Analysis of Terms as an Instrument of Comparative Philosophy

The article continues the polemics on the problems of interaction of philosophical cultures in the era of globalization, which was started at the meetings of the Round Table "Geography of Rationality". The author gives answers to critical questions, explains the methodology and principles of her work with Indian philosophical texts. A short research of the meta-term "cognitive subject" is an example of her methods. The analysis of cognitive subject aimed to justify the absence of the concepts of reason and rationality in Indian epistemic culture, the cornerstones of Western epistemic culture, since Modern times. The justification was carried out by comparing the generalized model of the cognitive subject, abstracted from the writings of empiricists and rationalists of the XVII–XVIII centuries, with the generalized models of the cognitive subject, reconstructed on the basis of authoritative writings of three variants of Indian epistemological teachings: Advaita Vedānta, Jainism and Buddhism. From the author's point of view, the absence of the concepts of reason and rationality in India leads to the non-classical problem of pluralism of epistemic cultures, and the exploration of the meta-term "cognitive subject" allows us to find, on the one hand, intersections in the contents of epistemologies in Indian philosophy and Western metaphysics of Modern times, and on the other, their incompatible contents, which are specific manifestations of pluralism of epistemic cultures. For her reconstruction of the cognitive subject models the author takes the principle of "double perspective" in combination with the methods of hermeneutical and logical analysis of philosophical terms. The principle determinates the consideration of the theoretical object from two sides: European and Indian. Having appeared in the Western epistemic culture, these methods effectively work to objectify the results of socio-humanitarian research, thanks to which they are becoming increasingly widespread among non-Western cross-cultural philosophers. When the author applies the method of logical analysis to justify the absence of the concepts of reason and rationality in India, she is guided by the rules of logical semantics and the principles of semiotics. The compared terms, Western and Indian, are considered as signs with their own meanings and senses. The senses are understood as sets of predicates important for solving the author’s task. The author of the article, taking into account the experience of famous philosophers, negatively assesses the possibility of solving the problem of unambiguously correct translation.

Epistemic Culture of Japan: General Outlines in the Mirror of the Historical and Philosophical Approach

Ability of knowledge and thinking operations, such as abstraction, comparison syllogisms and so on, are of course common to all peoples. Nevertheless, when referring to this or that specifi c cultural material, the problem of the existence of separate epistemic cultures arises. Contemporary research on epistemological diversity relies primarily on methods of analytic epistemology and focuses on identifying examples of ‘cross-linguistic divergence’ at the semantic level. The concepts of ‘know’ and ‘knowledge’ often become the object of research. However, there are suffi cient grounds for identifying and studying epistemic cultures also in terms of other parameters. This article is focused upon highlighting these parameters by referring to examples of the history of the Japanese spiritual tradition associated with Buddhist and Confucian teachings. In particular, the author examines the Buddhist doctrines of two truths and the identity of absolute being and the phenomenal world, as well as the neo-Confucian principle of the unity of knowledge and action from the point of view of their infl uence on the epistemological attitudes of Japanese culture. The undertaken analytic excursion allows, using the example of Japan, to show that each culture has its own set of assumptions underlying the cognitive strategy, certain preferences, more or less trust in relation to one or another form of acquiring knowledge, e.g., sensoryempirical, rational, intuitive forms, as well as ideas about the goals of cognition, differently perceived in diverse cultural and historical contexts.

Barriers to cross-disciplinary knowledge flow: The case of medical education research

Introduction The medical education research field operates at the crossroads of two distinct academic worlds: higher education and medicine. As such, this field provides a unique opportunity to explore new forms of cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange. Methods Cross-disciplinary knowledge flow in medical education research was examined by looking at citation patterns in the five journals with the highest impact factor in 2017. To grasp the specificities of the knowledge flow in medical education, the field of higher education was used as a comparator. In total, 2031 citations from 64 medical education and 41 higher education articles published in 2017 were examined. Results Medical education researchers draw on a narrower range of knowledge communities than their peers in higher education. Medical education researchers predominantly cite articles published in health and medical education journals (80% of all citations), and to a lesser extent, articles published in education and social science journals. In higher education, while the largest share of the cited literature is internal to the domain (36%), researchers cite literature from across the social science spectrum. Findings suggest that higher education scholars engage in conversations with academics from a broader range of communities and perspectives than their medical education colleagues. Discussion Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of doxa and field, it is argued that the variety of epistemic cultures entering the higher education research space contributes to its interdisciplinary nature. Conversely, the existence of a relatively homogeneous epistemic culture in medicine potentially impedes cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange.

