E-governance using mobile applications: A case study of India during the COVID-19 pandemic

Healthcare initiatives backed by electronic-governance (e-governance) principles have contributed well to the extant literature and practice. Governments and healthcare systems across the world were taken aback by the swamping impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, they reacted quickly by developing contact-tracing mobile applications (apps) for creating awareness, providing information about various healthcare initiatives, and helping citizens to use the required information in case of emergency. The major challenge was to develop such e-governance interventions in a short time and ensure their quick adoption among the masses. Hence, it is worthwhile to investigate the factors leading to the adoption of such e-governance initiatives, especially in the context of a widespread pandemic situation. The present study is an attempt to analyze the factors driving the intention to use contact tracing mobile apps launched by governments globally during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have conducted the study in the context of India, where the government launched a community-driven contact tracing mobile app for its citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020. The study adopted an empirical approach to test how epistemic value, convenience value, conditional value, functional value, and privacy concerns influenced the intention to use this approach. The study found that intention to use such an app was positively influenced by functional value, which in turn was positively influenced by convenience and conditional values. It suggests that the convenience of using the app, perceived seriousness of the pandemic (i.e., conditional value), and utilitarian benefits (i.e., functional value) of the contact-tracing mobile app enhanced its acceptance. However, its novelty (i.e., epistemic value) and privacy concerns are not significant predictors of intention to use. The study recommends that the government should place more emphasis on improving the functional value which is driven by convenience and context-specific features to push the use of an e-governance initiative during the crisis.

Data-driven news work culture: Reconciling tensions in epistemic values and practices of news journalism

This study investigates the epistemological implications of the appropriation of audience analytics in a data-driven news culture. Focussing on two central aspects of epistemology, epistemic value and epistemic practices, we ask two overall questions (1) How are audience metrics balanced and reconciled in relation to other standards in the justification of news as valuable knowledge? How are different practices of research and presentation, truth-seeking and truth-telling, prioritized in a news organization marked as a data-driven news work culture? The study presents a case study of a Scandinavian legacy news publisher that has pursued the embracing of a data-driven news work culture. It is based on a qualitative multi-method approach. The findings show how metrics are used as a superior standard in deciding on the epistemic value of news. This is expressed in strategies, guidelines and discussions in the newsroom, and put into practice in coaching, evaluations and rewarding of the performance of individual journalists. In the everyday news production, metrics are reconciled in relation to independent standards in journalism, related to the claims of news journalism to provide relevant and verified public knowledge about current events. Moreover, the study shows how the embracement of metrics radicalizes the focus on presentation, packaging and timing in the optimization of news material and in the valuing of professional practices. Efforts in research and truth seeking are more seldom explicitly valued. The work of fulfilling reasonable truth claims is mainly taken for granted.

Pengaruh Consumption Value dalam meningkatkan purchase intention layanan online food delivery pada Clay Craft Restaurant di Renaissance Bali Uluwatu Resort & Spa

Purchase Intention mengacu pada kemungkinan konsumen untuk membeli produk. Salah satu aspek yang mempengaruhi purchase intention adalah sejauh mana consumption value mendorongnya. Penelitian ini dilakukan untuk mengetahui pengaruh consumption value (functional value, social value, conditional value dan epistemic value) dalam meningkatkan purchase intention layanan online food delivery saat pandemi COVID-19 pada Clay Craft Restaurant di Renaissance Bali Uluwatu Resort & Spa. Teknik pengumpulan data yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah kuesioner, wawancara, studi dokumentasi dan observasi. Responden dalam penelitian ini berjumlah 100 responden dengan menggunakan purposive sampling. Teknik analisa data dalam penelitian ini adalah regresi linear berganda, Uji t, Uji F, uji koefisien determinasi dan sumbangan efektif. Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa consumption value (functional value, social value, conditional value dan epistemic value) secara simultan berpengaruh signifikan terhadap Purchase Intention. Berdasarkan hasil uji koefisien determinasi menunjukan bahwa Variabel pembentuk Consumption Value (Functional Value, Social Value, Conditional Value dan Epistemic Value) memiliki kontribusi sebesar 61,9% dalam mempengaruhi Purchase Intention, sedangkan sisanya 38,1% dipengaruhi oleh variabel lainnya yang tidak diteliti dalam penelitian ini.Kata Kunci: consumption value, purchase intention, online food delivery

The Epistemic Value of Affective Disruptability

In order to explore how emotions contribute positively or negatively to understanding the meaning of complex socio-culturally specific phenomena, I argue that we must take into account the habitual dimension of emotions – i.e., the emotion repertoire that a feeling person acquires in the course of their affective biography. This brings to light a certain form of alignment in relation to affective intentionality that is key to comprehending why humans understand situations in the way they do and why it so often is especially hard to understand things differently. A crucial epistemic problem is that subjects often do not even enter a process of understanding, i.e., they do not even start to consider a specific object, theory, circumstance, other being, etc. in different ways than the familiar one. The epistemic problem at issue thus lies in an unquestioned faith in things being right the way they are taken to be. By acknowledging the habitual dimension of affective intentionality, I analyze reasons for this inability and suggest that being affectively disruptable and cultivating a pluralistic emotion repertoire are crucial abilities to overcome this epistemic problem.

