What Exactly Is It All About? Puzzled Comments from a French Legal Scholar on the NBIC Convergence

The techno-scientific development has no frontier, but the legal systems still take roots in local and cultural references. French Law is built on a continental model and conveys values and preferences of the French population, including an essential role given to the State and to textual requirements. Until now, French law has been modified to cope with new and emerging technologies issues with the idea that they can be taken one after the other, on the fringes of the classic legal problems. Do the announcement of a convergence between Nanotechnologies, Biotechnologies, the sciences of Information and Cognition (NBIC) change the situation? According to “converging technologies” partisans, a lot of other deep perturbations may occur. Therefore, it could be pertinent to assess the legal implications of NBIC convergence. But trying to do so, a French legal scholar may first feel (and express) perplexity. What is the “convergence NBIC”? To answer, do we have to wonder which reality hides behind the expression or is it necessary to admit that the speeches are here more important to analyze than a hypothetical realization? Does it imply new legal questions? Do we need new methods to enlighten what is at stake? Is it a new challenge, stimulating the imagination of lawyers and legal scholars, or, on the contrary, is it a new illustration of the Economy of the promises, revealing big risks of vain (or inappropriate) intellectual and normative production? This article is dedicated to enlighten the important difficulties which mark out the road towards the answers to the legal questions raised by the “NBIC convergence”.     

The Eclipse of Imagination Within Educational ‘Official’ Framework and Why It Should be Returned to Educational Discourse: A Deweyan Perspective

In recent decades, the shift towards the “learnification” of educational discourse has de facto reframed educational purposes and schooling practice, thus reframing what students should know, strive for, and, in a sense, be. In this paper, given the efforts to disrupt the dominance of learning discourse, I seek to engage regarding a specific concern, namely, the progressive removal of imagination within educational official framework. Indeed, imagination has virtually disappeared from the documents, publications, web pages and recommendations of major educational agencies and institutions worldwide, with important and potentially damaging consequences for schooling, teaching and learning. Employing a Deweyan perspective, I argue that imagination plays a crucial role in the creation of pivotal educational features and phenomena, such as knowledge, inquiry, choice and deliberation, critical agency, meaning creation, and, importantly, the openness of possibilities. Therefore, the eclipse of imagination becomes, at the very same time, the eclipse of education; nurturing imagination is about nurturing education.     

Meaning and Conversational Impropriety in Sceptical Contexts

According to “disjunctivist neo‐Mooreanism”—a position Duncan Pritchard develops in a recent book—it is possible to know the denials of radical sceptical hypotheses, even though it is conversationally inappropriate to claim such knowledge. In a recent paper, on the other hand, Pritchard expounds an “überhinge” strategy, according to which one cannot know the denials of sceptical hypotheses, as “hinge propositions” are necessarily groundless. The present article argues that neither strategy is entirely successful. For if a proposition can be known, it can also be claimed to be known. If the latter is not possible, this is not because certain propositions are either “intrinsically” conversationally inappropriate (as Pritchard claims in his book) or else “rationally groundless” (as Pritchard claims in his paper), but rather that we are dealing with something that merely presents us with the appearance of being an epistemic claim.     

Imagination as Expansion of Experience

This paper proposes a developmental view on imagination: from this perspective, imagination can be seen as triggered by some disrupting event, which generates a disjunction from the person’s unfolding experience of the “real” world, and as unfolding as a loop, which eventually comes back to the actual experience. Examining recent and classical theorization of imagination in psychology, the paper opposes a deficitary view of imagination to an expansive notion of imagination. The paper explores Piaget, Vygotsky, Harris and Pelaprat & Cole consider: 1) What does provoke a “rupture” or disjunction? 2) What are the psychological processes involved in the imaginary loop? 3) What nourishes such processes? 4) What are the consequences of such imaginary loop, or what does it enable doing? The paper proposes to adopt an expansive view of imagination, as Vygotsky proposed—a perspective that has been under-explored empirically since his seminal work. To stimulate such sociocultural psychology of imagination, two empirical examples are provided, one showing how children make sense of metaphor in an experimental setting, the other showing a young person using a novel met at school as symbolic resource.     

How Does One Know What Shame Is? Epistemology,Emotions, and Forms of Life in Juxtaposition

Do women conceptualize—understand, know about, and react to—shame differently from the way men do? Does the experience and knowledge of shame have a gender-specificity, and along what lines could it be analyzed? By introducing a distinction between life or enduring experiences, “Erfahrung,” and episodic or occurrent experiences, “Erlebnis,” andby juxtaposing this distinction with the Rylean notion that knowledge is dispositional this paper argues for the plausibility of a gender-specificivy.     

