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This essay criticizes an ideal of inquiry it calls “Dragnet epistemology,” which holds that objectivity is the absence of any bias. This is an inappropriate ideal for human beings: Our epistemic limitations require us to depend on a variety of biases. Failure to recognize this fact, together with the false belief that science and other investigations succeed because they satisfy this ideal, has the negative political consequences of obscuring objectionable biases in prevailing opinion and delegitimating minority viewpoints. For this reason, epistemology has political import. If we are to be good knowers, the kind of knowers crucial to the health of a democratic society, we need to attend to the social dimensions of knowing. Genuine objectivity is a social virtue—that one that emerges only out of a healthy interchange among a host of single “sides.” That, in turn, depends upon equality in access to the organs of public communication.

This essay attempts to draw out the implications of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour for the consideration of art. This is not something Sohn-Rethel intended or invited, but the aim here is to proceed immanently: by simply extending his critique of Kant’s epistemology to Kant’s aesthetics. The result is a critique of Kant’s influential account of aesthetic experience and art as an ideological form of commodity exchange abstraction.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce a dynamic and integrative epistemology as a substitute to normative epistemology. Design/methodology/approach A philosophical argument based on the critique of literature. Findings Normative epistemology implies that knowing leads to certainty, and it has to be objective and universal because it is an accurate representation of reality. Dynamic and integrative epistemology uphold that knowing leads to accumulating insights though information processing. Knowing is a unified but fourfold process of experiencing, understanding, judging and acting (Lonergan, 1990). It occurs at four levels of consciousness: the empirical, the intellectual, the evaluative and the pragmatic (Lonergan, 1990). Dynamic and integrative epistemology extends rationality, knowledge and intelligence to non-humans because institutions have substantive, structural, behavior and teleological dimensions and processes that enable them to process information, i.e. to know. Research limitations/implications Translating a conceptual paper into practical action, organizational structuring or product design can be difficult. Practical implications Extending the concept of rationality to non-humans implies realizing that human abilities are limited and need to be augmented by proper institutional design and artificial tools. Social implications The design of intelligent organizations, societies and artificial tools. Originality value Normative epistemology which considers reason and faith, empirical (experience) and rational (understanding), positive (facts) and ideal (principles, representations or wishes), physical (objects) and “mental” (ideas or concepts), practice and theory, knowledge (episteme) and opinion (doxa), reflection and action as opposed and mutually exclusive can be replaced by a dynamic and integrative epistemology which puts emotional, intellectual, evaluative and pragmatic dimensions of human knowing in an order of succession through a unified but yet differentiated process which can be augmented by non-human “experts”.

Support is canvassed for a new approach to epistemology called anti-risk epistemology. It is argued that this proposal is rooted in the motivations for an existing account, known as anti-luck epistemology, but is superior on a number of fronts. In particular, anti-risk epistemology is better placed than anti-luck epistemology to supply the motivation for certain theoretical moves with regard to safety-based approaches to knowledge. Moreover, anti-risk epistemology is more easily extendable to epistemological questions beyond that in play in the theory of knowledge specifically. A key advantage of the view, however, is that anti-risk epistemology fares much better than anti-luck epistemology when it comes to accounting for the phenomenon of negative epistemic dependence. In particular, anti-risk epistemology is ideally placed to explain why such epistemic dependence is incompatible with knowledge, even when the negative epistemic dependence in play is of a purely modal variety (as one finds in epistemic twin earth cases).

Is there any point in researching accounting history? To answer this question, the first part of this article considers some epistemological ideas based on Popperian and pragmatist philosophies. Us...

