Social Epistemology, Descriptive and Normative

2021 ◽  
pp. 15-25
Author(s):  
Sanford C. Goldberg

Social epistemology ought to incorporate both a descriptive element (understanding our actual knowledge practices) and a normative element (assessing and evaluating those practices). While the two dominant traditions of social epistemology research in the last three decades tend to privilege one of these elements over the other, this chapter aims to articulate and defend an approach that can accommodate both and avoid the distortions.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amir Forouharfar

The paper was shaped around the pivotal question: Is SE a sound and scientific field of research? The question has given a critical tone to the paper and has also helped to bring out some of the controversial debates in the realm of SE. The paper was organized under five main discussions to be able to provide a scientific answer to the research question: (1)<b> </b>is “social entrepreneurship” an oxymoron?, (2) the characteristics of SE knowledge, (3) sources of social entrepreneurship knowledge, (4) SE knowledge: structure and limitations and (5) contributing epistemology-making concepts for SE.<b> </b>Based on the sections,<b> </b>the study relied on the relevant philosophical schools of thought in <i>Epistemology </i>(e.g. <i>Empiricism</i>, <i>Rationalism</i>, <i>Skepticism</i>, <i>Internalism</i> vs. <i>Externalism</i>,<i> Essentialism, Social Constructivism</i>, <i>Social Epistemology, etc.</i>) to discuss these controversies around SE and proposes some solutions by reviewing SE literature. Also, to determine the governing linguistic discourse in the realm of SE, which was necessary for our discussion,<i> Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)</i> for the first time in SE studies was used. Further, through the study, SE buzzwords which constitute SE terminology were derived and introduced to help us narrowing down and converging the thoughts in this field and demarking the epistemological boundaries of SE. The originality of the paper on one hand lies in its pioneering discussions on SE epistemology and on the other hand in paving the way for a construction of sound epistemology for SE; therefore in many cases after preparing the philosophical ground for the discussions, it went beyond the prevalent SE literature through meta-analysis to discuss the cases which were raised. The results of the study verified previously claimed embryonic pre-paradigmatic phase in SE which was far from a sound and scientific knowledge, although the scholarly endeavors are the harbingers of such a possibility in the future which calls for further mature academic discussion and development of SE knowledge by the SE academia.


Author(s):  
Sven Bernecker ◽  
Amy K. Flowerree ◽  
Thomas Grundmann

News matters. Democracies need independent, fact-based news to provide a voice for a diverse range of people, to watchdog the powerful, and to keep members of a society informed. Much of the news surrounding us today does not, for one reason or the other, meet the standards of epistemically valuable news. Our media environments are polluted by fake news and other forms of mis- and disinformation. We have a problem of fake news. This chapter presents the motivations and challenges for giving an account of fake news that can be useful to science. It then argues that a specific epistemology of fake news is needed as a new branch of social epistemology. The chapter presents a rough sketch of how the contours of such an epistemology of fake news may look like. It also gives an overview of the chapters of this volume.


Organizacija ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 197-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Rudež

Knowledge Management in the Hotel Industry Before and After the Entry in the EU: The Case of SloveniaThe paper deals with the impact of the EU entry on knowledge management in the hotel industry in Slovenia. For this purpose, the empirical research on knowledge management was carried out among hotel managers. It explored the changes in knowledge management between 2003 and 2006; that is before and after Slovenia entered the EU. The research revealed a progress in this period of time in knowledge management goals definition, transformation of not-owned into owned knowledge, inclusion of knowledge management in business reports, identification and elimination of the gaps between planned and actual knowledge. On the other hand, there was no further progress in the field of strategies and policy of knowledge management, perception of the importance of knowledge management's measurement, development of measures of knowledge management and diminishment of barriers to knowledge development. Further, several recommendations are suggested for hotel managers.


Author(s):  
Emily Sullivan ◽  
Max Sondag ◽  
Ignaz Rutter ◽  
Wouter Meulemans ◽  
Scott Cunningham ◽  
...  

Most experimental philosophy employs small-N studies with randomization. Additional light may be shed on philosophical questions by large-scale observational studies that employ Big Data methodologies. This chapter explains and showcases the promising methodology of testimonial network analysis and visualization for experimental epistemology, arguing that it can be used to gain insights and answer philosophical questions in social epistemology. The use case is the epistemic community that discusses vaccine safety primarily in English on Twitter. In two studies, the authors show, using both statistical analysis and exploratory data visualization, that there is almost no neutral or ambivalent discussion of vaccine safety on Twitter. Roughly half the accounts engaging with this topic are pro-vaccine, while the other half is con-vaccine. The results also indicate that these two camps rarely engage with one another, and that the con-vaccine camp has greater epistemic reach and receptivity than the pro-vaccine camp. In light of these findings, the authors question whether testimonial networks as they are currently constituted on popular forums such as Twitter are living up to their promise of delivering the wisdom of crowds.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174997552110335
Author(s):  
Neil Stephens ◽  
Photini Vrikki ◽  
Hauke Riesch ◽  
Olwenn Martin

On 22 April 2017, 10,000 people joined the March for Science London, one of 600 events globally asserting the importance of science against post-truth. Here we report an online and on-the-ground observational study of the London event in its distinct, post-Brexit referendum context. We analyse the motives for marchers’ attendance, and their collective enactment of what science is and why and by what it is threatened. Drawing upon Interaction Ritual Theory and the concept of civic epistemology, we develop the notion of populist knowledge practices to capture the ‘other’ that marchers defined themselves against. We detail how this was performed, and how it articulated a particular vision for science–society relations in Britain. In closing, we argue that the March for Science is one in a chain of anti-populist activist events that retains collective effervescence while transcending specific framings.


