Le point de vue de Michael Polanyi sur la science peut aider à comprendre le processus et le « produit » de l'analyse du renseignement. Les arguments de Michael Polanyi concernant les activités des scientifiques sont transférables dans le domaine de l'analyse du renseignement, offrant une perspective nuancée pour percevoir les défis épistémologiques et les problèmes auxquels sont confrontés les analystes. Les concepts de « connaissance tacite » et de « connaissance personnelle » de Polanyi contribuent au développement d'une compréhension (...) plus épistémologiquement efficace de certains aspects du processus et du produit de l'analyse du renseignement. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.13346.56008. (shrink)

Feminist epistemology has often been understood as the study of feminine "ways of knowing." But feminist epistemology is better understood as the branch of naturalized, social epistemology that studies the various influences of norms and conceptions of gender and gendered interests and experiences on the production of knowledge. This understanding avoids dubious claims about feminine cognitive differences and enables feminist research in various disciplines to pose deep internal critiques of mainstream research.

In this paper, I argue that what counts as the proper function of a trait is a matter of the de facto perspective that the biological system, itself, possesses on what counts as proper functioning for that trait. Unlike non-perspectival accounts, internal perspectivalism does not succumb to generality problems. But unlike external perspectivalism, internal perspectivalism can provide a fully naturalistic, mind-independent grounding of proper function and natural norms. The attribution of perspectives to biological systems is intended to be neither metaphorical (...) nor anthropomorphic: I do not mean to imply that such systems thereby must possess agency, cognition, intentions, concepts, or mental or psychological states. Instead, such systems provide the grounding for norms of performance when they internally enforce their own standard of (i.e., their own perspective on) what constitutes proper functioning or malfunctioning. By operating with a fixed, determinate level of generality, such systems provide the basis for an account of proper function that is immune to generality problems. (shrink)

The ArugmentThis essay answers a single question: what was Robert Hooke, the Royal Society's curator of experiments, doing in his well-known 1665 work,Micrographia?Hooke was articulating a “universal cure of the mind” capable of bringing about a “reformation in Philosophy,” a change in philosophy's interpretive practices and organization. The work explicated the interpretive and political foundations for a community of optical instrument users coextensive with the struggling Royal Society. Standard observational practices would overcome the problem of using nonstandard instruments, while inherent (...) inrepresentation– the interpretive practice championed in the text – were important theological and political meanings. Hooke's kind of experimental philosophy undermined the claims made by “atheists” and “enthusiasts” – the enemies of the restored church and state – while also producing useful knowledge. Equally important, Hooke modeled the community described inMicrographiaupon the classicalres publica, but his community made important concessions to Restoration political realities, especially the growing role of commercial or transactional relationships. (shrink)

In search of our highest capacities, cognitive scientists aim to explain things like mathematics, language, and planning. But are these really our most sophisticated forms of knowing? In this paper, I point to a different pinnacle of cognition. Our most sophisticated human knowing, I think, lies in how we engage with each other, in our relating. Cognitive science and philosophy of mind have largely ignored the ways of knowing at play here. At the same time, the emphasis on discrete, rational (...) knowing to the detriment of engaged, human knowing pervades societal practices and institutions, often with harmful effects on people and their relations. There are many reasons why we need a new, engaged—or even engaging—epistemology of human knowing. The enactive theory of participatory sense-making takes steps towards this, but it needs deepening. Kym Maclaren’s idea of letting be invites such a deepening. Characterizing knowing as a relationship of letting be provides a nuanced way to deal with the tensions between the knower’s being and the being of the known, as they meet in the process of knowing-and-being-known. This meeting of knower and known is not easy to understand. However, there is a mode of relating in which we know it well, and that is: in loving relationships. I propose to look at human knowing through the lens of loving. We then see that both knowing and loving are existential, dialectic ways in which concrete and particular beings engage with each other. (shrink)

Underlying the recent focus on embodied and interactive aspects of social understanding are several intuitions about what roles the body, interaction processes, and interpersonal experience play. In this paper, we introduce a systematic, hands-on method for investigating the experience of interacting and its role in intersubjectivity. Special about this method is that it starts from the idea that researchers of social understanding are themselves one of the best tools for their own investigations. The method provides ways for researchers to calibrate (...) and to trust themselves as sophisticated instruments to help generate novel insights into human interactive experience. We present the basics of the method, and two empirical studies. The first is a video-study on autism, which shows greater refinement in the way people with autism embody their social interactions than previously thought. The second is a study of thinking in live interactions, which provides insight into the common feeling that too much thinking can hamper interaction, and into how this kind of interactional awkwardness might be unblocked. (shrink)

