Events
Workshop 2
The social dimension of knowledge
3 & 4 September 2024
Studio 2, Advanced Research Centre, University of Glasgow
The second workshop will focus on issues that emerge with the social dimension of knowledge acquisition and rational belief-management. They include: what is the right response to disagreement with a peer, the emergence of fake news, and the conditions under which we are warranted in accepting the testimony of others.
Speakers
Epistemologists:
- Kate Nolfi, University of Vermont
- Sven Bernecker, University of Cologne
- Sophie Keeling, UNED Madrid
- Jack Lyons, University of Glasgow
Empirical Researchers:
- Kristina Hultgren, Open University
- Constance Smith, University of Manchester
- Bodo Winter, University of Birmingham
- Viktoria Spaiser, University of Leeds
Abstracts
Sophie Keeling
Resistant reasons
Much research has centred around beliefs and actions that conflict with what are in fact good reasons. Here the archetypal case would be in in which, say, I believe that I am a kind person in spite of obvious evidence to the contrary. But we can also identify a related and under-explored phenomenon whereby what seems resistant is that one responds in some way to a particular reason or group of reasons (e.g., when I always listen to one unreliable friend whatever they say). In this talk, I will introduce the concept of resistant reasons and its applications in both philosophy of psychology and social philosophy.
Kristina Hultgren
The rise of English in non-Anglophone universities: Challenges and opportunities of transdisciplinary approaches
In this presentation I explore the challenges and opportunities of working across disciplinary and epistemological boundaries on my UKRI-funded Future Leaders Fellowship. The fellowship explores the rapid ascendance of English as an academic language in non-Anglophone European universities from a transdisciplinary perspective. Whilst the global spread of English across the world often causes debate and raises concerns about educational disadvantage, epistemic homogenization and geopolitical inequality, the fact that it has mainly been studied by linguists has limited the potential to truly understand how English is intrinsically embedded in historical, political and economic processes of colonialism and capitalism. To understand this requires transdisciplinary approaches. In my presentation, I explore how borrowing and adapting frameworks, concepts and tools from political science into linguistics will shape not only the questions we ask but also the answers we find, in this case offering new understandings of the rise of English and its underlying processes. I consider some of the challenges of working across disciplinary and epistemological boundaries, including the often-tacit assumptions of how knowledge is constructed and what counts as ‘evidence’ in different disciplines.
Jack Lyons
Language learning and the epistemology of testimony in children
Anti-reductionist theories in the epistemology of testimony claim that testimony (believing on someone else’s say-so) is a basic source of justification, not reducible to perception, induction, and the rest. One prominent argument for this is that young children have justified testimonial beliefs, even though they’re not sophisticated enough to have the kind of inductive evidence needed for a reductionist epistemology. I’ll claim that this argument only works on the assumption of a heterodox and empirically implausible view about the nature of language acquisition. On the more plausible views, anyone able even to understand testimony is already inductively sophisticated enough for a reductionist epistemology.
Viktoria Spaiser
Empirical Research on Social Change in Response to Climate Change
In my research I work on understanding empirically how rapid social change in response to the climate crisis can happen and what prevents social change. In this talk I will given an overview of my work, including empirical research on how climate protest movements are triggering normative change and how normative change can lead to social change, how moral norms can lead to behavioural changes, including political behaviour and how socio-psychological mechanisms can lead to dysfunctional responses to the climate change threat, preventing social change. I will also briefly talk about my work on the Global Tipping Points Report and the notion of negative and positive social tipping points. All this empirical research is highly normative. Which beliefs are rational or irrational when facing climate change? Which social norms are functional or dysfunctional when facing climate change? What role does morality play in finding rational responses to the climate change threat? What social change is rational in terms of serving the collective good? Is there an agreed collective good? The talk will raise these and other questions to invite feedback and discussion across disciplines.
