This chapter contains section titled: Pluralistic Epistemology Panstructuralism Cultural Epistemology.

Zhang Dongsun was one of the most influential thinkers of the Republic of China, a reputation which rested, in part, on his extraordinary ability to introduce Western thought in a way which was compatible with the specific methodology of traditional Chinese thought. One of his greatest contributions was most certainly the creation and development of a modern theory of knowledge, based upon ancient Chinese and Chan Buddhist epistemology, and which in many respects represents a felicitous synthesis of modern science (...) and traditional Chinese thought. Therefore, the present paper will mainly focus upon his theory of knowledge. Zhang Dongsun called his theory “pluralistic”, given the assumption that various elements that enable comprehension and reasoning were mutually exclusive and irreducible. We shall therefore critically examine the elements proposed in Zhang’s main epistemological treatise Plural Epistemology , which represents the most complete, systematic and coherent treatment of his theory. (shrink)

A critique of responses to the problem posed to Christian philosophy by the fact of religious plurality by Alvin Plantinga, Peter van lnwagen, and George Mavrodes in the recent Festschrift dedicated to William Alston, and of Alston’s own response to the challenge of religious diversity to his epistemology of religion. His argument that religious experience is a generally reliable basis for belief-formation is by implication transformed by his response to this problem into the principle that Christianity constitutes the sole (...) exception to the general rule that religious experience is an unreliable basis for belief-formation, thus undermining his central thesis. Plantinga’s and van Inwagen’s defenses of the logical and moral permissability of Christian exclusivism fail to address the problem posed by the existence of other equally well-based religious belief-systems with equally valuable fruits in human life. Mavrodes’ discussion of polytheism, and his clarifying questions about religious pluralism, are also discussed. (shrink)

According to Paul Boghossian a core tenet of epistemic relativism is what he calls epistemic pluralism, according to which ‘there are many fundamentally different, genuinely alternative epistemic systems’, but ‘no facts by virtue of which one of these systems is more correct than any of the others’. Embracing the former claim is more or less uncontroversial–viz., a descriptive fact about epistemic diversity. The latter claim by contrast is very controversial. Interestingly, the Wittgenstenian ‘hinge’ epistemologist, in virtue of maintaining that rational (...) evaluation is essentially local, will be committed to the more controversial leg of the epistemic pluralist thesis, simply in virtue of countenancing the descriptive leg. This paper does three central things. First, it is shown that this ‘relativistic’ reading of Wittgenstein’s epistemology is plausible only if the locality of rational evaluation commits the Wittgenstenian to a further epistemic incommensurability thesis. Next, Duncan Pritchard’s novel attempt to save the hinge epistemologist from a commitment to epistemic incommensurability is canvassed and critiqued. Finally, it is suggested how, regardless of whether Pritchard’s strategy is successful, there might be another very different way—drawing from recent work by John MacFarlane —for the hinge epistemologist to embrace epistemic pluralism while steering clear of epistemic relativism, understood in a very specific way. (shrink)

Based on onto–epistemological pluralism and social practices this work maintains that the proclamation of cultural neutrality originating in the idea of equality without any distinction of color, sex, language, religion or political opinion, really favors white racism and cultural imperialism of the liberal way of life.This article argues that the process of reasoning which justifies human rights is distorted by particular interests, such as the colonization of American territory in the case of the Declaration of the Good People of Virginia (...) in 1776. As no–one questioned the reasons upon which the false belief that some human beings were classified as inferior or superior according to their physical features, it was reiterated as if it were a truth and, consequently acted upon, thereby fixing this belief in stereotypes. In this article I argue that the present Declaration of Human Rights is the result of continuing inherited presuppositions from the 18th Century. These have not been questioned and have constituted the world in which we live as a racist world in which the liberal tradition has consolidated its political power. (shrink)