As a field of knowledge production, educational administration and leadership scholars do a substantial amount of talking past one another. These parallel monologues are a major issue for the advancement of knowledge. Original contributions can only be made in relation to others. That is, the innovation or significance of scholarship is an act of (social) scientific distinction. This means purposely engaging with the other. In this paper, I argue that the knowledge frontiers of educational administration and leadership are highly fragmented and siloed. I do not, however, see diversity of scholarship as a fatal flaw nor do I argue for a form of knowledge centrism. Rather, my intervention is to propose a social epistemology for moving knowledge claims.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore an approach to epistemology which allows a portion of library and information science (LIS) to coherently explain its social and intellectual contributions, and to overcome some of the problems of epistemology that LIS encounters. Design/methodology/approach Literature based conceptual analysis of the problems of epistemology in LIS and the productive approach of Deweyan Pragmatism. Findings LIS’ problems with epistemology come from a variety of sources: epistemology itself, the combining of librarianship with information science, and the search for a common grounding of the information professions, their tools and their institutions. No such theoretical foundation is possible, but Deweyan Pragmatism offers a sensible, practical explanation for the historical development and practices of librarianship. Originality/value Pragmatism has been deployed in portions of LIS, but the full implications and the “fit” of Dewey’s ideas for librarianship and its epistemology are productive explorations.

Bullshit is a widely recognized problem. While philosophy has given the topic some consideration, the analysis it offers is limited by an individualistic understanding of knowledge and epistemology. This article reframes bullshit as a problem of social epistemology, drawing on philosophical work on social epistemology as well as related research in psychology and the sociology of knowledge to explore the problem of epistemic vigilance. The article then draws on interactional sociology as well as Glaeser’s recent work on understanding and institutions to delineate those social forces that undermine the task of epistemic vigilance. The article then examines several different types of bullshit in light of this tension between the individual pragmatic need to have true beliefs and the social pragmatic need to get along.

This paper offers an account of religious belief using the resources available within naturalized epistemology. The account accepts the basic architecture of an individual’s ‘web of belief’ as articulated by Quine and Ullian, and explores some of the further details of the Quinean account of naturalised epistemology. The paper then updates that account drawing on recent work in psychology and cognitive science. The paper also considers the purpose of an individual’s web of belief. Quine’s web of belief has a very tightly constrained purpose, namely, the prediction of future experience in the light of past experience. But, drawing lessons from the feminist critique of analytic epistemology and the philosophy of science, this paper considers the consequences if the purposes of a web of belief are wider than simply predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Drawing on work from the cognitive science of religion the paper suggests a wider set of purposes could result in religious beliefs existing in a web of belief, even when that web of belief is understood purely from the perspective of naturalised epistemology.

I argue against Greco's account of the value of knowledge, according to which knowledge is distinctively valuablevis-à-visthat which falls short of knowledge in virtue of its status as an achievement and achievements being finally valuable. Instead, I make the case that virtuous belief is also an achievement. I argue that the nature of knowledge is such that knowledge is finally valuable in a way that virtuous belief is not, precisely because knowledge is not simply a success from ability. The value of knowledge lies in the positive responsiveness of the world to an agent's epistemic virtuousness.

Modern epistemology adopted the idea of historicism, of the historicity of knowledge and the self-consciousness of the cognizer. The research, undertaken within cultural–historical epistemology, also spread in the context of the prevailing tendencies in the sphere of modern epistemology. The specificity of this type of epistemology is related to a special interpretation of the history of cognition. On this interpretation knowledge represents a cultural phenomenon that has an existentially-symbolical meaning for the cognizer. Therefore this type of epistemology returns us to the dimension of knowledge, which has in fact been lost today. It returns us to the original antique notion of knowledge as “good,” as something that changes the person who acquires it. And here in this context comes forth such a feature of knowledge as its integrity. At the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Russian philosophers turned to the problem field of “integral knowledge,” the core of which lies in the...

This article aims at a confrontation of two approaches to epistemology in order to answer the question posed in its title whether the theory of knowledge should focus on static or dynamic aspects of human cognition. In the first part, the author presents a metascientific understanding of epistemology defined in his own works as an ordered set of investigative perspectives, which practicing researchers have at their disposal when they are interested to attain a specific state of knowledge, or to support their beliefs about the nature of investigative domains with regard to the existence forms and accessibility of investigated objects. And, in the second, the subject matter of a more detailed presentation constitutes a psychophysiological approach to epistemology pertaining to the human organism preoccupied with sensorial and mental activities as a cognizing subject who aims at achieving a certain kind of information about reality. Common for both approaches to epistemology is the attainment of experiential knowledge. However, when the metascientific epistemology refers to a dispositional-perspectivistic state of knowledge acquired in cognition, the attention of the psychophysiological epistemology is paid to cognitive-constructivists activities of human organisms as subject acquiring their knowledge through personal experiences.

