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

Claire Field

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.

Luisa Enria

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.

Jesper Kallestrup

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.

Anastasia Shesterinina

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.

Ema Sullivan-Bissett

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.

Wataru Uegaki

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.

Peter Graham

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.

Joseph Lindley

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.