Based on onto–epistemological pluralism and social practices this work maintains that the proclamation of cultural neutrality originating in the idea of equality without any distinction of color, sex, language, religion or political opinion, really favors white racism and cultural imperialism of the liberal way of life. This article argues that the process of reasoning which justifies human rights is distorted by particular interests, such as the colonization of American territory in the case of the Declaration of the Good People of (...) Virginia in 1776. As no–one questioned the reasons upon which the false belief that some human beings were classified as inferior or superior according to their physical features, it was reiterated as if it were a truth and, consequently acted upon, thereby fixing this belief in stereotypes. In this article I argue that the present Declaration of Human Rights is the result of continuing inherited presuppositions from the 18th Century. These have not been questioned and have constituted the world in which we live as a racist world in which the liberal tradition has consolidated its political power. (shrink)

The path of religious pluralism starts with the fact that our world contains a number of religious faiths having different ideas of the nature of divinity as the main and fundamental principle of religions and therefore, different and various dogmas, rites, and rituals.Despite the claim that the idea of religious pluralism is a product of modern philosophical schools, specifically new epistemological principles, I have attempted to demonstrate that what I have called "pluralistic religion," as a part of a necessary and (...) substantial distinction that has to be drawn between this hypothesis and John Hick's classic theory of "religious pluralism," is strongly rooted in the principle of "ultimate truth and uniqueness of .. (shrink)

The world religions make conflicting claims about the nature of ultimate reality, and they all appeal to experience for justification of their claims. The experiential justifications for conflicting religious beliefs thus seem to be mutually destructive. One response to this situation, advocated by John Hick, is to reinterpret traditional religious claims in ways that eliminate the conflicts; another, favored by William P. Alston, is to defend the rationality of continuing, despite the conflicts, to engage in the doxastic practice of one’s (...) own religion. I begin this paper with a summary of the criticism of Alston’s defense that I have spelled out in greater detail elsewhere. After arguing that Alston’s conclusions require significant modification, I go on to defend the modified Alstonian conclusions against objections recently raised by Hick. I conclude by suggesting a view that seems to me to combine the best features of Alston’s and Hick’s approaches to religious pluralism. (shrink)

In this paper the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance is discussed and it is argued why it is of relevance for epistemic logic and social psychology. Roughly put, pluralistic ignorance is the case when a group of interacting agents all experience a discrepancy between their private opinions and the perceived opinions of the others. After introducing the phenomenon, numerous features of pluralistic ignorance that are of interest for epistemic logic and social epistemology, are discussed. This discussion serves two purposes: It (...) recaps the existing research on pluralistic ignorance within epistemic logic and social epistemology, while at the same time stating open problems for social epistemology and epistemic logic that pertains to the study of pluralistic ignorance. Finally, it is argued that the features of pluralistic ignorance of interest to epistemic logic and social epistemology relate to general features of information dynamics in situations of social interaction. (shrink)

جان هیک با وام گرفتن از مفهوم «دیدن به عنوان...» ویتگنشتاین و تعمیم آن به کل تجربه‌های ادراکی و نیز وام‌گیری از تمایز کانتی میان نومن و فنومن میان «حقیقت فی نفسه» و «حقیقت عند المدرک» تمایز می‌نهد . حقیقت فی نفسه همان خداوند در عالم واقع است و حقیقت عند المدرک همان تصوری است که در هر دین از خداوند ارائه شده است. دوتمایز ذکر شده مهم‌ترین مبنای معرفت شناختی نظریه کثرت گرایانه هیک را در باب ادیان تشکیل می‌دهند. (...) به نظر می‌رسد نظریه ادراک و نظریه توجیه در نظریه کثرت گرایانه هیک در باب ادیان از نوعی ابهام برخوردار هستند. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Foucaultian genealogy offers a critical approach to practices of remembering and forgetting which is crucial for resisting oppression and dominant ideologies. For this argument I focus on the concepts of counter-history and counter-memory that Foucault developed in the 1970’s. In the first section I analyze how the Foucaultian approach puts practices of remembering and forgetting in the context of power relations, focusing not only on what is remembered and forgotten, but how , by whom, (...) and with what effects. I highlight the critical possibilities for resistance that this approach opens up, and I illustrate them with Ladelle McWhorter’s genealogy of racism in Anglo-America. In the second section I put the Foucaultian approach in conversation with contemporary work in pragmatism and critical theory on the social epistemology of memory. In the third and final section, I explore some of the implications of the Foucaultian notion of resistance and what I term guerrilla pluralism for contemporary epistemological discussions of ignorance in standpoint theory and race theory. (shrink)