Anti-Skepticism Under a Linguistic Guise

In this paper I consider the plausibility of developing anti-skepticism by framing the question in linguistic terms: instead of asking whether we know, we ask what falls within the extension of the word “know”. I first trace two previous attempts to develop anti-skepticism in this way, from Austin (particularly as presented by Kaplan) and from epistemic contextualism, and I present reasons to think that both approaches are unsuccessful. I then focus on a recently popular attempt to develop anti-skepticism from the “function-first” approach associated with Craig, which I also show to be problematic. I then argue that the apparent prima facie plausibility of fighting skepticism on linguistic grounds is due to a methodological spill-over from linguistics. Once we recognize this, it becomes clear that the skepticism debate should not be conducted in linguistic terms.

     

“I am NN”: A Reconstruction of Anscombe's “The First Person”

This paper develops a way of understanding G. E. M. Anscombe's essay “The First Person” at the heart of which are the following two ideas: first, that the point of her essay is to show that it is not possible for anyone to understand what they express with “I” as an Art des Gegebenseins—a way of thinking of an object that constitutes identifying knowledge of which object is being thought of; and second, that the argument through which her essay seeks to show this is itself first personal in character. Understanding Anscombe's essay in this light has the merit of showing much of what it says to be correct. But it sets us the task of saying what it is that we understand ourselves to express with “I” if not an Art des Gegebenseins, and in particular what it is that we understand ourselves to express with sentences with “I” as subject that might seem to express identity judgments, such as “I am NN”, and “I am this body”.     

Knowing things and going places

When I say “I know Sarah,” or “I know Berlin,” what sort of knowledge am I claiming? Such knowledge of a particular is, I claim, not reducible to either propositional knowledge-that or to traditional physical know-how. Mere, bare knowledge by acquaintance also does not capture the kind of knowledge being claimed here. Using knowledge of a place as my central example, I argue that this kind of knowledge-of, or “objectual knowledge” as it is sometimes called, is of a distinctive epistemological sort. It is a genre of inherently first-personal aesthetic knowledge, but it also, like know-how, involves active skill. I end by exploring a couple of classic problems in aesthetic epistemology, applied to the case of knowledge-of as active aesthetic knowledge.     

Knowledge and knowledge gaps in semantic memory of technical artifacts

Two hypotheses have been considered regarding the relation between knowledge and semantic knowledge gaps: a “knowledge clash” hypothesis predicting more awareness of knowledge gaps with increasing knowledge, and a “knowledge deficit” hypothesis whereby the relation is the opposite. In order to examine these hypotheses, graduate and undergraduate students were asked to state what they knew and what they did not know about a sample of familiar and unfamiliar artifacts. None of the above hypotheses accounted for the results. Instead, knowledge was found to be differently related to various types of unknown features: increasing knowledge was related to less unknown features of the artifacts' function and to more unknown features about contingency relations. Unknown features of the artifacts’ behaviors were frequently reported in the two knowledge conditions. The results suggest new strands of research on the metacognition of “not knowing.”     

Challenging the ability intuition: From personal to extended to distributed belief-forming processes

Much of what we know results from information sources on which we epistemically rely. This fact about epistemic reliance, however, stands in tension with a very powerful intuition governing knowledge, an intuition that Pritchard (e.g., 2010) has termed the “ability intuition,” the idea that a believer's “reliable cognitive faculties are the most salient part of the total set of causal factors that give rise to [their] believing the truth” (Vaesen, 2011, p. 518; compare Greco, 2003; 2009; 2010). In this paper I suggest that this tension may indeed be ineliminable. I proceed by canvassing some representative attempts to reconcile epistemic reliance and the ability intuition. In doing so, I suggest that all of these attempts founder on one or the other of two elements of what I've previously described (Shieber, 2013, 2015) as a “personalist presumption” in discussions of social epistemology: an excessive focus on (i) reliability filters within the persons who are the recipients of information or (ii) on reliable truth-tracking and -conveying abilities in the persons who are the transmitters of information. In conclusion, I suggest how best to resolve the tension: by abandoning the ability intuition.     

Generating possibilities

Our knowledge of the most basic alternative possibilities can be thought of as generated recursively from what we know about the actual world. But what are the generating principles? According to one view, they are recombinational: roughly, alternative possibilities are generated by “patching together” parts of distinct worlds or “blotting out” parts of worlds to yield new worlds. I argue that this view is inadequate. It is difficult to state in a way that is true and non-trivial, and anyway fails to account for our knowledge that there might have been other things, properties, relations, and combinations of these than there actually are. I sketch and defend an alternative view based on the distinction between determinable and determinate properties: roughly, alternative possibilities are generated by “intra-determinable” variation, variation from one determinate to another of the same determinable.     

Epistemic presentism

Commonsense functionalism is taken to entail a version of the extended mind thesis, according to which one’s dispositional beliefs may be partly constituted by artifacts. As several opponents of the extended mind thesis have objected, claiming so can generate a cognitive/knowledge bloat, according to which we may count as knowing the contents of trusted websites, even before looking them up (!). One way to retain commonsense functionalism, but avoid the ensuing “cognitive/knowledge bloat” worry is to introduce epistemic presentism—the view that there are no dispositional beliefs and that we can only believe, and thereby know, things in the present. Independently of the above problem, epistemic presentism can be further motivated by shedding light on two central epistemological questions: (1) how to understand the distinction between doxastic and propositional justification and (2) how to interpret the closure principle. The view also aligns with strong intuitions about what we may take ourselves to know, what the relation between action and belief is, and what may count as part of our minds.     

