In this essay, I discuss a potential nexus for comparison between Hawaiian and Chinese philosophies grounded in what I call “terrestrial identity”. I bring Fei Xiaotong’s description of the formation of social identity in China, which is historically agrarian and inalienably place-based, to meet contemporary Hawaiian philosophical perspectives of personal responsibility, genealogical consciousness, and “seascape epistemology” to flesh out a new theory of relationality, one that includes the ontological, historical, and ethical relationship of humans to the land (...) on which they orient themselves and that defines the circumstances of their lives. The concept of terrestrial identity is inclusive in terms of types of relational entities, accommodating place, space, and memory into a comprehensive social ontology. It also opens onto discussions of contemporary social problems in a way that centres place and contextuality. I will conclude this essay with such a discussion, regarding homelessness among Kānaka Maoli. (shrink)

As the editors of the series, New Literary Theory, proclaim in the preface of the book, the purpose of the series is to make more room in literary theory for playful and accessible approaches to li...

Epistemologies have power. They have the power not only to transform worlds, but to create them. And the worlds that they create can be better or worse. For many people, the worlds they create are predictably and reliably deadly. Epistemologies can turn sacred land into ‘resources’ to be bought, sold, exploited, and exhausted. They can turn people into ‘labor’ in much the same way. They can not only disappear acts of violence but render them unnamable and unrecognizable within their conceptual (...) architectures. Settler systems of epistemic and conceptual resources and the relations among them are constructed to preclude certain forms of knowledge. This is not an accident; it is a central goal of colonial violence. Colonization and land dispossession would not be possible without the violent disruption of Indigenous knowledge systems and ongoing organized attempts to disrupt their survival. Violently disrupting the relationships of people to land is as much an epistemic project as it is a material one, and these two projects are inherently linked. The task of theorizing epistemic oppression is not only about epistemic oppression. Epistemic oppression is a story that gives language to a phenomenon in order to get past it, to carry on with the maintaining and reviving the forms of Indigenous and diasporic knowledge that colonialism has worked tirelessly to corrupt and silence. (shrink)

This article reimagines the meanings of U.S. national parks and so-called ‘natural’ places in our environmental histories and histories of science. Environmental historians have created a compelling narrative about the creation and use of U.S. national parks as places for recreation and natural resource conservation. Although these motivations were undoubtedly significant, I argue that some of the early parks were created and used for a third, often overlooked, reason: to preserve a permanent, state-sanctioned space for scientific knowledge production. Deconstructing the (...) concept of the “natural laboratory,” I show how scientists helped justify and then benefited from the creation of national parks. Hawaii National Park serves as my case study. Advocates of the national park aimed to give settler colonial scientists in the Hawaiian archipelago a permanent place for their research, while tying Hawai‘i’s exotic landscape into the sublime nature of the American West. The park was framed as a perfect laboratory for U.S. experts to study “curious” flora, fauna, and geological processes, becoming a major site of knowledge production in volcanology. Reimagining the parks in this way has ramifications for how we think about issues of access and justice. Environmental historians who have explored the ‘dark side’ of the conservation movement have yet to consider the other half of the story: the parks not only barred certain peoples and their ways of life, but also provided access to scientists – a set of actors whose work was deemed more complementary to conservationist goals than the activities of the Native Hawaiians – and marginalized local and indigenous epistemologies. Thus, the question so often asked in environmental history, “Who is nature for?” might be supplemented by the question, “Who has the power to know nature?”. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Real Understanding The Experience Distant — Understanding Hawaiian‐style The Experience Near — Understanding Holocaust Perpetrators Conclusion Notes.

The Hawaiian Drosophila have been a model system for evolutionary, ecological, and ethological studies since the inception of the Hawaiian Drosophila Project in the 1960s. Here we review the past and present research on this incredible lineage and provide a prospectus for future directions on genomics and microbial interactions. While the number of publications on this group has waxed and waned over the years, we assert that recent systematic, biogeographic, and ecological studies have reinvigorated Hawaiian Drosophila as (...) an evolutionary model system. The characteristics that distinguish good model clades from good model organisms (e.g., Drosophila melanogaster) are somewhat different so we first define what constitutes a good evolutionary model. We argue that the Hawaiian Drosophila possess many desired aspects of a good evolutionary model, describe how this group of geographically isolated flies have been used in the past, and propose some exciting avenues for future evolutionary research on this diverse, dynamic clade of Drosophila. (shrink)

