Thinking Ecologically, Knowing Responsibly

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-37
Author(s):  
Lorraine Code ◽  

This essay extends my engagements with questions of epistemic agency and the politics of epistemic location, in Epistemic Responsibility and in Ecological Thinking to consider how questions of understanding and of certainty play diversely into human and other ecological circumstances. In so doing, it opens lines of inquiry not immediately available in standard western-northern approaches to epistemology with their concentration on medium-sized physical objects in their presupposed neutrality and replicability. Working from a tacit assumption that knowing and knowers are always situated, and that they are enabled or restricted in so being, the book engages with specific epistemic situations in order to show how “situatedness” indeed makes knowledge possible, while regarding it as an enabling rather than a constraining modality.

Author(s):  
José Medina

This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in feminist philosophical work on injustice that is distinctly epistemic. The first part of the chapter focuses on the contributions that classic feminist theorists have made to the conceptualization of issues of epistemic injustice long before such name was available, focusing especially on the writings of feminists of color from the seventeenth century onward (Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, etc.). The second half of the chapter focuses on the contributions to recent discussions of epistemic injustice by contemporary feminist scholars, especially Lorraine Code, Kristie Dotson, and Miranda Fricker. The chapter highlights the ways in which the feminist paradigms of intersectionality and standpoint theory have shaped analyses of epistemic injustice and epistemic resistance against injustice, elaborating the key notions of epistemic agency, epistemic responsibility and epistemic advocacy.


Hypatia ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 170-176
Author(s):  
Phyllis Rooney

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Maloney

This is the third paper in the invited collection. Maloney highlights commonalities and divergences between two of Code’s works, Epistemic Responsibility (1987) and Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location (2006), focussing on three concepts: epistemic responsibility, which is central and common across both works; cognitive interdependence which is common to both works, but undergoes a major transformation in Ecological Thinking; and advocacy, which is entirely absent from the discussion in Epistemic Responsibility. Code’s work intersects with aspects of the work of two other thinkers—Miranda Fricker’s hermeneutic injustice and Mikhail Bakhtin’s creative understanding. Advocacy as it emerges in Ecological Thinking must include a dialogical process with the other that leads both to and from greater self-understanding if it is to do the work of destabilizing dominant modes of knowing; further, advocacy is both necessary for, and can only happen within, epistemic community.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Talbot

The Metropolitan Police’s Crime Museum, famously known as the Black Museum, exhibits evidence from some of the most appalling crimes committed within English society from the late-Victorian era into modernity. Public admittance to this museum is strictly prohibited, preventing all but police staff from viewing the macabre exhibitions held within. The physical objects on display may vary, but whether the viewer is confronted with household items, weaponry or human remains, the evidence before them is undeniably associated with the immorality surrounding the performance of a socially bad death, of murder. These items have an object biography, they are both contextualized and contextualize the environment in which they reside. But one must question the purpose of such a museum, does it merely act as a Chamber of Horrors evoking the anomie of English society in physical form, or do these exhibits have an educational intent, restricted to their liminal space inside New Scotland Yard, to be used as a pedagogical tool in the development of new methods of murder investigation.


Author(s):  
Nikolai Karepanov

The author argues that traces include surrounding reality objects (physical objects and fields), altered by phenomena or events that occurred as a result of movement, processes and actions. The identification and investigation of traces of the investigated events is most often carried out at the places of their occurrence, separately studied and analyzed after their seizure in specially adapted and appropriately equipped conditions. The methods of traces detection are very diverse and are being constantly improved, so it is difficult even to classify them. Still, it is possible to distinguish some methodologies proposed in theory and practice. The author considers some methods of identifying traces when searching for living persons and corpses, identifying corpses; identifying and fixing traces of human hands; identifying traces on payment cards; identifying electronic traces, identifying traces of removing embossed images; identifying traces using the latest achievements of science and technology; identifying traces and constructing sign systems in description of material objects. The necessity of introduction of a standard of detecting and investigating the traces of crimes is also discussed, and a system of actions that should be included into this standard is proposed.


Author(s):  
T. M. Robinson

This article argues the following five claims: 1. Plato’s description of the origins of cosmos in the Timaeus is not a myth, nor something unlikely: when he called it an eikos mythos or eikos logos, he meant a likely or trustworthy account on this very subject. 2. Among the details in this account, the following are prominent and surprising: a) the world was fashioned in time, in that precise point that was the beginning of time; b) several kinds of duration can be distinguished in cosmology (mainly eternity, sempiternity, perpetuity and time); and c) space is an entity characterized by movement and tension. 3. In the Statesman, Plato repeats much the same thing, adding this time the strange notion that the universe’s circular movement is periodically reversed. 4. In spite of the important differences in detail, there is a striking similarity between Plato’s account of the origins of the world and the explanation adopted by much of modern cosmology. 5. What Plato shares with so many instances of recent thought is here termed “cosmological imaginativity”. A first section of the paper deals exclusively with the Timaeus. Claims 1 and 2a are supported by a revision of the meanings of mythos and logos, followed by brief reference and discussion of the argument at Timaeus 27d, leading to the conclusion that Plato affirms that the ever-changing world has indeed had a beginning in time. Claim 2b describes five different types of duration, corresponding to Forms, the Demiurge, Space, the [empirical] world and its contents, physical objects. The second section is concerned with the myth in the Statesman, discussing it as a parallel and describing its peculiar turn to the Timaeus’ cosmology and cosmogony, a complex spheric and dynamic model. After digressing into some important ideas in modern cosmology, touching especially on affinities of some of Einstein’s ideas with of Plato’s own, the paper closes with a discussion of cosmological imaginativity, oriented to recover and recognize fully Plato’s greatness as a cosmologist.


Author(s):  
J. Christopher Maloney

The supposed problem of perceptual error, including illusion and hallucination, has led most theories of perception to deny formulations of direct realism. The standard response to this apparent problem adopts the mistaken presupposition that perception is indeed liable to error. However, the prevailing conditions of observation are themselves elements of perceptual representation, functioning in the manner of predicate modifiers. They ensure that the predicates applied in perceptual representations do indeed correctly attribute properties that perceived physical objects actually instantiate. Thus, perceptual representations are immune to misrepresentation of the sort misguidedly supposed by the spurious problem of perceptual misrepresentation. Granted the possibility that perceptual attribution admits of predicate modification, it is quite possible that perceptual experience permits both rudimentary and sophisticated conceptualization. Moreover, such treatment of perceptual predication rewards by providing an account of aspect alteration exemplified by perception of ambiguous stimuli.


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