Re‐framing systemic paradigms for the art of learning

Thoughtful people are increasingly concerned that the current paradigms for social, corporate, and educational activities are in disgraceful disarray. The “problem‐solving” or analytical model, the competitive or game model, the commercial or consumer model, the bureaucratic or institutional model, and the disease or illness model which prevail in public discourse are proving to be especially unwholesome. We cannot, however, educate ourselves without paradigms. A credible educational paradigm must be generally accessible without being simplistic, informative without being monothematic, and accommodating as well as discriminating. Given our disquiet with the current cognitive situation, a renewing paradigm must be somehow novel; given the character of human nature, a sustaining paradigm must be somehow familiar.

For a very long time now, professional Sciences have committed themselves to paradigms about “reality out there,” while professional Arts have devoted themselves to expressing “imagination from within here.” The more these two worldviews polarize in opposition to one another, the more room there is—and the more human heed there becomes—for mediation by an applied philosophy which accommodates the “real” as well as the “imaginary” in a complementary way. Such a philosophy would address not only “what do you know?” and “how do you do?” but also “how do you know?” and “why do you do?” In earlier times, people would have been considered neither educated nor wise unless they appreciated the Sciences and the Arts whole. In our time, we may not survive unless we can re‐integrate our fractured perceptions. How might we proceed to do so? There may be a systemological way.     

The knower and the known

This paper is a presentation and discussion of Spinoza's view on the knower, or the mind, as an agent. The knower is on his view to be regarded as an active or generative complex cognitive experience. Imagination, reason and intuition are the cognitive principles. On account of their intrinsic relation to “the first law of nature”, that of selfpreservation, together with the thesis of the mind as constituted by ideas or knowledge, these principles function at the same time as moral principles. Consequently, it makes sense to speak of an individual's moral attitude toward everything be knows. A discussion of imagination, reason and intuition mainly as cognitive principles is followed by some concluding remarks on the cognitive and moral relation between human beings: To know another human being is to know his knowledge. The moral attitude of individuals to each other is a function of their mutual knowledge of knowledge.     

The strategic performance of heterotopic experiences in higher education: Imagining spaces of potentiality for new South African identities

In an interview published in Esprit, Achille Mbembe asks “what is ‘today’, and what are we today? What are the lines of fragility, the lines of precariousness, the fissures in contemporary African life? And, possibly, how could what is, be no more, how could it give birth to something else?” As a response to this question of African identity, this article is twofold. Firstly, I aim to draw together an argument that recent and ongoing debates about decolonising knowledge (including Mbembe’s 2015 WISER lecture and open public conversations with the #RhodesMustFall [#RMF] student movement) can be read as part of the search for ways “to be otherwise”. In fact, higher education (HE) institutions should be, can be, and often are, crucial spaces of potentiality in this regard. An essential part of realising Mbembe’s vision of a new kind of human, therefore, would be to ensure that institutions in the contemporary HE landscape recognise, embrace and therefore (paradoxically) become what they are, namely “heterotopias”. Heterotopology is a metaphor Michel Foucault suggests in his 1967 lecture Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. Accepting that HE is a heterotopically discursive site, this article provides a brief, broad Foucaultian heterotopology of the contemporary HE landscape, with specific reference to the South African context. It focuses on Foucault’s three types of heterotopia (crisis, deviation and compensation) and his six principles of heterotopia. Secondly, it would be something of a performative contradiction if this article were merely to follow the conventions of a traditionally organised philosophical argument about an engaging metaphor (“heterotopia”). As an experimental “strategic performance”, the writing itself aims to produce a heterotopic reading experience, thereby joining in the heuristic excavation of experience, which is the task of the heterotopia. It draws disparate, clashing elements into a complex textual web, which should generate at least some feeling of disturbance or cognitive dissonance. In the article’s fissures and joints, readers should find points of entry for critical and creative thinking. As Johnson puts it in his analysis of Foucault’s metaphor, “heterotopias glitter and clash in their incongruous variety, illuminating a passage for our imagination”.     

Are we free to imagine what we choose?

It has long been recognized that we have a great deal of freedom to imagine what we choose. This paper explores a thesis—what we call “intentionalism (about the imagination)”—that provides a way of making this evident (if vague) truism precise. According to intentionalism, the contents of your imaginings are simply determined by whatever contents you intend to imagine. Thus, for example, when you visualize a building and intend it to be of King’s College rather than a replica of the college you have imagined the former rather than the latter because you intended to imagine King’s College. This is so even if the visual image you conjure up equally resembles either. This paper proposes two kinds of counterexamples to intentionalism and discusses their significance. In particular, it sketches a positive account of how many sensory imaginings get to be about what they are about, which explains how the causal history of our mental imagery can prevent us from succeeding in imagining what we intended.