New Work For Certainty

This paper argues that we should assign certainty a central place in epistemology. While epistemic certainty played an important role in the history of epistemology, recent epistemology has tended to dismiss certainty as an unattainable ideal, focusing its attention on knowledge instead. I argue that this is a mistake. Attending to certainty attributions in the wild suggests that much of our everyday knowledge qualifies, in appropriate contexts, as certain. After developing a semantics for certainty ascriptions, I put certainty to explanatory work. Specifically, I argue that by taking certainty as our central epistemic notion, we can shed light on a variety of important topics, including evidence and evidential probability, epistemic modals, and the normative constraints on credence and assertion

"A Brilliant Mind": Margaret Egan and Social Epistemology

Margaret Egan (1905???59) taught at the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago (1946???55) and at the School of Library Science at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio (1955???59). With her colleague Jesse Shera, Egan wrote ???Foundations of a Theory of Bibliography??? for Library Quarterly in 1952; this article marked the fi rst appearance of the term ???social epistemology.??? After Egan???s death, Shera has often been credited for the idea of social epistemology. However, there is ample evidence to show that it was Egan who originated the concept???one that is commonly viewed as fundamental to the theoretical foundations of library and information science.published or submitted for publicatio

Uniqueness and Logical Disagreement

This paper discusses the uniqueness thesis, a core thesis in the epistemology of disagreement. After presenting uniqueness and clarifying relevant terms, a novel counterexample to the thesis will be introduced. This counterexample involves logical disagreement. Several objections to the counterexample are then considered, and it is argued that the best responses to the counterexample all undermine the initial motivation for uniqueness

Quantity and number

Quantity is the first category that Aristotle lists after substance. It has extraordinary epistemological clarity: "2+2=4" is the model of a self-evident and universally known truth. Continuous quantities such as the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle are as clearly known as discrete ones. The theory that mathematics was "the science of quantity" was once the leading philosophy of mathematics. The article looks at puzzles in the classification and epistemology of quantity

Fact, Fiction and Virtual Worlds

This paper considers the medium of videogames from a goodmanian standpoint. After some preliminary clarifications and definitions, I examine the ontological status of videogames. Against several existing accounts, I hold that what grounds their identity qua work types is code. The rest of the paper is dedicated to the epistemology of videogaming. Drawing on Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin's works, I suggest that the best model to defend videogame cognitivism appeals to the notion of understanding

CATEGORIZATION OF ISLAMIC THINKING

Epistemology discusses the sources of knowledge and how to obtainknowledge. History has recorded that Islamic civilization was once the mecca ofworld knowledge around the 7th century to the 15th century. After that, thepackaging period began to become Malay, static, even backwards to the 21stcentury. The method used to obtain the data needed in this discussion is the LibraryResearch method. The result is that there are 3 (three) categorizations of Islamicthinking, namely Bayani epistemology, which is an epistemology which assumesthat the source of knowledge is revelation (text) or reasoning from the text. Burhaniepistemology is an epistemology which holds that the source of knowledge is reason.Meanwhile, the epistemology of 'irfani is an epistemology which assumes thatknowledge is the will (iradah). These three categories of thinking also have theirrespective advantages which of course can be used according to the problem orsituation at hand

Moving the gender agenda or stirring chicken’s entrails?: where next for feminist methodologies in accounting?

Purpose – The paper critiques recent research on gender and accounting to explore how feminist methodology can move on and radicalise the gender agenda in the accounting context. Design/methodology/approach – After examining current research on gender and accounting, the paper explores the nature of feminist methodology and its relation to epistemology. It explores three inter-related tenets of feminist methodology in detail: Power and Politics, Subjectivity and Reflexivity. Findings – The paper suggests that much research in the accounting is concerned with gender-as-a-variable, rather than being distinctly feminist, thus missing the opportunity to radicalise the agenda. It makes suggestions for how a feminist approach to methodology could be applied to the accounting context. Originality/value – The paper calls for a wider application of a feminist approach to accounting research and where this might be applied. Keywords – feminism, methodology, epistemology, gender, accounting, power, reflexivity, subjectivity Paper type – conceptual paper

Structures, inner values, hierarchies and stages: essentials for developmental robot architectures

In this paper we try to locate the essential components needed for a developmental robot architecture. We take the vocabulary and the main concepts from Piaget’s genetic epistemology and Vygotsky’s activity theory. After proposing an outline for a general developmental architecture, we describe the architectures that we have been developing in the recent years - Petitagé and Vygovorotsky. According to this outline, various contemporary works in autonomous agents can be classified, in an attempt to get a glimpse into the big picture and make the advances and open problems visible