Perceptual systems that integrate different principles and/or a different architecture at large may produce substantially varied outputs from the same scene. I call this thesis perceptual pluralism and I bring related empirical evidence to bear on the epistemological debate on perception. I argue that perceptual pluralism, coupled with the position that at least some different kinds of perception are equally successful in guiding interaction with the world, serve to undermine the thesis that the typical human perception is uniquely veridical. Last, (...) I consider perspectival realism as the epistemological stance that is prospectively best suited to this state of affairs, and provide a method for evaluating whether this prospect holds up. (shrink)

Economics plays a significant role in decision-making in contemporary western societies, but its role is increasingly questioned. A recurring topic among the challenges raised by critics is that economics as a discipline lacks sufficient pluralism. That is, it fails to enable, encourage, and respect the use of different ontologies, methodologies, theories, and/or schools of thought to study economic reality. Has this been a productive critique? Does talk about pluralism help identify genuine problems in the discipline? Pluralism in economics could draw (...) support from the current consensus in philosophy that pluralism in science is a good thing. I argue, however, that the claim that economic research is insufficiently pluralist is unlikely to convince economists who believe economics is already pluralist enough and that it does not offer unambiguous recommendations for change. This is because there are too many legitimate ways to interpret how pluralism maps to practice. There are numerous variables that pluralist ideals might focus on—the things that they seek multiple rather than one of—and different interpretations of how many of those variables economics has in practice. Yet, as I go on to argue, this does not mean that talk of pluralism is entirely beside the point, since the reasons pluralists offer for their ideals do help to identify genuine problems in economics. The social epistemic strategies that arguments for pluralism recommend point us to three concrete issues in the way economic research is organised: gender imbalances, a steep internal hierarchy, and a dismissive attitude to outsiders. I show that economic research could be more progressive, representative of the interests of those in society, accepted, and legitimate and less likely to fall into bias if the discipline alleviated its gender imbalances, if it were less hierarchical, and if it had a healthier relationship with outsiders. -/- In chapter 1, I outline the debate about pluralism in economics and explain how my thesis utilises a novel approach to social epistemology to offer a way out of the impasse in which that the debate presently resides. In chapter 2, I explain the different philosophical arguments for pluralism in science and categorise them using the variables they focus on and the reasons they give for pluralism. In chapter 3, I argue that interpreting pluralism as a particular arrangement of variables for economics to attain does not lead to unambiguous recommendations for change because it leaves too much open. Yet, I go on to argue, in chapter 4, that drawing on the reasons for pluralism can provide a set of heuristics for piecemeal evaluations of the social epistemic practices in economics. In chapters 5, 6, and 7, I apply these heuristics to economics. I provide evidence that [a] women are outnumbered in economics and face an adverse environment in the discipline, that [b] economics is steeply hierarchical, and that [c] economists form an in-group that assumes superiority and frequently dismisses outside voices. I argue that these three features of economic research block avenues for productive forms of feedback (mechanisms that help to challenge, justify, and refine scientific knowledge), block the interests of certain perspectives being heard, and block public scrutiny of the decisions made by economists. (shrink)

A number of those actively involved in the physical sciences anticipate the creation of a unified approach to all human knowledge based on reductionism in physics and Platonism in mathematics. We argue that it is implausible that this goal will ever be achieved, and argue instead for a pluralistic approach to human understanding, in which mathematically expressed laws of nature are merely one way among several of describing a world that is too complex for our minds to be able to (...) grasp in its entirety. (shrink)

Meynell’s contention is that feminists should attend to pictures in science as distinctive bearers of epistemic content that cannot be reduced to propositions. Remarks on the practice and function of medical illustration—specifically, images Nancy Tuana used in her discussion of the construction of ignorance of women’s sexual function (2004)—show pictures to be complex and powerful epistemic devices. Their affinity with perennial feminist concerns, the relation between epistemic subject and object, and the nature of social knowledge, are of particular interest.

