Epistemic dependence refers to our social mechanisms of reliance in practices of knowledge production. Epistemic oppression concerns persistent and unwarranted exclusions from those practices. This article examines the relationship between these two frameworks and demonstrates that attending to their relationship is a fruitful practice for applied epistemology. Paying attention to relations of epistemic dependence and how exclusive they are can help us track epistemically oppressive practices. In order to show this, I introduce a taxonomy of epistemic dependence. I argue that (...) this particular taxonomy is useful for tracking epistemically oppressive practices in institutional contexts. This is because, first, the forms of epistemic dependence in this taxonomy yield, what I call, diagnostic questions. These are questions that help us track how relations of epistemic dependence could become exclusive and that thus help reveal epistemic oppression in institutional contexts. Second, the forms of epistemic dependence in the taxonomy are interrelated. Paying attention not just to each of three forms of epistemic dependence but also to the way in which they are interrelated is useful for illuminating epistemically oppressive practices. I conclude by demonstrating how the diagnostic questions can be used in analyses of concrete institutional practices in asylum law and higher education. (shrink)

The fact that Sufi metaphysics is usually taken to be merely the writings of Islamic philosophers, like Ibn al-'Arabi, seems to underestimate the philosophical indications of literary texts in the Sufi tradition. When Sufi literary texts are examined for philosophical content, that content is sought within and through the traditional Sufist approach. However, there appears to be a lack of correspondence between the traditional approach on the main conceptions (of God, of the universe, etc.) in Sufism and what literary texts (...) can offer regarding those, when some literary texts are to be examined in a way in which an underlying philosophical system can be extracted from them. In this article, Ipresent a brief analysis of The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, one of the most significant works focusing on God and written in Sufi tradition. I suggest an alternative framework for Sufi metaphysics, which overlaps with the metaphysical connotations of The Conference of the Birds, via some Spinozistic ideas on God and on God's relationship to the rest of the universe. Since The Conference of the Birds represents a metaphysical doctrine that is apart from the traditional approach, I argue that we are not justified in thinking that Sufi metaphysics is only what Islamic philosophers have so far offered us. (shrink)

This chapter conducts a structural epistemic injustice investigation, inquiring into institutionalised frames of intelligibility, to identify pathological patterns of recognition in administrative categorisation. This allows me to discern a form of misrecognition, where I understand ‘misrecognition’ as obtaining whenever administrative systems prevent people from participating in and benefiting from such systems due to institutionalised frames of intelligibility. One way such misrecognition operates is through categorisation-related administrative violence. I suggest that one particular form of this violence is recognition bluffs. Recognition bluffs (...) are a form of misrecognition where administrative systems enable new categories of legibility promising recognition for certain populations while, at the same time, they limit that category in ways that harm those populations as well. As an example, I look into how ‘gender’ was recognised and administered through the social group category in asylum administration in the U.S.A. (shrink)

The human experience is shaped by information from different perceptual channels, but it is still debated whether and how differential experience influences language use. To address this, we compared congenitally blind, blindfolded, and sighted people's descriptions of the same motion events experienced auditorily by all participants (i.e., via sound alone) and conveyed in speech and gesture. Comparison of blind and sighted participants to blindfolded participants helped us disentangle the effects of a lifetime experience of being blind versus the task-specific effects (...) of experiencing a motion event by sound alone. Compared to sighted people, blind people's speech focused more on path and less on manner of motion, and encoded paths in a more segmented fashion using more landmarks and path verbs. Gestures followed the speech, such that blind people pointed to landmarks more and depicted manner less than sighted people. This suggests that visual experience affects how people express spatial events in the multimodal language and that blindness may enhance sensitivity to paths of motion due to changes in event construal. These findings have implications for the claims that language processes are deeply rooted in our sensory experiences. (shrink)

In answering my undergraduate students’ questions about what I do, I keep coming back to the term structural epistemology. If some students push me further to not hide behind terms, I tell them: I study structures (social, political, and cultural institutions and arrangements)—not all of them at the same time, obviously—and what they do to our knowledge practices (what we know and how we know). And I give some examples: how refugee regimes know “persecution,” I tell them, matters, particularly for (...) asylum seekers. I also tell them that mine is a kind of structural epistemology guided by structural concerns in women of color feminist theories. This essay is a long way of answering the question: What do I do when I do structural epistemology? I consider this question to be an important one not only as part of an effort to rethink what I take myself to be doing in professional philosophy but also as an effort to characterize commitments and strategies I am influenced by and work with as a structural epistemologist. (shrink)

