Objektivität und Wissen

Andrea Kern has criticized the view that the fallibility of judgements is due to their objectivity and has tried to show that objective knowledge is comprehensible only if its infallibility is not logically excluded. She argues that the notion of knowledge is more fundamental than that of error and that we must bring into play an epistemic capacity as a form of perfection to understand what knowledge is. In the present article, this position is charitably criticized and modified. It is argued that infallible knowledge is even actual, but not fully objective. Infallibility characterises our knowledge of logical and of spatio–temporal form and our judgments of the kind "it seems to me that p". This knowledge is in neither case knowledge of particular objective facts, but in both cases knowledge of what Sebastian Rödl calls the object überhaupt .

Beyond numbers: Using case study insights to support interpretation

Chapter 7 takes up the formal results from chapter 6 on the contextual settings behind the three response-patterns and discusses them in light of case-knowledge. Here, more in-depth insights on the contextual conditions illustrate on the basis of the empirical material how the different conjunctions of conditions unearthed in chapter 6 work in practice. For instance, it is shown how local actors in some cases perceive the ESF as a burden due to high co-financing and administrative overload, how in other local cases actors are attracted by the conceptual freedom of the funding, or how usage of the ESF becomes normalised in the context of public interventions in some cases. Chapter 7 uses the insights from the case studies to unravel the broader empirical pictures behind the contextual settings of the three response-patterns.