Winds of War: Epistemic and effective control in political discourse on war

This paper explores two key domains of speaker’s stance in discourse: epistemic and effective stance (Marín-Arrese 2011, 2015, 2021). The framework draws on Langacker’s (2009, 2013) distinction between the effective and the epistemic level in the grammar, and the systematic opposition thereof between striving for control of relations at the level of reality and control of conceptions of reality. Epistemic strategies pertain to the epistemic legitimisation of assertions, by providing epistemic support and epistemic justification for the proposition (Boye 2012). Effective control is aimed at the legitimisation of actions and plans of action. The joint deployment of epistemic and effective stance acts effects a strategy of combined control over hearers/readers’ acceptance of conceptions of reality and of plans of action. This paper studies the strategic use of these resources in the discourse of war and presents a case study on their use by two politicians, President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, in political speeches and statements during the build-up to the second Iraq war. Results indicate significant qualitative and quantitative differences in the preferred stance strategies in the discourse of the two politicians.

Rethinking Integration of Epistemic Strategies in Social Understanding: Examining the Central Role of Mindreading in Pluralist Accounts

In recent years, theories of social understanding have moved away from arguing that just one epistemic strategy, such as theory-based inference or simulation constitutes our ability of social understanding. Empirical observations speak against any monistic view and have given rise to pluralistic accounts arguing that humans rely on a large variety of epistemic strategies in social understanding. We agree with this promising pluralist approach, but highlight two open questions: what is the residual role of mindreading, i.e. the indirect attribution of mental states to others within this framework, and how do different strategies of social understanding relate to each other? In a first step, we aim to clarify the arguments that might be considered in evaluating the role that epistemic strategies play in a pluralistic framework. On this basis, we argue that mindreading constitutes a core epiststrategy in human social life that opens new central spheres of social understanding. In a second step, we provide an account of the relation between different epistemic strategies which integrates and demarks the important role of mindreading for social understanding.

Of Chimeras, Harmony, and Kintsugi: Towards a Historicist Epistemology of Paleontological Reconstruction, Theory-Change, and Exploring Heuristics

I analyze the epistemic strategies used by paleontologists between the early 19th and early 20th centuries to reconstruct features of ancient organisms from fossilized bodies and footprints by presenting two heuristics: (1) a “claim of harmony” which posits the harmonious interaction of natural objects in order for complex systems to be simplified and (2) the “kintsugi heuristic” which is used inter-theoretically to explore new claims of harmony. I apply these to three successive historical cases: Georges Cuvier’s laws of correlation, the panpsychist paleontology of Edward Drinker Cope, and the single-character approach of Henry Fairfield Osborn.

Is Reproducibility Always Important or Even Possible for a Scientific Experiment?

This article provides an extended commentary on three books by R. Laymon and A. Franklin about the methodology and epistemology of the scientific experi­ment, as well as their article on the issue of reproducibility of experiments. The reproducibility of scientific results has historically been considered one of the methodological standards of science, and it is associated with ideas about the truth and intersubjective nature of scientific knowledge. The problem of re­producibility has received particular attention in recent decades because special­ized studies have revealed that more than half of the results from the social sci­entific studies cannot be reproduced; many cases of fraud in biomedical sciences have been uncovered; and the collective nature of subjectivity in elementary par­ticle physics has accentuated the instability of the knowledge obtained by large collaborations. In reconstructing discussions about reproducibility in the philo­sophical literature, we distinguish between replicating an experiment by repeat­ing it in a way that is as close as possible to the original and actually reproducing it by re-obtaining a previously observed phenomenon in a significantly modified instrumental-theoretical setting. We also introduce the concept of replication-2 as an intermediate form between replication and reproducing. These kinds of re­search repetitions perform different functions in experimental practice. We show that a variety of kinds of replication and reproduction are at the heart of a set of epistemic strategies: experimental methodological standards identified by Franklin based on decades of research in scientific practice. We analyze a num­ber of experiments in which a single measurement, in the absence of epistemic strategies, was sufficient for the community to accept a new theory. In these cases, we argue, a theory based on high-value symmetry principles turned out to be the dominant lens of the community, while the experiment played a role only as a demonstration. Such examples, in our opinion, indicate that the experiment’s role in a situation of shifting scientific paradigms is different from its role in nor­mal science: the requirements for reproducibility and epistemic strategies are significantly alleviated in the former in comparison to the latter.

Counteracting Challenges to Gender Equality in the Era of Anti-Gender Campaigns: Competing Gender Knowledges and Affective Solidarity

This article focuses on the epistemic strategies employed by ultraconservative movements to oppose women’s reproductive rights and the ways in which the women’s movement counteracts these efforts. The core argument is that nowadays the opponents of gender equality and sexual democracy are seeking not only political but also epistemic power, producing a new body of gender knowledge. A detailed analysis of the struggles around the 2016 Stop Abortion bill in Poland shows, however, that the women’s movement can counteract these challenges by mobilizing not only medical and legal expertise, but also tacit knowledge and affects.