Epistemology is the science related to the practice of knowledge, for which the method is fundamental to scientific knowledge. This article focuses on the problematic of the epistemology of space production theory and its philosophical importance in Social Sciences. Objectively, we seek to draw notes on the epistemology of Henri Lefebvre's space production theory with emphasis on its significance to Geography. To do so, we will turn to the reading of his work of the same name La producción del espacio, as well as a review of relevant literature and information already published and available in print or electronic media about episteme, the concept of space and its capitalist production, of the urban and of Lefebvre's own theory. In short, the theory discussed it is part of a production about the city,the space and the urban that carries with it the marks of observation and interpretation of its time. Its author sought, through his method and methods of procedure, to construct a simultaneously descriptive, analytical and global knowledge project that would result in a theory about an urban space production.

Within the analytic tradition—especially under the influence of Frege's anti-psychologism—the thought of incorporating empirical ps ychology in to epistemology was definitely out of bounds. This began to change with the advent of "naturalistic" epistemology, in which Epistemology and Cognition (1986) played a role. However, there is no settled consensus (even among the naturalistically inclined) as to how, exactly, empirical psychology or cognitive science should contribute to the epistemological enterprise. This is the topic to which the present paper is addressed. The discussion explores four topics or issues in contemporary epistemology to which current research in psychology might make helpful contributions: (1) the generality problem for reliabilism; (2) algorithms and belief-forming processes; (3) epistemology and the Bayesian theory of vision; and (4) the rationality wars and dual-process systems.

The epistemology of Giovanni Battista Baliani, a leading 17th century Italian scientist, is the focus of this article. In his treatise on motion, De motu naturali gravium solidorum (1638), Baliani’s epistemology was grounded on empirical principles—the law of the pendulum essentially—in the footsteps of the “old” mixed mathematics. In a new edition, De motu naturali gravium solidorum et liquidorum (1646), Baliani changed his approach and grounded his epistemology on principles of natural philosophy with a metaphysical and not empirical evidence. An analysis of Baliani’s writings reveals a tension between his empiricist philosophy, which he maintained throughout his life, and his mathematical approach, which was still based on experience; but on an experience derived from measurements and intrinsically affected by errors, it was hence uncertain. A comparison with Galileo’s epistemology is also made to better understand trends in mathematical physics at the end of the 1600’s.

This paper is a metaphilosophical investigation into the relationship between science and epistemology. I defend the rather radical view that philosophical questions in epistemology can be answered either a priori or "from the armchair." In making that case I suggest parallels between how I think one should conceptualize the study of ethical philosophy and how I think one should conceptualize the study of epistemology.

Reformed epistemology, roughly, is the thesis that religious belief can be rational without argument. After providing some background, I present Plantinga's defense of reformed epistemology and its influence on religious debunking arguments. I then discuss three objections to Plantinga's arguments that arise from the following topics: skeptical theism, cognitive science of religion, and basicality. I then show how reformed epistemology has recently been undergirded by a number of epistemological theories, including phenomenal conservatism and virtue epistemology. I end by noting that a good objection to reformed epistemology must criticize either a substantive epistemological theory or the application of that theory to religious belief; I also show that the famous Great Pumpkin Objection is an example of the former.

Kuhnian philosophy of science has established the existence of a social dimension within epistemology, but neo-Kuhnian accounts remain limited by linguistically centered conceptions of rationality and normativity. As an alternative, I use an embodied epistemology to reframe two neo-Kuhnian concepts: Fred D’Agostino’s (2010) federal model of enquiry and William Rehg’s (2009) immanent cogency. Both concepts are concerned, in part, with how scientific communities balance conservative and innovative impulses. By treating interaction as a fundamental frame of analysis, embodied epistemology offers a more nuanced perspective on this “essential tension,” while also blunting realist re-interpretations of each concept.

