S. B. Trasmundi, Edward Baggs, Juan Toro, S. Steffensen
{"title":"Expertise in Non-Well-Defined Task Domains: The Case of Reading","authors":"S. B. Trasmundi, Edward Baggs, Juan Toro, S. Steffensen","doi":"10.1080/02691728.2023.2266690","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2023.2266690","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51614,"journal":{"name":"Social Epistemology","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139277726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Becoming a Knower: Fabricating Knowing Through Coaction","authors":"Marie-Theres Fester-Seeger","doi":"10.1080/02691728.2023.2266716","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2023.2266716","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTThis paper takes a step back from considering expertise as a social phenomenon. One should investigate how people become knowers before assigning expertise to a person’s actions. Using a temporal-sensitive systemic ethnography, a case study shows how undergraduate students form a social system out of necessity as they fabricate knowledge around an empty wording like ‘conscious living’. Tracing the engagement with students and tutor to recursive moments of coaction, I argue that, through the subtleties of bodily movements, people incorporate the actions of others as they become knowers. Knowing for a person solidifies as they imbue concepts, terms, facts, etc. with their own understanding. While coaction refers to the interlocking of actions in a specific moment, the fabrication of knowledge resides in temporally distributed moments of coaction where students deliberately incorporate and build on past occurrences in a present moment. In so doing, people cannot be separated from their systemic embedding. Linking coaction with systemic cognition, people fabricate knowledge within wider systemic structures. Within these boundaries, knowers come to fabricate knowledge for themselves and a wider system. Thus, knowing must be seen as an active, embodied, dialogical and multiscalar activity.KEYWORDS: Languagingcoactionsystemic cognitionembodiment AcknowledgmentsThis paper benefited greatly from the comments of two anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank Stephen Cowley for his very valuable comments and for the insightful conversations about this paper. I also would like to thank the two editors of this special issue, Sarah Bro Trasmundi and Charlie Lassiter, for their patience and kindness and for making this special issue happen. My special thanks go to Charlie Lassiter for his invaluable feedback and help on this paper. A heartfelt thanks go to the research participants who consented to this study. Without them, this paper could not have been written.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. The written language bias emerges from Linell’s (Citation1982) observation that ‘[o]ur conception of linguistic behavior is biased by a tendency to treat processes, activities, and conditions on them in terms of object-like, static, autonomous and permanent structures, i.e. as if they shared such properties with written characters, words, texts, pictures and images’ (1). Pointing towards the bias of treating ‘natural’ language in terms of its written forms – that is, as ‘thing’-like entities – greatly excludes how human beings bring about language. Consequently, rather than acknowledging the heterogeneous character of language, linguists (and beyond) assign fixed and stable meanings to lexical items, view language as homogeneous systems, and think about language use in terms of acting with stable structures (Linell Citation2019). Hence, traditional linguistics dismiss how people, through gaze, gestur","PeriodicalId":51614,"journal":{"name":"Social Epistemology","volume":" 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135291497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Designing an Expert-Setting for Interdisciplinary Dialogue: Literary Texts as Boundary Objects","authors":"Karin Kukkonen","doi":"10.1080/02691728.2023.2270552","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2023.2270552","url":null,"abstract":"While literature is often used as a source of examples and illustrations across disciplines, literary studies tends to be underrepresented in interdisciplinary exchanges. Perhaps the reason lies in a lack of understanding what actually is the expertise of literary studies and how this can be useful in interdisciplinary settings. In this article, I propose to outline the expertise of literary scholars through concepts of 4E cognition and to devise a proposal for how such expertise could successfully shape the epistemic common ground of social cognition of experts in interdisciplinary dialogue. Literature involves metacognition centrally through its language style, the design of the narrative and its links to other texts, and literary scholars have the expertise in formulating exactly how this works – in a non-mimetic way – through the analysis and interpretation of literary texts. This very particular expertise and practice of literary scholars enables literary texts to be proposed as a boundary object in interdisciplinary dialogues through a shared epistemic common ground. For this argument, I build on earlier theoretical work in 4E cognition and predictive processing and my experience running interdisciplinary workshops on that model.","PeriodicalId":51614,"journal":{"name":"Social Epistemology","volume":"55 10","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135539566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Censorship Bubbles Vs Hate Bubbles","authors":"Wendy