Feminist epistemology and philosophy of science studies the ways in which gender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge, the knowing subject, and practices of inquiry and justification. It identifies ways in which dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification systematically disadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform these conceptions and practices so that they serve the interests of these groups. Various practitioners of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science argue (...) that dominant knowledge practices disadvantage women by (1) excluding them from inquiry, (2) denying them epistemic authority, (3) denigrating their “feminine” cognitive styles and modes of knowledge, (4) producing theories of women that represent them as inferior, deviant, or significant only in the ways they serve male interests, (5) producing theories of social phenomena that render women's activities and interests, or gendered power relations, invisible, and (6) producing knowledge (science and technology) that is not useful for people in subordinate positions, or that reinforces gender and other social hierarchies. Feminist epistemologists trace these failures to flawed conceptions of knowledge, knowers, objectivity, and scientific methodology. They offer diverse accounts of how to overcome these failures. They also aim to (1) explain why the entry of women and feminist scholars into different academic disciplines, especially in biology and the social sciences, has generated new questions, theories, and methods, (2) show how gender has played a.. (shrink)

This volume will be of great interest to scholars and students in epistemology.

Social epistemology is the study of the social dimensions of knowledge or information. There is little consensus, however, on what the term "knowledge" comprehends, what is the scope of the "social", or what the style or purpose of the study should be. According to some writers, social epistemology should retain the same general mission as classical epistemology, revamped in the recognition that classical epistemology was too individualistic. According to other writers, social epistemology should be a (...) more radical departure from classical epistemology, a successor discipline that would replace epistemology as traditionally conceived. The classical approach could be realized in at least two forms. One would emphasize the traditional epistemic goal of acquiring true beliefs. It would study social practices in terms of their impact on the truth-values of agents’ beliefs. A second version of the classical approach would focus on the epistemic goal of having justified or rational beliefs. Applied to the social realm, it might concentrate, for example, on when a cognitive agent is justified or warranted in accepting the statements and opinions of others. Proponents of the anti-classical approach have little or no use for concepts like truth and justification. In addressing the social dimensions of knowledge, they understand "knowledge" as simply what is believed, or what beliefs are "institutionalized" in this or that community, culture, or context. They seek to identify the social forces and influences responsible for knowledge production so conceived. Social epistemology is theoretically significant because of the central role of society in the knowledge-forming process. It also has practical importance because of its possible role in the redesign of information-related social institutions. (shrink)

An overview of the epistemology of perception, covering the nature of justification, immediate justification, the relationship between the metaphysics of perceptual experience and its rational role, the rational role of attention, and cognitive penetrability. The published version will contain a smaller bibliography, due to space constraints in the volume.

In _Hinge Epistemology_, eminent epistemologists investigate Wittgenstein's concept of basic or 'hinge' certainty as deployed in _On Certainty_ and show its importance for mainstream epistemology.

This book explores the epistemic side of racial and sexual oppression. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from listening to each other.

Root, branch, and blossom, attention is intertwined with epistemology. It is essential to our capacity to learn and decisive of the evidence we obtain, it influences the intellectual connections we forge and those we remember, and it is the cognitive tool whereby we enact decisions about inquiry. Moreover, because it is both an epistemic practice and a site of agency, attention is a natural locus for questions about epistemic morality. This article surveys the emerging epistemology of attention, reviewing (...) the existing literature and sketching avenues for future investigation. It also argues for a reorientation of epistemology itself. This argument is the focus of Section 1. Section 2 briefly reviews philosophical accounts of attention, Section 3 focuses on issues in traditional, individualistic epistemology, and Section 4 turns to social epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper I explore Phyllis Rooney’s 2003 chapter, “Feminist Epistemology and Naturalized Epistemology: An Uneasy Alliance,” taking guidance from her critique of naturalized epistemology in pursuing my own analysis of another uneasy alliance: that between feminist epistemology and social epistemology. Investigating some of the background assumptions at work in prominent conceptions of social epistemology, I consider recent analyses of "epistemic bubbles" to ask how closely such analyses are aligned with ongoing research in feminist (...) epistemology. I argue that critical feminist insights in political philosophy are called for here, especially those that focus on multiple politically salient relationships and also emphasize practices of personal transformation as inseparably bound up with broader movements for social transformation. Insofar as feminist epistemology continues to carry another world in its heart, I argue that it will continue to rest uneasily with any effort to align it with—let alone subsume it within—the still emerging field of social epistemology. (shrink)