Interpretivism: Definitions, Trends, and Emerging Paths

Since the 1980s, scholars disputing the hegemony of positivist methodologies in the social sciences began to promote interpretive approaches, creating discussions about methodological pluralism and enabling a slow, and often resisted, proliferation of theoretical diversity. Within this context, “interpretivism” acquired a specific definition, which encompassed meaning-centered research and problematized positivist ideas of truth correspondence, objectivity, generalization, and linear processes of research. By critiquing the methodological assumptions that were often used to make positivism appear as a superior form of social science, interpretive scholars were confronted with questions about their own knowledge production and its validity. If meanings could be separated from objects, phenomena and identities could be constructed, and observers could not step out of their situated participation within these constructions, how could scholars validate their knowledge? Despite important agreements about the centrality, characteristics, and intelligibility of meaning, interpretivists still disagree about the different ways in which this question can be answered. Scholars often use diverse strategies of validation and they objectivize their interpretations in different degrees. On one side of the spectrum, some post-structuralist, feminist, and postcolonial scholars renounce methodological foundations of objectification and validation as much as possible. This opens the possibility of empirically researching epistemic assumptions, which scholars interpret either as components of dominant discourses or as alternatives that create possibilities of thinking about more multiplicity, difference, and diversity. On the other side, a number of constructivist, feminist, and critical scholars attach meanings to social structures and view their interpretations as reflecting parts of intersubjectivities, lifeworlds, cultures, etc. Since they use their own strategy to objectify interpretations and they solve the methodological question of validity, the scholars on this side of the spectrum either tend to pursue empirical research that does not analyze epistemic dimensions or they generalize particular experiences of domination. This disagreement influences not only the kind of empirical research that scholars pursue, but also creates some differences in the definitions of key interpretive notions such as power relations, reflexivity, and the role of empirical evidence. Within these agreements and disagreements, interpretivism created an overarching methodological space that allowed for the proliferation of theoretical approaches. Since the 1980s, post-structuralist, feminist, constructivist, neo-Marxist, postcolonial, green, critical, and queer theories have sought to expand the study of meanings, uncover aspects of domination, listen to previously marginalized voices, unveil hidden variations, and highlight alternatives. Some of the branches of these theories tend toward the different sides of the methodological spectrum and they disagree about the epistemic strategies that they can use to validate their knowledge production, but the opening of this interpretive space has allowed for scholars to deconstruct, reconstruct, and juxtapose meanings, contributing to the field from different perspectives and within particular empirical areas of research. Moreover, this diversifying process continues to unfold. Approaches such as the decolonial perspective that emerged in Latin American Studies continue to enter International Studies, creating new transdisciplinary debates and promoting other possibilities for thinking about international and global politics.

Brave New World

The article focuses on the crucial changes that science as an established social institution and an epistemological enterprise is undergoing, the key one is the loss of its monopoly on the production of socially useful knowledge and gradual transformation into something new, which, due to institutional and cultural reasons, we continue to call ‘science’. We suppose that the most appropriate conceptualization of the new phenomenon, which is replacing science as an institution, is “technoscience”, since the technical component in scientific practices has now taken a dominant position and technology production has become more important than fundamental knowledge. Technoscience has at least two sources: 1) capitalization of scientific activity that has led to classical science has been replaced with technoscience developing on first-priority funded applied research; 2) theorization and autonomy of the techno sphere, which have resulted in instrumentalization of all levels of knowledge production as well as in technological / symbolic construction of reality and tangled ontology of technoscientific objects. We discuss both of these sources, with particular attention being paid to such trends as epistemic strategies transformation, modified reality, social sciences and humanities conformation to technoscience norms, and knowledge bearers egalitarianization. A crucial transformation of both science itself and its position in society breaks inevitably a demarcation line that separates scientific knowledge from other types of knowledge while promotes the replacement of scientific theory with discourses. Apparently, in “technoscience” an ethos of its own is being formed, where interaction with the “external environment” (with other social spheres) is crucial. In this context, scientific activity is becoming more and more transepistemic, transinstitutional practice, and accordingly ceases to be guided by the classical scientific ethos determined by the goals and objectives of academic community itself.

Deformations: A Media Theory of Swarming

Under the concept of deformations, this chapter presents crucial aspects that link the phenomena of swarms to media theory. Here swarms are treated as a materialization of Serres’s figure of the ‘parasite.’ By attending to disruptive potential, swarm research has yielded new information in the context of a comprehensive media theory of interference. This includes methodological insights that are productive for concepts of media historiography. The chapter closes by tracing the epistemological and cultural-technical expansion of the zone affected by swarms. The conversion of the swarm as an object of knowledge into an operative figure of knowledge by computer simulation signifies a general shift in epistemic strategies: self-organizational phenomena came to be applied to the study of complex interactive processes.

Epistemic Strategies in Ethical Review: REB Members’ Experiences of Assessing Probable Impacts of Research for Human Subjects

Research ethics boards (REBs) are charged with applying ethical standards to protect the rights and interests of research subjects. Little, however, is known about how REB members perceive probable impacts of research participation for subjects. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 40 Canadian REB members, we identify three frequently reported epistemic strategies, including reliance on a local REB culture or ethos, use of resident authorities, and protective imagination. Far less commonly described strategies included direct or indirect contact with research subjects. REB members also reflected upon significant gaps in their knowledge and thus the importance of knowing what we don’t know. Recommendations arising from this support an evidence-based practice for ethics review involving clear epistemic standards for REBs learning about subjects’ experiences.