Our main aim is to discuss the topic of scientific controversies in the context of a recent issue that has been the centre of attention of many epistemologists though not of argumentation theorists or philosophers of science, namely the ethics of belief in face of rational disagreement. We think that the consideration of scientific examples may be of help in the epistemological debate on rational disagreement, making clear some of the deficiencies of the discussion as it has been produced until (...) now. Another central claim of our paper is that the common view according to which beliefs (and changes of beliefs) may exhibit and commonly exhibit a deontic status can be clarified in the light of Brandom’s approach to normative pragmatics and the pragmatic theories of argumentation that also have a normative character (here our example is van Eemeren’s pragma-dialectics). Our article highlights the similarities between both projects, similarities that to our knowledge were not noticed before. Finally, an important point of the article is that we need to take contextual elements into account in order to develop an adequate theory of disagreement. (shrink)

This article examines the UNESCO Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage. It accepts the general case made by UNESCO, but urges greater attention to the ‘real-world’ knowledge of ordinary people. The paper rejects taxonomies of knowledge based on metaphysical discussions of knowing. Instead, it argues for an approach to knowledge based on the social production of ‘knowledge acts’. It concludes by asserting that support for the diversity of social enactment of knowledge could have valuable outcomes in the form of new ways (...) of understanding new and emerging technologies. (shrink)

Any advanced theory of physics contains modules defined as essential components that are themselves theories with different domains of application. Different kinds of modules can be distinguished according to the way in which they fit in the symbolic and interpretive apparatus of a theory. The number and kind of the modules of a given theory vary as the theory evolves in time. The relative stability of modules and the variability of their insertion in other theories play a vital role in (...) the application, comparison, construction, and communication of theories. Modularity conveys some global unity to physics through the sharing of modules by diverse theories. This alternative to rigid hierarchies and holistic totalities permits a dynamical, plastic, and symbiotic approach to physical theory. (shrink)

This paper is a philosophical study of the nature of thinking based on the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Steiner. For Heidegger, the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers exemplified genuine thinking, appreciating the meaning of Being. But this kind of philosophy was soon replaced by the onto-theological approach, in which Being was reductively objectified, and the question of the meaning of Being was forgotten. Hence, according to Heidegger, we still have to learn to think. Commentators on Heidegger point to the similarities (...) between his approach to thinking and that of various mystical teachings, such as those of Meister Eckhart or Zen Buddhism. Another less well known philosopher who devoted himself to this question was Rudolf Steiner. Like Heidegger, Steiner claims that we do not know what it means to really think. Steiner was however more outspoken in insisting that only through a kind of meditative practice can we directly experience the nature of thinking. Present day materialistic explanations of thinking as caused by the brain stand in clear opposition to his spiritual conception of thinking. Drawing upon Heidegger and Steiner I argue against the materialistic understanding of thinking as jumping to unwarranted conclusions. The paper ends with describing some of the elements of Steiner Waldorf education which are intended to promote the development of living, creative thinking. (shrink)

Brummett and Salter propose a useful and timely taxonomy of clinical ethics expertise (2019). As the field becomes further “professionalized” this taxonomy is important, and the core of it is right. It needs some refinement around the edges, however. In their conclusion, Brummett and Salter rightly point out that there is a significant difference between the ethicist whose recommendations are procedure- and process-heavy, consensus-driven, and dialogical and the authoritarian ethicist whose recommendations flow from “private moral views” (Brummett and Salter, 2019). (...) This admission doesn’t go far enough. Brummett and Salter’s taxonomy fails to capture the notion that offering recommendations whose normative force is moral is different in kind from recommendations whose normative force is non-moral, such as those recommendations that are free of moral content or justified by convention. The difference is in kind, not scale. I argue further that clinical ethics expertise, if possible, consists at least in offering recommendations whose normative force is moral. These two claims imply that the taxonomy fails to cut clinical ethics expertise at the joints: the ethicist who offers justified non-moral normative recommendations is a different kind of ethicist from the one who offers justified moral normative recommendations, yet both are categorized as clinical ethics experts. I finish by offering a refinement of the taxonomy that more precisely categorizes clinical ethicists. (shrink)