The paper works towards an account of explanatory integration in biology, using as a case study explanations of the evolutionary origin of novelties-a problem requiring the integration of several biological fields and approaches. In contrast to the idea that fields studying lower level phenomena are always more fundamental in explanations, I argue that the particular combination of disciplines and theoretical approaches needed to address a complex biological problem and which among them is explanatorily more fundamental varies with the problem pursued. (...) Solving a complex problem need not require theoretical unification or the stable synthesis of different biological fields, as items of knowledge from traditional disciplines can be related solely for the purposes of a specific problem. Apart from the development of genuine interfield theories, successful integration can be effected by smaller epistemic units (concepts, methods, explanations) being linked. Unification or integration is not an aim in itself, but needed for the aim of solving a particular scientific problem, where the problem's nature determines the kind of intellectual integration required. (shrink)

Some biologists now argue in favour of a pluralistic approach to plant activities, understandable both from the classical perspective of physiological mechanisms and that of the biology of behaviour involving choices and decisions in relation to the environment. However, some do not hesitate to go further, such as plant “neurobiologists” or philosophers who today defend an intelligence, a mind or even a plant consciousness in a renewed perspective of these terms. To what extent can we then adhere to pluralism in (...) the study of plant behaviour? How does this pluralism in the study and explanation of plant behaviour fit into, or even build itself up, in a broader history of science? Is it a revolutionary way of rethinking plant behaviour in the twenty-first century or is it an epistemological extension of an older attitude? By proposing a synthesis of the question of plant behaviour by selected elements of the history of botany, the objective is to show that the current plant biology is not unified on the question of behaviour, but that its different tendencies are in fact part of a long botanical tradition with contrasting postures. Two axes that are in fact historically linked will serve as a common thread. 1. Are there several ways of understanding or conceiving plant behaviour within plant sciences and their epistemology? 2. Can the behaviour of a plant be considered in the same way as that of an animal? The working hypothesis defended in this article consists in showing that the current opposition between growth, development and reductionist physiology on the one hand and the biology of behaviour involving sensitivity and choices in plant activity on the other hand has been built up through the history of botany. (shrink)

Sometimes Always True aims to resolve, through a re-understanding of the nature of sense, three connected problems central to philosophical thought: that genuine pluralism must make room for outlooks that exclude pluralism, that philosophy ultimately explores sense as a whole and so must in some way step outside of sense, and that our experience of the deep questions of life therefore similarly involves suspensions of sense itself.

In a recently published paper, we argued that theories of cultural evolution can gain explanatory power by being more pluralistic. In his reply to it, Dennett agreed that more pluralism is needed. Our paper’s main point was to urge cultural evolutionists to get their hands dirty by describing the fine details of cultural products and by striving to offer detailed and, when explanatory, varied algorithms or mechanisms to account for them. While Dennett’s latest work on cultural evolution does marvelously well (...) on the first point, it has only whet our appetite on the second. Accordingly, the present paper aims to show what an evolutionary explanation of culture that takes the variety of cultural evolution mechanisms seriously would look like. We will focus on the cultural evolution of social epistemic mechanisms and we will propose that Darwinian algorithms should be complemented with a cultural analogue of the error reduction mechanism proposed to account for human cognition, with a particular emphasis on the necessity to build independencies between different sub-systems in charge of tracking states of the world. To illustrate our point, we will present how the evolution of the legal system as epistemic systems can be understood as a process of building increasingly better independencies and how various criticisms of the actual legal system calls for building even more of them. (shrink)

Building on Friedrich A. Hayek’s work in social philosophy, the paper gives an account of the central role of ignorance in institutional epistemology. The first part of the paper argues that if individuals involved in the search for knowledge are constitutionally ignorant and guided by norms, as Hayek saw them, they are more likely to attain knowledge if they follow different norms, including those that are redundant. The second part of the paper argues that the market as an institutional (...) arrangement, preferred by Hayek for its epistemic features, may lead to an epistemically detrimental reduction of agents following redundant norms. (shrink)

