Academic literature on the topic 'Epistemic Fluidity'

AbstractIn Group Duties, Stephanie Collins proposes a ‘tripartite’ social ontology of groups as obligation-bearers. Producing a unified theory of group obligations that reflects our messy social reality is challenging and this ‘three-sizes-fit-all’ approach promises clarity but does not always keep that promise. I suggest considering the epistemic level as primary in determining collective obligations, allowing for more fluidity than the proposed tripartite ontology of collectives, coalitions and combinations.

Following Isabelle Stengers’s call that the anthropocene should make us feel and think differently, this paper focuses on the human task to shift its affective response. Since Stengers calls for a new “us” that seeks to participate in an entanglement, I propose to explore the material and ontogenetic functions of soil, and specifically soil pores, in reimagining a new form of e-co-affectivity. A new e-co-affective response would emphasize the usually hidden fluidity and diachronic time of pores, and, in doing so, cultivate an epistemic and aesthetic sensitivity, deceleration, and percolation.

Three experiments investigated the consequences of the epistemic motivation toward closure on the emergence of creative interactions in small groups. In the first study, need for closure was manipulated via time pressure. Results showed that in groups under high need for closure (i.e. under time pressure) the percentage of creative acts during group discussion was reduced. The second study replicated this result using an individual differences operationalization of the need for closure. In the third study, groups composed of individuals high (versus low) in need for closure performed less creatively, and exhibited less ideational fluidity during group interaction. Moreover, it was demonstrated that conformity pressure mediates the negative relationship between dispositional need for closure and group creativity. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Dietitians provide nutritional care in various contexts and it is expected that dietetic subjectivity shapes and is shaped by health/nutrition discourse, but this has not been sufficiently explored. The purpose of this study was to further understand dietetic subjectivity, dietitians’ experiences of their education and relationships between educational and practice discourses. Twelve dietitians were recruited to participate in semi-structured research interviews. Feminist theoretical perspectives informed the research including the interpretation of data, which was analyzed according to the Listening Guide, a feminist voice-centered relational method. A theory of dietitian performativity informed by Butler (1999) emerged whereby dietitians expressed passion and melancholia for their practice. Also, participants experienced discontinuity between educational and practice contexts, which highlighted the need to integrate embodied epistemic perspectives throughout undergraduate education. These findings support a critical gesture in dietetic educational discourse away from positivism towards embodiment as a means for highlighting and reinforcing the complexity and fluidity of dietetic performativity.

Abstract Since the 1990s Western clinical radiology has been confronted with a fundamental media-induced change - the so-called analogue-digital migration. Film-based diagnostics and archiving of radiological images are transformed into digital interfaces and infrastructures. Networked software applications, namely picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), provide a new basis for processing and displaying image data. The design and implementation of PACS and their (user) interfaces challenged, amongst others, the search for data standards for digital diagnostics. The data format DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication) was developed to provide the technological basis for encoding image data. Simultaneously, DICOM determines how patients’ bodies are rendered machine-readable and how radiologists are able to gain software-based insights. A main function of DICOM metadata is encoding and continuously actualising patient identification for technological and human actors. A misidentification of image data and specific patient could lead to fatal errors in the furthe+r treatment process. Accordingly, metadata themselves meander between being invisible to the human user and being essential and hence necessarily visible information for diagnostics. Shifting between normativity and fluidity, DICOM metadata enables new practices of radiological diagnostics, which literally bear vital consequences for patients and, on another level, for the profession of radiology. The paper analyses inherent politics and tensions of metadata from a media theoretical point of view by employing the case of the DICOM standard. Based on subject-specific discourses, data models as well as an in-depth examination of exemplary DICOM metadata it shows how (meta)data politics redefine diagnostic infrastructures and routines as well as gain impact on epistemic and aesthetic practices at the turn of the analogue-digital migration.