This essay explores the dialectics of theory and practice in terms of argumentation theory. Adapting Jonsen and Toulmin's (1988) notion of a Theory-Practice spectrum, it conceives Theory and Practice as extreme ends of a continuum and discourses as falling at various points along the continuum. Every theoritical discourse has essential practical aspects, and every practical discourse has essential theoretical aspects. Practices are theorized to varying degrees but every practice is thorized to some degree. Reflective discourse, which is discourse about practice, (...) moves to and fro along the Theory-Practice continuum. Reflective discourse involves argumentation. Practical argumentation connects theory to practice; it appeals to general warrants, which may be simple or may tap into elaborate conceptual structures, in order to establish grounds for practical judgments. A practical discipline is a relatively coherent intellectual-professional enterprise that cultivates a field of social practice by engaging within itself and with practitioners in a reflective discourse. The argumentation of a practical discipline, like ordinary practical reflection, moves to and fro along the Theory-Practice continuum but in more methodical steps informed by systematic methodological reflection on the reflective process itself. (shrink)

How do we feel our body in emotion experience? In this paper I initially distinguish between foreground and background bodily feelings, and characterize them in some detail. Then I compare this distinction with the one between reflective and pre-reflective bodily self-awareness one finds in some recent philosophical phenomenological works, and conclude that both foreground and background bodily feelings can be understood as pre-reflective modes of bodily self-awareness that nevertheless differ in degree of self-presentation or self-intimation. Finally, I use the distinction (...) between foreground and background bodily feelings to characterize the experience of being absorbed in an activity, as opposed to accounts that imply that absorption involves bodily inconspicuousness. (shrink)

Is cybernetics good, bad, or indifferent? SherryTurkle enlists deconstructive theory to celebrate thecomputer age as the embodiment of difference. Nolonger just a theory, one can now live a virtual life. Within a differential but ontologically detachedfield of signifiers, one can construct and reconstructegos and environments from the bottom up andendlessly. Lucas Introna, in contrast, enlists theethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to condemn thesame computer age for increasing the distance betweenflesh and blood people. Mediating the face-to-facerelation between real people, allowing and (...) encouragingcommunication at a distance, information technologywould alienate individuals from the social immediacyproductive of moral obligations and responsibilities. In this paper I argue against both of thesepositions, and for similar reasons. Turkle''scelebration and Introna''s condemnation of informationtechnology both depend, so I will argue, on the samemistaken meta-interpretation of it. Like Introna,however, but to achieve a different end, I will enlistLevinas''s ethical philosophy to make this case. (shrink)

The phenomenon of the quantified self, which is especially addressed by sociology and medical humanities, is still quite disregarded by philosophy. Yet, the philosophical issues it raises are various and meaningful, from the realm of epistemology to the realm of ethics. Moreover, it may be read as a key symptom to investigate the complex technological era in which we live, starting from the meaning of contemporary technology itself from a philosophical perspective. I shall focus on one of the epistemological issues (...) raised by the phenomenon of the quantified self by arguing that it may be read in terms of epistemological anarchism, which also leads to other epistemological issues, such as a possibly detectable crisis of the notions of knowledge in general and science in particular as founded on the relationship between particularity and universality, as well as between reality and ideality. I shall select cases that are peculiarly representative of the founding epistemological stance I shall focus on. Yet, the reason why they deserve special attention is that they are also representative of an increasingly widespread attitude characterising not only the community of the quantified self but also, at least to some extent, anyone of us who may happen to use technologies to try to self-diagnose. (shrink)

Novel computational representations, such as simulation models of complex systems and video games for scientific discovery, are dramatically changing the way discoveries emerge in science and engineering. The cognitive roles played by such computational representations in discovery are not well understood. We present a theoretical analysis of the cognitive roles such representations play, based on an ethnographic study of the building of computational models in a systems biology laboratory. Specifically, we focus on a case of model-building by an engineer that (...) led to a remarkable discovery in basic bioscience. Accounting for such discoveries requires a distributed cognition analysis, as DC focuses on the roles played by external representations in cognitive processes. However, DC analyses by and large have not examined scientific discovery, and they mostly focus on memory offloading, particularly how the use of existing external representations changes the nature of cognitive tasks. In contrast, we study discovery processes and argue that discoveries emerge from the processes of building the computational representation. The building process integrates manipulations in imagination and in the representation, creating a coupled cognitive system of model and modeler, where the model is incorporated into the modeler's imagination. This account extends DC significantly, and we present some of the theoretical and application implications of this extended account. (shrink)

I develop a concept of observability that pertains to qualities rather than objects: a quality is observable if it can be registered by human sensation (possibly with the aid of instruments) without involving optional interpretations. This concept supports a better description of observations in science and everyday life than the object-based observability concepts presupposing causal information-transfer from the object to the observer. It also allows a rehabilitation of the traditional empiricist distinction between observations and their interpretations, but without a presumption (...) that observations are infallible. Using this concept of observability, I also propose a re-formulation of constructive empiricism that is easier to defend against realist attacks, while open to reasonable realist intuitions. (shrink)

