (shrink)

A cognitive architecture aimed at cumulative learning must provide the necessary information and control structures to allow agents to learn incrementally and autonomously from their experience. This involves managing an agent's goals as well as continuously relating sensory information to these in its perception-cognition information processing stack. The more varied the environment of a learning agent is, the more general and flexible must be these mechanisms to handle a wider variety of relevant patterns, tasks, and goal structures. While many researchers (...) agree that information at different levels of abstraction likely differs in its makeup and structure and processing mechanisms, agreement on the particulars of such differences is not generally shared in the research community. A dual processing architecture has been proposed as a model of cognitive processing, and they are often considered as responsible for low- and high-level information, respectively. We posit that cognition is not binary in this way and that knowledge at any level of abstraction involves what we refer to as neurosymbolic information, meaning that data at both high and low levels must contain both symbolic and subsymbolic information. Further, we argue that the main differentiating factor between the processing of high and low levels of data abstraction can be largely attributed to the nature of the involved attention mechanisms. We describe the key arguments behind this view and review relevant evidence from the literature. (shrink)

A credible fear test is an in-depth interview process given to undocumented people of any age arriving at a U.S. port of entry to determine qualification for asylum-seeking. Credible fear tests as a typical immigration procedure demonstrate not only what structural epistemic violence looks like but also how this violence lives in and through the design of asylum policy. Key terms of credible fear tests such as “significant possibility,” “evidence,” “consistency,” and “credibility” can never be neutral in the context of (...) colonial administrative violence. We argue that these terms function as mechanisms of exclusion and demonstrate that the capacity to be violent (i.e. to be an instrument of violence) is built into these tests, ready to be deployed when an administration wants to stop certain people from certain places from entering without regard to their own ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands. Not only are such practices instruments of violence, but the concept of ‘violence’ continues to be organized, defined, and conceived within settler colonial epistemologies so as to exclude these administrative forms of violence deployed against Indigenous peoples and people of color from recognition and nameability. We argue that this is an intentional strategy of colonial power preservation that is functionalized through social processes that remain structurally stable and self-regenerating across historical and political changes. (shrink)

One way to articulate the promise of interdisciplinary research is in terms of the relationship between knowledge and ignorance. Disciplinary research yields deep knowledge of a circumscribed range of issues, but remains ignorant of those issues that stretch outside its purview. Because complex problems such as climate change do not respect disciplinary boundaries, disciplinary research responses to such problems are limited and partial. Interdisciplinary research responses, by contrast, integrate disciplinary perspectives by combining knowledge about different issues and as a result (...) reduce ignorance about more aspects of the problem. In this paper, we develop this idea and argue that while interdisciplinary research can help remediate damaging ignorance about complex problems, it also creates conditions in which other damaging forms of ignorance can arise. We illustrate this point in detail with three case studies before discussing three implications of our analysis for identifying and managing deleterio... (shrink)

Self-regulation in early childhood is an important predictor of success across a variety of indicators in life, including health, well-being, and earnings. Although conceptually self-regulation has been defined as multifaceted, previous research has not investigated whether there is conceptual and empirical overlap between the factors that comprise self-regulation or if they are distinct. In this study, using a bifactor model, we tested the shared and unique variance among self-regulation constructs and prediction to pre-academic and social-emotional skills. The sample included 932 (...) preschool children, their parents, and their teachers in the United States. Children’s self-regulation was assessed using measures of executive function, behavioral self-regulation, and emotion regulation. The bifactor model demonstrated a common overarching self-regulation factor, as well as distinct executive function and emotion regulation factors. The common overarching self-regulation factor and executive function predicted children’s pre-academic and social-emotional skills. The emotion regulation factor predicted children’s social-emotional skills. Identifying the shared and unique aspects of self-regulation may have important implications for supporting children’s regulatory skills as well as their success in school. (shrink)

