Browsing by Subject "Epistemology"

This thesis investigates two episodic television shows, Arrested Development and Scrubs, and attempts to establish why one succeeded with audiences and the other failed. Following the work of genre theory, it is asserted that the two shows resonate with opposing narratives framing lived experience. The former presents the institutional (or restrictive) force of language to guide one's thoughts, mark disassociations between the self and others, and determine action. The latter appeals to the creative (or liberating) use of dialogue and narrative to inspire agency. In privileging the concrete situations in which interactions with others enable growth without restricting the will, and in which others are engaged in the same self-investigation, Scrubs calls for an acknowledgement of others. Arrested Development points to the metaphysical language and power systems that make such acknowledgements impossible. It is argued thereafter that both world-pictures have their place. The opposition between Arrested Development and Scrubs develops into a dual affirmation of how ordinary uses of language have the potential to create arbitrary limits between the self and others, but also how ordinary language in a state of emergence from the particular lives of a multiplicity of speakers enables us to meaningfully communicate in the first place and antagonizes the metaphysical pictures that hold us captive. This thesis concludes by exploring the way that fiction, as a series of propositions, occupies the middle space between an epistemological opening up and closing off of the self to others, allowing it to be used for either purpose, or for both at once.

This thesis comprises an investigation into a very well known and perennial philosophical debate over the interpretive status of our most well confirmed scientific theories, known as "scientific realism." I do not defend scientific realism; rather, I set out to determine what scientific realism is in the first place. My contention is that the thesis is not a single, unified view, but rather a conglomeration of loosely associated propositions that are highly conceptually interwoven, but rarely distinguished. These consist of several different metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic doctrines, which I examine in great detail. I then argue that the indeterminate nature of scientific realism muddles the issue (if there is any) and renders debates fruitless. I attempt to define a thesis with relatively more precise content, which I call the "Core Realist Commitment," CRC. I argue that the CRC prioritizes epistemology - with the thesis that we can and do have (some) theoretical knowledge. I then demonstrate the relatively minimal commitments of the CRC, namely, a minimalist and very undemanding metaphysics, and almost none of the semantic theses that have been traditionally associated with realism. I conclude that the CRC is a step forward in thinking about the debate, not just for its relative precision but also because it is consistent with, and even tolerant of, a wide array of disagreement over concerns that are, I argue, external to the debate and need to be decided on independent grounds.

Heightened awareness of the evolutionary, socio-cultural, and psychological origins of our moral judgments pushes many of us in the direction of moral skepticism, in the direction of doubting the objective truth of our moral judgments. But should awareness of the origins of our moral judgments shake our confidence in them? Are there good moral debunking challenges or debunking arguments from premises concerning the accessible origins of our moral judgments to skeptical conclusions regarding them? In vigorous pursuit of these questions, this dissertation sifts three promising moral debunking challenges to moral realism, namely Richard Joyce's (2001) evolutionary debunking argument from epistemic insensitivity, Sharon Street's (2006) "Darwinian Dilemma," and David Enoch's (2010) "Epistemological Challenge." It is argued that each challenge faces cogent objections that not only demonstrate the inadequacy of the best debunking challenges available but also instructively guide us to the development of new and more forceful debunking challenges to moral realism. This dissertation develops two new and forceful debunking challenges, both of which target the epistemic reliability and justification of our moral judgments on realist views of the moral facts. The first new debunking challenge starts from the premise that the best explanation of our moral judgments does not appeal to their truth and invokes a new species of epistemic insensitivity to secure the conclusion that our moral belief-forming processes are epistemically unreliable. The second new debunking challenge reasons that the best explanation of the fact that moral realists have no good explanation of the reliability of our moral belief-forming processes is that there is no such reliability.

In this dissertation, I defend the thesis that an epistemic judgment of probability must be interpreted against the background of the context of inquiry in which it is made: in the abductive context, judgments of probability are matters of decision, made strategically in service to the investigative goal of the inquirer; in deduction, probabilities are derived based on the premises chosen in abduction, in order to explicate the implied commitments the agent may incur from those decisions; during the inductive stage, the inquirer is expected to conduct her empirical investigation in a deliberate manner, in accordance with the assertions and decisions she made during abduction and deduction, collectively referred to as the deliberative context.

I set the stage by proposing a pragmatist reading of Bas van Fraassen's Reflection Principle and his voluntarist interpretation of assertions of degrees of beliefs as performative locutions to express the intention to undertake a proportional epistemic commitment. I argue for a refinement of this view that I call deliberativism, which introduces an abductive dimension to understand the normative force that regulates these epistemic judgments. I then argue that decisions made in the context of abduction have inferential repercussions on the validity of inductive inference. In particular, I situate deliberativism in the context of statistical inference by critically examining a problem in the literature called optional stopping, which occurs when the experimenter's intention to stop can manipulate the statistical significance of the data. The last chapter explores the Pericean idea of deductive reasoning as the strategic interrogation of a provisionally chosen hypothesis by focusing on J. M. Keynes' notion of the weight of evidence.