L’articolo esamina il rapporto tra l’ermeneutica filosofica e la bioetica, discutendo criticamente alcune tesi al riguardo di Hans Georg Gadamer, e argomenta la possibilità di uno statuto epistemologico della bioetica. L’Autore ritiene, infatti, che la verità nella ricerca di impianti teorici di bioetica che molti studiosi – soprattutto di formazione bioetica – tentano per fornire un quadro valutativo che si armonizzi con le concrete esigenze operative sollecitate dal progresso scientifico altro non riveli che una situazione di “fluidità” epistemologica della bioetica. Tale situazione, poi, viene enfatizzata dalla perdurante crisi dei modelli della razionalità occidentale e che coinvolge sia le discipline scientifiche sia la filosofia. La prospettiva ermeneutica intende mostrare che 1. la fluidità e la storicità dlle valutazioni e delle procedure di intervento costituiscono una condizione insuperabile; 2; la fusione tra l’atto della comprensione e il momento dell’applicazione sono necessari. Tenuto conto di certe pretese riduzionistiche della stessa ermeneutica, allora la giustificazione della bioetica come episteme passa attraverso la confutazione di tali pretese. L’articolo, intatti, sostiene la legittimità della bioetica non solo a livello pratico-valutativo, ma anche teorico-normativo.

Abstract. Recognizing the fluidity around the definitions and boundaries of Islamic psychology (IP), I propose that the assumption of decolonial thought may help IP reimagine its vision, orientation, and directions. Distinguished by three fundamentals – epistemic freedom, liberation, and humanization – paradigmatic IP may harvest psycho-spiritual, cognitive, and affective resources as well as methodological, ethical, and metaphysical substance through the creation of an archive of Islamic humanism to speak back to all areas of psychology and cognate disciplines focused on human behavior. The espousal of decolonial thought locates IP within larger bodies of solidarity and decolonizing scholarship committed to pluriversal and transformatory enactments of knowledge.

AbstractThough James Fenimore Cooper’s five Leatherstocking-Tales (1823–1841) seem unlikely candidates for an encyclopaedic poetics, they encompass frontier life in an extensive scope, integrating a wide range of sources as well as using immense descriptive detail that often enough overgrows their plot. Even more to the point is the often voiced scepticism towards academic knowledge. By taking the tales as a test case for the ‘encyclopaedic novel‘, I explore how encyclopaedic reference shifts in the genesis of these five novels. In addition, a survey of contemporary publishing shows a similar fluidity in the various bearings that encyclopaedic forms could take on at the time. Given the double flexibility of the status and formation of encyclopaedic knowledge, both in the Leatherstocking tales and in contemporary discourse, the article suggests a less strict, more profane and popularly grounded, as well as more historically relative notion of what constitutes an encyclopaedic narrative. As to the Leatherstocking tales, I suggest that they occupy an epistemic space that was then only recently given up by academic encyclopaedic thought, and that they do so by claiming an encyclopaedic function of their own.

Hantu (in Bahasa Indonesia), or ghosts, are portrayed as the incarnation of monstrous or evil souls wishing to harm humans (Amin et al., 2017). Most modern Indonesians still believe in ghosts, proven by an outgrowing number of ghost films. From the 1970s until the present, more than 320 ghost films have been made and can be differentiated according to each culture, custom, and religion in Indonesia. Indonesian people believe that ghost films in Indonesia are scarier than ghost films from abroad because of a symbolic bond between ghosts and traditional myths represented in the films. For example, one of the ghost films in Indonesia titled Pengabdi Setan or “Satan’s Slaves” that has been watched by 4.2 million moviegoers was using gender (e.g. the fertility of women), occupation (e.g. the profession of artists), and religion (e.g. the role of religious leaders) as the conservative narratives’ symbols. However, based on scientific consensus, the existence of ghosts is not a valid concept and is classified as pseudoscience (Regal, 2009). Yet the existence of ghosts cannot be falsified because of the human belief besides the world’s end and the belief in the spirits of the dead has existed ever since humans embraced animism before humans began writing texts (Bunge, 1999; Briefs et al., 2010; and Nees, 2015). After humans knew letters, studying Indonesian’s belief in ghosts through document theory is almost as important as studying humans’ development in writing. Previous studies on ghost films have been identified from the fields of cinematography, culture, and film criticism, yet they have not been examined through the lens of document theory. This paper aims to understand ghost films in Indonesia through concepts in document theory such as materiality, productivity, and fixity. The results discuss the material aspect of ghost films as documents with informative material regardless of the film’s genre, based on document theory (Otlet, 1934; Briet, 1951). Our findings also show productivity and fixity; for example, ghost films are creatio ex materia as information creation and use are the materials from which ghost films are created (Gorichanaz, 2017) and have the ability to tell the same story over different places and times (Levy, 1994; Narayan, 2015). For instance, ghost-type such as Pocong and Kuntilanak has indicated the concept of ghosts that passed down by previous Indonesian ancestors. This study, however, does not discuss recent efforts to perpetuate those memories through the film, but rather the film as a material is important to analyze through document theory. In terms of productivity, ghost films have the added value of releasing ghosts as materials, triggering the human imagination and our ability to provide evidence of changing epistemic perspectives over space and time. In terms of fixity, our study opens opportunities for further research, such as fluidity, floating fixity, authenticity, and other aspects with which to analyze ghost films as (digital) documents. As an additional result, drawing from Foucault’s panopticon concept (Foucault, 1970; Wood, 2003), we found that perpetuating the power from which people have unconsciously been mentally controlled is a kind of panopticism. Since documents function as panopticons, ghost films have provided power and will “discipline” people because these ghost stories can be haunting and frightening. Thus, the panopticon metaphor in ghost films emphasizes the internalization of external surveillance rationales so that people have accepted these rationales as part of the self-practices because they can never be sure the hidden others are watching them (Lupton, 2016).