The purpose of this discussion is to analyze comparatively the influential argument for religious pluralism offered by John Hick and the argument for religious exclusivism (sectarianism) which can be generated by proponents of what has come to be labeled ‘Reformed Epistemology.’ I argue that while Hick and the Reformed exclusivist appear to be giving us incompatible responses to the same question about the true nature of ‘religious’ reality, they are actually responding to related, but distinct questions, each of which (...) must be considered by those desiring to give a religious explanation for the phenomenon of religious diversity. Moreover, I conclude that the insights of neither ought to be emphasized at the expense of the other. (shrink)

Epistemological pluralism is a recognized feature of nursing knowledge, which embraces both objective, scientific knowledge and situated knowledge that include subjective experience, values and affect, and is encountered in relationship. While there is a lively literature about describing and validating the need for pluralism in nursing's knowledge base, there has been less discussion of how to work with and across different kinds of knowing that are used in practice. In this paper, I describe Kasulis’ heuristic framework for understanding more clearly (...) what is entailed in different kinds of knowledge, and what some of their advantages and disadvantages might be. The framework was created by Thomas Kasulis, an American scholar of Japanese philosophy who identified broad orientations in Asian and Western philosophies that he characterized as ‘intimacy’ and ‘integrity’, respectively. Kasulis emphasized that his framework is a heuristic, a tool for making distinctions more clearly between different styles of thinking, that can manifest not only between cultural traditions from different parts of the world, but also between subcultures within one of the dominant orientations. He breaks his two orientations down by five distinguishing categories of objectivity, relating, affect, embodiment and transparency. In this paper, each category is described and discussed in relation to aspects of nursing knowledge. Looking at different epistemological viewpoints in this way helps to clarify their differences, and to explain the difficulty of reading across them, when they entail basic assumptions that are not commensurable with each other. Kasulis’ framework offers a new way of reading across viewpoints commonly seen in the epistemological pluralism of nursing. It is a tool that can sharpen critical discernment about what is at stake, what can be gained, and what might get missed while operating in either the intimacy or integrity orientation. (shrink)

From the epistemological posture that we present in this work we sustain the following thesis:-That as subjects we constitute the world we live in through one of the possible conceptual frameworks.-Our cognitive and social practices construct the world in a certain manner, which makes us responsible for the way this world is constituted.

D’Oro asks whether Collingwood’s metaphysics of absolute presuppositions leads to the belief-system relativism that is the target of Boghossian’s sustained criticism in his Fear of Knowledge. She argues that Collingwood’s metaphysics of absolute presuppositions aims to defend a form of epistemic pluralism which is not reducible to the kind of epistemic relativism Boghossian critiques. The decoupling of epistemic pluralism from epistemic relativism rests on a reading of absolute presuppositions as epistemic “hinges” which give rise to the characteristic complexes of questions (...) and answers operative in different contexts of inquiry. The task of the metaphysician, D’Oro argues, is to show that the questions asked in different contexts of inquiry are entailed by the absolute presuppositions constitutive of those forms of knowing. Since epistemic pluralism is not a form of epistemic relativism, it is not vulnerable to the stock objections raised against relativism. (shrink)

This book introduces an account of cognitive architecture, Cognitive Pluralism, on which the basic units of understanding are models of particular content domains. Having many mental models is a good adaptive strategy for cognition, but models can be incompatible with one another, leading to paradoxes and inconsistencies of belief, and it may not be possible to integrate the understanding supplied by multiple models into a comprehensive and self-consistent "super model". The book applies the theory to explaining intuitive reasoning and cognitive (...) illusions and explores implications for epistemology, semantics, and disunity of science. (shrink)

In this paper I develop and support a feminist virtue epistemology and bring it into conversation with feminist contextual empiricism and feminist standpoint theory. The virtue theory I develop is centered on the virtue of epistemic trustworthiness, which foregrounds the social/political character of knowledge practices and products, and the differences between epistemic agencies that perpetuate, on the one hand, and displace, on the other hand, normative patterns of unjust epistemic discrimination. I argue that my view answers important questions regarding (...) epistemic agency which both contextual empiricism and standpoint theory leave open, but need to have answered. Feminist virtue epistemology thus emerges as providing an integrative framework for pluralism in feminist epistemology that illuminated connections among theories through engagement with the lived experiences, aspirations, and epistemic work of feminist epistemic agents. (shrink)

