Overcoming obstacles to a truly global psychological theory,research, and praxis in Africa

In African countries, psychology as it is taught, researched, and practised contributes to epistemic injustice and epistemological violence while depriving Africans of epistemic agency. This is largely because psychology has remained and continues to remain Eurocentric. However, the continual Eurocentric hegemony is not entirely imposed but internalised. This has made this Eurocentric hegemony self-perpetuating with African involvement. In this paper, the sources of this hegemony are explored with a view to identifying how Africans themselves contribute to the persistence of these academic “ills”. Furthermore, processes are examined through which African psychologists can disentangle themselves from this vicious cycle in order to make accurate and innovative contributions to the global understanding of human nature. Nsamenang’s pioneering role in confronting the wrongs is discussed, paving the way for the next generation of African psychologists to make contributions that are similar to, or surpass, Nsamenang’s lifetime contributions. I conclude by making some recommendations as to the way forward in the post-Nsamenang era.     

Fuzzy Genes: Epistemic Tensions in Genomics

Genomics contributed to making modern biology a prolific multi-disciplinary field leading to new approaches such as systems biology. Reporting in the media reflects the high stakes involved in these changes, but such reporting often appears inconsistent as contradictory claims are made about new applications contrasting with uncertainties from new insights. Such inconsistent claims might relate to different disciplines involved in the field. New approaches from engineering disciplines such as computer science have changed research practices and approaches towards the object; the meaning of genes having become context-dependent. Since disciplines must cooperate, tensions arise over methods, evidence criteria and the significance of hypotheses. The concept of epistemic cultures, developed to highlight differences between distant fields such as high-energy physics and molecular biology, can render insights into the ‘cultures’ related to practices and approaches within genomics. Qualitative interviews with scientists shed light on how computer science and experimental molecular biology co-operate and which problems arise from epistemic differences as the criteria for relevant findings become subject to the disciplinary context. In addition, genomics-like approaches have entered other fields of biological research, whilst systems biology further challenges hypothesis-driven experimentation. This may lead to a new epistemic culture differing from the one previously described. These findings provide insights into how different accounts arise and shed light on general properties of prolific multi-disciplinary research fields. Inconsistencies in the way such fields appear from outside might be considered normal rather than the exception.     

Situating Rhetorical Politics in Heidegger's Protopractical Ontology 1923–25: The French Occupy the Ruhr

Abstract

¹ 1 I am grateful to audiences at the University of California, Riverside, the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association at the University of East Anglia, and at Dalhousie University for helpful questions. Sincere thanks go to two anonymous referees and the editors of this Journal. For written comments, detailed discussion and encouragement, I am particularly grateful to Duncan MacIntosh, Susan Sherwin, Richmond Campbell, Lorraine Code, Steven Burns, Guy Longworth, Gary Watson, Margaret Chapman and Guy Blanchard. This paper makes a preliminary case for a central and radical claim. I begin with Bernard Williams’ seldom-faced argument that integrity cannot be a moral virtue because it lacks two key ingredients of moral virtues, namely a characteristic thought and motivation. Whereas, for example, generosity involves the thought that another could use assistance, and the motivation to actually give assistance, integrity lacks these two things essential to morally excellent responses. I show that several maneuvers aimed at avoiding Williams’ challenge fail and that others are likely to remain unpersuasive. The paper concludes by offering an argument to the best explanation: Williams’ important insight is best explained by the supposition that integrity is an epistemic virtue, and an epistemic virtue of a practical sort.     

The Internal Problem of Dreaming: Detection and Epistemic Risk

Abstract

There are two epistemological problems connected with dreaming, which are of different kinds and require different treatment. The internal problem is best seen as a problem of rational consistency, of how we can maintain all of:

1. Dreams are experiences we have during sleep.

2. Dream‐experiences are sufficiently similar to waking experiences for the subject to be able to mistake them for waking experiences.

3. We can tell that we are awake.

(1)–(3) threaten to violate a requirement on discrimination: that we can only tell Xs from Ys if there is some detectable difference between Xs and Ys. Attempts to solve the problem by Descartes and Williams are considered. It is suggested that if we take account of levels of epistemic risk, we can use Descartes’s criterion of lack of coherence, at least with hindsight – which is the time when we need to use it.     