One of the recent attempts to explore epistemic dimensions of forced displacement focuses on the institution of gender-based asylum and hopes to detect forms of epistemic injustice within assessments of gender related asylum applications. Following this attempt, I aim in this paper to demonstrate how the institution of gender-based asylum is structured to produce epistemic injustice at least in the forms of testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. This structural limit becomes visible when we realize how the institution of asylum is (...) formed to provide legitimacy to the institutional comfort the respective migration courts and boards enjoy. This institutional comfort afforded to migration boards and courts by the existing asylum regimes in the current order of nation-states leads to a systemic prioritization of state actors’ epistemic resources rather than that of applicants, which, in turn, results in epistemic injustice and impacts the determination of applicants’ refugee status. (shrink)

Systemic epistemic failings in institutions are often explained through settler epistemologies and settler colonial frameworks that both obscure and reproduce the conditions necessary for those failings to endure. What is never questioned in the standard picture of institutional epistemic injustice is the implicit origin myth of an ‘institutional big bang’ that spawned many modern social institutions out of presumably noble orienting goals for a well-functioning society in democratic nation-states. We are concerned with the functional outcomes of institutions in settler colonial (...) societies, and how these outcomes consistently undermine whitewashed narratives of any inherent institutional design allegedly aimed at promoting testimonial justice in settler colonial societies. Institutions are built to target and maintain a status quo, especially (but not only) when they are charged with securing part of the social order or fabric of settler colonial societies. We will illustrate this concern through a discussion of various functional outcomes of the U.S. institution of asylum using Shannon Speed’s (2019. Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler-Capitalist State. The University of North Carolina Press) analysis of the violence Indigenous women migrants from Latin America experience within the complex administrative web of U.S. migration and asylum systems. (shrink)

In this chapter, Kristie Dotson and Ezgi Sertler probe the transformative potential of framework approaches to social justice. They challenge the idea that framework shifts at different levels equate to changes in the social arrangements they aim to reconceptualize. Ultimately, they claim that framework approaches to social transformation have two limitations that include: (i) failing to lead to the epistemological ingenuity they often promise; and, even where such ingenuity might be achieved, (ii) leaving untouched the actual social arrangements that (...) facilitate the circumstances under analysis. This chapter proceeds in four sections. First, there is an introduction to viewing social justice issues through epistemological approaches. Second, Dotson and Sertler explain what they mean by a framework approach to social transformation. Third, they discuss a framework approach to social justice by looking into framework approaches to understanding “political prisoners” and its potential aims and aspirations. Fourth, they conclude by responding to a potential objection for this framework analysis by assessing the “work” of their own framework analysis. (shrink)

One way to articulate the promise of interdisciplinary research is in terms of the relationship between knowledge and ignorance. Disciplinary research yields deep knowledge of a circumscribed range of issues, but remains ignorant of those issues that stretch outside its purview. Because complex problems such as climate change do not respect disciplinary boundaries, disciplinary research responses to such problems are limited and partial. Interdisciplinary research responses, by contrast, integrate disciplinary perspectives by combining knowledge about different issues and as a result (...) reduce ignorance about more aspects of the problem. In this paper, we develop this idea and argue that while interdisciplinary research can help remediate damaging ignorance about complex problems, it also creates conditions in which other damaging forms of ignorance can arise. We illustrate this point in detail with three case studies before discussing three implications of our analysis for identifying and managing deleterio... (shrink)

BackgroundThe ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are widely endorsed but compliance is limited. We sought to determine whether journal-requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist improves full compliance with the guidelines.MethodsIn a randomised controlled trial, manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE (March–June 2015) were randomly allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist or current standard practice. Authors, academic editors, and peer reviewers were blinded to group allocation. Trained reviewers performed outcome adjudication (...) in duplicate by assessing manuscripts against an operationalised version of the ARRIVE guidelines that consists 108 items. Our primary outcome was the between-group differences in the proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist subitems.ResultsWe randomised 1689 manuscripts (control: n = 844, intervention: n = 845), of which 1269 were sent for peer review and 762 (control: n = 340; intervention: n = 332) accepted for publication. No manuscript in either group achieved full compliance with the ARRIVE checklist. Details of animal husbandry (ARRIVE subitem 9b) was the only subitem to show improvements in reporting, with the proportion of compliant manuscripts rising from 52.1 to 74.1% (X2 = 34.0, df = 1, p = 2.1 × 10−7) in the control and intervention groups, respectively.ConclusionsThese results suggest that altering the editorial process to include requests for a completed ARRIVE checklist is not enough to improve compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines. Other approaches, such as more stringent editorial policies or a targeted approach on key quality items, may promote improvements in reporting. (shrink)