Xin","doi":"10.1080/02691728.2023.2274324","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2023.2274324","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTIn this paper, I argue that considerations of epistemic bubbles can give us reason to defend censorship of hate speech. Although censoring hate speech leads to epistemic bubbles (‘censorship bubbles’), they tend to be less epistemically problematic than epistemic bubbles generated by the circulation of hate speech (‘hate bubbles’). Because hate speech silences its target groups and creates the illusion that the dominant group identities are threatened, hate bubbles are likely more restrictive in structure than censorship bubbles and have a stronger tendency to turn into echo chambers where opposing views are actively discredited. Therefore, I argue that censorship bubbles might be a minor price we ought to pay to avoid hate bubbles. Additionally, my analysis shows that we cannot focus exclusively on the content or the structure of epistemic bubbles, since their content can partly determine their structure, as is in the case of hate bubbles.KEYWORDS: Hate speechcensorshipepistemic bubbles AcknowledgmentsI thank Emanuel Viebahn, Caroline West and James Evans for reading and commenting on this paper.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Here Alcoff draws from Lorraine Code Citation1993.2. Here Alcoff draws from Sandra Harding Citation1991.3. Here Alcoff draws from Charles Mills Citation1997.Additional informationNotes on contributorsWendy XinWendy Xin is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include environmental ethics, emotions, feminist philosophy and social epistemology.","PeriodicalId":51614,"journal":{"name":"Social Epistemology","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135636704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cringe","authors":"Thomas J. Spiegel","doi":"10.1080/02691728.2023.2268588","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2023.2268588","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTWhile shame and embarrassment have received significant attention in philosophy and psychology, cringe (also sometimes called ‘vicarious embarrassment’ and ‘vicarious shame’) has received little thought. This is surprising as the relatively new genre of cringe comedy has seen a meteoric rise since the early 2000s. In this paper, I aim to offer a novel characterization of cringe as a hostile social emotion which turns out to be closer to disgust and horror than to shame or embarrassment, thus disclosing ‘vicarious shame’ and ‘vicarious embarrassment’ to be misnomers. The closing part offers an explanation as to why cringe and cringe comedy in particular have become recently more relevant: cringe allows one to express hostility and disgust (often at other forms of life) in a nonviolent manner which fits perfectly well within the permissible boundaries of tolerance set up in liberal Western democracies since the second half of the 20th century.KEYWORDS: Cringevicarious embarrassmentvicarious shameemotions Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. While shame and embarrassment are sometimes treated as different phenomena, the current focus on cringe (Fremdscham) allows us to gloss over these differences.2. For the changing semantics of ‘cringe’ in the age of social media, cf. Gomez-Mejia (Citation2020, 317ff.).3. Hacker (Citation2017) further speaks of ‘other-directed shame’ which seemingly picks out a different kind of shame, i.e. not what is described here as cringe, but a kind where one feels due to the actions of others, not instead of others.4. Paulus et al. (Citation2013) – likely due to their background in psychology – use the term ‘empathetic’ (rather than ‘sympathetic’) here, but this terminology is contentious insofar as empathy is often regarded in philosophy as a capacity of discernment of emotions in others (e.g. Edith Stein’s original sense of Einfühlung). Empathy then does not necessarily sharing an emotion with someone (psychologists Nadler, Dvash, and Shamay-Tsoory Citation2015 commit the same terminological mix-up). Hence, what these authors have in mind is better described as ‘sympathetic’.5. In this way cringe (vicarious embarrassment) is different from vicarious anger. In vicarious anger, I am really just angry on behalf of someone else.6. Cf. also Montes Sánchez and Salice (Citation2017) who offer an exhaustive argument as to why Fremdscham is to be delineated from shame simpliciter.7. In an excellent paper, Mayer et al. (Citation2021) are the only ones to consider the role of laughter in cringing. They suggest that laughter likely only occurs in cringing at someone if the cringer is not strongly committed to the social norms being broken. While this may sometimes be the case, I would contend that the point of cringing and cringe comedy often is that one is supposed to laugh at something even if someone finds the norm violation in question offensive; and whether or not th","PeriodicalId":51614,"journal":{"name":"Social Epistemology","volume":"360 12","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136069729","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Wrong of Bullshit","authors":"Thorian R. Harris","doi":"10.1080/02691728.2023.2267501","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2023.2267501","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51614,"journal":{"name":"Social Epistemology","volume":"136 3-4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136317578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to the Special Issue: “Expertise, Semiotics and