Is it plausible or useful to talk of the main response to the Covid pandemic as being a paradigm? To find out, it’s worth exploring key elements of the concept of paradigm as applied outside of science … [please read… Read More ›
COVID-19
Towards an Institutional Account on Epistemic Humility and Arrogance, Jaana Parviainen and Anne Koski
Our article (Parviainen, Koski, and Torkkola 2021) has sparked debate about epistemic humility in a crisis when political decision-making requires evidence-based knowledge but scientific experts have no answers. Alena Bleicher’s response (Bleicher 2021), published in the Social Epistemology Review and… Read More ›
Covid Information Struggles, Brian Martin
Some viewpoints about COVID-19 are being censored, especially by tech companies such as Facebook and Google. Some of those being censored are calling foul. To understand more about struggles over information about Covid, it is useful to look at tactics… Read More ›
Commentary on Brian Martin’s “Tactics Against Scheming Diseases,” Sue Curry Jansen
Brian Martin’s backfire model provides a recipe for activists to respond to actions that violate established norms and are publicly perceived as unjust or extreme. It involves situations where disclosure of an offending act causes a public outcry, which fuels… Read More ›
Closing the Hermeneutical Gap in STEM Education: A Reply to Lawrence Torcello, Sharon E. Mason
Education has a plurality of aims, one of which is to increase knowledge and decrease ignorance. The relation between knowledge and ignorance, however, turns out to be surprisingly complicated. Sometimes ignorance is actively held in place by various forces that… Read More ›
The Need for an Imaginative Politics, Mats Rosengren
Gothenburg, Sweden, May through July 2020—An Introduction of Sorts[1]. Ever since the ‘birth of politics’ in ancient Greece, where philosophers and rhetoricians competed to educate the young, the importance of the social imaginary for the founding of cities and creating… Read More ›
Science Denial, Pseudoskepticism, and Philosophical Deficits Undermining Public Understanding of Science: A Response to Sharon E. Mason, Lawrence Torcello
In this reply, I examine the relationship between science denialism and education. Specifically I want to address how the mode of science denial I identify as pseudoskepticism relates to information deficits of a philosophical nature … [please read below the… Read More ›
A Critical Review of Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game by Steve Fuller, Des Hewitt
Reviewing Steve Fuller’s book, Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game, from the Greek island of Zakynthos, in the middle of a global pandemic is a surreal experience…. [please read below the rest of the article]. Article Citation: Hewitt, Des. 2020…. Read More ›
Neurath’s Ship Meets Social Epistemology, Finn Collin
Otto Neurath’s (1944) oft-quoted simile about the battered sailors gives a precise depiction of the human condition. Like other animals, humans face constant threats to their survival, but, unlike them, we are not adapted to a particular natural environment in… Read More ›
When a Virus Goes Viral — Life with COVID-19, Steve Fuller
Imagine the following scenario. You are a doctor working in a hospital in a very large and relatively polluted city, normally subject to a high level of seasonal respiratory ailments. Moreover, your healthcare system is stretched because of budget cuts… Read More ›