Which Scientificity for the social Sciences?

Since their emergence in the nineteenth century, the epistemology of social sciences has oscillated from aiming at the classical model of scientificity to emphasizing its own specificities. We argue here that the existence of unambiguous, well defined objects has allowed discoveries and cumulativity in the natural sciences. Whereas, in the social sciences, the term is most often used in a metaphorical meaning, as it represents a basically fluid and changing reality. Its apprehension partly depends on the emotional/intellectual identity of the researcher, which makes it difficult to achieve a full consensus. Yet, beside real, natural or created objects, we do find structures, regularities and objectivations in society.     

What the Wise Ought Believe: A Voluntarist Interpretation of Hume's General Rules

This paper advances an interpretation of what Hume called ‘the general rules’: natural principles of belief-formation that nevertheless can be augmented via reflection. According to Hume, reflection is, in part, what separates the wise from the vulgar. In this paper, I argue that for Hume being wise must therefore be, to some degree, voluntary. Hume faced a significant problem in attempting to reconcile his epistemic normativity, i.e. his claims about what we ought to believe, with his largely involuntarist theory of the mind. Reflection on the General Rules, and an interpretation of that reflection as voluntary, helps explain not only Hume's theory of belief, but also how he hoped to reconcile epistemic normativity with naturalism about the mental.     

How a Mental Health Professional Handles Referrals and Fees

Summary

The choice of referral and the relationship between referral sources can pose clinical and ethical dilemmas, due to the potential that the relationship between the psychologist and the referral source will interfere with the treatment relationship. Once the referral has been made, the referring psychologist must be sensitive to a second, and often a more problematic level of risk: conflicts that occur between the patient and the referral recipient. The situation becomes even more problematic when a psychologist is giving or receiving any form of compensation in connection with the referral. In addition to clouding the clinical relationship, the giving or receiving of such compensation, whether it is characterized as “referral fees” or otherwise, has important legal consequences, and may well result in license revocation proceedings or even criminal liability.     

Stress,Coping, and Emotions on the World Stage: The Experience of Participating in a Major Soccer Tournament Penalty Shootout

This study was designed to capture the first-hand experiences of stressors, coping, and emotions that elite professional soccer players have during a major soccer penalty shootout. Eight players who each took part in an important European Championships penalty shootout were interviewed. The results showed that the experience of stressors, coping, and emotions changed extensively throughout the event. Moreover, the participants experienced a series of different stressors, some of which were specific to the penalty shootout, and they employed a variety of coping strategies. Anxiety was the most common emotion. Practitioners can use these results to help design valid simulation protocols.     

Kant's Neoplatonism: Kant and Plato on Mathematical and Philosophical Method

Both Plato and Kant devote much attention and care to deliberating about their method of philosophizing. And, interestingly, both seek to expand and explain their view of philosophical method by one selfsame strategy: explaining the contrast between rational procedure in mathematics and in philosophy. Plato and Kant agree on a fundamental point of philosophical method that is at odds with the mathematico‐demonstrative methodology of philosophy found in Spinoza and present in Christian Wolff. Both reject the axiomatic approach with its insistence on fundamental truths postulated from the outset. Both alike insist that philosophizing—unlike mathematics—is an exercise in theorizing where the questions of basicness and foundations come into view only after the inquiry has gone on for a long, long time—and certainly not at its start.     

Russell's Early Theory of Denoting

The ancient Greek method of analysis has a rational reconstruction in the form of the tableau method of logical proof. This reconstruction shows that the format of analysis was largely determined by the requirement that proofs could be formulated by reference to geometrical figures. In problematic analysis, it has to be assumed not only that the theorem to be proved is true, but also that it is known. This means using epistemic logic, where instantiations of variables are typically allowed only with respect to known objects. This requirement explains the preoccupation of Greek geometers with questions as to which geometrical objects are ‘given’, that is, known or ‘data’, as in the title of Euclid's eponymous book. In problematic analysis, constructions had to rely on objects that are known only hypothetically. This seems strange unless one relies on a robust idea of ‘unknown’ objects in the same sense as the unknowns of algebra. The Greeks did not have such a concept, which made their grasp of the analytic method shaky.     

In the letter of mere reason: Rethinking the universal secular intellectual with Immanuel Kant,Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

This article reconsiders a question, ‘Is Critique Secular?’, which ostensibly polarised Saba Mahmood and Stathis Gourgouris in the 2008 exchange forum of Public Culture. After positing that Mahmood and Gourgouris are mutually invested in challenging and overcoming the intransigence of epistemic secularism, the article canvasses Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's deconstruction of the Kantian ‘universal secular intellectual’. The article suggests that Spivak's reading of Kant's Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone constitutes a vital exercise in democratic criticism that sets into relief an important convergence between Mahmood and Gourgouris as interlocutors. Delineating imbrications among Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Judgment and Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, the article synthesises Jacques Derrida's work on Kantian aesthetics and Spivak's recalibration of the Kantian intellectual as a means to unsettle the recalcitrance of epistemic secularism in academic debate and public culture.     

An epistemic and dynamic approach to abductive reasoning: Abductive problem and abductive solution

We propose a study of abductive reasoning addressing it as an epistemic process that involves both an agent?s information and the actions that modify this information. More precisely, we present and discuss definitions of an abductive problem and an abductive solution in terms of an agent?s information, that is, in terms of knowledge and beliefs. The discussion is then formalised by ‘implementing’ our definitions in a dynamic epistemic logic framework, where the properties of these definitions are studied, an epistemic action that represents the application of an abductive step is introduced, and an illustrative example is provided. A number of the most interesting properties of abductive reasoning (those highlighted by Peirce) are shown to be better modelled within this approach.     

African philosophy and global epistemic injustice

In this paper, I consider how the discourse on global epistemic justice might be approached differently if some contributions from the African philosophical place are taken seriously. To be specific, I argue that the debate on global justice broadly has not been global. I cite as an example, the exclusion or marginalisation of African philosophy, what it has contributed and what it may yet contribute to the global epistemic edifice. I point out that this exclusion is a case of epistemic injustice. I observe that the absence of a philosophical technique that prevails on philosophers to engage with others from other traditions might be responsible for this epistemic lopsidedness and marginalisation. I go beyond the re-statement of this problem of marginalisation of African philosophy to point out relevant doctrines from the African place. I show how they are united under the methodological and ideological disposition of conversationalism. I argue that this ideology might be a better model for realising the goal of global epistemic justice which is the overcoming of all forms of exclusions and lopsidedness in global epistemic discourses through fair allocation of intellectual spaces.