BackgroundThe ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are widely endorsed but compliance is limited. We sought to determine whether journal-requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist improves full compliance with the guidelines.MethodsIn a randomised controlled trial, manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE (March–June 2015) were randomly allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist or current standard practice. Authors, academic editors, and peer reviewers were blinded to group allocation. Trained reviewers performed outcome adjudication (...) in duplicate by assessing manuscripts against an operationalised version of the ARRIVE guidelines that consists 108 items. Our primary outcome was the between-group differences in the proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist subitems.ResultsWe randomised 1689 manuscripts (control: n = 844, intervention: n = 845), of which 1269 were sent for peer review and 762 (control: n = 340; intervention: n = 332) accepted for publication. No manuscript in either group achieved full compliance with the ARRIVE checklist. Details of animal husbandry (ARRIVE subitem 9b) was the only subitem to show improvements in reporting, with the proportion of compliant manuscripts rising from 52.1 to 74.1% (X2 = 34.0, df = 1, p = 2.1 × 10−7) in the control and intervention groups, respectively.ConclusionsThese results suggest that altering the editorial process to include requests for a completed ARRIVE checklist is not enough to improve compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines. Other approaches, such as more stringent editorial policies or a targeted approach on key quality items, may promote improvements in reporting. (shrink)

Frege made a derivative of the distinction that he made between the meanings of senses (Sinn) and references (Bedeutung) on judgments, and named the judgments which he treats as hollow functions; ‘Unsaturated’ (ungesättigt) phrases and the phrases which completed an argument as, ‘Saturated’ (gesättigt) phrases. Saturated phrases consist of first and second level concepts and are considered to be meaningful expressions with an accurate value. Frege became the founder of modern symbolic logic with the language of formal logic he developed (...) in ‘Concept Writing’, and based all this formal analysis on the distinction of ‘function (Funktion) – argument (Argument)’ and ‘concept – coverage’. The philosopher, who makes sense of the judgments as their ‘thoughts’; determines the logical value accuracy of the reference on the basis of this distinction, has adopted a contradictory acceptance in terms of both considering the judgments as a condition of being able to receive a truth value and reducing them to the senses of the sentences. Then, if the thoughts were indeed the sense of the sentences, as Frege thought, then it would not be possible to speak of sentences that were meaningful but lacked truthfulness. That is why, to overcome this distress, we propose to change the definition of thought in Frege's theory and to consider it as function values, not the sense of sentences. Likewise for us, thoughts are not the senses of the sentences, nor are they references. Contrariwise, thoughts are the function value of the sentences. To put it in a different way, if a sentence lacks function value, it can be meaningful but not true or false, and if the sentence has a function value, it can be true or false. Thus, for us, thoughts are neither the expression of the sentence in the language nor the logical value of the sentence; thoughts are function values that can be true or false. (shrink)

The principles offered by beliefs affect the thinking styles of individuals. Although it has been argued in recent studies that believers and non-believers have different thinking styles, there are few studies examining the relationship between belief and cognitive styles in Muslim groups. In this study, the relationships between intrinsic religious motivation and "critical thinking", which is one of the most desired thinking skills today, and " dichotomous thinking", which can be expressed as black-and-white thinking and primarily associated with negative structures, (...) were examined. The study was carried out with 395 university students, and the data was obtained by a socio-demographic information form, the Intrinsic Religious Motivation Scale, the Critical Thinking Disposition Scale, and the Dichotomous Thinking Scale. Findings suggested a positive significant relationship between intrinsic religious motivation and critical thinking and dichotomous thinking, and a positive significant relationship between critical thinking and dichotomous thinking. Regarding the relationship between dichotomous thinking and critical thinking, intrinsic religious motivation had a mediating role. The Islamic faith often invites reasoning and thinking and affirms this way of thinking; at the same time, it offers various conceptual tools for dichotomous thinking with discourses such as heaven-hell, good-evil, dark-light, and faith-denial. Although critical thinking and dichotomous thinking are seen as opposite constructs, the findings have been interpreted as the Islamic belief supporting both critical thinking and dichotomous thinking at the same time, thus reducing the rigidity of dichotomous thinking. The findings were discussed in the light of the relevant literature, and suggestions were made for further research. (shrink)