: The distinction between science and philosophy plays a central role in methodological, programmatic and institutional debates. Discussions of disciplinary identities typically focus on boundaries or else on genealogies, yielding models of demarcation and models of dynamics. Considerations of a discipline's self-image, often based on history, often plays an important role in the values, projects and practices of its members. Recent focus on the dynamics of scientific change supplements Kuhnian neat model with a role for philosophy and yields a model (...) of the evolution of philosophy of science. This view illuminates important aspects of science and itself contributes to philosophy of science. This interactive model is general yet based on exclusive attention to physics. In this paper and two sequels, I focus on the human sciences and argue that their role in the history of philosophy of science is just as important and it also involves a close involvement of the history of philosophy. The focus is on Gestalt psychology and it points to some lessons for philosophy of science. But, unlike the discussion of natural sciences, the discussion here brings out more complication than explication, and skews certain kinds of generalizations. (shrink)

I will first discuss how social interactions organize, coordinate, and specialize as “artifacts,” tools; how these tools are not only for coordination but for achieving something, for some outcome (goal/function), for a collective work. In particular, I will argue that these artifacts specify (predict and prescribe) the mental contents of the participants, both in terms of beliefs and acceptances and in terms of motives and plans. We have to revise the behavioristic view of “scripts” and “roles”; when we play a (...) role we wear a “mind.” No collective action would be possible without shared and/or ascribed mental contents. This is also very crucial for a central form of automatic mind-reading (mind ascription). Second, I will argue that often what really matters is the ascribed/prescribed, worn, mind not the real, private one. We have to play (like in the symbolic play) “as if” we had those mental contents. This social convention and mutual assumption makes the interaction work. The ascribed beliefs and goals are not necessarily explicitly there; they might be just implicit as inactive (we act just by routine and automatically) or implicit as potential. The coordination and social action works thanks to these “as if” (ascribed and pretended) minds, thanks to those conventional constructs. Our social minds for social interactions are coordination artifacts and social institutions. (shrink)

This article draws on the conclusion of the Commission on the Humanities in The Humanities in American Life that the aim of a liberal arts education is to foster critical reasoning through the use of language or discourse. This paper maintains that the critical method is in itself insufficient to achieve its purpose. Its failure is in its exclusion of feeling and of silence from the thinking process. Hence, the ultimate object of my analysis is to correct and to complement (...) the critical method with the aesthetic method of teaching the humanities. Central to the aesthetic method is art as a means to cultivate contemplative and creative skills. The essay brings out and examines the value of art as voices of silence in Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Dionysius, Bonaventure, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and Paul Gauguin, and pays particular attention to the diaries of Eugène Delacroix. In the course of doing so, I shall be trying to make clear that art teaches us how to listen and how to encounter ourselves totally and completely. It goes on to suggest several pedagogical principles or consequences that flow from this aesthetic pedagogy. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the emerging position in metaphysics that artifact functions characterize real kinds of artifacts. We analyze how it can circumvent an objection by David Wiggins (Sameness and substance renewed, 2001, 87) and then argue that this position, in comparison to expert judgments, amounts to an interesting fine-grained metaphysics: taking artifact functions as (part of the) essences of artifacts leads to distinctions between principles of activity of artifacts that experts in technology have not yet made. We show, (...) moreover, that our argument holds not only in the artifactual realm but also in biology: taking biological functions as (part of the) essences of organs leads to distinctions between principles of activity of organs that biological experts have not yet made. We run our argument on the basis of analyses of artifact and biological functions as developed in philosophy of technology and of biology, thus importing results obtained outside of metaphysics into the debate on ontological realism. In return, our argument shows that a position in metaphysics provides experts reason for trying to detect differences between principles of activities of artifacts and organs that have not been detected so far. (shrink)

This paper proceeds through four stages. First, it provides an account of the origins and evolution of the concept of educational theory. Second, it uses this historical narrative to show how what we now call 'educational theory' is deeply rooted in the foundationalist discourse of late nineteenth and early twentieth century modernity. Third, it outlines and defends a postfoundationalist critique of the foundationalist epistemological assumptions on which our understanding of educational theory has been erected. Finally, it argues that the only (...) conclusion to draw from this postfoundationalist critique is that educational theory has run its course and should now be brought to a dignified end. (shrink)

