Trust is a topic of longstanding philosophical interest. It is indispensable to every kind of coordinated human activity, from sport to scientific research. Even more, trust is necessary for the successful dissemination of knowledge, and by extension, for nearly any form of practical deliberation and planning. Without trust, we could achieve few of our goals and would know very little. Despite trust’s fundamental importance in human life, there is substantial philosophical disagreement about what trust is, and further, how trusting is (...) normatively constrained and best theorized about in relation to other things we value. This entry is divided into three sections, which explore key (and sometimes interconnected) ethical and epistemological themes in the philosophy of trust: (1) The Nature of Trust; (2) The Normativity of Trust, and (3) The Value of Trust. (shrink)

This essay endeavors to show that application of a universalist epistemic method in theological ethics results in a construal of God, which is, from a biblical perspective, reductionist, and is a form of ethics in which universality is achieved at the expense of plurality. It argues for the formal possibility of an ecclesial ethics grounded in a tradition-centered rationality. It further argues that such an ethic need not result in a narrow and defensive sectarianism, a rigid and (...) static orthodoxy, or an authoritarian dogmatism. The posture of an ecclesial ethic based on the kind of critical realism advocated here may retain an apologetic and dialogical relation with the broader society, as it seeks to embody the incarnational narrative in its particular context. (shrink)

The need for fair and just AI is often related to the possibility of understanding AI itself, in other words, of turning an opaque box into a glass box, as inspectable as possible. Transparency and explainability, however, pertain to the technical domain and to philosophy of science, thus leaving the ethics and epistemology of AI largely disconnected. To remedy this, we propose an integrated approach premised on the idea that a glass-box epistemology should explicitly consider how to (...) incorporate values and other normative considerations, such as intersectoral vulnerabilities, at critical stages of the whole process from design and implementation to use and assessment. To connect ethics and epistemology of AI, we perform a double shift of focus. First, we move from trusting the output of an AI system to trusting the process that leads to the outcome. Second, we move from expert assessment to more inclusive assessment strategies, aiming to facilitate expert and non-expert assessment. Together, these two moves yield a framework usable for experts and non-experts when they inquire into relevant epistemological and ethical aspects of AI systems. We dub our framework ‘epistemology-cum-ethics’ to signal the equal importance of both aspects. We develop it from the vantage point of the designers: how to create the conditions to internalize values into the whole process of design, implementation, use, and assessment of an AI system, in which values (epistemic and non-epistemic) are explicitly considered at each stage and inspectable by every salient actor involved at any moment. (shrink)

Luck threatens in similar ways our conceptions of both moral and epistemic evaluation. This essay examines the problem of luck as a metaphilosophical problem spanning the division between subfields in philosophy. I first explore the analogies between ethical and epistemic luck by comparing influential attempts to expunge luck from our conceptions of agency in these two subfields. I then focus upon Duncan Pritchard's challenge to the motivations underlying virtue epistemology, based specifically on its handling of the problem of epistemic (...) luck. I argue that (1) consideration of the multifold nature of the problem of epistemic luck to an adequate account of human knowledge drives us to a mixed externalist epistemology; and (2) the virtue-theoretical approach presents a particularly advantageous way of framing and developing a mixed externalist epistemology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Metaphilosophy is the property of Blackwell Publishing Limited and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts). (shrink)

In this Symposium on the Ethics and Epistemology of Big Data, we present four perspectives on the ways in which the rapid growth in size of research databanks—i.e. their shift into the realm of “big data”—has changed their moral, socio-political, and epistemic status. While there is clearly something different about “big data” databanks, we encourage readers to place the arguments presented in this Symposium in the context of longstanding debates about the ethics, politics, and epistemology of (...) biobank, database, genetic, and epidemiological research. (shrink)

This book defends the consistency, plausibility, and interest of the brand of Ancient Skepticism described in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, both through detailed exegesis of the original texts, and through sustained engagement with an array of modern critics.