A Virtue Epistemology presents a new approach to some of the oldest and most gripping problems of philosophy, those of knowledge and scepticism. Ernest Sosa argues for two levels of knowledge, the animal and the reflective, each viewed as a distinctive human accomplishment. By adopting a kind of virtue epistemology in line with the tradition found in Aristotle, Aquinas, Reid, and especially Descartes, he presents an account of knowledge which can be used to shed light on different varieties (...) of scepticism, the nature and status of intuitions, and epistemic normativity. (shrink)

What is it to know someone? Epistemologists rarely take up this question, though recent developments make such inquiry possible and desirable. This paper advances an account of how such interpersonal knowledge goes beyond mere propositional and qualitative knowledge about someone, giving a central place to second-personal treatment. It examines what such knowledge requires, and what makes it distinctive within epistemology as well as socially. It assesses its theoretic value for several issues in moral psychology, epistemic injustice, and philosophy of (...) mind. And it offers an account of the complex content in play if interpersonal knowledge is to be understood in terms of its mental states and their functions. (shrink)

How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.

Social epistemology is the study of the social dimensions of knowledge or information. There is little consensus, however, on what the term "knowledge" comprehends, what is the scope of the "social", or what the style or purpose of the study should be. According to some writers, social epistemology should retain the same general mission as classical epistemology, revamped in the recognition that classical epistemology was too individualistic. According to other writers, social epistemology should be a (...) more radical departure from classical epistemology, a successor discipline that would replace epistemology as traditionally conceived. The classical approach could be realized in at least two forms. One would emphasize the traditional epistemic goal of acquiring true beliefs. It would study social practices in terms of their impact on the truth-values of agents' beliefs. A second version of the classical approach would focus on the epistemic goal of having justified or rational beliefs. Applied to the social realm, it might concentrate, for example, on when a cognitive agent is justified or warranted in accepting the statements and opinions of others. Proponents of the anti-classical approach have little or no use for concepts like truth and justification. In addressing the social dimensions of knowledge, they understand "knowledge" as simply what is believed, or what beliefs are "institutionalized" in this or that community, culture, or context. They seek to identify the social forces and influences responsible for knowledge production so conceived. Social epistemology is theoretically significant because of the central role of society in the knowledge-forming process. It also has practical importance because of its possible role in the redesign of information-related social institutions. (shrink)

This essay aims to sharpen debates on the pros and cons of historical epistemology, which is now understood as a novel approach to the study of knowledge, by comparing it with the history of epistemology as traditionally pursued by philosophers. The many versions of both approaches are not always easily discernable. Yet, a reasoned comparison of certain versions can and should be made. In the first section of this article, I argue that the most interesting difference involves neither (...) the subject matter nor goal, but the methods used by the two approaches. In the second section, I ask which of the two approaches or methods is more promising given that both historical epistemologists and historians of epistemology claim to contribute to epistemology simpliciter. Using traditional problems concerning the epistemic role of perception, I argue that the historical epistemologies of Wartofsky and Daston and Galison fail to show that studying practices of perception is philosophically significant. Standard methods from the history of epistemology are more promising, as I show by means of reconstructing arguments in a debate about the relation between perception and judgment in psychological research on the famous moon illusion. (shrink)

Recent third person approaches to thought experiments and conceptual analysis through the method of surveys are motivated by and motivate skepticism about the traditional first person method. I argue that such surveys give no good ground for skepticism, that they have some utility, but that they do not represent a fundamentally new way of doing philosophy, that they are liable to considerable methodological difficulties, and that they cannot be substituted for the first person method, since the a priori knowledge which (...) is our object in conceptual analysis can be acquired only from the first person standpoint. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Belief Revision in Latin America: The Legacy of Carlos Alchourrón The AGM Approach The Logic of Theory Change and Epistemology What Is an Epistemic State? Departures from AGM References.