Self-regulation in early childhood is an important predictor of success across a variety of indicators in life, including health, well-being, and earnings. Although conceptually self-regulation has been defined as multifaceted, previous research has not investigated whether there is conceptual and empirical overlap between the factors that comprise self-regulation or if they are distinct. In this study, using a bifactor model, we tested the shared and unique variance among self-regulation constructs and prediction to pre-academic and social-emotional skills. The sample included 932 (...) preschool children, their parents, and their teachers in the United States. Children’s self-regulation was assessed using measures of executive function, behavioral self-regulation, and emotion regulation. The bifactor model demonstrated a common overarching self-regulation factor, as well as distinct executive function and emotion regulation factors. The common overarching self-regulation factor and executive function predicted children’s pre-academic and social-emotional skills. The emotion regulation factor predicted children’s social-emotional skills. Identifying the shared and unique aspects of self-regulation may have important implications for supporting children’s regulatory skills as well as their success in school. (shrink)

Strengthening a theorem of D.W. Kueker, this paper completely characterizes which countable structures do not admit uncountable L ω 1 ω -elementarily equivalent models. In particular, it is shown that if the automorphism group of a countable structure M is abelian, or even just solvable, then there is no uncountable model of the Scott sentence of M. These results arise as part of a study of Polish groups with compatible left-invariant complete metrics.

A credible fear test is an in-depth interview process given to undocumented people of any age arriving at a U.S. port of entry to determine qualification for asylum-seeking. Credible fear tests as a typical immigration procedure demonstrate not only what structural epistemic violence looks like but also how this violence lives in and through the design of asylum policy. Key terms of credible fear tests such as “significant possibility,” “evidence,” “consistency,” and “credibility” can never be neutral in the context of (...) colonial administrative violence. We argue that these terms function as mechanisms of exclusion and demonstrate that the capacity to be violent (i.e. to be an instrument of violence) is built into these tests, ready to be deployed when an administration wants to stop certain people from certain places from entering without regard to their own ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands. Not only are such practices instruments of violence, but the concept of ‘violence’ continues to be organized, defined, and conceived within settler colonial epistemologies so as to exclude these administrative forms of violence deployed against Indigenous peoples and people of color from recognition and nameability. We argue that this is an intentional strategy of colonial power preservation that is functionalized through social processes that remain structurally stable and self-regenerating across historical and political changes. (shrink)

Let E be a coanalytic equivalence relation on a Polish space X and (A n ) n∈ω a sequence of analytic subsets of X. We prove that if lim sup n∈K A n meets uncountably many E-equivalence classes for every K ∈ [ω] ω , then there exists a K ∈ [ω] ω such that ⋂ n∈K A n contains a perfect set of pairwise E-inequivalent elements.

Frege made a derivative of the distinction that he made between the meanings of senses (Sinn) and references (Bedeutung) on judgments, and named the judgments which he treats as hollow functions; ‘Unsaturated’ (ungesättigt) phrases and the phrases which completed an argument as, ‘Saturated’ (gesättigt) phrases. Saturated phrases consist of first and second level concepts and are considered to be meaningful expressions with an accurate value. Frege became the founder of modern symbolic logic with the language of formal logic he developed (...) in ‘Concept Writing’, and based all this formal analysis on the distinction of ‘function (Funktion) – argument (Argument)’ and ‘concept – coverage’. The philosopher, who makes sense of the judgments as their ‘thoughts’; determines the logical value accuracy of the reference on the basis of this distinction, has adopted a contradictory acceptance in terms of both considering the judgments as a condition of being able to receive a truth value and reducing them to the senses of the sentences. Then, if the thoughts were indeed the sense of the sentences, as Frege thought, then it would not be possible to speak of sentences that were meaningful but lacked truthfulness. That is why, to overcome this distress, we propose to change the definition of thought in Frege's theory and to consider it as function values, not the sense of sentences. Likewise for us, thoughts are not the senses of the sentences, nor are they references. Contrariwise, thoughts are the function value of the sentences. To put it in a different way, if a sentence lacks function value, it can be meaningful but not true or false, and if the sentence has a function value, it can be true or false. Thus, for us, thoughts are neither the expression of the sentence in the language nor the logical value of the sentence; thoughts are function values that can be true or false. (shrink)