In this interesting paper, Lavazza and Massimini draw attention to a subset of the ethical issues surrounding the development and potential uses of cerebral organoids. This subset concerns the possibility that cerebral organoids may one day develop phenomenal consciousness, and thereby qualify as conscious subjects—that there may one day be something it is like to be an advanced cerebral organoid. This possibility may feel outlandish. But as Lavazza and Massimini demonstrate, the science of organoids is moving fast, and I agree (...) that the ethical issues now deserve careful scrutiny. The ethical issues are not entirely separate from epistemological issues concerning how certain we could ever be (a) that an organoid is conscious or (b) that regarding any conscious state or process, an organoid is capable of tokening that state or undergoing that process. Lavazza and Massimini’s approach is theory-based—they claim that ‘we need a general theory of consciousness that attempts to explain what experience is and what type of physical systems can have it’. I am not convinced, however, that a theory of consciousness is what we need. Nor am I convinced that detecting the presence of consciousness is the most important moral issue. Let me say a word regarding theories of consciousness first. In general, to the extent that pervasive disagreement characterises expert discussion of some phenomenon P, one should modify one’s credence downward regarding any theory of the nature of P. In my view, this is the case regarding expert discussion of consciousness. Although most philosophers are confident that consciousness is an entirely physical phenomenon, a …. (shrink)

Empirical research on moral injury (MI) has rapidly evolved since 2009. Originally developed to address the moral dimensions of traumatic experiences among US veterans, MI has also found application in the context of traumatized refugees. This paper delves into the ethical and epistemological questions that arise when applying a concept originally rooted in a qualitatively distinct experience and a demographically different population to refugees. It is argued that the prevailing clinical and psychological conceptualization of MI may not adequately accommodate the (...) unique needs and experiences of refugee populations. This examination underscores the imperative of conceptualizing to better serve the ethical and epistemic demands of refugee communities. (shrink)

The traditional legal verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity as well as the more recent verdict of guilty but mentally ill rest on often unquestioned epistemological assumptions about human behavior and its causes, unjustified reliance on forensic psychiatrists, and questionable, if not deplorable ethical standards. This paper offers a critique of legal perspectives on insanity, historical and current, based on the altermative epistemological and ethical assumptions of Thomas S. Szasz. In addition, we examine Szasz''s unique rhetorical analysis of (...) mental illness and its implications for forensic psychiatry. (shrink)

Biomedical innovation and translation are increasingly emphasizing research using “big data.” The hope is that big data methods will both speed up research and make its results more applicable to “real-world” patients and health services. While big data research has been embraced by scientists, politicians, industry, and the public, numerous ethical, organizational, and technical/methodological concerns have also been raised. With respect to technical and methodological concerns, there is a view that these will be resolved through sophisticated information technologies, predictive algorithms, (...) and data analysis techniques. While such advances will likely go some way towards resolving technical and methodological issues, we believe that the epistemological issues raised by big data research have important ethical implications and raise questions about the very possibility of big data research achieving its goals. (shrink)

Abstract: In this article, I consider some of the similarities and differences between deontologism in ethics and epistemology. In particular, I highlight two salient differences between them. I aim to show that by highlighting these differences we can see that epistemic deontologism does not imply epistemic internalism and that it is not a thesis primarily about epistemic permissibility . These differences are: (1) deontologism in epistemology has a quasi -teleological feature (not shared with moral deontologism) in that (...) it does not require that one abide by epistemic duties for the sake of (and not merely in accordance with) those very duties; and (2) in ethics, the relevant options we speak of are whether someone acts or does not act; in epistemology, we have an analogous further option: we can speak of whether someone believes that p , fails to believe that p , or withholds judgment about that p. (shrink)

In this article, I will argue in favor of both the ethical and epistemological utility of explanations in artificial intelligence -based medical technology. I will build on the notion of “explicability” due to Floridi, which considers both the intelligibility and accountability of AI systems to be important for truly delivering AI-powered services that strengthen autonomy, beneficence, and fairness. I maintain that explicable algorithms do, in fact, strengthen these ethical principles in medicine, e.g., in terms of direct patient–physician contact, as well (...) as on a longer-term epistemological level by facilitating scientific progress that is informed through practice. With this article, I will therefore attempt to counter arguments against demands for explicable AI in medicine that are based on a notion of “whatever heals is right.” I will elucidate my elaboration on the positive aspects of explicable AI in medicine as well as by pointing out risks of non-explicable AI. (shrink)

How should those who value reasonable pluralism navigate ethical and epistemological challenges related to speech and inquiry in higher education? We propose the ethical pursuit of public knowledge as a guiding vision for public colleges and universities with the understanding that other institutions will serve different purposes. The ethical criterion of mutuality calls for engagement across difference and reciprocal recognition of others’ basic equality and liberty. To maintain epistemic legitimacy, knowledge-production processes in these institutions should elevate ideas warranted by public (...) reasons that have withstood rigorous critical scrutiny above those that have not. Some forms of speech—including the expression of extremist views on both the Right and the Left—will prove unreasonable and incompatible with the guiding vision and should therefore be marginalized within these institutions. (shrink)

