For many philosophers, it doesn’t seem right to say that we are mainly in the business of trying to describe our concepts. We are, at our best, trying to improve them. ‘Conceptual engineering’ describes this vision of philosophical practice. It… Read More ›
Month: February 2024
What is an Idol? A Response to Eric Steinhart, Bernard N. Wills
Eric Steinhart has kindly responded (2024) to my review (2023) of Believing in Dawkins and has responded to a number of criticisms I have made. For this I would like to thank him. I cannot address every point he raises… Read More ›
The End of Theory? A Reply to Susen, Michael Strand
I thank Simon Susen for the opportunity for further engagement on his important contribution. If I can humbly claim to have at least partially inspired him to ask the immensely generative questions he offers in his rejoinder (Susen 2023), then… Read More ›
Putting Hate Speech at Its Place: A Political-Epistemological Perspective, Massimiliano Badino
The pollution of our epistemic environments is a pressing problem. The largest share of our belief system is assembled through interactions with other agents mediated by digital epistemic environments such as social networks, forums, news websites, and the like. Recently,… Read More ›
Follow the Signs: Taking Direction from Semiotics on How to Identify Experts, Jamie Carlin Watson
Abstract The recognition problem—or, the difficulty of non-experts to appropriately distinguish experts from cleverly disguised fakes—is a perennial problem in expertise studies. And the more we learn about human cognition and the social distribution of knowledge, the more intractable the… Read More ›
The Two Cultures of Interdisciplinarity, Karen Kastenhofer
In 1959, the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow held his famous Rede lecture on “The Two Cultures” (Snow 1961[1959]), juxtaposing the intellectual cultures of science on the one hand and of the humanities and arts (or, more precisely,… Read More ›
Review: The Science-Music Borderlands, Atoosa Afshari
The Science-Music Borderlands, edited by Elizabeth H. Margulis, Psyche Loui and Deirdre Loughridge, offers a fresh perspective and broadened sense of music studies. The book splits into four parts, each with several chapters, which tackle significant myths in music science…. Read More ›
On Experts and Expertise: A Response to the Special Issue of Social Epistemology 38 (1), Charles Bazerman
I am not a philosopher. Nor in my own publications have I intentionally followed any of the professional canons of philosophical reasoning or philosophical genres.[1] Nonetheless, from my interdisciplinary research in writing studies, scientific writing, academic writing, and the circulation… Read More ›
The Dream of a Technology for the People, Adam Riggio
The introduction to the research collection Governing Smart Cities as Knowledge Commons ends with a striking imperative. For the book to succeed fully in its purpose, its readers will have to organize the knowledge commons institutions that they describe. We… Read More ›
Empathy vs. Compassion: A Concluding Discussion, Caroline Bollen and Colin Marshall
In the paper “Towards a Clear and Fair Conceptualization of Empathy” (2023a), Caroline Bollen sets up a proposal for an anti-discriminatory and explicitly normative notion of empathy. In a reply, Colin Marshall (2023) raised four challenges to her argument—to which… Read More ›