Response to ‘Somatic Intentionality Bifurcated: A Sellarisan Response to Sachs’s Merleau-Pontyan Account of Intentionality’

ABSTRACT

This article advances a new analysis of stupidity as a distinctive form of cognitive failing. Section 1 outlines some problems in explicating this notion and suggests some desiderata. Section 2 sketches an existing model of stupidity, found in Kant and Flaubert, which serves as a foil for my own view. In Section 3, I introduce my theory: I analyse stupidity as form of conceptual self-hampering, characterised by a specific aetiology and with a range of deleterious effects. In Section 4, I show how this proposal meets the desiderata and I clarify how it diverges from existing accounts. My position is close to a ‘public health approach’, in contrast to the virtue/vice framework employed by Engel or Mulligan.     

On epistemic and moral certainty: A wittgensteinian approach

Abstract

Epistemic and moral certainities like ‘This is a hand’ or ‘Killing people is evil’ will be interpreted as constitutive rules of language games, such that they are unjustifiable, undeniable and serving as obliging standards of truth, goodness and rationality for members of a community engaging in the respective practices.     

Indicatives at stake

Several authors have claimed that indicative conditionals are sensitive to the epistemic perspective of agents. According to this sort of view, the truth of an indicative conditional depends on the background evidence of some relevant agent or group of agents. In this paper, I argue that the context-dependence of indicative conditionals goes beyond this. Indicative conditionals are not only sensitive to the evidence of agents, but also to contextual factors that determine what is inferable from such background evidence (plus the antecedent of the conditional). More specifically, my proposal is that when the inference associated with a conditional is defeasible, the truth of that conditional is sensitive to practical stakes (in a similar way that knowledge claims are sensitive to practical stakes).     

Children's Understanding of Behavioral Consequences of Epistemic States: A Comparison of Knowledge,Ignorance, and False Belief

The author addressed the issue of the simultaneity of false belief and knowledge understanding by investigating children's ability to predict the behavioral consequences of knowledge, ignorance, and false belief. The second aim of the study was to explore the role of counterfactuals in knowledge understanding. Ninety-nine (99) children, age 3–7 years old, completed the unexpected transfer task and a newly designed task in which a protagonist experienced 1 of the following 4 situations: knowing a fact, not knowing a fact, knowing a procedure, and not knowing a procedure. The results showed that factual ignorance was as difficult as false belief for the children, whereas the other conditions were all easier than false belief, suggesting that the well-known lag between ignorance and false belief may be partly methodologically based. The results provide support for a common underlying conceptual system for both knowing and believing, and evidence of the role of counterfactual reasoning in the development of epistemic state understanding. Methodological variations of the new task are proposed for future research.     

A PUZZLE ABOUT NATURALISM

Abstract: This article presents and solves a puzzle about methodological naturalism. Trumping naturalism is the thesis that we must accept p if science sanctions p, and biconditional naturalism the apparently stronger thesis that we must accept p if and only if science sanctions p. The puzzle is generated by an apparently cogent argument to the effect that trumping naturalism is equivalent to biconditional naturalism. It turns out that the argument for this equivalence is subtly question‐begging. The article explains this and shows more generally that there are no scientific arguments for biconditional naturalism.     

INTRODUCTION: VIRTUE AND VICE

Abstract: This introduction to the collection Virtue and Vice, Moral and Epistemic addresses three main questions: (1) What is a virtue theory in ethics or epistemology? (2) What is a virtue? and (3) What is a vice? (1) It suggests that a virtue theory takes the virtues and vices of agents to be more fundamental than evaluations of acts or beliefs, and defines right acts or justified beliefs in terms of the virtues. (2) It argues that there are two important but different concepts of virtue: virtues are qualities that attain good ends, and virtues are qualities that involve good motives. (3) Accordingly, vices are qualities that either fail to attain good ends or involve bad motives. Finally, the introduction summarizes the eleven essays in the collection, which are divided into four sections: the Structure of Virtue Ethics and Virtue Epistemology; Virtue and Context; Virtue and Emotion; and Virtues and Vices.