This essay addresses the relationship between Hume’s moral theory and his epistemological project. More specifically, it focuses on one particular aspect of the relationship between Hume’s moral theory and his general scepticism with regard to reason. Several philosophers, such as David Owen and Annette Baier, have suggested that Hume’s moral theory provides significant support for his appeal to reason/reasoning. To uncover some of the main obstacles that any future attempts to rest Humean reason on ethics will probably face, this (...) essay critically examines a few of the most prominent examples of such accounts, particularly Michael Ridge’s “Epistemology Moralized: David Hume’s Practical Epistemology,” the most developed account of the possible moral support of reason in Hume‘s philosophy. (shrink)

All major research ethics policies assert that the ethical review of clinical trial protocols should include a systematic assessment of risks and benefits. But despite this policy, protocols do not typically contain explicit probability statements about the likely risks or benefits involved in the proposed research. In this essay, I articulate a range of ethical and epistemic advantages that explicit forecasting would offer to the health research enterprise. I then consider how some particular confidence levels may come into conflict (...) with the principles of ethical research. (shrink)

Abstract: In this article, the logic and functions of character-trait ascriptions in ethics and epistemology is compared, and two major problems, the "generality problem" for virtue epistemologies and the "global trait problem" for virtue ethics, are shown to be far more similar in structure than is commonly acknowledged. I suggest a way to put the generality problem to work by making full and explicit use of a sliding scale--a "narrow-broad spectrum of trait ascription"-- and by accounting for (...) the various uses of it in an inquiry-pragmatist account. In virtue theories informed by inquiry pragmatism, the agential habits and abilities deemed salient in explanations/evaluations of agents in particular cases, and the determination of what relevant domains and conditions an agent's habit or ability is reliably efficacious in, is determined by pragmatic concerns related to our evaluative epistemic practices. (shrink)

Empathy is a familiar form of emotionally charged imaginative perspective taking. In this dissertation I offer an account of empathy’s moral importance that emphasizes the special value of its unique epistemic functions. Specifically, I defend what I call the humane understanding thesis: empathy is the source of a distinct epistemic good, humane understanding, which consists in the appreciation of the intelligibility of others’ emotional perceptions, and humane understanding is necessary for fully virtuous relations with other people. Adam Smith held that (...) empathy is the unique means by which we judge the propriety of other’s emotions. I draw out the kernel of truth in this surprising claim. Emotions inevitably present the world in a certain evaluative light. When I see my situation as calling out for my anger, or fear, or adoration, my emotion appears to me to be properly responsive to my situation. I can judge my emotion to be inappropriate, all things considered. However, I cannot both be angry at your betrayal and be totally mystified by my own anger, or resent you but see no absolutely nothing in your conduct that appears to call out for my resentment. This insight applies to empathy. When we empathize, we feel genuine emotions. And when we feel these emotions, we cannot fail to appreciate the intelligibility of the other’s original emotion first-hand. This appreciation constitutes humane understanding of the other’s emotion. I further clarify the nature of this epistemic achievement by distinguishing it from two other nearby forms of understanding, one that is achieved through narrative rather than perspective taking, and one that is achieved through unemotional perspective taking. Empathy has recently come in for some heavy criticism. It has been described as not only morally unnecessary, but positively morally corrosive. Recognizing that empathy is the unique means by which we secure humane understanding of others’ emotional perceptions enables us to appreciate aspects of empathy’s moral significance that its most prominent detractors have neglected. Humane understanding is a powerful way of being close to another person, and closeness is something that social beings like ourselves crave, not for any further or deeper purpose, but just because it is valuable to us in and of itself. People have a powerful need to be empathized with because empathy relieves a painful form of loneliness. Empathy can be a way of caring, rather than just a means of getting us to care. In further defense of empathy’s moral significance, I also argue that empathy has a meaningful role to play in the development of both our reflective beliefs about moral properties and our emotional sensitivity to those same properties. Empathy can allow us to discover new moral distinctions through imaginative emotional experience, and it can also help us to shape and sharpen our moral emotional perception. Finally, I round out my review of empathy’s moral significance with an argument that empathy with others makes it very difficult to intend to treat them in certain immoral ways. We cannot both empathize with someone and see them as unfeeling, as unthinking, or as lacking a normative perspective on the world. Consequently, empathizing with someone is at least not compatible with treating them as a mere object. I offer my Smithian picture of empathy’s moral and epistemic functions as an alternative to the popular Humean view that empathy moves us from our default position of solipsism and egoism to knowledge of and care for other’ inner lives. That view’s ambition is tantalizing, but it distorts both the nature of empathy and the nature of our other-oriented concern and understanding. Hume’s account of empathy’s significance, and the more recent accounts that take after it, end up making it look as though empathy simply contributes to the expansion of egoism, and/or as though empathy depends for its motivational efficacy on a kind of epistemic mistake. (shrink)

