Avvai- An Epistemic Advantage

Tamil world always owe its tribute to Avvai for her scholarly contribution. Desire to do virtue is an iconic statement of this great personality who perceived to be an epistemic advantage. The purpose of this article is to examine her work as a children literary creator and to explore her cognitive success in terms of Educational Philosophy. Her literary contribution plays a major role in identifying the Tamil community as an epistemic community. The pattern of knowledge construction employed by Avvai enhances the individual to explore knowledge, to discover the ultimate truth and establishing virtue. This article is known for its analysis of the literary work and social dialogues chose to add Avvai’s commitment to establishing that education is a way to subdue the senses and achieve reality. This piece of research ignites a spark to future researcher to view Avvai as a social scientist rather than a Tamil scholar with reference to the normative principles established in her work.

Mandevillian Intelligence

Mandevillian intelligence is a specific form of collective intelligence in which individual cognitive shortcomings, limitations, and biases play a positive functional role in yielding various forms of collective cognitive success. When this idea is transposed to the epistemological domain, mandevillian intelligence emerges as the idea that individual forms of intellectual vice may, on occasion, support the epistemic performance of some form of multi-agent ensemble, such as a socio-epistemic system, a collective doxastic agent, or an epistemic group agent. As a specific form of collective intelligence, mandevillian intelligence is relevant to a number of debates in social epistemology, especially those that seek to understand how group (or collective) knowledge arises from the interactions between a collection of individual epistemic agents.

Epistemic Luck

In almost any domain of endeavour, successes can be attained through skill, but also by dumb luck. An archer’s wildest shots occasionally hit the target. Against enormous odds, some fair lottery tickets happen to win. The same goes in the case of purely cognitive or intellectual endeavours. As inquirers, we characteristically aim to believe truly rather than falsely, and to attain such standings as knowledge and understanding. Sometimes such aims are attained with commendable competence, but of course, not always. Epistemic luck is a species of luck which features in circumstances where a given cognitive success – in the broadest sense, some form of cognitive contact with reality – is attained in a manner that is (in some to-be-specified sense) interestingly lucky – viz., chancy, accidental or beyond our control. In the paradigmatic case, this involves the formation of a belief that is luckily true, and where the subject plausibly deserves little credit for having got things right. Although the literature on epistemic luck has focused predominantly on the relationship between luck and propositional knowledge – which is widely taken to (in some sense) exclude luck – epistemologists are increasingly exploring the compatibility of epistemic luck with other kinds of epistemic standings, such as knowledge-how and understanding.

On Virtue, Credit and Safety

According to robust virtue epistemology, the difference between knowledge and mere true belief is that in cases of knowledge, the subject’s cognitive success is attributable to her cognitive agency. But what does it take for a subject’s cognitive success to be attributable to her cognitive agency? A promising answer is that the subject’s cognitive abilities have to contribute to the safety of her epistemic standing with respect to her inquiry, in order for her cognitive success to be attributable to her cognitive agency. Call this idea the contribution thesis. The author will argue that the contribution thesis follows naturally from virtue epistemological accounts of knowledge, and that it is precisely the contribution thesis that allows the virtue epistemologist to deal with a wide variety of objections. Nevertheless, the principal aim of this paper is to argue that virtue epistemological theories of knowledge that are committed to the contribution thesis are ultimately untenable. There are cases of knowledge where the subject’s cognitive abilities do not improve the safety of the subject’s belief.

Maximizing entropy of the Predictive Processing framework

The Predictive Processing (PP) framework offers a unifying view on the existence and working of all living systems. The core premise of PP states that as long as agents minimize prediction error, and consequently entropy, they are successful. Current developments and advances in PP indicate that the interaction between agents and their environments is an important component of entropy minimization. In this paper, we explore by means of computer simulations, the interaction between PP-agents and their environments under different conditions. We argue the need to redefine the notion of success in PP in terms of entropy, behavioral and cognitive success, as we show that the environmental conditions that lead to entropy success, are different from conditions that lead to behavioral or cognitive success. Furthermore, we show that being equipped in and applying the mechanisms to minimize prediction error, do not in practice guarantee that the agents will be successful in any sense (entropy, cognitive or behavioral).

Evaluating the Cognitive Success of Thought Experiments

Thought experiments are widely used in natural science research. Nonetheless, their reliability to produce cognitive results has been a disputable matter. This study is conducted to present some rules of confirmation for evaluating the cognitive outcome of thought experiments. I begin given an example of a “paradigmatic” thought experiment from Galileo Galilei: the falling bodies. Afterwards, I briefly surveying two different accounts of thought experiments: James R. Brown’s rationalism and John D. Norton’s empiricism. Then, I discuss their positions and I show that none of them may tip the balance towards the rationalism or empiricism they try to defend. Finally, I put forward that the notion of confirmation, connected to the notion of increasing plausibility, can be used to develop some confirmation rules to compare the explanatory power of thought experiments in competition, regardless of their rational or empirical nature in which the discussion of this type of experiment has been engaged in recent years.

ANTIECONOMY, ECONOMY CRISIS AND CRISIS OF ECONOMICS

The gist of this article is the idea that the orthodox theory of economic crisis unduly reduces its subject to business crisis and that it is the outcome of the narrowness and limitedness of the individualistic economic approach to the problem, employed mostly by neoliberals and libertarians. As individualists (the individualistic camp) explicitly or implicitly identify economy with market, their perception of an economic crisis is reduced to business crisis, crisis of the production of private goods. However, the concept of economy is broader than that of the market; thus, an economic crisis cannot be reduced to a business crisis. In addition, the theory of economic crisis could be enriched by the concept of anti-economy, which does not fit the individualistic economic paradigm. Therefore, a correction of the theory of economic crisis is needed, and this correction should be done in a holistic cognitive framework. Holism opens the possibility (which doesn’t automatically guarantee cognitive success) to look at the economic crisis through a wider lens, to perceive it as a whole. The shift from individualistic reductionism to holism allows us to see a correlation between cognitive crisis and crisis in real economy, and to introduce the concept of systemic crisis.