Kate Nolfi
Exploring an Action-Oriented Approach to Understanding the Nature of Knowledge
Knowledge seems to be as good as it gets, epistemically speaking, at least when it comes evaluating individual doxastic states, considered in isolation. Indeed, it seems that a doxastic state is as epistemically praiseworthy as it can possibly be (at least when considered in isolation) if and only if it constitutes knowledge. My goal here is to begin exploring a somewhat unorthodox and distinctively action-oriented approach to understanding the nature of knowledge, one that draws inspiration from certain elements of the increasingly influential 4E paradigm in cognitive science. Put somewhat flatfootedly, the core idea animating an action-oriented approach is just that doxastic states are most illuminatingly understood functionally, as tools of a certain sort for achieving situationally-appropriate action. Accordingly, species of epistemic evaluation are properly understood in terms of and by reference to the demands of the distinctive function that doxastic states paradigmatically perform within mental economies like ours in the service of situationally-appropriate action. For a doxastic state to be as good as it gets, epistemically speaking, is just for that doxastic state to be the best possible tool for performing this action-oriented function. A doxastic state constitutes knowledge in virtue of being as praiseworthy as it could be qua the distinctive sort of action-subservingtool that it is. On the action-oriented approach, developing an account of the nature of knowledge is, in part, an empirical project: empirical inquiry both can and should inform our understanding of the distinctive function that doxastic states paradigmatically perform within mental economies like ours in the service of situationally-appropriate action. I will explore some of the ways in which certain questions about this distinctive action-subserving function inform the ultimate shape and character of an action-oriented account of the nature of knowledge. In so doing, I begin to sketch an agenda for the empirical investigation that developing an action-oriented account of the nature of knowledge will need to involve.
Constance Smith
Knowing failure after the Grenfell Tower fire
Drawing on the work of methodological theorist Celia Lury, this paper explores the Grenfell fire inquiry as a site of knowledge production; a particular kind of ‘problem space’. Grounded in anthropological theory and ethnographic research with affected communities in North Kensington, it explores how the inquiry did not only examine what failed any why in relation to the Grenfell fire, but how it established the parameters of what counted as acceptable evidence through which failure could be apprehended. These parameters were often contested by local communities: while the official inquiry sought to frame the fire as a discrete event, for residents the fire is inextricable from longer histories of housing, discrimination and gentrification. Seven years on, the fire still reverberates, its afterlife constellating with new narratives and politics that refract failure differently. In this paper, I explore how failure is never pre-known; its shape must be made to appear. As such, failure is continually interrogated and recomposed both as an object of knowledge and as an instrument for its formation.
Sven Bernecker
Epistemic Autonomy and Dependence in the Medical Context
Given the epistemic inequality between medical staff and patients, it is often rational for patients to simply defer to medical authorities. At the same time, patients have the ultimate decision-making responsibility for their own treatment. How are patients supposed to be able to make informed and autonomous choices about their treatment if they lack (adequate) understanding of the relevant medical details? I propose a strategy for reconciling epistemic autonomy with epistemic dependence.
Bodo Winter
Statistical rituals and the generalizability crisis
The 20th century saw a major shift in the way science was conducted, with a dedicated move towards the adoption of statistical methods. The particular type of statistical methodology that has emerged as dominant over the course of the 20th century is the deeply ritualized tradition of ‘null hypothesis significance testing,’ which despite incessant calls for replacement continues to be the status quo in almost all fields, from psychology over linguistics to many of the ‘hard’ sciences. Many have pointed out that the incentive system surrounding significance tests — seeking significant results — is one factor that has brought us into the replication crisis (many findings previously held to be true failed to replicate). In this talk, I will argue that significance tests have also been instrumental in luring us into what Yarkoni (2020) has called the “generalizability crisis”: many findings fail to generalize because they do not adequately model important sources of variation in the data. I will argue that Bayesian approaches to statistical analysis provide substantial benefits for counteracting the generalizability crisis, and furthermore provide a path out of deeply ritualized statistical traditions.
Schedule
To facilitate in-person attendance at our events, we offer financial assistance for travel, childcare, etc., to people who might need it. For more information, please see the Equality, Diversity, & Inclusion page.
Workshop 1
Acquiring and losing knowledge
23 & 24 April
Cottrell Building C.3A142, University of Stirling
The first workshop will focus on the nature of knowledge, its difference from mere opinion, how it can be acquired and lost, its relation with the notions of evidence, truth and reliability of information sources.