The idea of a virtue has traditionally been important in ethics, but only recently has gained attention as an idea that can explain how we ought to form beliefs as well as how we ought to act. Moral philosophers and epistemologists have different approaches to the idea of intellectual virtue; here, Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski bring work from both fields together for the first time to address all of the important issues. It will be required reading for anyone (...) working on either side of the debate. (shrink)

This book uses Viktor Frankl's Existential Psychology (logotherapy) to explore the ways some professors use unusually personal scholarship to discover meaning in personal adversity. A psychiatrist imprisoned for three years in Nazi concentration camps, Frankl believed the search for meaning is a powerful motivator, and that its discovery can be profoundly therapeutic. Part I begins with four stories of professors finding meaning. Using the case studies as a foundation, Part II investigates issues of epistemology and ethics in unusually (...) personal research from an existential perspective. The book offers advice for graduate students and faculty who want to live and work more meaningfully in the academy. (shrink)

In this article, I consider some of the similarities and differences between deontologism in ethics and epistemology. In particular, I highlight two salient differences between them. I aim to show that by highlighting these differences we can see that epistemic deontologism does not imply epistemic internalism and that it is not a thesis primarily about epistemic permissibility. These differences are: (1) deontologism in epistemology has a quasi‐teleological feature (not shared with moral deontologism) in that it does not (...) require that one abide by epistemic duties for the sake of (and not merely in accordance with) those very duties; and (2) in ethics, the relevant options we speak of are whether someone acts or does not act; in epistemology, we have an analogous further option: we can speak of whether someone believes that p, fails to believe that p, or withholds judgment about that p. (shrink)

In this work I defend moral realism, the thesis that there are objective moral truths, by defending “epistemic realism.” Epistemic realism is the thesis that epistemic judgments, e.g., judgments that some belief is epistemically reasonable, or justified, or known or should be held, are sometimes true and made true by stance-independent epistemic facts and properties. -/- One might think that epistemic realism needs no defense because it is obviously true and nearly universally accepted. But there are influential arguments against moral (...) realism, which is analogous to epistemic realism: moral realists think that moral judgments, e.g., that something is morally good, or ought to be done, are sometimes true because there are stance-independent moral facts and properties. Moral irrealists deny this for a variety of semantic, metaphysical, psychological and epistemological reasons. They argue that moral judgments are neither true nor false since they are non-cognitive expressions of emotion or commands, or are never true since they fail to refer, or that their truth is “relative.” -/- Drawing on the moral irrealisms of Ayer, Stevenson, Hare, Mackie, Harman, and more recent thinkers, I construct parallel arguments for epistemic irrealisms. On these views, epistemic judgments are also merely expressive, a kind of command, always false, or relativistic in truth conditions: even “epistemic platitudes” like “justified beliefs are better than unjustified beliefs” and “ideally, one’s beliefs ought to be consistent” are understood not as epistemic propositions that might be believed (much less believed truly), or as attempts to accurately represent epistemic facts, or as attributions of epistemic properties. -/- The implications of these claims are highly at odds with common epistemological assumptions, even those that moral irrealists tend to accept. I argue that these implications are rationally unacceptable and that, therefore, the premises that support them should be rejected. Since these premises are those given in defense of moral irrealisms, I thereby defend both moral and epistemic realism. Thus, I argue that “oughts,” “shoulds” and other evaluative judgments are equally legitimate in both ethics and epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper, we first classify different types of second opinions and evaluate the ethical and epistemological implications of providing those in a clinical context. Second, we discuss the issue of how artificial intelligent could replace the human cognitive labour of providing such second opinion and find that several AI reach the levels of accuracy and efficiency needed to clarify their use an urgent ethical issue. Third, we outline the normative conditions of how AI may be used as second opinion (...) in clinical processes, weighing the benefits of its efficiency against concerns of responsibility attribution. Fourth, we provide a ‘rule of disagreement’ that fulfils these conditions while retaining some of the benefits of expanding the use of AI-based decision support systems in clinical contexts. This is because the rule of disagreement proposes to use AI as much as possible, but retain the ability to use human second opinions to resolve disagreements between AI and physician-in-charge. Fifth, we discuss some counterarguments. (shrink)