The first part of this paper asks why we need, or what would motivate, ameaningful expansion of epistemology. It answers with three critical arguments found in the recent literature, which each purport to move us some distance beyond the preoccupations of ‘post-Gettier era’ analytic epistemology. These three—the ‘epistemic luck,’ ‘epistemic value’ and ‘epistemic reconciliation’ arguments associated with D. Pritchard, J. Kvanvig, and M. Williams, respectively—each carry this implication of needed expansion by functioning as forceful ‘internal critiques’ of the (...) tradition. The second part of the paper asks what specific directions an expanded field of epistemology should take. While this is taken as an open question for debate, the expansion suggested here remains continuous with the analytic tradition, while also underlining the centrality of the acquired or ‘reflective’ intellectual virtues in meeting the burdens of the three arguments. Responsibilism, as here understood, is not a philosophical thesis so much as an orientation of commitment to clearing away philosophical assumptions that systematically obstruct recognition of the importance of empirically-informed research programs into the reflective virtues. (shrink)

This advanced textbook, now in its second edition, provides an accessible overview of some of the main issues in contemporary epistemology. Written by an expert in the field, it covers such key topics as virtue epistemology, anti-luck epistemology, epistemological disjunctivism, epistemic value, understanding, radical scepticism, and contextualism. This book is ideal as a set text for an advanced undergraduate or postgraduate course in epistemology, and will also be of general interest to researchers in philosophy.

Ludwik Fleck, Edmund Husserl : on the historicity of scientific knowledge -- Gaston Bachelard : the concept of "phenomenotechnique" -- Georges Canguilhem : epistemological history -- Pisum : Carl Correns's experiments on Xenia, 1896-99 -- Eudorina : Max Hartmann's experiments on biological regulation in protozoa, 1914-21 -- Ephestia : Alfred Kähn's experimental design for a developmental physiological -- Genetics, 1924-45 -- Tobacco mosaic virus : virus research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes for Biochemistry and Biology, 1937-45 -- The concept of (...) the gene : molecular biological perspectives -- The liquid scintillation counter : traces of radioactivity -- The concept of information : the writings of François Jacob -- Intersections -- Preparations -- The economy of the scribble. (shrink)

How do we know right from wrong? Do we even have moral knowledge? Moral epistemology studies these and related questions about our understanding of virtue and vice. It is one of philosophy’s perennial problems, reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Hume and Kant, and has recently been the subject of intense debate as a result of findings in developmental and social psychology. Throughout the book Zimmerman argues that our belief in moral knowledge can survive sceptical challenges. He also (...) draws on a rich range of examples from Plato’s Meno and Dickens’ David Copperfield to Bernard Madoff and Saddam Hussein. (shrink)

Operational epistemology is, to a first approximation, the attempt to provide cognitive rules such that one is in principle always in a position to know whether one is complying with them. In Knowledge and its Limits, I argue that the only such rules are trivial ones. In this paper, I generalize the argument in several ways to more thoroughly probabilistic settings, in order to show that it does not merely demonstrate some oddity of the folk epistemological conception of knowledge. (...) Some of the generalizations involve a formal semantic framework for treating epistemic probabilities of epistemic probabilities and expectations of expectations. The upshot is that operational epistemology cannot work, and that knowledge-based epistemology has the right characteristics to avoid its problems. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Porchat Pereira and the Neo‐Pyrrhonian School Knowledge and Skepticism: The Legacy of Ezequiel de Olaso Luis Villoro and the Beginnings of Systematic Studies in Analytic Epistemology Current Analytic Epistemology in Latin America Acknowledgments References Further Reading.

As Anthony Tol explains in his general introduction to (his translation of) Vollenhoven's 1926 inaugural address, the Reformed epistemology that Vollenhoven espouses here is essentially three-layered. Most basic is the intuition - the starting point of all knowing. It starts with discerning. Then there is knowledge. At this point language, communication, and judgments are relevant. The third layer is thought. Thought may disclose and renew or criticize and correct against the background of what we know. Thought is also central (...) to concept formation. The factor that runs through these three layers is truth, taken realistically. It has its seat in the intuition of discerning. It is central to knowledge, for the essence of knowledge is said to be "possessing truth." And in connection with thought, or more particularly in concept formation, the latter is described as "truth grasped in a form." Apart from advocating his own understanding of epistemology in this inaugural address, Vollenhoven takes issue with how epistemology is generally understood. The critique is cast in a historical overview. (shrink)

The article critically discusses Walton’s (and co-authors’) argument scheme approach to good argumentation. Four characteristics of Walton’s approach are presented: 1. Argument schemes provide normative requirements. 2. These schemata are enthymematic. 3. There are associated critical questions. 4. The method is inductive, abstracting schemata from groups of similar arguments. Four adequacy conditions are applied to these characteristics: AC1: effectiveness in achieving the epistemic goal of obtaining and communicating justified acceptable opinions; AC2: completeness in capturing the good argument types; AC3: efficiency (...) in achieving the goals; AC4: justification of the argument schemes. The discussion reveals weaknesses in Walton’s account, including they are neither effective nor truly justified. A better alternative is an epistemological approach based on epistemological principles. (shrink)