What is the criterion to accept or reject propositions about the social reality as scientific? We need rules for that, which must have some rationality, some logic. This logic is called epistemology. Science is epistemology. What is the epistemology of economics? The answer is still debated. The use of the falsification epistemology of Karl Popper in economics has been questioned. This chapter presents this epistemology and analyzes the reasons for its shortcomings. Then the chapter introduces the process epistemology of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, which deals with complex realities, and shows that the two epistemologies are complementary and thus can be combined into a single composite epistemology. The composite epistemology is now applicable to sciences dealing with complex realities, such as those studied by economics.

Debates regarding theory and practice in social work have often avoided detailed discussion regarding the nature of knowledge itself and the various ways this can be created. As a result, positivistic conceptions of knowledge are still assumed by many to be axiomatic, such that context-dependent and practitioner-oriented approaches to knowledge creation and use are assumed to lack epistemological rigor and credibility. By drawing on epistemology, this theoretical paper outlines the case for a renewed approach to knowledge definition, creation and use within social work by reference to pragmatism. Pragmatism has the potential to act as an organizing theoretical framework, taking account of the role of both ontology and epistemology, acting as a functional methodology for the further enhancement of practice-based knowledge.

Knowledge and skill are intimately connected. In this essay, I discuss the question of their relationship and of which (if any) is prior to which in the order of explanation. I review some of the answers that have been given thus far in the literature, with a particular focus on the many foundational issues in epistemology that intersect with the philosophy of skill.

Feminist standpoint epistemology is neither a necessary nor a sufficient starting point for social work intervention research. Contemporary social scientists readily grapple with cultural, political, and/or structural aspects of social problems either in the absence of or in conjunction with an explicitly formulated feminist standpoint epistemology. The article also argues against privileging any group’s voice for purposes of social work intervention research, including the voices of marginalized and oppressed groups whose judgments, perceptions, and statement of facts are as prone to error or likely to be as mistaken as anyone else’s.

Expanding on recent philosophical contributions to the conceptual and normative framework of scientific imperialism, I examine whether the economics approach to social epistemology can be considered a case of economics imperialism and determine whether economics’ explanatory expansionism appropriately contributes to this philosophical subfield or not. I argue first that the economics approach to social epistemology counts as a case of economics imperialism under a broad conception of the term, and second that we have good reasons to doubt the appropriateness of the incursion of economics into social epistemology, insofar as economics’ attempt at explanatory unification fails to express significant human interests.

Based on the methodology of the historical epistemology of knowledge organization with a Dilthyean approach, the aim of the study is to discuss some prominent aspects of Bibliology, considered as macroknowledge, based on the discourses of Gabriel Peignot, Paul Otlet and Robert Estivals. The main objective was to consider “epistemology” as the pioneer in the endeavor to support scientific discourse that is now called epistemology of informational studies, informational epistemology, or epistemology of Science Information. More specifically, the objective is to discuss the relationship of Bibliology with Peignot and Otlet and its expression during the “long nineteenth century”, based on scientific, rational and systematic culture and the acclaim of epistemology as it reflects academic-empirical knowledge. From a vertical perspective, we discuss the scientific concept of “book” and its importance for the development of Bibliology for Gabriel Peignot and Paul Otlet. A proposta do trabalho, sob a via metodológica de uma epistemologia histórica da organização dos saberes, de fundo diltheyano,é discutir alguns aspectos preponderantes da Bibliologia, tomada como macrossaber, a partir, centralmente, dos discursos deGabriel Peignot, Paul Otlet e Robert Estivals. É objetivo do estudo perceber tal “epistemologia” como uma das pioneiras na tentativa de sustentação de um discurso científico para o que hoje é tratado como epistemologia dos estudos informacionais, ouepistemologia informacional ou, ainda, epistemologia da Ciência da Informação. Especificamente objetiva-se aqui discutir a relação da Bibliologia entre Peignot e Otlet e sua manifestação no “longo século XIX”, pautado na cultura científica, racional e sistemática, e na consagração da epistemologia como reflexo do conhecimento acadêmico-empírico. Como verticalização, o estudo adentra a discussão sobre a elaboração científica do conceito de “livro” e sua prioridade na formulação da Bibliologia entre Gabriel Peignot e Paul Otlet