Through examples of embodied and learning-centered pedagogy, we discuss transformative learning of transgressive topics. We begin with a taxonomy of types of learning our students undergo as they resolve inconsistencies among their pre-existing beliefs and the material they confront in our course on feminist ethics and epistemology. We then discuss ways to help students maximize their learning while confronting internal inconsistencies. While we focus on feminist topics, our approach is broad enough to be relevant to anyone teaching a (...) transgressive or controversial topic. (shrink)

This book develops and defends a theory of responsible belief. The author argues that we lack control over our beliefs, but that we can nonetheless influence them. It is because we have intellectual obligations to influence our beliefs that we are responsible for them.

Disagreement is, for better or worse, pervasive in our society. Not only do we form beliefs that differ from those around us, but increasingly we have platforms and opportunities to voice those disagreements and make them public. In light of the public nature of many of our most important disagreements, a key question emerges: How does public disagreement affect what we know? This volume collects original essays from a number of prominent scholars--including Catherine Elgin, Sanford Goldberg, Jennifer Lackey, Michael Patrick (...) Lynch, and Duncan Pritchard, among others--to address this question in its diverse forms. The book is organized by thematic sections, in which individual chapters address the epistemic, ethical, and political dimensions of dissent. The individual contributions address important issues such as the value of disagreement, the nature of conversational disagreement, when dissent is epistemically rational, when one is obligated to voice disagreement or to object, the relation of silence and resistance to dissent, and when political dissent is justified. Voicing Dissent offers a new approach to the study of disagreement that will appeal to social epistemologists and ethicists interested in this growing area of epistemology. (shrink)

Plato’s Pragmatism offers the first comprehensive defense of a pragmatist reading of Plato. According to Plato, the ultimate rational goal is not to accumulate knowledge and avoid falsehood but rather to live an excellent human life. The book contends that a pragmatic outlook is present throughout the Platonic corpus. The authors argue that the successful pursuit of a good life requires cultivating certain ethical commitments, and that maintaining these commitments often requires violating epistemic norms. In the course of defending the (...) pragmatist interpretation, the authors present a forceful Platonic argument for the conclusion that the value of truth has its limits, and that what matters most are one’s ethical commitments and the courage to live up to them. Their interpretation has far-reaching consequences in that it reshapes how we understand the relationship between Plato’s ethics and epistemology. Plato’s Pragmatism will appeal to scholars and advanced students of Plato and ancient philosophy. It will also be of interest to those working on current controversies in ethics and epistemology. (shrink)

While there is a vast amount of writing on the concept of a virtue and its role in various areas of philosophy, this literature is fairly fragmented, with historians, ethicists, and epistemologists rarely engaged in direction conversation with one another. In light of this, Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology is a most welcome collection of essays in which virtue epistemologists and virtue ethicists—including ethicists grounded in the history of philosophy—for the first time take up various issues (...) in consultation with each other. The volume is divided into five parts and contains eleven articles by some of the leading scholars in both ethics and epistemology; the overall quality of the contributions is very high. Since there is not a single theme uniting all of the articles (other than focusing on virtue), I shall begin by providing a brief summary of each contribution to the volume. I shall then offer some critical remarks on a thesis that is espoused, both directly and indirectly, by several of the authors included in this collection. (shrink)

Through examples of embodied and learning -centered pedagogy, we discuss transformative learning of transgressive topics. We begin with a taxonomy of types of learning our students undergo as they resolve inconsistencies among their pre-existing beliefs and the material they confront in our course on feminist ethics and epistemology. We then discuss ways to help students maximize their learning while confronting internal inconsistencies. While we focus on feminist topics, our approach is broad enough to be relevant to anyone teaching (...) a transgressive or controversial topic. (shrink)