Speakers
Epistemologists:
- Peter Graham, University of California Riverside
- Claire Field, University of Zurich
- Ema Sullivan-Bissett, University of Birmingham
- Jesper Kallestrup, University of Aberdeen
Empirical Researchers:
- Joseph Lindley, Lancaster University (Design Research)
- Luisa Enria, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (Anthropology)
- Wataru Uegaki, University of Edinburgh (Linguistics)
- Anastasia Shesterinina, University of York (Comparative Politics)
Abstracts
University of Zurich
The Value of Level-Incoherence for Avoiding Knowledge Loss
Level-coherence is a particular kind of harmony between our beliefs about what we ought to do and believe, and what we actually do and believe. Level-coherence has traditionally been thought irrational. Here, I argue that this is a mistake. I show how in a specific set of epistemic environments – those in which it is particularly easy to acquire justified false beliefs about normative requirements of epistemic rationality – level-incoherence is the rationally dominant strategy, primarily because of the role it plays in helping us avoid knowledge loss. I argue that successfully accommodating the epistemic value of level-incoherence in these environments means avoiding thinking of level-coherence as required of rationality. I suggest that instead, we should think of the apparent tension involved in level-incoherence as a defeasible reason to undertake further inquiry.
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Indigenous Knowledge in Epidemic Response: Between Integration and Incommensurability
Recent health emergencies, from the 2014-16 West African Ebola outbreak to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, have highlighted the limitations of purely biomedical responses that do not take into account the knowledge and experiences of communities affected by epidemics. This has resulted in increased efforts to develop ‘integrated’ approaches to epidemic response—which include multidisciplinary teams and efforts to directly engage communities in epidemic responseIn this paper, I focus on the challenges that emerge when, during these integrative efforts, different notions of what constitutes ‘evidence’ confront each other in seemingly irresolvable ways. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Sierra Leone, I explore this question through the case of traditional healers and efforts to bring them into epidemic response activities. I firstly trace how healing knowledge is acquired and transmitted, teasing out what forms of evidence are generated as well as how they are internally and externally contested. I then consider how integrative efforts have led to erasure or loss of knowledge through assimilation, but also how everyday encounters in the field show much more complex negotiations. The paper finally raises key questions on the possibilities and limits of integration and the implications of considering incommensurability between ways of knowing.
University of Aberdeen
Digitally Extended Knowledge
The hypothesis of extended cognition says that mental processes or states extend to include extra-organismic parts of the external world, provided certain conditions on cognitive integration are met. Moreover, if knowledge is assumed to be a mental state, knowledge is by a similar line of reasoning, equally extended. However, extended knowledge presents additional challenges to do with cognitive bloat, given that knowledge is widely regarded as a distinctive cognitive achievement, for which special credit is due. This paper explores the idea that Dropbox, Google, or Wikipedia, rather than external resources, may serve to extend knowledge beyond our bodily boundaries, and if so whether this new hypothesis of digitally extended knowledge leads to any untoward expansion of knowledge.
University of York
Ethnographic surprises as a source of innovation in collective action research
This chapter draws on eight months of immersive field research with Abkhaz participants and non-participants in the Georgian-Abkhaz war of 1992-1993 to explore the value of ethnographic surprises as a source of innovation in the processual analysis of collective action. It situates the contribution in the interpretive tradition where unanticipated insights that generate changes in research designs are recognized as a major part of the research process and develops a particular notion of ethnographic surprises as unexpected narratives and observations that emerge systematically through fieldwork but are unaccounted for by existing theories. Viewed in this way, ethnographic surprises shaped both my research question and theoretical framework and enabled my core contributions to the study of mobilization in civil war—challenging the dominant assumption of potential participants’ knowledge of risk involved in mobilization and placing intense uncertainty that ordinary people experience when violence breaks out in their communities at the centre of analysis. This analysis has implications for our understanding of the broader process of mobilization and specific mechanisms that help individuals navigate uncertainty to make a range of mobilization decisions at the war’s onset. It demonstrates the potential of careful attention to participants’ own perceptions of their lived reality to advance knowledge of the processes of collective action.