The whole culture of the Black man, his religion, his cosmology, his technology, and so on possesses scientific bases. However, the epistemological bases of his science differ from those of modern Western thought. And, this difference prevents those who study Black African culture on the basis of Western epistemology to discover its scientific scope. In this article, the author develops the naturalized epistemology of the African traditional science. This epistemology teaches us that the African starts from the notion of God, to whom all reality is attributed; the Black African science is mainly a deductive science in which knowledge is of a revelatory nature. Contrary to the Western epistemology, the focus of the epistemology of the African science is the moral and spiritual conformity of the initiate to the religious norms and the praxis of the knowledge he produces. Far from being a bunch of superstitious beliefs, the African traditional religion, which is the basis of African lore, is demonstrated today, thanks to the apologetic tools developed by the Institut des Sciences Animiques, to be a scientific knowledge whose cosmology leads to the holistic “theory of everything.” This proves the natural convergence between African traditional lore and Newtonian physics.

This article intends to show that the defense of “understanding” as one of the major goals of science education can be grounded on an anti-reductionist perspective on testimony as a source of knowledge. To do so, we critically revisit the discussion between Harvey Siegel and Alvin Goldman about the goals of science education, especially where it involves arguments based on the epistemology of testimony. Subsequently, we come back to a discussion between Charbel N. El-Hani and Eduardo Mortimer, on the one hand, and Michael Hoffmann, on the other, striving to strengthen the claim that rather than students’ belief change, understanding should have epistemic priority as a goal of science education. Based on these two lines of discussion, we conclude that the reliance on testimony as a source of knowledge is necessary to the development of a more large and comprehensive scientific understanding by science students.

GER Lloyd discerns two conflicting hypotheses concerning human cognition: cross-cultural universality and cultural relativity. The history of science is one discipline among many actively contributing to our understanding of human cognition at present. Not surprisingly, then, the dichotomy is also present in the history of science. In contrast to current approaches to the history of science, which highlight cultural relativity, genetic epistemology, which is conceived by Jean Piaget as a science of the acquisition of knowledge, emphasises cross-cultural universality. Using the multidimensionality of phenomena and different styles of inquiry, I will argue that there is no inherent contradiction in the different approaches to the history of science. However, the amicable co-existence of both approaches has been undermined by Peter Damerow, who criticised the applicability of genetic epistemology to the historical development of knowledge on historical and theoretical grounds. In this paper, I will review Damerow’s theoretical critique, and, in formulating a response, I will argue that genetic epistemology cannot be dismissed as one of many legitimate styles of inquiry into the history of science on the basis of this critique.

In this paper, it is argued that the differences between Gettier-era epistemology and post-Gettier epistemology can be largely traced to differences in methodology. We will give a “rational reconstruction” of how we did things then, what we do now, and what considerations moved us to do things differently. In summary form, during the Gettier era the methodology of epistemology was roughly what Chisholm called “particularism” and Rawls called “the method of reflective equilibrium.” Various developments forced an abandonment of this Gettier era methodology, in favor of several new constraints on an adequate theory of knowledge. Questions about the nature of epistemic normativity, the relations between knowledge and action, the value of knowledge, and the social dimensions of knowledge, all became important for adjudicating among competing theories of knowledge. This was appropriate in that the older methodology was inadequate. The new methodology accounts for the increased richness and depth that we see in epistemology today.

I will claim that the distinction Craig French describes between “specific realizations of knowledge” and “means of knowing”, after respective theorisations by Timothy Williamson and Quassim Cassam, can be seen as a faultline between epistemology on the one hand, and (merely) the analysis of ordinary language use on the other. The possibility of this disjunction, I believe, raises the question as to whether the latter kind of analysis has anything to contribute to epistemology at all. Cassam’s “explanatory” conception of ways of knowing is shown to be inconsistent as an epistemology, and prone to use of unfair examples even considered as (merely) the analysis of ordinary discourse for expressions of knowledge. Nonetheless, in order to argue that this is the case, the “explanatory” conception helps us to consider the better mode of analysis for explanations of knowledge in philosophy.

