Explorative Experiments and Digital Humanism: Adding an Epistemic Dimension to the Ethical Debate

The rise of Digital Humanism calls for shaping digital technologies in accordance with human values and needs. I argue that to achieve this goal, an epistemic and methodological dimension should be added to the ethical reflections developed in the last years. In particular, I propose the framework of explorative experimentation in computer science and engineering to set an agenda for the reflection on the ethical issues of digital technologies that seriously considers their peculiarities from an epistemic point of view. As the traditional epistemic categories of the natural sciences cannot be directly adopted by computer science and engineering, the traditional moral principles guiding experimentation in the natural sciences should be reconsidered in the case of digital technologies where uncertainty about their impacts and risks is very high.

A cognitive account of subjectivity put to the test: using an insertion task to investigate Mandarin result connectives

This article aims to further test the cognitive claims of the so-called subjectivity account of causal events and their linguistic markers, causal connectives. We took Mandarin Chinese, a language that is typologically completely different from the usual western languages, as a case to provide evidence for this subjectivity account. Complementary to the commonly used corpora analyses, we employed crowdsourcing to tap native speakers’ intuitions about causal coherence, focusing on four result connectives kějiàn ‘therefore’, suǒyǐ ‘so’, yīncǐ ‘so/for this reason’ and yúshì ‘thereupon/as a result’. The analysis shows systematic differences regarding the use of connectives in relations that differ in terms of subjectivity, demonstrating that native speakers make use of subjectivity to encode and decode different types of causal relations in discourse. Moreover, our study evidences that a comprehensive model of subjectivity should include the epistemic dimension of certainty about the subjectivity scale that might be indicated by other linguistic elements. In-depth analyses of the test items revealed that the presence/absence of modality words in the result segments are related to different preferential patterns for the connectives. There is a trade-off between the epistemic dimension of certainty and the expression of subjectivity in the four connectives involved.

Written argumentation practices in two Argentinian undergraduate courses: multidimensionality and epistemic potentials

This paper states that the epistemic potentialities of writing and arguing are largely derived from the interweaving of four dimensions. Three of them are constitutive (the logical, rhetorical, and dialectical dimensions), and one is integrative (the epistemic dimension). Thus, we characterize how these four distinct dimensions operate in texts produced by first-year university students in two disciplines (Linguistics and Biology) and how those students reflect on their processes of writing and arguing. The results belong to qualitative research designed as a multiple case study, which focused on teaching practices that intertwine disciplinary contents, writing, and argumentation in Argentinian university classrooms. These results deepen the academic literacies’ lines of research regarding the role that argumentation plays in academic writing. We analyze texts produced by students and interviews with them to characterize the dimensions that such students deploy when writing and arguing to learn in their disciplines.

Forgiveness and the Repairing of Epistemic Trust

The epistemic relevance of forgiveness has been neglected by both the discussion of forgiveness in moral psychology and by social epistemology generally. Moral psychology fails to account for the forgiveness of epistemic wrongs and for the way that wrongs in general have epistemic implications. Social epistemology, for its part, neglects the way that epistemic trust is not only conferred but repaired. In this essay, I show that the repair of epistemic trust through forgiveness is necessary to the economy of knowledge for fallible persons like us. Despite the fact that forgiveness is never included on lists of important intellectual virtues or epistemic activities, it is vital to our lives as social knowers. Likewise, an account of forgiveness that neglects its epistemic dimension is importantly incomplete.

Emotional Tension as a Frame for Argumentation and Decision-Making: Vegetarian vs. Omnivorous Diets

Argumentative discourse has a complexity that is not entirely captured by purely structural analyses. In arguments about socio-scientific issues (SSI), a range of dimensions, besides scientific knowledge, including values, ethical concerns, cultural habits, or emotions, are mobilized. The relationship between argumentation and emotions is now drawing attention of researchers. Our focus is on the dynamic interactions among emotions and scientific evidence. We draw from Plantin, who proposed that emotions are mobilized as argumentative resources alongside knowledge. The goal of our study is to examine in which ways emotional tension frames the construction of arguments about vegetarian vs. omnivorous diets (ODs) with a group of four preservice teachers. The results suggest that the interactions between the group emotional tension and the evaluation of evidence drive a change toward a decision that would be emotionally acceptable for all participants. Participants attended to the epistemic dimension, weighing evidence, and values about the choices, but the emotional framing took priority. We suggest that the analysis of this emotive framing may be a fruitful approach for sophisticated studies of argumentation beyond structural issues.

Situated and subjugated: Fixer knowledge in the global newsroom

This article examines the role of the fixer in international news production, particularly war reportage, and reorients an ongoing debate about the role of local media-workers in foreign bureaus. While the institutional conditions of fixing have received some scholarly attention, the epistemic dimension of fixers’ labour yet requires critical examination. Utilizing eighteen months of participant observation and qualitative interviews with fixers and foreign journalists in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, I demonstrate that the local, ‘situated’ knowledge of fixers is both structural to, and ultimately suppressed by, the global, ‘professional’ knowledge of international news. This tension is evident in the routines of war reportage – gathering information, navigating checkpoints – and in journalism’s generic conventions, as where the byline – mark of professional authorship – establishes a hierarchy regarding what counts as authoritative meanings for war. In resituating analysis of fixing from the institutional to the epistemic, this article aims to recover the displacements inherent to normative representations of foreign conflict.

New Educational Mission

The last chapter proposes to go not only beyond the epistemic dimension to improve it, but also beyond the lesson content. The German's lesson shows how easily we can exceed students' expectations and arouse their curiosity, enthusiasm, and learning investment. If we aspire to decrease school violence, bullying, and delinquency, a new educational mission would be to surpass teaching without necessarily being demanding or time-consuming. Indeed, making use of the relational dimension—using the multiple intelligence and STEAM approaches to include students through competence—seemss to refer to the new school mission as an aspiration builder rather than a selection referee and inducer of discouragement.

Qualia realism and representationalism

The article deals with the problem of naturalistic explanation of an essential feature of all conscious mental states – the phenomenal character. The conception of qualia realism can be considered as one of the options for a non-naturalistic explanation of this phenomenon. Nevertheless, it is believed that the phenomenal character of experience can be explained in terms of representational content that are more acceptable to naturalism. As a rule, in these discussions, qualia are identified with the non-representational properties of experience – mental paint. The author analyzes in detail the relationship between the concepts of “qualia” and “mental paint” in the key work of G. Harman. It is shown that Harman’s argument against qualia realism fails. He defined qualia in terms of the mental paint conception, which contains consequences that replace the original thesis of qualia realism. To attack the foundations of qualia realism in a more relevant way, the author develops A. Kind’s idea of the epistemic dimension of qualia. Kind points out that since the philosophers arrived at the question of the existence of qualia by considering the plausibility of functionalism, they were so focused on metaphysical considerations that they forgot that this phenomenon is connected in the first epistemic dimension. On the basis of this, a new version of the argument from transparency of experience versus qualia realism was proposed. The argument demonstrates that the qualia realism fails the test of introspective analysis of perceptual experience. Qualia turn out to be theoretical objects that do not fulfill their prescribed explanatory function. This undermines the foundations of metaphysical arguments against the reductionist approach to consciousness, since they proceeded from the assumption of the existence of referents of the concept of “qualia”. The variant of the explanation of the phenomenal character of experience in terms of representationalism also faces internal problems. In this regard, the author offers the option of direct realism, since it is well compatible with the transparency thesis and is generally consistent with the naturalistic attitudes of the representationalism.