Science is not the only form of knowledge but it is the best, being the most successful epistemic enterprise in history.
Philosophy is dead,’ Stephen Hawking once declared, because it ‘has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.’
The response from some philosophers was to accuse Hawking of ‘scientism'
Un des trucs les plus violents qu'on m'ait sorti lors d'une de mes brèves incursions dans le monde académique, c'est : "Ressemblance n'est pas raison"
Un adage qui présente tous les oripeaux de la rigueur scientifique n'est-ce pas ?
J'ai mis du temps à comprendre pourquoi cet adage m'avait tellement blessé à l'époque (c'était il y a 20 ans au moins)
Maintenant que je suis plongé dans des pensées qui tentent de décoloniser l'épistémologie, je comprends mieux. Et prends conscience que ma passion pour les anthropologies "animistes" (et pour les polythéismes antiques !) est venue en quelque sorte s'inscrire en opposition à cette épistémologie occidentale "dans la mesure où elle va de soi, et prétend s'imposer universellement à toute pensée, d'où qu'elle soit" (alors qu'elle s'origine dans la modernité dualiste et coloniale européenne - et ne vaut d'abord que pour les scholars du cru)
On chemine parfois de manière étrange, sans être vraiment conscient des itinéraires que nous empruntons, et puis, un jour ou l'autre (ou jamais), tout devient plus clair (ou plus obscur).
When scientists make erroneous pronouncements outside their area of expertise that's misinformation. When they make predictions that prove wrong that can be hugely consequential. How do we stop ourselves from doing this and how do we recognise epistemic trespass in others? What actually constitutes 'expertise', particularly in novel, interdisciplinary contexts ?
Join the scibeh.org 2024 online workshop to help us all work this out
Some Narrative Conventions of Scientific Discourse
Rom Harré, 1990
"The academic ‘we’ might seem at first glance to be just a version of the editorial ‘we’. Like the latter it is mutedly egocentric but it is not mainly used to imply teamwork. Rather, it is used to draw the listener into complicity, to participate as something more than an audience. "
"The moral status of persons determines the epistemic status of their results. This becomes entirely intelligible if we think in terms of trust rather than truth. Trust in someone’s results depends very much on our faith in that person, whereas truth, so it seems to me, ought to be tied to trust in a methodology, regardless of who uses it, provided they use it competently. " - Harré p 93.
‘There is no such thing as a real picture,’ says Samsung exec
"As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce [what you’re seeing], and it doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to define a real picture by saying, ‘I took that picture’, but if you used AI to optimize the zoom, the autofocus, the scene – is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop."
Are #philosophy students’ intuitions about thought experiments different because of expertise?
Longitudinal studies of philosophy and #CogSci students (N = 226) didn't seem to reveal as much: there were some group differences in intuitions, but a selection/indoctrination effect seemed more likely than “a general expertise” or “expertise specific to particular subfields”.
How should numeric probabilities be translated into words? Maybe they shouldn't be.
"Words of estimative probability" wreak havoc in high-stakes communication like #intelligenceCommunity assessments and briefings, in part because intelligence and defense institutions map numbers to different words (!) — see Amelia Kahn's forthcoming work at ameliakahn.wordpress.com.
"... 1. Can Violence Be Turned into an Autonomous Object of Philosophical Reflection? ...
,,, . A typical tendency of modernity leads to avoiding the analysis of violence (especially visible, strong, bloody violence), liquidating it through a sort of easy “psychiatrization”: violent people are people who “are not well”—that is, crazy people. In most cases, however, psychiatry has nothing to do with it ... "
"Our current scientific exploration of reality oftentimes appears focused on epistemic states and empiric results at the expense of ontological concerns. Any scientific approach without explicit ontological arguments cannot be deemed rational however, as our very Being can never be excluded from the equation."
--Leanne Whitney, Beyond Conception: Ontic Reality, Pure Consciousness and Matter https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/496 #leannewhitney#ontology#epistemology
Making the circumcision controversy controversial: Going meta and taking aim at the messenger(s): Reply to Wamai et al.,
de Camargo Jr et al., 2015, Global Public Health
"For those of us who study the use of rhetoric in science, their commentary offers a fascinating example of many of the well-documented observations made by authors working in Science and Technology Studies."
Critical Realism: A Critical Evaluation
Tong Zhang, Social Epistemology 2022
"positivism provides the scientists with the excuse to focus on formulating and revising auxiliary theories and omit the discussion of core theories, thereby leading to the establishment of dogmatic metaphysics."
Practising reflexivity: Ethics, methodology and theory construction
Supriya Subramani, 2019, Method. Innovations
"From the relativist epistemological stance that constructivist grounded theory adopts, I believe that there are multiple constructed social realities and participants, researchers, and their experiences are part of the process of constructing meanings."