A number of those that have advocated for theoretical pluralism in epistemology suggest that naturalistic arguments from cognitive science can support their case. Yet these theorists have traditionally faced two pressing needs. First, they have needed a cognitive science adequate to the task. Second, they have needed a bridge between whatever scientific account of cognition they favor and the normative claims of a pluralistic epistemology. Both of these challenges are addressed below in an argument for theoretical pluralism that (...) brings together two recent prototype-activation approaches to cognition. The paper dovetails Paul Churchland's neuro-computational approach with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's image schematic approach, and shows how they mutually support each other in an increasingly persuasive naturalistic case for theoretical pluralism in epistemology. (shrink)

The Evolutionary Synthesis is often seen as a unification process in evolutionary biology, one which provided this research area with a solid common theoretical foundation. As such, neo-Darwinism is believed to constitute from this time onward a single, coherent, and unified movement offering research guidelines for investigations. While this may be true if evolutionary biology is solely understood as centred around evolutionary mechanisms, an entirely different picture emerges once other aspects of the founding neo-Darwinists’ views are taken into consideration, aspects (...) potentially relevant to the elaboration of an evolutionary worldview: the tree of life, the ontological distinctions of the main cosmic entities , the inherent properties of self-organizing matter, evolutionary ethics, and so on. Profound tensions and inconsistencies are immediately revealed in the neo-Darwinian movement once this broader perspective is adopted. This pluralism is such that it is possible to identify at least three distinct and quasi-incommensurable epistemological/metaphysical frameworks as providing a proper foundation for neo-Darwinism. The analysis of the views of Theodosius Dobzhansky, Bernhard Rensch, and Ernst Mayr will illustrate this untenable pluralism, one which requires us to conceive of the neo-Darwinian research agenda as being conducted in more than one research programme or research tradition at the same time. (shrink)

Epistemic pluralists in the philosophy of science often argue that different epistemic perspectives in science are equally warranted. Sandra Mitchell – with her Integrative Pluralism (IP) – has notably advocated for this kind of epistemic pluralism. A problem arises for Mitchell however because she also wants to be an epistemological pluralist. She claims that, not only are different epistemic perspectives in science equally warranted in different contexts, but different understandings of these epistemic perspectives in science are also equally warranted (...) in different contexts. The problem is that Mitchell argues that her understanding of epistemic perspectives in science (IP) is the correct one, and it is dilemmic to then claim that there is more than one such understanding. As solution, I suggest that we abandon epistemological pluralism and instead follow Feyerabend in being opportunistic pluralists. We can adopt pluralism as a short-term strategy in the pursuit of a long-term unitary goal. This unitary goal is what philosophers of understanding call objectual understanding, the kind of understanding that Integrative Pluralism tacitly aspires to anyway. (shrink)

Grounding pluralism is the view that there are multiple kinds of grounding. In this essay, I motivate and defend an explanation-theoretic view of grounding pluralism. Specifically, I argue that there are two kinds of grounding: why-grounding—which tells us why things are the case—and how-grounding—which tells us how things are the case.

In what sense do groups have beliefs? This paper provides a novel answer to this question by combining pluralism and summativism about group belief. The resulting view is called pluralistic summativism. The paper starts by critically assessing the three main debates in the literature—the disputes between monism and pluralism, summativism and non-summativism, and believism and rejectionism—and draws a general methodological lesson for the summativism/non-summativism debate—namely, that intuitions about cases alone are not enough to adjudicate between views of group belief, and (...) that the debate would benefit from a reflective equilibrium approach. All of this serves as motivation for the novel pluralist and summative view, which has some advantages, for example, when it comes to moral evaluation. (shrink)

