Browsing by Subject "Epistemology"
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Item Effects of intervention on undergraduate pre-service teachers in literacy educationWilliams, Alma ElizabethItem Epistemicism(2015-05) Hu, Ivan J.; Sainsbury, R. M. (Richard Mark); Kamp, Hans; Bonevac, Daniel A.; Koons, Robert C.; Dever, Joshua; Raffman, DianaI propose a new theory of vagueness centered around the epistemology and normativity of vagueness. The theory is a version of epistemicism—the view that vagueness is a fundamentally epistemic phenomenon—that improves upon existing epistemicist accounts by accommodating both the alleged tolerance and open texture of vague predicates, while foregoing excessive metaphysical commitments. I offer a novel solution to the infamous Sorites paradox, one that outrivals alternative contextualist theories in their ability to explain the phenomenology of vagueness as well as its deontic consequences.Item An epistemological approach to the mind-body problem(2011-08) Bogardus, Tomas Alan; Tye, Michael; Pautz, Adam R.; Koons, Robert C.; Bonevac, Daniel A.; Sosa, Ernest D.; Barnett, David B.This dissertation makes progress on the mind-body problem by examining certain key features of epistemic defeasibility, introspection, peer disagreement, and philosophical methodology. In the standard thought experiments, dualism strikes many of us as true. And absent defeaters, we should believe what strikes us as true. In the first three chapters, I discuss a variety of proposed defeaters—undercutters, rebutters, and peer disagreement—for the seeming truth of dualism, arguing that not one is successful. In the fourth chapter, I develop and defend a novel argument from the indefeasibility of certain introspective beliefs for the conclusion that persons are not complex objects like brains or bodies. This argument reveals the non-mechanistic nature of introspection.Item Evidentiary criteria in Galen : three competing accounts of medical epistemology in the second century CE(2012-12) Salas, Luis Alejandro; Hankinson, R. J.; White, Stephen AThis report examines the sectarian backdrop for Galen of Pergamum's medical epistemology. It considers the justificatory role that experience (empeiria) and theoretical accounts (logoi) play in Empiricist and Dogmatist epistemology in an attempt to track how Galen incorporates experience into theoretical accounts as a means by which to undergird them. Finally, it briefly considers the exiguous evidence for Methodism, Galen's main medical rivals in the Roman world and claims that Galen forges a middle path between these sects.Item The intellectual given(2010-05) Bengson, John Thomas Steele; Sosa, David, 1966-; Bealer, George; Dancy, Jonathan; Pautz, Adam; Sainsbury, Mark; Tye, MichaelSome things we know just by thinking about them: for example, that identity is transitive, that three are more than two, that wantonly torturing innocents is wrong, and other propositions which simply strike us as true when we consider them. But how? This essay articulates and defends a rationalist answer which critically develops a significant analogy between intuition and perception. The central thesis is that intuition and perception, though different, are at a certain level of abstraction the same kind of state, and states of this kind are, by their very nature, poised to play a distinctive epistemic role. Specifically, in the case of intuition, we encounter an intellectual state that is so structured as to provide justified and even knowledgeable belief without requiring justification in turn—something which may, thus, be thought of as given. The essay proceeds in three stages. Stage one advances a fully general and psychologically realistic account of the nature of intuition, namely, as an intellectual presentation of an apparent truth. Stage two provides a modest treatment of the epistemic status of intuition, in particular, how intuition serves as a source of immediate prima facie justification. Stage three outlines a response to Benacerraf-style worries about intuitive knowledge regarding abstract objects (e.g., numbers, sets, and values); the proposal is a constitutive, rather than causal, explanation of the means by which a given intuition connects a thinker to the fact intuited.Item Perceptual Disanalogy: On the Alstonian Analogy Argument from Religious Experience(2010-10-12) Williams, William ColemanAnalogy arguments from religious experience attempt to establish a direct analogy between sense perception and certain kinds of religious experience construed in terms of a perceptual model. C. B. Martin challenges traditional analogy arguments from religious experience by contending that there is a disanalogy between both kinds of experience due to the fact that there is a society of testing and checkup procedures available to sense perception that is not available to religious experience. William P. Alston presents his own analogy argument from religious experience in Perceiving God. Alston establishes an analogy between sense perception and religious experience by arguing that certain kinds of religious experience can be construed in terms of a perceptual model. In doing so, Alston maintains that sense perception and certain kinds of religious experience that count as perception?mystical perception?produce justified beliefs in very similar ways. Thus, Alston defuses Martin's objection by arguing that both kinds of perception have testing and checkup procedures available to them, procedures which are necessary to defeat the prima facie justification of perceptual beliefs. However, I argue that because there are apparently inconsistent core beliefs in the practice of forming beliefs on the basis of Christian mystical perception, the analogy between sense perception and mystical perception is threatened. In order for Alston's analogy argument to be successful, he must address this problem.Item Rational belief in classical India : Nyaya's epistemology and defense of theism(2010-05) Dasti, Matthew Roe; Phillips, Stephen H., 1950-; Sosa, Ernest D.; Koons, Robert C.; Bonevac, Daniel; Juhl, Cory; Bryant, Edwin F.Nyāya is the premier realist school of philosophy in classical India. It is also the home of a sophisticated epistemology and natural theology. This dissertation