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Social Epistemology
Social epistemology refers to a broad set of approaches that can be taken in epistemology (the study of knowledge) that construes human knowledge as a collective achievement. Another way of characterizing social epistemology is as the evaluation of the social dimensions of knowledge or information. As a field of inquiry in analytic philosophy, social epistemology deals with questions about knowledge in social contexts, meaning those in which knowledge attributions cannot be explained by examining individuals in isolation from one another. The most common topics discussed in contemporary social epistemology are testimony (e.g. "When does a belief that x is true which resulted from being told 'x is true' constitute knowledge?"), peer disagreement (e.g. "When and how should I revise my beliefs in light of other people holding beliefs that contradict mine?"), and group epistemology (e.g. "What does it mean to attribute knowledge to groups rather than individuals, and when are such ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steve Fuller (sociologist)
Steve William Fuller (born 1959) is an American social philosophy, social philosopher in the field of science and technology studies. He has published in the areas of social epistemology, academic freedom, and in support of intelligent design and transhumanism. Biography Fuller attended Regis High School (New York City), Regis High School in Manhattan. Admitted as a John Jay Scholar to Columbia University, he majored in history and sociology and graduated summa cum laude in 1979. Awarded a Kellett Fellowship, he studied at Clare College, Cambridge, and received an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science in 1981. He earned his Ph.D. in the same subject from the University of Pittsburgh in 1985, where he was an Andrew Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellow. Fuller's doctoral dissertation, "Bounded Rationality in Law and Science", explored the implications of the views of Herbert A. Simon for political theory and philosophy of science. Fuller held assistant and associate professorships ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epistemology
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called "the theory of knowledge", it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowledge in the form of skills, and knowledge by acquaintance as a familiarity through experience. Epistemologists study the concepts of belief, truth, and justification to understand the nature of knowledge. To discover how knowledge arises, they investigate sources of justification, such as perception, introspection, memory, reason, and testimony. The school of skepticism questions the human ability to attain knowledge while fallibilism says that knowledge is never certain. Empiricists hold that all knowledge comes from sense experience, whereas rationalists believe that some knowledge does not depend on it. Coherentists argue that a belief is justified if it coheres with other beliefs. Foundationalists, by contrast, maintain th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steven Shapin
Steven Shapin ( ) (born 1943) is an American historian and sociologist of science. He is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Harvard University. Early life and education Steven Shapin (born 1943 in New York) was educated at Central High School (Philadelphia) and at Reed College (Portland, Oregon), where he studied biology. He did graduate work in genetics at the University of Wisconsin before taking his Ph.D. in the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. Employment After a postdoctoral year at Keele University (England), Shapin was, from 1972 to 1989, Lecturer (later Reader) at the Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh. From 1989 to 2003, he was Professor of Sociology and a member of the Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego, and, from 2003 to 2014, he was Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, retiring as Emeritus Professor in 2014. He also held brief ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault ( , ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French History of ideas, historian of ideas and Philosophy, philosopher who was also an author, Literary criticism, literary critic, Activism, political activist, and teacher. Foucault's theories primarily addressed the relationships between Power (social and political), power versus knowledge and liberty, and he analyzed how they are used as a form of social control through multiple institutions. Though often cited as a Structuralism, structuralist and Postmodernism, postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels and sought to critique authority without limits on himself. His thought has influenced academics within a large number of contrasting areas of study, with this especially including those working in anthropology, communication studies, criminology, cultural studies, feminism, literary theory, psychology, and sociology. His efforts against homophobia and racial prejudice as well as against other Ideology, id ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American History and philosophy of science, historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term ''paradigm shift'', which has since become an English-language idiom. Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of science, scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by Objectivity (philosophy), objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently Commensurability (philosophy of science), incommensurable; that is, there is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Library And Information Science