This collection then, in addition to contributing to some ongoing debates in applied epistemology, also aspires to be something of a call to arms. We hope that it will demonstrate that applied epistemology is an important and under-acknowledged field of philosophical inquiry. One thing that seems to have hindered the recognition of applied epistemology as a subject on a par with applied ethics is the fact that some of the (very few) people who work on it have an unnecessarily narrow conception of its scope. One very influential definition of the subject is given by Larry Laudan: Applied epistemology in general is the study of whether systems of investigation that purport to be seeking the truth are well engineered to lead to true beliefs about the world. Theorists of knowledge, as epistemologists are sometimes known, routinely examine truth-seeking practices like science and mathematics to find out whether they are capable of delivering the goods they seek. Essential though such an enterprise undoubtedly is, the truth test conception of applied epistemology that it delivers is surely too narrow. The respects in which it is narrow can be brought out by comparison with applied ethics. First, the truth test conception focuses exclusively on one epistemic good – truth – when there are other pertinent epistemic values worth focusing on, such as the successful weighing of different kinds of values or evidence, and such as understanding, including social understanding that is fundamentally interpretive. Thus, the truth test conception might be compared to a conception of applied ethics that focuses exclusively on a single ethical good, such as happiness. Of course there are ethical theories, most notably utilitarianism, which do this, but even advocates of utilitarianism do not usually think that applied ethics is just a matter of calculating total (or average) happiness in this case or that. Instead, utilitarians, like Peter Singer, will usually, when doing applied ethics, try to construct arguments that will be persuasive to as broad an audience as possible, and not to just his fellow utilitarians.

What has come to be known as the ‘linguistic turn’ in historical theory over the past forty years or so has finished what the two World Wars began in demolishing the confidence that the historical discipline possessed at the turn of the twentieth century. This confidence was most memorably expressed by Lord Acton that one day we would possess ‘ultimate history’. Today most historians are probably more inclined to subscribe to Pieter Geyl’s view that history is ‘an argument without end’. Yet the jettisoning of a teleological goal for historical accounts does not mean that we have to also part with the idea of progress; we just need a new definition of it. In this article I argue that we should adopt an evolutionary epistemology of history which sees progress as something pushed from behind, rather than aiming at an undefined point in the future; but this is not the only advantage an evolutionary epistemology can offer us. I go on to outline two further aspects of evolutionary epistemology which may benefit historical theorists.

The landscape of contemporary epistemology has significantly diversified in the past 30 years, shaped in large part by two complementary movements: virtue and social epistemology. This diversification provides an apt theoretical context for the epistemology of education. No longer concerned exclusively with the formal analysis of knowledge, epistemologists have turned their attention towards individuals as knowers, and the social contexts in which epistemic goods such as knowledge and understanding are acquired and exchanged. As such, the concerns of epistemology have once again aligned with questions lying at the heart of the philosophy of education regarding the nature, aims and practice of education. Employing the conceptual tools and frameworks of the contemporary field, these questions are addressed by both epistemologists and education theorists in the emerging epistemology of education literature.

The paper offers a historical outline of the main positions and protagonists of feminist epistemology as a specific field in philosophy at the end of the twentieth century, in the context of a feminist critique of knowledge in academia in general as part of international feminist movements. The main question discussed is whether there is a specific feminist concept of philosophical and scientific knowledge. If so, what is its innovative aspect? What are the philosophical problems in arguing for feminist knowledge? Is there a specific insight or methodological approach? A further question is what role, if any, feminist epistemology plays in the interdisciplinary field of Gender Studies. The discussion will centre on how feminist epistemology relates to non-scientific practices. In particular, the role of the concept of objectivity in feminist epistemology will be elaborated. This will illuminate the connection between the feminist knowledge project with other emancipatory projects and outline how feminist constructivism might play a prominent role in this context in the twenty-first century.

Recent knowledge first epistemology features a number of different accounts of justified belief, including a knowledge first reductionism according to which to believe justifiably is to know Sutton (2005, 2007), Littlejohn (Forthcoming a, b), Williamson (2000, 2010), a knowledge first version of accessibilism Millar (2010) and a knowledge first version of mentalism Bird (2007). This paper offers a knowledge first version of virtue epistemology and argues that it is preferable to its knowledge first epistemological rivals: only knowledge first virtue epistemology manages to steer clear of a number of problems that its competition encounters.