Interactivity”","authors":"Charles Lassiter, Sarah Bro Trasmundi","doi":"10.1080/02691728.2023.2263411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2023.2263411","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTIn this article, we offer an overview of the philosophical and psychological literatures on expertise. Work so far has failed to engage with recent work in embodied and encultured cognition--in particular the notions of interactivity and semiosis. We suggest how bringing these concepts on board reveals new areas of research concerning the philosophy and psychology of expertise. We conclude with a brief synopsis of each paper.KEYWORDS: Expertiseinteractivitysemiotics Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. These are keywords from abstracts that occur together in the dataset at least 25 times and clustered together based on their frequency of co-occurrence as well as the documents in which they co-occur.2. Apologies to Hilary Putnam.Additional informationNotes on contributorsCharles LassiterCharles Lassiter is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga University. His research focuses on the epistemology and metaphysics of mind of encultured cognition.Sarah Bro TrasmundiSarah Bro Trasmundi is Associate Professor of Cognitive Ethnography at the University of Southern Denmark and Researcher at Oslo University in the research group ‘Literature, Cognition and Emotions’. She focuses on the intersection between cognition, imagination, and language in domains such as literature, interaction, reading and education.","PeriodicalId":51614,"journal":{"name":"Social Epistemology","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135853501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reading the Signs: From Dyadic to Triadic Views for Identifying Experts","authors":"Charles Lassiter","doi":"10.1080/02691728.2023.2263423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2023.2263423","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTA naturalistic approach to expert-identification begins by asking, ‘how do novices pick out putative experts?’ Alvin Goldman and Elizabeth Anderson, representing a fairly common approach, consider agents’ psychological biases as well as social situatedness. As good as this is, culture’s role in shaping cognitive mechanisms is neglected. An explanatory framework that works well to accommodate culturally-sensitive mechanisms is Peircean semiotics. His triadic approach holds that signs signify objects to interpreters. Applying the triadic model to expert-identification: novices interpret signs of expertise as pointing to particular experts. The main advantage of the framework is that it is significantly more nuanced than the Goldman-Anderson model in describing how agents identify experts. It explicitly accommodates cultural and agential differences in expert-identification. It also explicitly admits the possibility of rational disagreement in assessment of evidence for expertise. But these advantages come at a cost. Namely, it’s difficult in theory – as well as practice – to make one’s way into the semiotic system of someone from another culture to help guide them away from fraudulent experts. Even so, it’s a trade-off worth making since it organizes relevant details for expert-identification, which is a first step in sketching a better normative theory.KEYWORDS: Expert identificationcultural psychologyC.S. Peircesemioticsrecognition problem Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Examples of untrustworthy experts include sham epistemic authorities (Lassiter Citation2019) and epistemic trespassers (Ballantyne Citation2019).2. What makes an expert an expert isn’t necessarily the same as how novices identify experts. For instance, an excellent track-record could make A an expert in topic T, but there’s nothing about track-records in Anderson’s to-do list.3. These aren’t entailed by inside-out social epistemology, but they do fit naturally with the approach. Here is a brief sketch of how. Objectivism about Justification prohibits facts about justification from being grounded in community needs and interests, which (defeasibly) suggests that the justificatory facts are grounded in individuals. Non-natural Meaning is typically coupled with a story about discerning that meaning, which is usually conceptualized as an individual process. Finally, the sciences appealed to trend towards the individualist end of the spectrum, e.g. cognitive and social psychology. Again, none of these is entailed by an inside-out epistemology, but one can find these claims manifested in the work of Goldman and Anderson, as well as Martini (Citation2014).4. There are many ways to refine this position. I’m sticking with Boghossian’s formulation since it seems to capture what is common to other iterations of the idea. See Carter and McKenna (Citation2021) for an overview5. Another option is to seriously overhaul Methodol","PeriodicalId":51614,"journal":{"name":"Social Epistemology","volume":"2016 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135094769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Apology for an Average Believer: Wagered Belief and Information Environments","authors":"Richard Kenneth Atkins","doi":"10.1080/02691728.2023.2263408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2023.2263408","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTSome persons who believe provably false claims – such as that there were significant voter irregularities in the 2020 election – may nevertheless be evidentially rational for holding their false beliefs. I consider a person I call our average believer. In