What signals do firms in emerging economies send to stakeholders when they adopt corporate social responsibility practices? We argue that in emerging economies, firms that adopt CSR practices positively signal investors that their firms have superior capabilities for filling institutional voids. From an institution-based view, we hypothesize that the institutional environment moderates the signaling effect of CSR on a firm’s financial performance. Based on a sample of firms from ten Asian emerging economies, we find a positive relationship between CSR practices (...) and financial performance. This positive relationship is stronger in the less developed capital market than in the more developed one. The financial benefits of CSR practices are also more salient in the low information diffusion market than in the high one. We emphasize that signaling theory and the institution-based view can jointly contribute to the CSR literature. (shrink)

Pylyshyn's effort in establishing the cognitive impenetrability of early vision is welcome. However, his view about the role of attention in early vision seems to be oversimplified. The allocation of focal attention manifests its effect among multiple stages in the early vision system, it is not just confined to the input and the output levels.

Enterprise philanthropy is practiced in a very unique and rudimentary form in China. Based on a unique random survey data on 3837 Chinese private enterprises conducted in 31 provinces of China in 2006, I find the significant positive relationship between enterprise philanthropy donation and enterprise profitability, and the result supports the political and institutional power view of enterprise philanthropy in the latest development of China. Simply put, Chinese private enterprises carried out philanthropy activities to better protect property rights and nurture (...) political connections, which in turn, leads to better enterprise profitability. The␣result is even stronger in institutions weaker provinces. (shrink)

An inclusive vision of mathematics-- its beauty, its humanity, and its power to build virtues that help us all flourish. For mathematician Francis Su, a society without mathematical affection is like a city without museums. To miss out on mathematics is to live without experiencing some of humanity's most beautiful ideas. In this profound book, written for a diverse audience but especially for those disenchanted by their past experiences, an award-winning mathematician and educator weaves personal reflections, puzzles, and stories to (...) show how mathematics meets basic human desires and cultivates virtues essential for human flourishing. Readers will explore mathematical concepts-- and see how mathematical thinking can even fulfill such longings as for love, play, freedom, justice, and community. Some lessons come from those who have struggled, including philosopher Simone Weil, whose own mathematical contributions were overshadowed by her brother's, and Christopher Jackson, who discovered mathematics as an inmate in a federal prison. Christopher Jackson's letters to the author appear throughout the book and show how this intellectual pursuit can-- and must-- be open to all. (shrink)

Gender segregation in baccalaureate degree fields declined rapidly in the first half of the period from 1971 to 2002; at the same time, women's representation among baccalaureate degree recipients increased most rapidly relative to men's. The desegregation of the early period resulted mainly from women's increased entry into business-related fields and declining proportions of women majoring in traditional fields such as education and English. Men did not contribute to integration by moving toward fields numerically dominated by women. Fixed-effects regression models (...) suggest that feminization of fields discourages later cohorts of men from entering them, as predicted by the devaluation perspective. The stalling of desegregation came from a combination of men's disinclination to enter fields that are “too” filled with women, and the slowdown in women making less traditional choices. (shrink)

Driven by the cognitive-neoassociationistic model of aggression, this study examines how supervisors’ negative affect at work influences their interaction with subordinates, which further affects subordinate outcomes. Drawing upon research on power/resource interdependence and victim precipitation theory, we also test whether the positive relationship between supervisors’ negative affect and abusive supervision is moderated by leader–member exchange. Using one hundred and eighty supervisor–subordinate dyads from five hotels, we found that, supervisors’ negative affect at work was positively related to abusive supervision, LMX buffered (...) the positive association between supervisors’ negative affect and abusive supervision, and the indirect effects of supervisors’ negative affect on subordinate outcomes via abusive supervision was buffered by LMX, such that the indirect effects were only found in dyads with lower LMX, but not in dyads with higher LMX. Theoretical contributions and practical implications for managers and organizations were also discussed. (shrink)

This paper considers the debate between economists and philosophers about the role of values in economic analysis by examining the recent debate between Hilary Putnam and Sir Partha Dasgupta. It argues that although there has been a failure to communicate there is much more agreement than it seems. If Dasgupta's work is seen as part of the methodological tradition expounded by John Stuart Mill and John Neville Keynes, economists and philosophers will have a better basis for understanding each other. Unlike (...) the logical-positivist tradition, which treats facts and values as two mutually exclusive concepts, the Mill- Keynes tradition recognizes that facts and values are intertwined. Unlike the Smithian tradition, which blends the study of facts and normative rules, it divides economics into a science that studies "what is" and an art which considers "what ought to be done". (shrink)