For a few decades now there has been a minor gigantomachia going on in the study of ancient skepticism, especially as regards the interpretation of Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrhonianism. Or perhaps, since Burnyeat and others bring out big guns like Hume as allies for their position, it could be better characterized as an ongoing attempted patricide, which, of course, also has a long and well-established tradition in ancient thought. If the ‘mainstream’ interpretation regards Sextus, and thereby a whole strain of (...) skepticism, as having as part of his project the radical undermining of belief, then the father-killers in this episode of the story have their hero in Michael Frede. It is Frede who is responsible for the latest attempt at defending Sextus, and thus the possibility of a coherent skepticism, from the charge that it is ultimately self-refuting insofar as it would finally reduce its practitioner to the condition of absolute stasis. The only real skeptic, so the charge goes, would be some form of inanimate object. This problem has dogged skepticism since its inception. Witness the perhaps apocryphal or even malicious stories about Pyrrho attempting to withhold judgment about any and every impression as his more practical—though strangely ambivalent regarding their master’s teachings—followers kept him from the rather embarrassing end that various passing vehicles, etc., would have provided. Frede has attempted to show that the skeptical position as it is put forward by someone like Sextus is almost the exact reverse of this interpretation. It is the skeptic who is most willing to engage the world as it is presented to us and the first to resist attempts to ‘pull back the veil’ in order to reveal this world as it ‘actually’ is, with all the attendant revisions to our ethics, politics, etc. that this would entail. (shrink)

In response to Anton Froeyman's paper, “Virtues of Historiography,“ this article argues that philosophers of history interested in why historians cherish such virtues as carefulness, impartiality, and intellectual courage would do wise not to classify these virtues unequivocally as either epistemic or moral virtues. Likewise, in trying to grasp the roles that virtues play in the historian's professional practice, philosophers of history would be best advised to avoid adopting either an epistemological or an ethical perspective. Assuming that the historian's virtuous (...) behavior has epistemic and moral dimensions (as well as aesthetic, political, and other dimensions), this article advocates a non-reductionist account of historical scholarship, which acknowledges that the virtues cherished by historians usually play a variety of roles, depending on the goals they are supposed to serve. Given that not the least important of these goals are epistemic ones, the articles concludes that virtue ethical approaches, to the extent that they are focused on the acquisition of moral instead of epistemic goods, insufficiently recognize the role of virtue in the pursuit of such epistemic aims as knowledge and understanding. (shrink)

In this book Morton White develops a theory concerning the connection between our beliefs about what ought to be done and our descriptive beliefs. The theory is worked out in detail, illustrated, and contrasted with views that rely on the obscure notion of meaning employed by those who try to define 'ought' in terms of 'is' and to deduce normative statements from descriptive statements.

This book contributes to two debates and it does so by bringing them together. The first is a debate in metaethics concerning normative reasons, the considerations that serve to justify a person’s actions and attitudes. The second is a debate in epistemology concerning the norms for belief, the standards that govern a person’s beliefs and by reference to which they are assessed. The book starts by developing and defending a new theory of reasons for action, that is, of practical (...) reasons. The theory belongs to a family that analyses reasons by appeal to the normative notion of rightness (fittingness, correctness); it is distinctive in making central appeal to modal notions, specifically, that of a nearby possible world. The result is a comprehensive framework that captures what is common to and distinctive of reasons of various kinds: justifying and demanding; for and against, possessed and unpossessed; objective and subjective. The framework is then generalized to reasons for belief, that is, to epistemic reasons, and combined with a substantive, first-order commitment, namely, that truth is the sole right-maker for belief. The upshot is an account of the various norms governing belief, including knowledge and rationality, and the relations among them. According to it, the standards to which belief is subject are various, but they are unified by an underlying principle. (shrink)

Technologies are significant in research not only as instruments for gathering data and analyzing information; they also provide a valuable resource for the development of theory—in terms of what has been called the “tools to theory heuristic.” Focusing on the specific example of the fields of educational psychology and instructional technology and design, this paper begins by describing how the workings of the “tools to theory heuristic” are evident in the metaphors and descriptions of behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. In each (...) of these psychological paradigms, the mind is understood in terms of a contemporaneous technological innovation: as rudimentary circuitry, as computerized data processing, and finally, in terms of information representation and visualization. The paper then argues that in applied disciplines like educational technology and human–computer interaction, technology plays two important but conflicting roles. It first operates heuristically to explain complex mental phenomena; it is then designed and developed explicitly as a tool for facilitating and developing these same complex mental processes. This paper concludes by arguing that this dual role represents an ethical dilemma—a kind of epistemological and practical “conflict of interest” in instructional technology and in related fields of systems and interface design. (shrink)