The goal of the present paper is to construct a formal explication of the pluralistic ignorance explanation of the bystander effect. The social dynamics leading to inaction is presented, decomposed, and modeled using dynamic epistemic logic augmented with ‘transition rules’ able to characterize agent behavior. Three agent types are defined: First Responders who intervene given belief of accident; City Dwellers, capturing ‘apathetic urban residents’ and Hesitators, who observe others when in doubt, basing subsequent decision on social proof. It is shown (...) how groups of the latter may end in a state of pluralistic ignorance leading to inaction. Sequential models for each agent type are specified, and their results compared to empirical studies. It is concluded that only the Hesitator model produces reasonable results. (shrink)

This chapter explores perspectivism in the American Pragmatist tradition. On the one hand, the thematization of perspectivism in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science can benefit from resources in the American Pragmatist philosophical tradition. On the other hand, the Pragmatists have interesting and innovative, pluralistic views that can be illuminated through the lens of perspectivism. I pursue this inquiry primarily through examining relevant sources from the Pragmatist tradition. I will illustrate productive engagements between pragmatism and perspectivism in three areas: (...) in the pragmatists’ fallibilistic theories of inquiry and truth, in their pluralistic metaphysics, and in their views on cultural pluralism. While there are some potential sticking points between pragmatism and perspectivism, particularly around the visual metaphor of perspective, these philosophical approaches nonetheless have much to learn from each other. Perspectivism is in danger of falling between the horns of pernicious relativism and a platitudinous view of the limits of human perception and cognition. The pragmatists accounts of truth and reality open the possibility of a more thoroughgoing perspectivism. I will follow this thread through Charles S. Peirce’s, William James’, and John Dewey’s theories of inquiry and truth, Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics, James’ radical pluralism, Dewey’s cultural naturalism, Richard Rorty’s anti-essentialism, Jane Addams’ standpoint epistemology, W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of race consciousness, Horace Kallen’s and Alain LeRoy Locke’s cultural pluralism, and Mary Parker Follett’s account of pluralistic integration. (shrink)

Advocates of political liberalism hold it as a superior alternative to perfectionism on the grounds that it avoids superfluous and/or controversial claims in favor of a maximally-inclusive approach undergirded by a "free-standing" justification for the ideology. These assertions prove difficult to defend: political interpretations of liberalism tend to be implicitly ethnocentric; they often rely upon a number of controversial, and even empirically falsified, assumptions about rationality--and in many ways prove more parochial than their perfectionist cousins. It is possible to reform (...) political liberalism to address these challenges, but generally at the expense of the supposed normative force and universality of the liberal project. However, this para-liberal approach is much better in keeping with contemporary findings in sociology, psychology and cognitive science--and can much more effectively accommodate the illiberal challenge. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Pluralistic Ignorance Modal Operator Epistemology Agents and Inquiry Methods Multimodal Systems Knowledge Transmissibility Knowledge Transmissibility and Public Announcement Knowledge Transmissibility and Pluralistic Ignorance References.

This paper addresses the following question: Can one and the same utterance token, in one unique speech situation, intentionally and conventionally perform a plurality of illocutionary acts? While some of the recent literature has considered such a possibility Perspectives on pragmatics and philosophy. Springer, Cham, pp 227–244, 2013; Johnson in Synthese 196:1151–1165, 2019), I build a case for it by drawing attention to common conversational complexities unrecognized in speech acts analysis. Traditional speech act theory treats communication as: a dyadic exchange (...) between a Speaker and a Hearer who trade illocutionary acts endowed with one and only one primary force. I first challenge assumption by discussing two contexts where plural illocutionary forces are performed in dyadic discussions: dilemmatic deliberations and strategic ambiguity. Further, I challenge assumption by analyzing poly-adic discussions, where a speaker can target various participants with different illocutionary acts performed via the same utterance. Together, these analyses defend illocutionary pluralism as a significant but overlooked fact about communication. I conclude by showing how some phenomena recently analyzed in speech act theory—back-door speech acts New work on speech acts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 144–164, 2018) and dog-whistles New work on speech acts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 360–383, 2018)—implicitly presuppose illocutionary pluralism without recognizing it. (shrink)