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Local-level, place-based scholarships – synonymous with “promise” scholarships – are a policy strategy to improve college completion in the United States by directing financial aid to stude...

Ethnographic research involves prolonged and often personal interaction between the researcher and research participants. This paper is a collaboration between a social work researcher and a research participant who became acquainted through the researcher’s ethnographic fieldwork for her dissertation. Despite differing in numerous and significant ways, not the least of which are age, class, education, and race, the two women developed a quasi-friendship after the researcher exited the field–a time when many researcher-participant relationships wane or terminate entirely. The two recorded and transcribed a series of informal conversations wherein they reflected on their experiences in the research process. Of particular salience is the research participant’s perspective of the immaterial benefits she experienced through her participation in the research and her perception of the qualities of a “good” qualitative researcher: one who approaches listening as a practice and cultivates relationships with participants slowly and naturally. The authors’ reflections indicate that participants may be able to offer valuable feedback on the research experience, and researchers might use participants’ unique perspectives to alter their research approach and/or techniques.

Increased political and research interest in extracurricular activities stems, in part, from the claim that these programs especially benefit disadvantaged youth. However, little literature has synthesized studies across types of disadvantage to assess this claim. This article reviews research on disadvantaged youth in extracurricular programs, including differences by gender, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, and immigrant status. Our review reveals a promising, if complicated, picture. Although disadvantaged youth are less likely to participate in extracurricular activities, they often experience greater benefits, depending on the risk status and activity type. Evidence clearly supports expanding access to extracurricular programs for disadvantaged youth.

Obligations to provide evidence to others arise in many contexts. This paper develops a framework within which to understand what it is to provide evidence to someone. I argue that an initially plausible connection between evidence-providing and evidence-possession fails: it is not the case that in order to count as providing evidence to someone, the intended recipient must have the evidence. I further argue that the following is possible: evidence is provided to an agent, the agent does not have the evidence, but it is not the case that the agent is culpably ignorant of the evidence.

This paper challenges a common assumption in the literature concerning the problem of divine hiddenness, namely, that the following are inconsistent: God's making available adequate evidence for belief that he exists and the existence of non-culpable nonbelievers. It draws on the notions of defeated evidence and glimpses to depict the complexity of our evidential situation with respect to God's existence.

Defenses of pragmatic encroachment commonly rely on two thoughts: first, that the gap between one’s strength of epistemic position on p and perfect strength sometimes makes a difference to what one is justified in doing, and second, that the higher the stakes, the harder it is to know. It is often assumed that these ideas complement each other. This chapter shows that these ideas are far from complementary. Along the way, a variety of strategies for regimenting the somewhat inchoate notion of stakes are indicated, and some troubling cases for pragmatic encroachment raised.

[Extract] The idea that there is pragmatic encroachment on knowledge has been vigorously explored in recent literature, but what has been rather less explored is how pragmatic encroachment interacts with another important principle about the structure of knowledge, namely, epistemic closure. In this chapter, we plan to go some way toward remedying that. For the purposes of this chapter, we will focus on single-premise closure, which we will understand as the idea that a proposition competently deduced from something one knows (and believed on that basis) is also known. It is hard to explore the interaction between pragmatic encroachment and closure without some detailed model of how pragmatic encroachment works. To that end, section 1 presents a model for cashing out some standard subject-sensitive ideas. It is a model that we’ve discussed at length elsewhere, and is built on the idea that one knows p only if the gap between one’s strength of epistemic position for p and perfect epistemic position makes no practical difference. In section 2, we explain why that model is antithetical to closure. In section 3, we critically discuss some ways of trying to fix the model so as to restore harmony. In section 4, we discuss the interaction of closure with another idea that is used to motivate pragmatic encroachment, namely the idea that stakes make a difference to whether one knows.

[Extract] The idea that there is pragmatic encroachment on knowledge has been vigorously explored in recent literature, but what has been rather less explored is how pragmatic encroachment interacts with another important principle about the structure of knowledge, namely, epistemic closure. In this chapter, we plan to go some way toward remedying that. For the purposes of this chapter, we will focus on single-premise closure, which we will understand as the idea that a proposition competently deduced from something one knows (and believed on that basis) is also known. It is hard to explore the interaction between pragmatic encroachment and closure without some detailed model of how pragmatic encroachment works. To that end, section 1 presents a model for cashing out some standard subject-sensitive ideas. It is a model that we’ve discussed at length elsewhere, and is built on the idea that one knows p only if the gap between one’s strength of epistemic position for p and perfect epistemic position makes no practical difference. In section 2, we explain why that model is antithetical to closure. In section 3, we critically discuss some ways of trying to fix the model so as to restore harmony. In section 4, we discuss the interaction of closure with another idea that is used to motivate pragmatic encroachment, namely the idea that stakes make a difference to whether one knows.

No one believes every miracle report they hear. At least, no one I know. For religious and non-religious alike, it is common to disbelieve testimony to the miraculous; it is also common to dismiss such testimony outright. This chapter investigates the rationality of failing to believe miracle reports. Hume famously argued that it is irrational to believe that a miracle has occurred on the basis of testimony alone. While certain aspects of Hume’s argument have received extensive discussion, other features of his argument have been largely overlooked. After offering a reconstruction of Hume’s argument, I will argue that epistemic defeat plays a central role in the argument and explore the aptness of as well as some limitations to Hume’s reasoning.

The principle that when one knows p, one is in a good enough epistemic position to treat p as a reason for action is used to motivate pragmatic encroachment. When combined with fallibilism, this principle (Sufficiency) results in the rejection of purism, the view that pragmatic factors are irrelevant to knowledge. Fallibilism, purism, and Sufficiency each have substantial prima facie intuitive support; and yet the three seem to form an inconsistent triad. The author of this chapter challenges the account of reasons that underlies one prominent way of arguing for Sufficiency and then she delineates a position that manages to avoid the trilemma.

After a long period of emphasis on academic skills, researchers have recently shown growing interest in the importance of noncognitive skills as drivers of life outcomes for poor children. “Grit” and “hope” are among the more popular focal points in this research. This article argues terms like these are most useful when they are thought of as a part of a cluster of concepts related to the idea of alienation, in the sense of powerlessness. Framing the “new” concepts that way helps connect our thinking to a wider range of empirical work and helps identify important unresolved issues for future research. We also argue the most profitable approaches will be those which help us understand how individual characteristics interact with structural context, avoiding an exclusive emphasis on either individual characteristics or structural contexts.

Pragmatic encroachment offers a picture of knowledge whereby knowledge is unstable. This paper argues that pragmatic encroachment is committed to more instability than has been hitherto noted. One surprising result of the arguments in this paper is that pragmatic encroachment is not merely about changes in stakes. All sorts of practical factors can make for the presence or absence of knowledge on this picture – stakes are just one factor among many that are knowledge-depriving. In this way, the focus in the literature on ‘stakes-sensitivity’ is misleading. Furthermore, insufficient attention has been paid to the variety of ways in which on this view pragmatic factors affect knowledge: pragmatic factors are not merely knowledge-depriving but are also knowledge-inducing.

It is widely acknowledged that epistemic modals admit of inter-subjective flexibility. This paper introduces intra-subjective flexibility for epistemic modals and draws on this flexibility to argue that fallibilism is consistent with the standard account of epistemic modals. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.