This dissertation focuses on the intellectual and political trajectory of the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), an autonomous indigenous working group in which I participate, alongside other Aymaras and Quechuas from Bolivia. Grounding itself on the recuperation of ancestral knowledges of the ayllu and its reconstitution, this group has been seeking to decolonize knowledge and therefore society at large.

I have used an oral history methodology, revaluing the word and knowledge of the forefathers and foremothers. They are the inheritors and experts of the movement of caciques and representatives of communities and ayllus, who in the early twentieth century focused on defending their territorial rights on the basis of old colonial titles against the attacks of the landowning oligarchy. Using this methodology, I have questioned such principles of Western research as subject-object, Cartesian rationalism, the instrumental character of research, social discrimination, and epistemic racism in academia.

Guided by the Aymara axiom of qhip nayr uñtasis sarnaqapxañani, looking back to walk forth, as a pluriversal way of thinking that points the contemporaries to their immediate past and deep communal memory, out of whose relation critical sense emerges, it was possible to articulate the process of "Reconstitution and Strenghtening of the Ayllu," whose objective is the reconstitution of political and social organizing forms of thought, as well as the "renewal of Bolivia."

The concept of complementary duality is a salient aspect of Aymara and Quechua ontology, since together with triadic and tetralectic models, these are principles structuring ayllu knowledge, social organization, and politics. These principles are very different from the paradigms of dialectical materialism or the politics of "left" and "right." Despite colonial practices and colonialism, these principles still govern ayllu or communities, as paradigms learnt in the experience of work and needs, through the long observation of the cosmological movement and integration with animal and plant kingdoms, with mountains and vital or energetic fluids making up beings in the environment, all of which are considered as brethren and protecting parents.

Aymara and Quechua thought are wholistic and integral. Among their most important axes are parity and complementarity. These constitute a kind of vital codes, which in a way similar to deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) are found in almost all beings, in their most diverse modality, and therefore are the guarantors for the transmission of values and survival.

The THOA belongs to the range of lettered indiginous thinkers, such as Felipe Waman Puma de Ayala and Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti, as well as of the work Dioses y hombres de Huarochirí, the couple Katari-Amaru, or Eduardo Leandro Nina Qhispi - creator of the principle of brotherhood, who proposed the "renovation of Bolivia" -, among others who through our actions reivindicate the wisdom of the ayllus, which expresses a different way of doing politics. Bolivia's current President, Evo Morales, would be the starting point of that model, whose goal is the suma jaqaña or "good living".

My dissertation is about good arguments and why they fail to persuade. Besides being a common experience of everyday life, this is an old worry of Plato's that continues to motivate two contemporary lines of research. The first concerns what makes something a good argument, and the second concerns what a mind must be like to be moved by one. Together, these lines guide my project and divide it into two parts. Part I is about good reasons, specifically epistemic reasons. In my first chapter, I defend epistemic instrumentalism, the position that epistemic reasons are good reasons only relative to one's epistemic preferences. I acknowledge that epistemic instrumentalism opens the door to a terrible proliferation of incompatible preferences, but claim that this is merely a potential problem, and not an actual problem to be solved. In my second chapter, I discuss the nature of reasonhood, and argue, contrary to orthodoxy, that there is no compelling reason to accept the skeptic's claim that, because of the inconsistency of three very basic epistemic preferences, it is impossible for any position to be conclusively safe to hold. Part II is about immovable minds. Immovable minds are minds that are unpersuaded by good reasons. In my third chapter, I argue that for good reasons to be persuasive, the properties that make them good reasons must be identified, through habituation, with other desirable qualities like pleasure or success. Identifying the merits of good reasons with other rewards cultivates intellectual character, and intellectual character, as I argue in my final chapter, remains worth cultivating, notwithstanding situationist doubts about the existence of character and intuitionist concerns about human rationality.

Naturalism faces problems caused by a lack of agreement about whether there is or can be a meaningful and useful conception of naturalism as a general research position. Without a widely agreed upon account of what naturalism in general amounts to there is no clear and definitive way to adjudicate disputes as to what is consistent with naturalism; the absence of such an account also makes it impossible for specific projects in naturalistic inquiry to take guidance from naturalism in general. In the following, I develop a determinate account of naturalism in general, which I think could find acceptance among naturalists because it accounts for many of the features commonly associated with naturalism. To do this, I first lay out the problem to be solved, express its importance, and explain what a solution to the problem would involve. I then make appeal to an account of naturalism developed by Penelope Maddy and use this account to show that the published and unpublished work of Charles Sanders Peirce offers, prima facie, a more determinate account of naturalism than is commonly recognized and that goes beyond the account given by Maddy. With this Peircean account developed, I then measure it against the criteria I develop and conclude that a Pericean account of naturalism does promise to adjudicate various disputes in the naturalism literature and to offer guidance to the development and application of specific projects in naturalistic inquiry.

