The weight of facts: A puzzle about perception,reasons and deliberation

How should we understand the epistemic role of perception? According to epistemological disjunctivism (ED), a subject’s perceptual knowledge that p is to be explained in terms of the subject believing that p for a factive and reflectively accessible reason. I argue that ED raises far‐reaching questions for rationality and deliberation; I illustrate those questions by setting up a puzzle about belief‐suspension, and I argue that ED does not have the resources to make sense of the rationality of belief‐suspension in cases in which suspending is clearly rational. The conclusion that I draw from the puzzle is mainly negative: the epistemic contribution of perception cannot be explained in terms of a warrant‐conferring relation between perception and belief. However, toward the end, I sketch a positive picture of the epistemic role of perception in terms of a direct explanatory relation between perception and knowledge.     

Probing the history of social psychology,exploring diversity and views of the social: Publication trends in the European Journal of Social Psychology from 1971 to 2016

The European Journal of Social Psychology (EJSP), as the voice of the European Association of Social Psychology, aims to promote diversity and a distinctively ‘European’, more ‘social’, social psychology (SP). However, whether and how these objectives have been accomplished over time remains controversial. This article enters this debate, tracing the history of SP as depicted by EJSP publications, via two types of lexicometric analyses of all abstracts of the Journal (1971–2016). Themes, processes, methods, and their organisation in cycles and clusters over time, were identified and analysed. Regarding diversity, findings indicate that the publications reflect several of the new theoretical proposals that emerged over the years, but do not fully reflect the variety of perspectives and methods of the discipline. It further indicates that lately the ‘social’ is predominantly present in attention to pressing social issues, albeit the processes involved in them are mostly theorised at an individualistic level. This pattern suggests the importance of keeping open the quest for epistemological and methodological diversity, and of re-problematising what the ‘social’ in SP means. By contributing to mapping the history of SP, offering a more comprehensive and reflexive view for it, the present analyses also help in forging a stronger discipline.     

Naturalizing Moral Justification: Rethinking the Method of Moral Epistemology

The companion piece to this article, “Situating Moral Justification,” challenges the idea that moral epistemology's mission is to establish a single, all‐purpose reasoning strategy for moral justification because no reasoning practice can be expected to deliver authoritative moral conclusions in all social contexts. The present article argues that rethinking the mission of moral epistemology requires rethinking its method as well. Philosophers cannot learn which reasoning practices are suitable to use in particular contexts exclusively by exploring logical relations among concepts. Instead, in order to understand which reasoning practices are capable of justifying moral claims in different types of contexts, we need to study empirically the relationships between reasoning practices and the contexts in which they are used. The article proposes that philosophers investigate case studies of real‐world moral disputes in which people lack shared cultural assumptions and/or are unequal in social power. It motivates and explains the proposed case study method and illustrates the philosophical value of this method through a case study.     

My Scholarly Life in Cybernetics

This article narrates how I discovered cybernetics, who inspired me to make the contributions of which I am proud, and the ideas that led me to recognize the importance of understanding the social world we live in as a consequence of what we do in language. It took me some time before I recognized that circular causality and digitalization that made cybernetics the driver of the current revolution toward a computationally autonomous information society had serious limitations. When used to explain human involvements, the mathematics of cybernetics trivializes what we do to each other and blinds us to recognize how cybernetics transformed society. Studying conversations and discourses made me aware of how cybernetic vocabularies, guiding concepts, and computational metaphors were enacted. By contrast to (first- or second-order) cybernetics, I learned that a cybernetics that is practiced in conversations and acknowledges the social consequences of what it generates had to be reflexive. Shifting attention from causal circularities to reflexive circularities opens up huge new areas for exploring socially meaningful contributions and criticizing the epistemologies of mindless discursive practices (e,g., of claiming the superiority of artificial intelligence and the power of computers). Such claims merely entrap their believers into inaction.     

Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks: The Role of Analogies in Bioethical Analysis and Argumentation Concerning New Technologies

New medical technologies provide us with new possibilities in health care and health care research. Depending on their degree of novelty, they may as well present us with a whole range of unforeseen normative challenges. Partly, this is due to a lack of appropriate norms to perceive and handle new technologies. This article investigates our ways of establishing such norms. We argue that in this respect analogies have at least two normative functions: they inform both our understanding and our conduct. Furthermore, as these functions are intertwined and can blur moral debates, a functional investigation of analogies can be a fruitful part of ethical analysis. We argue that although analogies can be conservative; because they bring old concepts to bear upon new ones, there are at least three ways in which they can be creative. First, understandings of new technologies are quite different from the analogies that established them, and come to be analogies themselves. That is, the concepts may turn out to be quite different from the analogies that established them. Second, analogies transpose similarities from one area into another, where they previously had no bearing. Third, analogies tend to have a figurative function, bringing in something new and different from the content of the analogies. We use research-biobanking as a practical example in our investigations.     

EXPERIENCE AND EXPLANATION: THE JUSTIFICATION OF COGNITIVE CLAIMS IN THEOLOGY

Abstract. The justification of cognitive claims in theology can be dealt with adequately only if the epistemological issues of metaphorical reference, experiential adequacy, and explanatory progress are seen as crucial problems for the more encompassing problem of rationality in theology. In order to guarantee any claim to reality depiction the theologian will have to argue for a plausible theory of reference on the basis of interpreted religious experience. In this discussion important analogies between the rationality of theological theorizing and the rationality of science are revealed.     

Contemplative dialogue as the basis for a transdisciplinary attitude: Ecoliteracy toward an education for human sustainability

Our EcoDialogue Center is an educational space for human sustainability within the University of Veracruz. We propose that creating sustainable knowledge requires re-thinking how we conceive ourselves as human beings. This requires paying attention to what we call “the quality of being,” which means caring about and attending to the physical–emotional–mental–spiritual as the foundation of education. This way we can create a space where we can dialogue contemplatively where all dimensions of our lives interact; the physical, the emotional, the communitarian, the social politic, the planetarium, and the spiritual being act with social–environmental responsibility.     

Identification of Matrices in Science and Engineering

Engineering science is a scientific discipline that from the point of view of epistemology and the philosophy of science has been somewhat neglected. When engineering science was under philosophical scrutiny it often just involved the question of whether engineering is a spin-off of pure and applied science and their methods. We, however, hold that engineering is a science governed by its own epistemology, methodology and ontology. This point is systematically argued by comparing the different sciences with respect to a particular set of characterization criteria. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Epistemological Beliefs of Technical College Instructors

The purpose of this study was to examine the epistemological beliefs of technical college instructors and to compare them by educational level. Data were collected and analyzed using two methods of inquiry. First, using the Learning Environment Preferences survey instrument, there was a significant difference in intellectual development among levels of education. Specifically, instructors with a master's degree scored significantly higher than instructors with either a baccalaureate or less than a baccalaureate degree. Second, focus groups were used to explain and interpret the findings. Two themes emerged showing different epistemological beliefs about ways of thinking and learning styles.     

心理学经验主义、理性主义与解释学认识论比较研究

虽然现代心理学一直想摆脱哲学的束缚与羁绊,但心理学的发展中总是自觉不自觉地表露出不同的认识论取向。经验主义、理性主义和解释学哲学对现代心理学的发展产生了重要影响。三种取向的心理学在心理学研究对象本质的理解、知识形成的途径、研究结果的表现形式以及研究方法的选择上各执己见,由此展现出三种不同的心理学风景。经验主义认识论注重事物各种特征的描述,经验材料的收集,主张采用自然科学研究方法以揭示现象的规律与法则。理性主义认识论关注现象背后的深层次结构,主张用信息加工、记忆检索、图式与结构、感觉输入等方式获得对现象本质的认识,并以形式结构的方式呈现研究结果。解释学认识论则注重对人类实践活动的理解,重视人与环境的相互作用,主张以语义的言说阐明研究结果。在未来,心理学仍需寻求完善的认识论基础,真正确立适于人性的心理学研究方式,以期展示人的完整本质。