presents a distinctive interpretation of Nyāya’s epistemology and considers how it may be developed in response to various classical and contemporary challenges. I argue that it is best understood as a type of reliabilism, provided relevant qualifications. Moreover, I show that a number of apparently distinct features of Nyāya’s approach to knowledge tightly cohere when seen as components of a thoroughgoing epistemological disjunctivism. I defend Nyāya epistemology as a viable contemporary option, illustrating how it avoids problems faced by generic reliabilism. In the second portion of the dissertation, I examine the way in which Nyāya’s knowledge sources (perception, inference, and testimony) are deployed in support of a theistic metaphysics, highlighting Nyāya’s principled extension of its views of knowledge acquisition. In an appendix, I provide a full translation and commentary on an argument for God’s existence by Vācaspati Miśra (a 10th century philosopher who is unique in having shaped several distinct schools), found in his commentary on Nyāya-sūtra 4.1.21.Item Telling secondhand stories : news aggregation and the production of journalistic knowledge(2015-08) Coddington, Mark Allen; Reese, Stephen D.; Anderson, C W; Bock, Mary A; Lawrence, Regina G; Strover, Sharon LNews aggregation has become one of the most widely practiced forms of newswork, as more news is characterized by information taken from other published sources and displayed in a single abbreviated space. This form of newsgathering has deep roots in journalism history, but creates significant tension with modern journalism's primary newsgathering practice, reporting. Aggregation's reliance on secondhand information challenges journalism's valorization of firsthand evidence-gathering through the reporter's use of observation, interviews, and documents. This dissertation examines the epistemological practices and professional values of news aggregation, exploring how aggregators gather and verify evidence and present it as factual to audiences. It looks at aggregation in relationship to the dominant values and practices of modern professional journalism, particularly those of reporting. The study employs participant observation at three news aggregation operations as well as in-depth interviews with aggregators to understand the practices of news aggregation as well as the epistemological and professional values behind them. I found that aggregation proceeds by gathering textual evidence of the forms of evidence gathered through reporting work, positioning it as a form of second-order newswork built atop the epistemological practices and values of modern journalistic reporting. Aggregators' distance from the evidence on which they base their reports lends them a profound sense of uncertainty, which they attempt to mitigate by using textual means to communicate their epistemological ambivalence to their audiences and by seeking out technologically afforded means to get closer to news evidence. Aggregators' uncertainty extends to their professional identity, where they attempt to improve their marginal professional status by articulating their own ethical values but also by emphasizing their connections to traditional reporting. Narratively speaking, however, their work does not break down traditional journalistic forms, but instead broadens the narrative horizon to conceive of individual news accounts primarily as part of larger story arcs. The study illuminates the fraught relationship between aggregation and reporting, finding that while aggregation is heavily dependent on reporting, it can be developed as a valid, professionally valued form of newswork. Ultimately, both forms of work have a crucial role to play in providing vital, engaging news to the public.Item The structure of perceptual justification(2016-08) Miller, Brian Townsend; Sosa, Ernest; Dever, Josh; Dogramaci , Sinan; Pryor, James; Sainsbury, Richard; Schoenfield, MiriamWhen does a perceptual experience as of my hands provide justification for me to believe that I have hands? One initially plausible positive requirement is that I must have reasons to believe something else: that my experience is veridical. Also plausible is the negative requirement that I must not have reasons to believe that my experience is in this case non-veridical. Dogmatists about perception reject the positive requirement and embrace the negative one, holding that perceptual justification is immediate — it doesn’t rest upon any other justification that I possess — but it is also defeasible, and in particular it is underminable. Whereas Dogmatism is a theory in the epistemology of perception, Bayesianism is a theory of coherence for partial beliefs and of how coherence it to be maintained in the face of new evidence. Just as it is incoherent to believe both I have hands and ¬(I have hands), it is incoherent to be highly confident in both of those propositions. Bayesianism offers a formal account of this latter type of coherence. Importantly, though Bayesianism is a theory of coherence, it is not a coherence theory of the sort defended by Davidson and BonJour: it is not an attempt to explain all facts about justification in terms of facts about coherence. Hence the Bayesian’s claim that partial beliefs are subject to norms of coherence is at least prima facie consistent with the Dogmatist’s claim that some beliefs are immediately justified by experience. I develop and defend Bayesian Dogmatism. I begin by responding to an argument advanced by Cohen, Hawthorne, Schiffer, and White, which purports to show that Bayesians cannot model episodes of perceptual learning in which the proposition learned is both immediately justified and defeasible. I go on to respond to arguments from Weisberg, which purport to show that Bayesianism is inconsistent with underminable perceptual learning. Finally, I defend the superiority of Jeffrey Conditionalization to Holistic Conditionalization as a rule of updating on propositions learned from experience.Item The Varieties of Self-Knowledge(2012-07-16) Kabeshkin, Anton SergeevichIn this thesis I consider the problem of the distinctiveness of knowledge of our own mental states and attitudes. I consider four influential approaches to this problem: the epistemic approach, the "no