Are Theories Politically Flexible?

Social theories are politically flexible if people use them to support opposite political claims. But is this even possible? And what kind of theories have such a property? Moving beyond epistemological debates about neutrality and value-leadenness, this article defends an empirical approach to the study of flexible and rigid political uses of social theories. I identify two main sources of flexibility: endogenous properties of theories, notably their generality, ambiguity, and neutrality, and exogenous features of the contexts in which they are used and of the individuals who use them, notably differences in political and epistemic culture.

The Document as Epistemic Object: Notes on Archival Knowledge Cultures

This article strategically resituates scholarly engagement with archival documents within the media ecology and the epistemic culture that sustains literary and cultural studies, noting affinities between historical and contemporary configurations as well as between theoretical and medial-material dimensions of archives. Based on current debates on the growing relevance of archival documents in American Studies and adjacent fields, it stakes out a framework that leans on recent work in a small branch of contemporary literary theory focused on historical epistemology, especially with regard to the notion of ‘epistemic objects’. Engaging these theoretical concerns, the article discusses concrete archival collections and documents, including letters by the novelist Willa Cather and items from a capacious archive documenting the emergence and evolution of Andrew Carnegie’s public library philanthropy. I outline several ways in which the shape and the aesthetics of such archives embody the information economies and epistemic situations of the past – in this case, the formative period around 1900. Finally, the article addresses the digital document overload that confronts the contemporary researcher and comments on the emerging archival knowledge culture of today’s humanities.

Scaling up and rolling out through the Web

The purpose of this paper is to investigate online public participation and engagement in science through crowdsourcing platforms. In order to fulfil this purpose, this paper will use the crowdsourcing platform Zooniverse as a case study, as it constitutes the most prominent and established citizen science platform today. The point of departure for the analysis is that Zooniverse can be seen as a “platformization” of citizen science and scientific citizenship. The paper suggests that the mobilisation of individuals who participate and engage in science on the Zooniverse platform takes place through an epistemic culture that emphasises both authenticity and prospects of novel discoveries. Yet, in the process of turning “raw” data into useable data, Zooniverse has implemented a framework that structures the crowd, something that limits the sort of participation that is offered on the platform. This limitation means that the platform as a whole hardly be seen as fostering a more radical democratic inclusion, for example in the form of a co-production of scientific knowledge, that dissolves the institutional borders between scientists and non-professional volunteers.

Changing Infrastructural Practices: Routine and Reproducibility in Automated Interdisciplinary Bioscience

Proponents of engineering and design approaches to biology aim to make interdisciplinary bioscience research faster and more reproducible. This paper outlines and deploys a practice-based approach to analyses of infrastructure that focuses on the routine epistemic activities and charts how two such routines are unsettled and resettled in the background of epistemic culture. This paper describes attempts to bring about new research infrastructures in synthetic biology using robotics and software-enabled design. A focus on the skills of pipetting shows how established manual labor has to be reconfigured to fit with novel robotic automations. An analysis of curating frozen materials shows that automated design presents new problems for the established activities of storing and retrieving biological materials. These movements, while transient, have implications for organizing interdisciplinary collaboration, research productivity, and enabling greater reproducibility. This paper explores the idea of infrastructure as practice and shows how this has important implications for studies of research infrastructures. This article discusses the main contributions of this approach for analysts of infrastructure in terms of movements, temporalities, and ethics and offers suggestions for what the research implies for synthetic biology.