Optimality justifications: new foundations for foundation-oriented epistemology

In this paper a new conception of foundation-oriented epistemology is developed. The major challenge for foundation-oriented justifications consists in the problem of stopping the justificational regress without taking recourse to dogmatic assumptions or circular reasoning. Two alternative accounts that attempt to circumvent this problem, coherentism and externalism, are critically discussed and rejected as unsatisfactory. It is argued that optimality arguments are a new type of foundation-oriented justification that can stop the justificational regress. This is demonstrated on the basis of a novel result in the area of induction: the optimality of meta-induction. In the final section the method of optimality justification is generalized to deductive and abductive inferences.     

Predictive processing and the representation wars: a victory for the eliminativist (via fictionalism)

In this paper I argue that, by combining eliminativist and fictionalist approaches toward the sub-personal representational posits of predictive processing, we arrive at an empirically robust and yet metaphysically innocuous cognitive scientific framework. I begin the paper by providing a non-representational account of the five key posits of predictive processing (“prediction-signal”, “error-signal”, “prior”, “likelihood”, and “posterior probability”). Then, I motivate a fictionalist approach toward the remaining indispensable representational posits of predictive processing, and explain how representation can play an epistemologically indispensable role within predictive processing explanations without thereby requiring that representation metaphysically exists. Finally, I outline four consequences of accepting this approach and explain why they are beneficial: (1) we arrive at a victory for metaphysical eliminativism in the ‘representation wars’; (2) my account fits with extant empirical practice; (3) my account provides guidance for future research; and, (4) my account provides the beginnings of a response to Mark Sprevak’s IBE problem for fictionalist approaches toward sub-personal representation.     

Hospitality and Embodied Encounters in Educational Spaces

This short paper responds to the essays by Shilpi Sinha, Shaireen Rasheed, and Lyudmila Bryzzheva. It considers how racial inequality between teachers and students affects the possibilities of educational hospitality, both in cases of white teachers teaching racialized students and in cases of racialized teachers teaching white students. The response takes a phenomenological turn, considering the relative vulnerability of bodies that encounter each other in educational spaces which, themselves, are not neutral.     

Ethics,Subjectivity, and Sociomaterial Assemblages: Two Important Directions and Methodological Tensions

Research that explores ethics can help educational communities engage twenty-first century crises and work toward ecologically and socially just forms of life. Integral to this research is an engagement with social theory, which helps educators imagine our shared worlds differently. In this paper I present two theoretical-methodological directions for educational research that centres ethics: Ethics and (human) subjectivity; and Ethics-in-assemblage. While both approaches might be seen as commensurable, they can also be seen as quite divergent. Using Michel Foucault’s later work on subjectivity and ethics, as well as recent work in Anthropology, I present a methodological direction for research into ethical subjectivity, how students come to see themselves as self-reflective ethical actors. Relevant here is the tension between ethics and politics, individual and collective modes of being, as both are crucial to both struggles for justice on a damaged planet. The second direction involves a sociomaterialist approach that employs Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘assemblage’ as well as Karen Barad’s notion ‘entangled responsibility’ to show that ethics can also be seen to co-emerge with/in phenomena that exceed human relations. In short, exploring ethics through educational research means simultaneously examining ethics as subjectivity and ethics as co-emergent larger assemblages/phenomena.     

The redundancy problem: From knowledge-infallibilism to knowledge-minimalism

Among the epistemological ideas commonly associated with the Descartes of the Meditations, at any rate, is a knowledge-infallibilism. Such an idea was seemingly a vital element in Descartes’s search for truth within that investigative setting: only a true belief gained infallibly (as we would now describe it) could be knowledge, as the Meditations conceived of this. Contemporary epistemologists are less likely than Descartes was to advocate our ever seeking knowledge-infallibility, if only because most are doubtful as to its ever being available. Still, they would agree—in a seemingly Cartesian spirit—that if infallible knowledge was available then it would be a stronger link to truth than fallible knowledge ever manages to be. But this paper argues that infallible knowledge lacks that supposed advantage over fallible knowledge. Indeed, we will see why we should move even further away from the epistemological model at the heart of the Meditations: we should adopt knowledge-minimalism, by conceiving of a belief’s being true as always sufficient for its being knowledge—this, for any belief.     