Epistemic reliabilism holds that a belief is justified if and only if it is produced by a reliable or truth-conducive process. I argue that reliabilism offers an epistemology for bounded rationality. This latter concept refers to normative and descriptive accounts of real-world reasoning instead of some ideal reasoning. However, as initially formulated, reliabilism involves an absolute, context-independent assessment of rationality that does not do justice to the fact that several processes are reliable in some reasoning environments but not in (...) others, as is widely reported in the cognitive sciences literature. I consider possible solutions to this problem. Resorting to ‘normality reliabilism’, a variant of the theory, is one; but I find it insufficient. Therefore, in addition, I propose to relativise the reliability assessment to reasoning environments. This novel version of reliabilism fits bounded rationality better than the original one does. (shrink)

Hostile epistemology is the study of how environmental features exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities. I am particularly interested in those vulnerabilities arise from the basic character of our epistemic lives. We are finite beings with limited cognitive resources, perpetually forced to reasoning a rush. I focus on two sources of unavoidable vulnerability. First, we need to use cognitive shortcuts and heuristics to manage our limited time and attention. But hostile forces can always game the gap between the heuristic and the (...) ideal. Second, we need to trust others, and trust makes us vulnerable. In particular, we need to trust experts whose expertise lies beyond our individual ability to vet. So we must rely on various imperfect signals and proxies, like institutional affiliation, to manage our trust. We are forced to use these imperfect and exploitable forms of reasoning, in order to cope with a cognitively overwhelming world. I present the hostile epistemology framework as a counterbalance to vice epistemology, which tends to locate responsibility for bad beliefs in the character of the believer. I draw two conclusions from my analysis. First: suppose we accept that that only communities and institutions can know about the world. This deeply social approach doesn’t solve the problem of expert identification. The individual still faces a problem: given their incomplete understanding, how should the individual pick which group to trust? Second: we might have hoped to get some kind of static picture of the right principles of reasoning — but hostile epistemology presents a different picture. We have to use risky heuristics and shortcuts, which hostile forces can game and exploit. We can respond by shifting to a different set of heuristics, but this simply shifts the location of our vulnerabilities. These new heuristics are also exploitable. There is no end to this, only a constant struggle to adapt. Limited beings in a hostile epistemic environment are locked in an unending epistemic arms race. (shrink)

A rigorous, authoritative new anthology which brings together some of the most significant contemporary scholarship on the theory of knowledge Carefully-calibrated and judiciously-curated, this strong and contemporary new anthology builds upon Epistemology: An Anthology, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2008) by drawing a concise and well-balanced selection of higher-level readings from a large, diverse, and evolving body of research. Includes 17 readings that represent a broad and vital part of contemporary epistemology, including articles by female philosophers and emerging thought (...) leaders Organized into seven thoughtful and distinct sections, including virtue epistemology, practical reasons for belief, and epistemic dysfunctions among others Designed to sit alongside the highly-successful anthology of canonical essays, Epistemology: An Anthology, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2008) Edited by a distinguished editorial team, including Ernie Sosa, one of the most influential active epistemologists Highlights cutting edge methodologies and contemporary topics for advanced students, instructors, and researchers. (shrink)

This paper sheds light on an epistemological dimension of Frege’s “On Sense and Reference.” Under my suggested reading of it, one of its aims is to suggest a picture about propositional knowledge and its production. According to this picture, judgment, which produces propositional knowledge, is identification of the truth-value True with the reference of a given sentence. The propositional knowledge that p, produced by the judgment that p, consists in the knowledge of the identity between the True and the reference (...) of “p.” Judgment as such is a primitive kind of identification. It produces non-propositional knowledge of the identity of the True to which propositional knowledge is reduced. (shrink)

Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: An Introduction is structured around six questions and the answers to them that have been offered by feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science. By showing how these answers differ from those of traditional philosophical approaches, the book situates feminist work in relation to philosophy more generally. The questions are: Who knows? What do we have knowledge of? How do we know? What don't we know? Why does it matter? and How can we know (...) better? In addressing these questions, the book reviews feminist accounts of objectivity, agnotology, issues in social epistemology--including epistemic injustice--and considers how feminist epistemology and philosophy of science aim at better knowledge production. The audience for the book is upper division undergraduates, but it will be useful as a foundation for graduate students and other philosophers who are seeking a general understanding of feminist work in these areas. (shrink)