Epistemic Emotions and Co-inquiry: A Situated Approach

This paper discusses the virtue epistemology literature on epistemic emotions and challenges the individualist, unworldly account of epistemic emotions. It argues that epistemic emotions can be truth-motivating if embedded in co-inquiry epistemic cultures, namely virtuous epistemic cultures that valorise participatory processes of inquiry as truth-conducive. Co-inquiry epistemic cultures are seen as playing a constitutive role in shaping, developing, and regulating epistemic emotions. Using key references to classical Pragmatism, the paper describes the bridge between epistemic emotions and co-inquiry culture in terms of habits of co-inquiry that act as the scaffolding of epistemic emotions. The result is a context-sensitive and practice-oriented approach to epistemic emotions that conceives of those emotions as being shaped by co-inquiry epistemic cultures.

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.

Researching conferences as spaces of valuation: a pragmatic approach

Scientific conferences are not only sites of knowledge exchange and networking. They are also spaces of valuation that are constitutive of epistemic cultures. At conferences, scholars (re-) negotiate what counts as good research, what kind of scholarship is considered valuable and which epistemic properties matter for their field. This negotiation sometimes happens explicitly, but more often through evaluative acts: statements of reasoning and justification, questions and remarks, and evaluative emotional utterances that include literal and figurative expressions of appreciation, scepticism, rejection, etc. Combining conference ethnography with a pragmatic approach borrowing insights from linguistics offers a way to identify and interpret such evaluative acts in conference talk. An analysis of data from the 3rd International Forest Policy Meeting (IFPM3), a virtual event with participants from across the globe, serves as illustrative case. Text materials generated through observing participation (field notes, transcripts, chat comments and abstracts) show how forest policy researchers ascribe worth to studies characterised by methodical rigour and praxis orientation, and guided by an objectivistic ideal of science. However, the latter was also challenged by panelists who enthusiatically appraised reflexive research that acknowledged the role of emotions in knowledge production.The IFPM3 case shows that conferences offer a unique space for observing academic valuation practice. Exploring how scholars enact values through conference discourse will not only help to better understand the specificities of particular research fields and their epistemic cultures. It can also more generally enhance the understanding of how social and epistemic levels in science intersect.

‘They are all dead that I could ask’: Indigenous Innovation and the Micropolitics of the Field in Twentieth-century Southern Africa

Recovering the agency, skill and innovation of archaeological field assistants from historical encounters is essential to interrogating processes of knowledge production, but is often hampered by access to appropriate archival sources and methods. We detail a field project from early twentieth-century Basutoland (modern-day Lesotho) that is unique both for its aim to salvage details of rock-art production as a dying craft and for its archive chronicling the project's intellectual journey from experiment to draft manuscripts to published work over more than three decades. We argue that critical historiographic attention to this archive offers a guide for examining the intimate dynamics of fieldwork and the effects of these micropolitics on the archaeological canon. We demonstrate how sustained attention to long processes of knowledge production can pinpoint multiple instances in which the usability of field assistants’ scientific knowledge is qualified, validated, or rejected, and in this case how an African assistant is transformed into an ethnographic interlocutor. For rock-art studies especially, this represents a need for interrogating the epistemic cultures—not just the content—of foundational historical data.

Attaining the Stable Movement of Knowledge Objects through the Swedish Criminal Justice System

This article thinks with infrastructure about the stable movement of knowledge objects such as crime scene reports, traces, and order forms through the Swedish criminal justice system. Infrastructures span different communities and borders; the criminal justice system is made up of necessarily disparate epistemic cultures. Thus, they share a central concern: Both aim for stable movement from one context to another. Thinking with infrastructure, the article argues, makes it possible to widen analytical focus and capture the structures and the continuous work that resolve the tension between different sites and thus enable the stable movement of knowledge objects. Using sensibilities from infrastructure studies– for the resolution of tensions, for continuous maintenance, and for inequalities – the article argues that the criminal justice system enacts the knowledge objects’ stability across epistemic cultures. In other words, the stable movement of evidence-to-be through the Swedish criminal justice system is the result of infrastructuring, that is, of its continuous creating of conditions that facilitate movement and create and re-create stability. This perspective may be useful for studying the movement of knowledge also in other contexts.