From Hostility to Hospitality: Teaching About Race and Privilege in a Post-election Climate

Now more than ever the role of the other has been put into question and marginalized in a redefinition of an “American national self-protective identity” in the current post election climate. In philosophical terms, an identity of a radical other- implies that any change, any difference, any impurity can be conceived as posing a threat to identity. If a specific group of people is identified as preventing the self from being what it ought to be, the other is identified as a security threat. One option is to willingly conform to the assigned role as a threat. The opposite option I argue in my paper is one that can be achieved through the lens of a cosmopolitan framework of hospitality. By exploring the writings of French philosopher, feminist and psychoanalyst Luce Irigary’s cosmopolitan pedagogy of difference rooted in the concept of hospitality from the point of view of education, I hope put forth an alternative phenomenological pedagogy, one that connects issues of positionality with those of an embodied anti-racist philosophy of difference. By using case studies from my own classroom, I hope to elucidate how educators can implement an anti-racist pedagogy in the current post election climate, by creating spaces for dialogue where students are engaging in an authentic discourse on the nature of their positionality.     

The Fascist Seduction of Narrative: Walter Benjamin’s Historical Materialism Beyond Counter-Narrative

This essay introduces Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism to illuminate how history teachers may invoke a critique of the past and present through democratizing the production of knowledge in the classroom. Historical materialism gives students access to the means of knowledge production and entrusts them with the task of generating a critique of politics though encounters with historical objects. The rise of the alt-right, alternative facts, and fake news sites necessitates social studies methods that intervene into the fascist seductions of narrative in history. A Benjaminian pedagogy emphasizes reading practices that acknowledge the political layers of history inscribed within the objects. This generates space for forms of pessimism and dialectic critiques of barbarism that students may experience with history beyond the teacher’s capacity for understanding. In the name of democracy over fascism, the article adds a political critique to students’ historical and critical thinking skills.     

Paulo Freire and Philosophy for Children: A Critical Dialogue

This paper is an attempt to connect the Brazilian Paulo Freire’s well known educational thinking with the “philosophy for children” movement. It considers the relationship between the creator of philosophy for children (P4C), Matthew Lipman and Freire through different attempts to establish a relationship between these two educators. The paper shows that the relationship between them is not as close as many supporters of P4C have claimed, especially in Latin America. It also considers the context of Educational Policies in our time and why Freire’s understanding of the politics of education makes it impossible to be Freirean and at the same time be neutral or favorable to the actual status quo. Finally, after presenting Lipman’s understanding of the relationship between philosophy, education and democracy and their connection to capitalism, it proposes ways to begin the political path of philosophizing with children inspired by Paulo Freire’s educational thinking. As a result, a more politically committed path to doing philosophy with children is offered.     

Admitting a Sense of Superiority: Aggrandized Higher Education Status as an Objection to Educational Inequality

Recalling the landmark US Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the advancement of educational equality is often associated with the reduction of stigmatizing differences in status or “sense of inferiority” engendered by separately and differentially educated citizens. This essay takes up the obverse concern, the sense of superiority sustained by educational inequality, with particular focus on the inequality signaled by higher education status (HES). I contend that the presence of aggrandized HES in a democratic society provides reasons to object to educational inequality for which institutions of higher education ought to be held responsible. Aggrandized HES not only demands a questionable deference from citizens in a democratic society; it also weakens HES’s signaling of epistemic authority and equality of educational opportunity, which harms the public’s motivation to learn by distorting beliefs about education. To address this problem, I argue that the best policy solution for curbing aggrandized uses of HES is to transform the positional aspect of higher education using an admissions policy originally suggested by Elizabeth Anderson, which I term the elite culture strategy. Beyond admissions policies, this essay addresses the larger concern of educating citizens to perceive and assess educational status according to democratic norms and not solely in terms of self-interested gain.     

No advantage for remembering horizontal over vertical spatial locations learned from a single viewpoint

Previous behavioral and neurophysiological research has shown better memory for horizontal than for vertical locations. In these studies, participants navigated toward these locations. In the present study we investigated whether the orientation of the spatial plane per se was responsible for this difference. We thus had participants learn locations visually from a single perspective and retrieve them from multiple viewpoints. In three experiments, participants studied colored tags on a horizontally or vertically oriented board within a virtual room and recalled these locations with different layout orientations (Exp. 1) or from different room-based perspectives (Exps. 2 and 3). All experiments revealed evidence for equal recall performance in horizontal and vertical memory. In addition, the patterns for recall from different test orientations were rather similar. Consequently, our results suggest that memory is qualitatively similar for both vertical and horizontal two-dimensional locations, given that these locations are learned from a single viewpoint. Thus, prior differences in spatial memory may have originated from the structure of the space or the fact that participants navigated through it. Additionally, the strong performance advantages for perspective shifts (Exps. 2 and 3) relative to layout rotations (Exp. 1) suggest that configurational judgments are not only based on memory of the relations between target objects, but also encompass the relations between target objects and the surrounding room—for example, in the form of a memorized view.