Wilfred Carr; Can Educational Research be Scientific?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 17, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 35–43, https://doi.org/10.1111.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2012v16n1p53 Ratifying Haeckel and contradicting Kant’s negative prophesy, in this paper I try to show that Darwin was, really, the Newton of the blade of grass . Darwin showed how the configurations according to goals of the living beings, could be explained from a naturalistic point of view, without having to postulate the existence of an intentional agent that had arranged or prearranged then. This achievement, nevertheless, was obtained by a way that Kant could not foresee and that Haeckel could (...) not understand: Darwin came there showing that there was more natural science than that Newton, Kant and Haeckel could conceive. (shrink)

This essay examines the relation of Darwin's orchids book to a central persuasive flaw in theOrigin: Its inability to give variation sufficient “presence” to break the hold of “design” in the mind of the reader. Darwin characterized the orchids book as “a flank movement on the enemy”; this essay identifies the “enemy” as Paley's natural theology and the “flank” as thetopoi, maxims, and habits of perception that led Darwin's colleagues and contemporaries to see design in nature. Moreover, this essay examines (...) three aspects of rhetorical timing pertinent toOrchids - time askairos, time as adequate duration, and time as transformation - and then relates those features to Robert Cox's Heideggerian logic of repetition, disavowal, and transcendence. The essay concludes with implications of the tactical and temporal aspects of Darwin's reasoning for understanding both the logic of science and of Darwin as a rhetorical artist. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore the epistemological foundations of narrative research in education. In particular, I seek to explain how one can obtain knowledge, given its origin in teachers' subjective experiences. The problem with rhetorical and aesthetic criteria that narrative researchers use to warrant their knowledge claims is not that they don't meet a correspondence criterion of truth as post-positivists contend, but rather that they fail to connect teachers' ethical views with their practice. Since narrative research is (...) aimed at understanding teachers' actions and not at seeking some kind of mechanism in teachers' behaviour, the link between past experiences and present teaching practice is not causal but teleological. I suggest that although the knowledge claims of narrative researchers may not be justified (because they don't meet the criteria of truth as correspondence theory), we might nonetheless be intellectually entitled to accept them. Entitlement is an epistemic right or warrant that constitutes knowledge as justification, but uses different reasons—teleological not causal explanations. I offer three criteria to establish entitlement to accept narrative researchers' findings: (1) the meeting of rhetorical standards such as plausibility, adequacy, and persuasion; (2) the inclusion of teachers' stories about their pedagogical practice; (3) the meeting of ethical criteria that connects a teacher's actions to an articulate and defensible end-in-view or vision of the good. (shrink)

Karl Jaspers argued that academics must be prepared to accept, perhaps even to welcome, the fact that most students 'will learn next to nothing' from a university education. In this paper I shall argue that, while Jaspers' model is unpersuasive as an ideal and inaccurate as a description, there is an uncomfortable truth lurking behind his forthright but gloomy conclusion; viz., that university teaching pays little direct attention to the needs of the student in the wider world (i.e. to the (...) needs of the student qua employee or qua citizen or even qua rounded human being) and pays even less attention, or perhaps none at all, to the needs and expectations of third parties such as employers. In terms of the political context universities now find themselves in, this is an uncomfortable and embarrassing truth for faculty to admit, for it appears to epitomise a self-regarding and inward looking academy. Yet, despite this, perhaps it is a truth that academics should be prepared to accept, even to welcome. At least, in starting any serious discussion on the nature of a university education, it should be a truth we are prepared to admit. (shrink)

It has been suggested that our experiences of embodiment in general appear to constitute an experiential ground for dualist philosophy and that this is particularly so with experiences of dissociation, in which one feels estranged from one’s body. Thus, Drew Leder argues that these play “a crucial role in encouraging and supporting Cartesian dualism” as they “seem to support the doctrine of an immaterial mind trapped inside an alien body”. In this paper I argue that as dualism does not capture (...) the character of such experiences there is not even an apparent separation of self and body revealed here and that one’s body is experienced as uncanny rather than alien. The general relationship between our philosophical theorizing and the phenomenology of lived experience is also considered. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that recent developments in higher education presuppose a conceptual framework that fails plausibly to account for indispensable aspects of educational experience—in particular that a university education is fundamentally a project of personal transformation within a particular social order. It fails, I suggest, primarily because it consists of mutually supporting but erroneous conceptualisations of knowledge and the human subject. In pursuit of transparency and codification we have seemingly forgotten education's existential dimension: that education is closely tied (...) to questions of personal identity and the formation of character and that this is an embodied project. (shrink)