As a work of Christian dogmatic theology, this dissertation proceeds from the primary theological claim that human existence in time is determined by the incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. It also examines how the predominant accounts of time in the modern West have been affected by, and produced by, claims of scientific authority. The implications of these accounts are not only a matter of abstract doctrinal and philosophical reflection. Instead, they have had, and continue to have, concrete ramifications for human life together. They have been death-dealing rather than life-giving, characterized by a set of temporal pathologies that participate at the deepest level in marking some lives as expendable.

There are four particular pathologies that this project addresses in turn. The first is the mystification of theology by questions of human origins, especially as those questions are addressed by figures of scientific authority. The second is the problem of progress and politicized eschatology, in which securing a desired vision of the future becomes a human project. The third is temporal distancing, in which some human beings are marked as temporally retrograde or outside of history. The fourth, and final, problem addressed is the Hegelian perspective outside of time from which time is evaluated.

This dissertation offers a set of Christological temporal recalibrations through a reading of Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, highlighting the ways that both figures rejected an approach to time that is not coincidentally intertwined with a racialized account of history, and with the co-opting of Christianity by the modern Western state. It also suggests how the liturgical calendar may, and may not, provide Christians with the formational resources to think differently about their own time, and about their neighbors.

Dwelling with the alterity of the deep sea, my dissertation, "Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater," considers how the ocean environment produces cognitively estranging conditions for conceptualizing media and media theory. Concepts in media theory have thus far exhibited what I call a "terrestrial bias," theorizing primarily dry technologies through a language whose metaphorics have developed through human lives lived on land, rather than in the volume of the sea. In order to better understand the "terrestrial bias" in media theory, I develop a critical method of "conceptual displacement" that involves submerging key concepts in media theory underwater, engaging both literary texts and digital media. Specifically, I turn to Vilém Flusser's speculative fiction text "Vampyroteuthis Infernalis" to rethink "inscription"; ocean data visualizations to rethink "database"; and Jacques Cousteau's diving narratives to rethink "interface." Focusing on the ocean expands the critical discussion of the relation between embodiment and knowledge taken up by feminist science studies, and necessitates the inclusion of the environmental conditions for knowing; our milieu determines the possibilities of our media, and the way that we theorize our media in language. The ocean thus serves as an epistemic environment for thought that estranges us from our terrestrial habits of perception and ways of speaking about media, providing an important check on the limits of theory and terrestrial knowledge production, compelling us to have the humility to continually try to see--and describe--differently.

Turning to the ocean to rethink concepts in media theory makes apparent the interrelation between technology, desire, ecology, and the survival of human communities. While media theory has long been oriented toward preservation and culture contexts of recording, studying media in ocean contexts requires that we consider conditions that are necessarily but contingently ephemeral. Yet to engage with the ephemeral is also to engage with issues of mortality and the desire towards preservation--of what we want to remain--a question that especially haunts coastal communities vulnerable to sea-level rise. What the ocean teaches us, then, is to reflect on what we want our media technologies to do, as well as the epistemological question of how we are habituated to see and perceive. By considering the ocean as a medium and as an estranging milieu for reconsidering media concepts, I argue for an expanded definition of "media" that accounts for the technicity of natural elements, considering how media futures are not only a matter of new digital innovations, but fundamentally imbricated with the archaic materiality of the analog.

“Witness” is widely recognized as an essential descriptor of Christian life, in large part because of Jesus’ final words to his disciples Acts 1:8, and yet little agreement exists about what practices constitute Christian witness. Despite Acts’ pervasive interest in “witness” as the shape of apostolic life, no one has yet engaged its entire narrative in order to illuminate its portrait of “witness.” This dissertation fills that gap in Christian scriptural scholarship via cohesive and comprehensive narrative analysis that, following Acts’ lead, privileges a theological hermeneutical lens in order present the epistemic and political aims embedded in Acts’ vision of witness. In Acts, apostolic witness originates with God, and God’s character and power comprehensively shape witness as a communal life-pattern of integrated epistemology and politics that repudiates all forms of falsehood and violence and, instead, embraces truth, resilience, and creativity as exemplified in Jesus’ resurrection. Acts’ portrait of witness urges Christians today toward essential practices of truth telling as well as creative and resilient responses to injustice. This twofold exhortation offers both great encouragement and a strong corrective to Christians engaged in contemporary politics in the United States and beyond.