her daily life, she incidentally gathers evidence favoring the hypothesis that there were significant voter irregularities, but she does not investigate the matter. Her information environment, moreover, is such that it accidentally (through no fault of her own) excludes counterevidence to the thesis that there were such irregularities and intensifies the flow of information that there were irregularities. As a consequence, she becomes convinced that there were significant voting irregularities in the 2020 U.S. election. I argue that while she is not zetetically rational, for she does not investigate the matter, she is evidentially rational in that she apportions her belief to the evidence. While she has no right to the Cliffordian, or assertoric, belief that there were such irregularities, she is not epistemically blameworthy for having the wagered belief it is true.KEYWORDS: Beliefconvictionrationalityevidence AcknowledgmentsAn earlier version of this essay was delivered at the 2022 Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy conference. I am indebted to the attendees for their questions and comments. Junhee Han assisted with research for this article and proofread an earlier version, for which I am grateful. I thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments, which have helped improve this essay.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. After writing this essay, I discovered that Endre Begby (Citation2021) also discusses information environments; I haven’t the space here to examine how well our accounts align.Additional informationNotes on contributorsRichard Kenneth AtkinsRichard Kenneth Atkins is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He is author of Peirce on Inference (Oxford 2023), Charles S. Peirce’s Phenomenology (Oxford 2018), Peirce and the Conduct of Life (Cambridge 2016), and Puzzled?! (Hackett 2015). His articles have appeared in Synthese, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, European Journal of Philosophy, and British Journal for the History of Philosophy, among other venues.","PeriodicalId":51614,"journal":{"name":"Social Epistemology","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135094120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Enacting Practices: Perception, Expertise and Enlanguaged Affordances","authors":"Rasmus Gahrn-Andersen","doi":"10.1080/02691728.2023.2261397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2023.2261397","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTThe paper thematizes basic content-free cognition in human social practices. It explores the enlanguaged dimension of skilled practical doings and expertise by taking the minimal case of concept-based perception as its starting point. Having made a case for considering such activity as free of mental content, I argue in favor of the abolishment of the distinction between truth-telling and social consensus, thus questioning the assumption held by proponents of Radical Enactivism, namely that truth and accuracy conditions are restricted to content-involving activity. Instead, I claim, even content-free practical activity can be evaluated on the basis of accuracy conditions which ultimately tie with agents’ practical understandings and the normative aspects of the practice. With this as my backdrop, I explore how expertise arises in the interplay of enlanguaged affordances, concept-involving perception and the normative accuracy conditions that constrain a particular practice.KEYWORDS: Expertisecontent-free cognitionEnactivismpractices Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. Concrete concepts such as ‘cat’, ‘house’ and ‘cucumber’ differ fundamentally from abstract concepts such as ‘freedom’, ‘language’, ‘human rights’, ‘beauty’, ‘politics’, etc. which are all devoid of concrete sensory referents (cf. Paivio Citation1986).2. The fact that Heidegger’s work resonates with anti-representationalist positions is well-known (see, Clark and Toribio Citation1994, 406).3. Indeed, there are also non-basic as-structures and this relates to the distinction between the pre-predicative and predicative. For as Engelland (Citation2020) argues, ‘The statement, “There’s a bird in the store!” makes explicit the part-whole relation resident in the experience of bird and of store. Predication (the apophantic is of S is p) remains founded on pre-predicative explication (the hermeneutic as of taking S as p)’ (10) Relatedly, Heidegger points out that ‘the “as” does not first show up in the statement, but is only first stated, which is possible only because it is there as something to be stated’ (Heidegger Citation2010, 145). So, a statement such as ‘I see this thing as a hammer’ contains to the very least as-structures on two levels: first, there is the pre-predicative, hermeneutic experience of the thing as a hammer which motivates the statement in the first place and, then, the thematization of this ‘as’ in the statement. In fact, we could go even further and argue that in the context of the statement, ‘this thing’ is taken as or understood as a Subject while ‘a hammer’ is taken as a predicate. This suggests that there are different as-structures in play whenever we are articulating statements based on our experiencing of things as somethings.4. A simulator is defined as: ‘the imitative representation of the functioning of one system or process by means of the functioning of another’ (https://www.merriam-webster.","PeriodicalId":51614,"journal":{"name":"Social Epistemology","volume":"94 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135718787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}