1982 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benny Brodda

Taggin is the proces of assigning morphological, sytactic and /or semantic information to linguistic units in a text. The most important problems in connection with tagging are, of course, those related to subject matter, but in computerized tagging systems, which this article is about, there are also several technical problems. They automatically announce thermselves, and have to be solved one way or the other. In this paper a fairly extensive description of a computer system (THE TAGGER) is given, which is an attempt to solve some of the problems diswcussed. This article is non-technical in the sense that it presupposes no actual Knowledge of programming, but some general experience of computers and computational linguistics is of course helpful.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amir Forouharfar

The paper was shaped around the pivotal question: Is SE a sound and scientific field of research? The question has given a critical tone to the paper and has also helped to bring out some of the controversial debates in the realm of SE. The paper was organized under five main discussions to be able to provide a scientific answer to the research question: (1)<b> </b>is “social entrepreneurship” an oxymoron?, (2) the characteristics of SE knowledge, (3) sources of social entrepreneurship knowledge, (4) SE knowledge: structure and limitations and (5) contributing epistemology-making concepts for SE.<b> </b>Based on the sections,<b> </b>the study relied on the relevant philosophical schools of thought in <i>Epistemology </i>(e.g. <i>Empiricism</i>, <i>Rationalism</i>, <i>Skepticism</i>, <i>Internalism</i> vs. <i>Externalism</i>,<i> Essentialism, Social Constructivism</i>, <i>Social Epistemology, etc.</i>) to discuss these controversies around SE and proposes some solutions by reviewing SE literature. Also, to determine the governing linguistic discourse in the realm of SE, which was necessary for our discussion,<i> Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)</i> for the first time in SE studies was used. Further, through the study, SE buzzwords which constitute SE terminology were derived and introduced to help us narrowing down and converging the thoughts in this field and demarking the epistemological boundaries of SE. The originality of the paper on one hand lies in its pioneering discussions on SE epistemology and on the other hand in paving the way for a construction of sound epistemology for SE; therefore in many cases after preparing the philosophical ground for the discussions, it went beyond the prevalent SE literature through meta-analysis to discuss the cases which were raised. The results of the study verified previously claimed embryonic pre-paradigmatic phase in SE which was far from a sound and scientific knowledge, although the scholarly endeavors are the harbingers of such a possibility in the future which calls for further mature academic discussion and development of SE knowledge by the SE academia.


2021 ◽  
pp. 36-46
Author(s):  
Matt Ostercamp

Shortly after the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, I came across the 1872 painting American Progress. In this painting, westward expansion is being led by a large floating white woman with a schoolbook in one arm and telegraph wires in the other. The indigenous inhabitants of the west cower before this apparition. It is indeed a haunting image. In this paper, I explore the legacy of enlightenment constructs of civilized/savage in the operations of academic libraries. I then introduce indigenous authors Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Shawn Wilson who offer some alternatives to western knowledge practices. Finally, I conclude by reflecting on what theological librarians can contribute to our professional conversation on White Supremacy.


2009 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Torsten Wilholt

AbstractScientific procedures are widely expected to be unbiased, in the sense that they do not single out one specific set of claims about which they yield false results more often than about others. This assumed feature of the practices of science can be called procedural objectivity. I argue that attempts to analyze procedural objectivity on the level of individual rationality fail. The appropriate balance of inductive risks for each scientific investigation hinges upon value judgments for which no binding, ‚neutral‘ standard can be derived from universal principles. I make the case that the perspective of social epistemology offers a much more promising approach to establish a substantial conception of procedural objectivity. I examine two genuinely social elements of the sciences’ procedural objectivity. One consists in conventional standards, which are adopted by research communities in order to facilitate epistemic trust and which impose constraints on methodological choices that affect the balance of inductive risks. The other is constituted by the plurality of approaches within research communities and the mechanism of mutual criticism. Procedural objectivity in science thus becomes understandable as a social phenomenon.


2016 ◽  
Vol 71 (04) ◽  
pp. 583-607
Author(s):  
Daniel Nordman

TheHistoire du Marocedited by Mohamed Kably is a monumental collaborative work involving more than fifty authors, all, with only one exception, Moroccan. It is thus a de facto “Moroccanized” history (though not excessively so) and the synthesis that it presents marks an important milestone. This article will nevertheless suggest some alternative thematic or transversal structures while also highlighting some of the volume's guiding threads: the initial geographical tableau, the periodization, its vision of historical origins and antiquity, the “plural” nature of Morocco and its relationship with the exterior world. In terms of the overall tone of the volume, it is necessary to evaluate its place in the broader historiographical context today. Other recent studies have revealed an oscillation between two scales, the one tending toward oversimplified generalities (the Middle Ages, the modern period), the other toward what has sometimes seemed an excessive focus on the specific and the exceptional. TheHistoire du Marochandles these debates with cautious discretion as they run through its chapters in a light filigree; it is a useful tool, pedagogic and accessible to a large and diverse public because it is neither intransigent nor polemical. Hard to reduce to particular historical currents, it is a scholarly work, an example of reasoned academic study. It is based on actual knowledge, without preconceived boundaries, and will remain a reference, scholarly, experimental, and pragmatic. It seems most unlikely, after the publication of this volume, that the history of Morocco will need to be rewritten over again.


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