reasons view," the neo-expressivist approach and the rational agency approach. I argue that all of them face serious problems. I further argue that many of these problems are connected with the lack of fine-grained enough classification of the entities with respect to which we have self-knowledge. I suggest such a classification, distinguishing passive occurrent mental states, mental actions and standing attitudes, and argue that we should treat each of these categories separately for the purpose of explaining self-knowledge of them. I discuss in detail self-knowledge we have with respect to two of these categories: standing attitudes and mental actions. On my account self-knowledge of standing attitudes stands in a derivative relation to self-knowledge of other kinds. In my discussion of self-knowledge of mental actions I establish that we have a distinctive non-observational kind of self-knowledge and show some specific characteristics of this kind of self-knowledge. In the end I attempt to relate self-knowledge of mental actions to practical knowledge in the ordinary sense of skill.Item Transnational Mexican-origin families : ways of knowing and implications for schooling(2012-05) Kasun, Gail Sue; Urrieta, Luis; De Lissovoy, Noah; Foley, Douglas E.; Sánchez, Patricia; Valenzuela, AngelaTransnational Mexican-origin Families is a qualitative study of four working class, Mexican-origin families who resided in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. region and who also made return visits to Mexico at least every two years. Through critical ethnographic case studies, the researcher worked with the families for over two years in multi-sited ethnography, with locations in the U.S. and Mexico. The dissertation examines the following question: What are the ways of knowing of Mexican-origin transnational students and their families in the Washington, D.C. area, and how do these transnational families experience their ways of knowing regarding education in formal schooling contexts? Using transnational theory and Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of conocimiento, or knowing, this study shows how transnational families’ ways of knowing are situated in three mutually-constituted domains. They are: 1) chained knowing, including the ways participants are chained to the Mexican-U.S. border and to their communities in Mexico and the U.S., 2) sobrevivencia or survivalist knowing, in terms of how the families both survive and thrive, highlighting what I call their “underdog mentality” as well as the matters of life and death on both sides of the border, and 3) Nepantlera knowing, or an in-between knowing, which allows for attempts at bridge buildings and creation of Third Spaces. In regards to schooling, the transnational aspects of these families’ lives remained hidden, despite the students’ eagerness to share about their transnationalism. Schools tended to respond to their transnational families along the “continuum of the comfortable,” or a line where schools increased their outreach to these families only moderately and only along their terms. The intention of this research is to disrupt assimilationist discourses about immigrants, particularly in light of the need to be able to navigate an increasingly globalized world. Preliminary findings suggest the need to begin to reframe immigrants as transnational, value their language heritages, disrupt the comfort of educators in their outreach to transnational families, and for educators, in particular, to learn to do the work of border crossing in their outreach to transnational families.Item Undressing nature: the uncertain enlightenment and the hermeneutic ontology of the novel(2015-12) Cowles, Lynn Aysley; Garrison, James D.; Rumrich, John; Bertelsen, Lance; Longaker, Mark; Ingrassia, Catherine_Undressing Nature_ argues that in some of the writing produced by pioneers working in new literary generic forms at the end of the Early Modern period, the characteristics of irony, self-reflexive discourse, and the consistent examination of the fictional in relation to the real function narratively and culturally to undermine the empiricist project of totalizing knowledge that prescribed the field of natural philosophy during the Enlightenment. These characteristics, which came to be identified with the genre of the novel in subsequent centuries, refuse the determination of perfect or exact meaning within systems of signification, and they excavate the Enlightenment subject from Cartesian epistemological interiority. As they contemplated divisions between the external material world and the inner thinking mind, some Early Modern figures relied on the rhetorical tradition of figuring words or expression as the dress or clothing that brings forth human thought or nature into the world of interaction and communication. Because of the philosophical position of language or dress in between the universal and the particular, these metaphors provide fascinating examples of the philosophical nexus between literature, culture, and philosophy. By approaching the task of interpreting both words and the world with skepticism, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and Henry Fielding scrutinized the ideological infrastructures of Enlightenment thought and reformulated contemporary understandings of knowing and being. Their ironic discourse interrogated the concept of the stable self, and in the process of doing so, these authors tested out, examined, and developed a discursive structure for meaning and interpretation that relied on the subject’s position in a networked system of identification. In such a system, being and identity are contingent upon the subject’s relationship not only with other subjects but also with material objects in the world like books and clothes. The externalizing of subjectivity removes the self from the Cartesian binary of mind and body and implicates the subject in relation to others such that identity and meaning are understood in an hermeneutic network of ontological signification. Undressing Nature argues that the discursive structure of the novel provides a venue in which theorizers of uncertainty and indeterminacy during the Enlightenment produced narratives that exhibit and reconstruct that hermeneutic ontology.