As Helen Longino's overview ofHypatia's engagement with feminist epistemology suggests, the last twenty‐five years’ contributions to this field reveal a strong focus on the topic of knowledge. In her short outline, Longino questions this narrow focus on knowledge in epistemological inquiry. The main purpose of this article is to provide a framework for systematically taking up the questions raised by Longino, one that prevents us from running the risk of becoming unreflectively involved in sexist, racist, or otherwise problematic inquiry. I argue that a specific form of the method of Reflective Equilibrium, as it is widely discussed in moral epistemology, logic, and theories of rationality, enables us to cope with the problems of traditional epistemology, which feminist theorizers such as Sally Haslanger have pointed to. With the account of Reflective Equilibrium I am offering—drawing in many respects on the model provided by Catherine Z. Elgin—we have an ameliorative method that allows us to rethink epistemological values, goals, and standards in a systematic way, and that largely avoids implicit and explicit biases in epistemology.

Humanism as a paradigm is often declared as an alternative approach to education. This paradigm is, in fact, an approach developed in the field of literature and education. The objective of this study is to determine the values underlie the epistemology of the humanistic education theory. Epistemology is the elements that are abstract or implicit. To recognize the epistemology of humanism education theory, this study examines the elements of basic assumptions, values and models of the theory. The results show that the assumptions promoting the theory have similarities with the basic assumptions of the phenomenological epistemology. It sees humans as creatures with consciousness and knowledge for what he did. Thus, every human’s behavior or action is conducted in purpose. In humanistic education theory, meaningfulness and usefulness of the learning process are determined by the learner, not the educator. For that reason, learning design and methods should be developed by the participants based on the needs of the learners. Therefore, the theory does not provide a model for an individual learning process. Thus, it can be concluded that the theory of humanism education rooted from phenomenology epistemology.

A theoretical reflection on epistemology is presented. The important role of epistemological analysis in research in mathematics education is discussed. I analyze the epistemological evolution as a consequence of the changes in the mathematical culture and demonstrate how the epistemological analysis is tightly linked to the cultural dimension. Then I analyze the connection between epistemology and networking of theories. Different meanings of the word “epistemic” are observed as well as the role of epistemology in the networking of theories.

As the volumes of HTS attest, qualitative methods are used in housing and related studies. Yet, if my experience is anything to go by, this approach to research is studied little in undergraduate a...

There is great interest these days in applying scientific research methods to dance and other embodied practices (for example, see Schmalzl and Kerr 2016). That is hardly surprising, given how important the discoveries of technological science are to the world we live in. In this essay, I explore a different pathway. How does science work? Through what processes do the sciences generate new knowledge? Arguably, if we want to understand how science works, scientists are not the people to ask. Scientists can tell us how molecules and particles and chemicals work, but who can tell us how scientists work? I have argued (Spatz 2015) that social analyses of science — the field of social epistemology — have as much to offer our understanding of embodied practice as science does. When technoscience looks at embodied practices like dance, it follows its usual approach of reduction and division: It sees bodies and body parts, heart rates and brainwave patterns, muscles and tendons, statistics and other quantitative measures. This is very different from what social epistemology sees when it looks at embodied practice. Social epistemology (Schatzki et al. 2001) studies how practice is structured by knowledge. When it looks at dances and dancers, it sees styles and schools, practices and techniques, social processes of transmission and innovation, invented traditions and traditions of invention. Above all, social epistemology sees dances and dancers as epistemic, as knowable but never fully known, constantly unfolding. Rather than trying to pin down a dance, social epistemology treats it as a field of knowledge that increases rather than decreases in complexity the more we study it. A social epistemology of dance would examine the objects that interest dancers rather than those that interest scientists. It would do so in a way that brings a particular kind of rigor to those objects, accounting for both their corporeality — what social epistemology calls realism — and their social construction. In this chapter, I begin to develop such an account.