University of Birmingham
Monothematic Delusions are Misfunctioning Beliefs
Monothematic delusions are bizarre beliefs which are often accompanied by highly anomalous experiences. For philosophers and psychologists attracted to the exploration of mental phenomena in an evolutionary framework, these beliefs represent—notwithstanding their rarity—a puzzle. A natural idea concerning the biology of belief is that our beliefs, in concert with relevant desires, help us to navigate our environments, and so, in broad terms, an evolutionary story of human belief formation will likely insist on a function of truth (true beliefs tend to lead to successful action). Monothematic delusions are systematically false and often harmful to the proper functioning of the agent and the navigation of their environment. So what are we to say? A compelling thought is that delusions are malfunctioning beliefs. Compelling though it may be, I argue against this view on the grounds that it does not pay due attention to the circumstances in which monothematic delusions are formed, and fails to establish doxastic malfunction. I argue instead that monothematic delusions are misfunctioning beliefs, that is, the result of mechanisms of belief formation operating in historically abnormal conditions. Monothematic delusions may take their place alongside a host of other false beliefs formed in difficult epistemic conditions, but for which no underlying doxastic malfunction is in play.
University of Edinburgh
The question-orientation of knowing, caring, and wondering
In this talk, I will discuss the semantics of various attitudinal predicates such as “know”, “care” and “wonder” from a linguistic perspective. In particular, I will defend the position that these predicates in general are question-oriented. That is, their semantic argument is a question (modelled as a set of propositions) rather than a proposition simpliciter. I will defend this position based on two main arguments: (a) when epistemic predicates (such as “know”, “forget” and “remember”) and Predicates of Relevance (such as “care”, “matter” etc.) take an interrogative complement (such as “who will call”), their interpretations cannot be reduced to declarative-embedding counterparts of the form “x knows/forgot/remembers/cares that p”, where p is a propositional answer to the interrogative; (b) taking the question-oriented semantics allows us to have a straightforward explanation of the selectional restrictions of predicates like “wonder” and “believe”, i.e., the fact that they are compatible with only a certain type of complement.
University of California, Riverside
Can Testimony Generate Warrant?
Our folk epistemology holds that neither memory nor testimony can generate propositional justification, but only functions to preserve it either overtime or between persons. But I’m committed to a view where it is possible for testimony to generate propositional warrant. This talk reviews the existing debate and reports to provide examples, where both sides of the debate should be willing to grant the possibility that testimony can generate new propositional warrant.
Lancaster University
Design, Research, and the Craft of Intermediate Knowledge
The practices of design and research come together in many ways under the banner Design Research. For example, researchers study designers to understand the nature of their professional creative practice. Similarly, designers do research to understand their clients’ needs and what they need to design. Finally, the process of designing, in and of itself, can simultaneously be a creative and a research activity. This mode of Design Research leverages the cognitive, practical, and inquiring aspects of design processes to not only produce a tangible outcome (i.e., a ‘design’) but also to produce new insights about the world (i.e., ‘knowledge’).
The nature of the knowledge produced by design is empirical—it arises directly from the observation and experience of designing as opposed to theory. However, given knowledge emerging from design tends to arise from ultimately particular design instances, it is hard to argue it is verifiable. Rather, this is a type of ‘intermediate level’ knowledge. Intermediate level knowledge aspires to be relevant and generative across different contexts but is overtly different from the universality of generalisable theories.
In this session I will use extracts from the documentary film Permission to Muck About to frame the story of Design Research’s history, present, and contemporary challenges. I will argue that the foundations of the Design Research field are, in fact, core components of most inquiry. Nonetheless, this kind of understanding is undervalued in the dominant research, innovation, and epistemological paradigm. I advocate for improved education about knowledge and epistemology from primary school onwards, to move towards a new more inclusive knowledge paradigm.
Schedule
To facilitate in-person attendance at our events, we offer financial assistance for travel, childcare, etc., to people who might need it. For more information, please see the Equality, Diversity, & Inclusion page.
Theme by the University of Stirling