The Epistemic Role of Outlaw Emotions

Outlaw emotions are emotions that stand in tension with one’s wider belief system, often allowing epistemic insight one may have otherwise lacked. Outlaw emotions are thought to play crucial epistemic roles under conditions of oppression. Although the crucial epistemic value of these emotions is widely acknowledged, specific accounts of their epistemic role(s) remain largely programmatic. There are two dominant accounts of the epistemic role of emotions: The Motivational View and the Justificatory View. Philosophers of emotion assume that these dominant ways of accounting for the epistemic role(s) of emotions in general are equipped to account for the epistemic role(s) of outlaw emotions. I argue that this is not the case. I consider and dismiss two responses that could be made on behalf of the most promising account, the Justificatory View, in light of my argument, before sketching an alternative account that should be favoured.

Getting to the source of the illusion of consensus

Consensus between informants is a valuable cue to a claim’s epistemic value, when informants’ beliefs are developed independently of each other. Recent work (Yousif et al., 2019) described an illusion of consensus such that people did not generally discriminate between the epistemic warrant of true consensus, where a majority claim is supported by multiple independent sources, and false consensus arising from repeated claims from the same source. Three experiments tested a novel account of the illusion of consensus; that it arises when people are unsure about the independence of the primary sources on which informant claims are based. When this independence relationship was ambiguous we foundevidence for the illusion. However, when steps were taken to highlight the independence between data sources in the true consensus conditions, and confidence in a claim was measured against a no consensus baseline (where there was an equal number of reports supporting and opposing a claim), we eliminated the illusion of consensus. Under these conditions, more weight was given to claims based on true consensus than false consensus. These findings show that although the illusion of consensus is prevalent, people do have the capacity to distinguish between true and false consensus.

Ecotourism Consumption Values in the Unfamiliar Market and Mediating Role of Destination Image

This empirical study aims to determine the dimensions of the perceived value that are considered by the market that is unfamiliar to the ecotourism in relation to ecotourism purchase intention. The study also examines the role of destination image as mediators on the relation between perceived value and ecotourism purchase intention. Data was collected through a survey by self-administered structured questionnaire. The data from 355 respondents are analyzed using descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analyses and regression analysis. The study findings reveal that three significant predictors i.e. conditional value, emotional value and epistemic value influence ecotourism purchase intention in the unfamiliar market. The strongest influence comes from conditional value, followed by emotional value and epistemic value. Result of this study also reveals that perceived value consisting of these three dimensions significantly influences ecotourism purchase intention. Destination image partially mediate relationship between perceived value and ecotourism purchase intention. This study concludes that only three perceived values significantly affect ecotourism purchase intention in the unfamiliar market. The conceptual model of this study is grounded in the priori causal model. Inferring strong causal effect may be considered as a limitation as it is not based on mixed models method. For deep understanding of the metaphor of values, future studies can carry qualitative investigation by experimental designs or focus groups. Connivance sampling technique also put limitation on the generalization of the study. The present study add to comprehensive understanding about the perceived values that are evaluated by individuals who are unfamiliar with ecotourism. While there is extensive research both for demand and supply in the area of ecotourism, this studyprovide the perceived values considered by the potential tourists who are unfamiliar to ecotourism.

Collective Epistemic Luck

A platitude in epistemology is that an individual’s belief does not qualify as knowledge if it is true by luck. Individuals, however, are not the only bearers of knowledge. Many epistemologists agree that groups can also possess knowledge in a way that is genuinely collective. If groups can know, it is natural to think that, just as true individual beliefs fall short of knowledge due to individual epistemic luck, true collective beliefs may fall short of knowledge because of collective epistemic luck. This paper argues, first, that the dominant view of epistemic luck in the literature, the modal view, does not yield a satisfactory account of lucky collective beliefs. Second, it argues that collective epistemic luck is better explained in terms of groups lacking (suitably defined) forms of control over collective belief formation that are specific to the different procedures for forming collective beliefs. One of the main implications of this, we will argue, is that groups whose beliefs are formed via internal deliberation are more vulnerable to knowledge-undermining collective luck than groups that form their beliefs via non-deliberative methods, such as non-deliberative anonymous voting. The bottom line is that the greater exposure to knowledge-undermining luck that deliberation gives rise to provides a reason (not a conclusive one) for thinking that non-deliberative methods of group belief formation have greater epistemic value.

The epistemic value of independent lies: false analogies and equivocations

Here I critically assess an argument put forward by Kuorikoski et al. (Br J Philos Sci, 61(3):541–567, 2010) for the epistemic import of model-based robustness analysis. I show that this argument is not sound since the sort of probabilistic independence on which it relies is unfeasible. By revising the notion of probabilistic independence imposed on the models’ results, I introduce a prima-facie more plausible argument. However, despite this prima-facie plausibility, I show that even this new argument is unsound in most if not all cases of model-based robustness analysis. This I do to demonstrate that the epistemic import of model-based robust analysis cannot be satisfactorily defended on the basis of probabilistic independence.