Library and information science (LIS)Library and Information Sciences is the name used in the Dewey Decimal Classification for class 20 from the 18th edition (1971) to the 22nd edition (2003). are two interconnected disciplines that deal with information management. This includes organization, access, collection, and regulation of information, both in physical and digital forms.Coleman, A. (2002)Interdisciplinarity: The Road Ahead for Education in Digital Libraries D-Lib Magazine, 8:8/9 (July/August). Library science and information science are two original disciplines; however, they are within the same field of study. Library science is applied information science. Library science is both an application and a subfield of information science. Due to the strong connection, sometimes the two terms are used synonymously. Definition Library science (previously termed library studies and library economy) is an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary field that applies the practices, p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". According to philosopher Paul Weiss (philosopher), Paul Weiss, Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician". Bertrand Russell wrote "he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever". Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for thirty years, Peirce meanwhile made major contributions to logic, such as theories of Algebraic logic, relations and Quantifier (logic), quantification. Clarence Irving Lewis, C. I. Lewis wrote, "The contributions of C. S. Peirce to symbolic logic are more numerous and varied than those of any other writer—at least in the nineteenth century." For Peirce, logic also encompassed much of what is now called epistemology and the philoso ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Underdetermination
In the philosophy of science, underdetermination or the underdetermination of theory by data (sometimes abbreviated UTD) is the idea that evidence available to us at a given time may be insufficient to determine what beliefs we should hold in response to it. The underdetermination thesis states that all evidence necessarily underdetermines any scientific theory. Underdetermination exists when available evidence is insufficient to identify which belief one should hold about that evidence. For example, if all that was known was that exactly $10 were spent on apples and oranges, and that apples cost $1 and oranges $2, then one would know enough to eliminate some possibilities (e.g., 6 oranges could not have been purchased), but one would not have enough evidence to know which specific combination of apples and oranges were purchased. In this example, one would say that belief in what combination was purchased is underdetermined by the available evidence. In contrast, ''overdetermin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Duhem–Quine Thesis
In philosophy of science, the Duhem–Quine thesis, also called the Duhem–Quine problem, says that unambiguous falsifications of a scientific hypothesis are impossible, because an empirical test of the hypothesis requires one or more background assumptions. Rather than disproving the main hypothesis, the blame can be placed on one of the background beliefs or "auxiliary" hypotheses.: "The physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses" (Duhem)... "Duhem denies that unambiguous falsification procedures do exist in science." It is named after French theoretical physicist Pierre Duhem and American logician Willard Van Orman Quine, who wrote about similar concepts. In recent decades, the set of associated assumptions supporting a thesis sometimes is called a bundle of hypotheses, i.e. a hypothesis and its background assumptions. Although a bundle of hypotheses as a whole can be tested against the empirical world a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Knowledge Society
A knowledge society generates, shares, and makes available to all members of the society knowledge that may be used to improve the human condition. A knowledge society differs from an information society in that the former serves to transform information into resources that allow society to take effective action, while the latter only creates and disseminates the raw data.Castelfranchi, C. (2007).Six critical remarks on science and the construction of the knowledge society ''Journal of Science Communication, 6''(4), 1-3. The capacity to gather and analyze information has existed throughout human history. However, the idea of the present-day knowledge society is based on the vast increase in data creation and information dissemination that results from the innovation of information technologies.Vallima, J. & Hoffman, D. (2008). Knowledge society discourse and higher education. ''Higher Education, 56''(3), 265-285. The UNESCO World Report addresses the definition, content and fut ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism is the coexistence of multiple cultures. The word is used in sociology, in political philosophy, and colloquially. In sociology and everyday usage, it is usually a synonym for ''Pluralism (political theory), ethnic'' or cultural pluralism in which various ethnic and cultural groups exist in a single society. It can describe a mixed ethnic community area where multiple cultural traditions exist or a single country. Groups associated with an Indigenous peoples, indigenous, aboriginal or wikt:autochthonous, autochthonous ethnic group and settler-descended ethnic groups are often the focus. In reference to sociology, multiculturalism is the end-state of either a natural or artificial process (for example: legally controlled immigration) and occurs on either a large national scale or on a smaller scale within a nation's communities. On a smaller scale, this can occur artificially when a jurisdiction is established or expanded by amalgamating areas with two or more di ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Essentialism
Essentialism is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their Identity (philosophy), identity. In early Western thought, Platonic idealism held that all things have such an "essence"—an Theory of forms, "idea" or "form". In ''Categories (Aristotle), Categories'', Aristotle similarly proposed that all objects have a Substance theory, substance that, as George Lakoff put it, "make the thing what it is, and without which it would be not ''that'' kind of thing". The contrary view—non-essentialism—denies the need to posit such an "essence". Essentialism has been controversial from its beginning. In the ''Parmenides (dialogue), Parmenides'' dialogue, Plato depicts Socrates questioning the notion, suggesting that if we accept the idea that every beautiful thing or just action partakes of an essence to be beautiful or just, we must also accept the "existence of separate essences for hair, mud, and dirt". Older social theories were often conceptually esse ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