The immigrant problem, one of the most striking socio-pathological events of our day, is more often raised in the context of political issues. While these debates are driven by local and political interests, what is hidden behind political calculations is the tragic position of the migrant. The migrant, who comes to the agenda with political debates, takes on an extremely negative image in terms of social relations. The problem with the sameness of "We" is that the "Other" or the immigrant, (...) as the expression of an element that is incompatible with the local culture, is pushed from the field of "I" into otherness, and is evaluated as an element of conflict that does not force the transformation of publicity on the social level. Although the interest-based determining power of politics has negative effects on the formation of sufficient human common sense regarding the problem, there is an intense debate in the philosophical literature on the basis of Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Lévinas. Most of the studies put forward in the context of associating the ideas put forward by the thinkers in question with immigration have kept the research deep but limited in scope. In our study, the subject was not deemed necessary in depth, it was sufficient to discuss the basic thinkers, views and the basic dynamics of the relevant views on the subject, and care was taken to outline the relevant literature. Levinas, who stands out as one of the dynamics of the basic literature on immigration and the emphasis on "Otherness", pointed to Western thought that did not prioritize ethical relations as the cause of the political crises of his time. Levinas tries to handle the problem of Otherness, which emerges as a political, ethical and legal problem of the tension that the "I"-centered way of thinking, which brings about sameness, will experience against the "Other", in a different way from the tradition of thought that prioritizes ontology. In the thought of Levinas, who considers the “Other” as an alternative field of sameness, the transcendence dimension of Otherness has the function of removing the Self from narcissism through the discovery or tension of the alterity in the "Other" rather than the sameness of the position of the "I" against the "Others". There is a belief that the "Other", embodied in transcendent Otherness, will lead to an act of unconditional hospitality in the "I". It can be seen that Arendt also discusses the problems that Levinas puts on the agenda. In the context of "Otherness", Arendt's criticisms of the concept of right, which manifests itself with a political ontological understanding rather than an ethical relationship as expressed in Levinas, are in question. Thus, while it becomes possible to question the legal structure that does not include the “Other” in the political sphere, the importance of the "Other" for political discourse is also revealed. At this point, conditional hospitality comes to the fore in the context of foreigner's right, which we encounter in Kant. However, Derrida, who would state that Levinas's unconditional hospitality had practical problems, also found Kant's conditional hospitality problematic. The immigrant, as the “Other” of our time, which is hoped to gain an ethical-political basis of thought in the context of the idea of hospitality, aims to re-discuss the idea of hospitality developed in the existing literature, while also being a call to produce thoughts on the philosophical understanding of the immigrant and the importance of creating a philosophy of immigration. (shrink)

In this article, the introduction to the book of Kitāb al-Mulakhkhas al-Muwatta' by Qābisī (d. 403/1012), one of the hadith scholars of Maghrib geography, is discussed. The author wrote this work in order to bring together the continual documents in the Ibn al-Qāsim narra-tion of Mālik b. Anas' (d. 179/795) al-Muwatta. In the introduction, the author first stated the purpose of the writing of Kitāb al-Mulakhkhas al-Muwatta''s and the method followed in the work. Namely, he states that he compiled this (...) work to respond to the demands of those who asked him to bring together the hadiths of Mālik b. Anas, whose chain is complete. In the compilation of the work, he was content with the only narration of Muwatta. He followed the method of collecting the musnad hadiths in this narration, the ones with clear continuous. However, he preferred not to include the narrations that were closed in his continuous in his work. After this information, the author has included some issues of hadith methodology in the introduction part. The main purpose of the study is to determine the concepts and subjects of the hadith methodology that he discussed in this section. In this context, firstly, information about Qābisī's life was given, and his education was mentioned. Then, some information about the features of the work in question is presented. Afterwards, the concepts of hadith methodology that he mentioned in the introduction of his work and his explanations on these issues were examined under separate headings. Although he is encouraged to narrate hadiths in this introduction, he provides information about the refraining of many hadith transmissions, the conditions of endurance of hadith, the words of the narration considered as 'muttasil and munqati', the narration with the meaning of the hadiths and the lahn in the hadith. When the approaches of Qābisī on these issues are examined, it is revealed that he tends towards the views of the Mālikī school, which he is a follower of and Imam Mālik. For this reason, the parts in which he adopted Mālik’s approaches and tended to explain the issues by referring to him are mentioned. (shrink)