Anti-Luck Epistemologies and Necessary Truths

That believing truly as a matter of luck does not generally constitute knowing has become epistemic commonplace. Accounts of knowledge incorporating this anti-luck idea frequently rely on one or another of a safety or sensitivity condition. Sensitivity-based accounts of knowledge have a well-known problem with necessary truths, to wit, that any believed necessary truth trivially counts as knowledge on such accounts. In this paper, we argue that safety-based accounts similarly trivialize knowledge of necessary truths and that two ways of responding to this problem for safety, issuing from work by Williamson and Pritchard, are of dubious success.     

Experience,Embodiment, and Epistemologies

Gail Mason's Spectacle of Violence undertakes an important project in confronting a number of serious questions about definitions of violence and power, and about the nature of experience, subjectivity, and mind/body dualisms. Hartsock's comments on the book focus on issues of experience, embodiment, and standpoint theories.     

The Development of Implicit Epistemologies During Early and Middle Adulthood

This study examined the development of implicit epistemologies of Finnish adults during the last ten years. It was hypothesized that specific adult experiences are stimulating for development. Moreover, a person's exploratory orientation was hypothesized to be related to development. Kitchener and King's model and method of Reflective Judgment provided tools to study adolescents' and adults' epistemologies and their possible development. Participants (N = 59) were given initial (1986–1988) and follow-up (1993–1994) Reflective Judgment interviews. The age range was from 24–50 years in the follow-up groups. The Reflective Judgment mean stage scores clearly increased during the two study periods (M₁ = 4.64,M₂ = 5.10; F(1, 58) = 32.82, p = .000). Education, in particular education beyond a person's primary profession/occupation, was a strong predictor of development. Also, encountering diversity and exploratory orientation were related to development, but their connections were more complicated. No gender differences were found. The results support the idea that positive changes in thinking and reasoning take place during adulthood.     

Reflexivity, Relativism, Microhistory: Three Desiderata for Historical Epistemologies

This paper tries to motivate three desiderata for historical epistemologies: (a) that they should be reflective about the pedigree of their conceptual apparatus; (b) that they must face up to the potentially relativistic consequences of their historicism; and (c) that they must not forget the hard-won lessons of microhistory (i.e. historical events must be explained causally; historical events must not be artificially divided into internal/intellectual and external/social “factors” or “levels”; and constructed series of homogenous events must not be treated as quasi-organisms). Ian Hacking’s work on styles of reasoning and Lorraine Daston’s and Peter Galison’s investigation into epistemic virtues are used to identify the costs of neglecting these desiderata.     

Sixth-Grade Students' Epistemologies of Science: The Impact of School Science Experiences on Epistemological Development

Previous studies have documented that middle school students have a limited "knowledge unproblematic" epistemology of science (i.e., scientists steadily amass more facts about the world by doing experiments) with no appreciation of the role played by scientists' ideas in guiding inquiry. An important question concerns to what extent students this age and younger are ready to restructure their epistemological views to focus on more "constructivist" issues: the conjectural, explanatory, testable, and revisable nature of theories. This study tests the claim that even elementary school students can make significant progress in developing a more sophisticated, constructivist epistemology of science, given a sustained elementary school science curriculum that is designed to support students' thinking about epistemological issues. To assess the impact of elementary science experiences on students' epistemological views, 2 demographically similar groups of 6th-grade students were individually interviewed using the Nature of Science Interview developed by Carey and colleagues (Carey, 1991; Carey, Evans, Honda, Jay, & Unger, 1989). Both groups had experienced sustained elementary science instruction; 1 taught from a constructivist perspective and 1 taught from a more traditional perspective. We found that students in the more traditional science classroom had developed a knowledge unproblematic epistemology of the type previously reported by Carey et al. (1989). In contrast, students in the constructivist classroom had developed an epistemological stance toward science that focused on the central role of ideas in the knowledge acquisition process and on the kinds of mental, social, and experimental work involved in understanding, developing, testing, and revising these ideas. We conclude that elementary schoolchildren are more ready to formulate sophisticated epistemological views than many have thought. We discuss how these findings relate to the broader epistemological literature, and the features of the constructivist classroom environment that may have supported the development of these sophisticated understandings.     

Exploring Similarities and Differences in Personal Epistemologies of U.S. and German Elementary School Teachers

The current study examines the personal epistemology of fourth-grade elementary school teachers from Germany (n = 10) and the United States (n = 10) to gain a more nuanced understanding of teachers’ beliefs about knowledge and knowing through a cross-cultural lens. Analyses of semi-structured interviews reveal similarities and differences in the statements of teachers. Four themes are identified: The majority of teachers believed that (a) knowing is uncertain and (b) knowledge has domain-specific qualities; (c) U.S. teachers seemed to view knowledge more as being embedded within their community, while (d) German teachers discussed more internal knowledge sources. The general discussion includes possible cross-cultural explanations for these four emerging themes and points tentatively to developmental issues stemming from uncertainty beliefs. Conceptual and educational implications are discussed and suggestions for future research are given.     

Two Jungs. Apropos a paper by Mark Saban

Jung's idea of the ‘personal equation’ amounts to the reflection that theoretical differences between the psychologies that people teach are rooted in their personalities, in other words, that they are due to the psychology each one ‘has’. This concept also applies to different interpretations of Jung's work. The serious difficulties that Mark Saban has with my psychology are a case in point. Recourse to the concept of the personal equation reveals that Saban has his Jung and I have mine. With his insistence on his Talmudic methodological principle of dream interpretation, that ‘the dream is its own interpretation’, according to Saban Jung means nothing but a rejection of Freudian free association. My Jung goes far beyond that. Jung understands this methodological principle above all in terms of what he calls ‘circumambulation’. The main part of this paper is devoted to an elucidation of what circumambulation involves as a mode of dream interpretation. The paper concludes with the distinction Jung himself introduced between two types of reading of his work, either as ‘paper’ and ‘dead nostrums’ or as ‘fire and wind’, and pleads for a reconstruction of Jung's psychology as a whole in terms of his most advanced, deepest insights, instead of a dogmatic reading mainly based on the early Jung, a reading for which his later revolutionary insights are at best negligible embellishments.