Many trends in agricultural biotechnology have extended fluidly from the first era of genetic modification using recombinant DNA techniques to the era of gene editing. But the high-profile, explicit, and assertive discourse of democratization with gene editing — especially CRISPR-Cas9 — is something new. In this paper, I draw on semi-structured interviews with gene editors, policy analysts, and communications experts as well as with critical academic and civil society experts. I use Science and Technology Studies and political ecology lenses to unpack democratization in three main parts. First is democratizing discourses: On what grounds is CRISPR said to be democratic? Who is saying so? How do dissident communities respond to these narratives? Second is agricultural applications, with a focus on the Innovative Genomics Institute’s work in developing gene-edited food crops, including a case of saveable clonal hybrid rice. Third is governance, where I contrast US Department of Agriculture regulations and the CRISPRcon conference as “closed” and “invited” spaces, respectively, for democratic participation. Next, I argue that “created spaces,” in which power is held by typically delegitimized actors and ideas, offer an opening for working out democracy on the terrain of biotechnology. I conclude with a set of principles and practices for CRISPR governance based on the idea that democratization of biotechnology requires epistemic justice. By gathering multiple, partial knowledges together, we move beyond narrow risk-benefit framings to better evaluate not just what CRISPR is and does, but what democracy means and whom it serves.

In this thesis, I explore the issue of epistemic responsibility. I start by examining an argument against the use of critical thinking made by Michael Huemer. Huemer argues that critical thinking is not epistemically responsible, because it is not as truth conducive as credulity. Huemer instead argues that credulity should be the default approach taken by non-experts. After dissecting this argument, I go on to examine one of the critics to Huemer’s argument: David Kary. Kary argues that critical thinking and credulity are not mutually exclusive and can therefore be combined in an epistemically responsible way. Kary further argues that one must consider the social components of epistemic responsibility, and that when one does so, it is evident that truth conduciveness is not the only component of epistemic responsibility. I extend Huemer and Kary’s discussion by arguing that epistemic responsibility is even more complex. Epistemic superiority, equality and inferiority are fluid positions that change depending on context, and this must be considered when evaluating epistemic responsibility. The consequence of this approach is that a combination of critical thinking and credulity is the most responsible alternative. I end by arguing for the intellectual virtues and benefits of embracing this argument.

In the conclusion, I come back on key issues of my analysis of Ālāol’s poetics. Whereas performance and the absence of theoretical frame recorded in treatises on grammar or poetics are defining features of the vernacular tradition, we witness attempts to describe and systematize vernacular poetics in eastern South Asia. Sanskrit played a major role in this attempt at systematizing vernacular poetics to foster connoisseurship. The domain of reference of vernacular poets was not poetics per se or rhetoric, but lyrical arts and musicology. But efforts to describe vernacular poetics also display an awareness of the importance of heteroglossia and fluidity in vernacular aesthetics in contrast with Sanskrit. The opening up of the Sanskrit episteme constituted by vernacular poetics also made possible the recourse to literary models and quasi-experimental uses of vernacular poetic idioms. Old Maithili, Avadhi, and Persian were visible components of the making of vernacular poetics in Bengal.