Hasil untuk "Epistemology. Theory of knowledge"

B. Hofer

J. Pollock

Bridget Pratt, J. de Vries

The silencing of the epistemologies, theories, principles, values, concepts and experiences of the global South constitutes a particularly egregious epistemic injustice in bioethics. Our shared responsibility to rectify that injustice should be at the top of the ethics agenda. That it is not, or only is in part, is deeply problematic and endangers the credibility of the entire field. As a first step towards reorienting the field, this paper offers a comprehensive account of epistemic justice for global health ethics. We first introduce several different conceptions of justice and decolonisation in relation to knowledge, purposefully drawing on work emanating from the global South as well as the global North. We then apply those conceptions to the global health ethics context to generate a tripartite account of the layers of epistemic justice in the field: who is producing ethics knowledge; what theories and concepts are being applied to produce ethics knowledge; and whose voices are sought, recorded and used to generate ethics knowledge. These layers reflect that the field spans conceptual and empirical research. We conclude by proposing that, going forward, three avenues are key to achieve greater epistemic justice at each layer and to help decolonise global health ethics: namely, understanding the problem, dialogue and structural change.

Mabohlokoa P. Khotso Khanyetsi

This study is inspired by Sannere’s song ‘Lerato’ in his accordion music that depicts Basotho women positively. For a very long time, the portrayal of women in Basotho accordion music has always been negative. Negativity seems to be depicted through certain songs of many Basotho accordion music artists. However, in his song, ‘Lerato’, Sannere marks a new turn that merits the attention of scholars as it challenges the prevailing delineation of women in Basotho accordion music. In a notable departure, from the negative portrayal of a woman, Sannere in his song ‘Lerato’, assumes agency by communicating messages of love, appreciation and respect for a Mosotho woman. This study seeks to unpack Sannere’s song ‘Lerato’ to affirm his positive contribution to the portrayal of women. This study employed Africana Womanism as its theoretical framework to scrutinise the portrayal of women. By listening to this song several times, the researcher identified the notions of interest and analysed only the parts of the song that merited the notion of interest with a focus on their lyrical content. A thematic analysis of this song revealed how Sannere portrays women challenging the negative portrayal of women in this genre. This study argues that the negative portrayal of women in the Basotho accordion music is precarious for human society, highlighting its effects both in Lesotho and South Africa. Contribution: The findings of this study will contribute to Basotho accordion music studies, underscoring the significance of African Womanism in understanding African women.

Tsz Fung Pang, Maryam Berijanian, Thomas Orth et al.

Legal documents are often long, dense, and difficult to comprehend, not only for laypeople but also for legal experts. While automated document summarization has great potential to improve access to legal knowledge, prevailing task-based evaluators overlook divergent user and stakeholder needs. Tool development is needed to encompass the technicality of a case summary for a litigator yet be accessible for a self-help public researching for their lawsuit. We introduce PersonaMatrix, a persona-by-criterion evaluation framework that scores summaries through the lens of six personas, including legal and non-legal users. We also introduce a controlled dimension-shifted pilot dataset of U.S. civil rights case summaries that varies along depth, accessibility, and procedural detail as well as Diversity-Coverage Index (DCI) to expose divergent optima of legal summary between persona-aware and persona-agnostic judges. This work enables refinement of legal AI summarization systems for both expert and non-expert users, with the potential to increase access to legal knowledge. The code base and data are publicly available in GitHub.

Ebrahim Norouzi, Nicole Jung, Anna M. Jacyszyn et al.

Chemistry is an example of a discipline where the advancements of technology have led to multi-level and often tangled and tricky processes ongoing in the lab. The repeatedly complex workflows are combined with information from chemical structures, which are essential to understand the scientific process. An important tool for many chemists is Chemotion, which consists of an electronic lab notebook and a repository. This paper introduces a semantic pipeline for constructing the BFO-compliant Chemotion Knowledge Graph, providing an integrated, ontology-driven representation of chemical research data. The Chemotion-KG has been developed to adhere to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles and to support AI-driven discovery and reasoning in chemistry. Experimental metadata were harvested from the Chemotion API in JSON-LD format, converted into RDF, and subsequently transformed into a Basic Formal Ontology-aligned graph through SPARQL CONSTRUCT queries. The source code and datasets are publicly available via GitHub. The Chemotion Knowledge Graph is hosted by FIZ Karlsruhe Information Service Engineering. Outcomes presented in this work were achieved within the Leibniz Science Campus ``Digital Transformation of Research'' (DiTraRe) and are part of an ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration.

Ángel Deroncele-Acosta, Ramiro Gross-Tur, Omar Bellido-Valdiviezo et al.

The Epistemic Competence of the Researcher is a critical success factor for ethical, rigorous, and creative research performance, but it requires a deep epistemological and methodological mastery, however, the current scientific literature has not yet achieved a conceptual arrangement, that allows researchers and educators to have a comprehensive theoretical framework for a holistic understanding of this competence. The objective of this study was to build a comprehensive theory on the epistemic competence of the researcher. A qualitative approach was used, deploying an open interview and the grounded theory method. Ten experts in social science didactics from 7 Latin American universities and 3 Spanish universities participated. The interviews were processed manually and with the support of ATLAS.TI software, finding 23 emerging categories that were contrasted with the results of a term co-occurrence network of 6081 studies imported from Scopus. From the cross-check of empirical and theoretical results, the following concepts were selected to coincide. Finally, the theoretical framework established was made up of the following concepts: 1.- knowledge building and conceptual change, 2.- epistemological beliefs, 3.- concept mapping and knowledge creation, 4.- conceptual understanding, 5.- conceptual framework, 6.- concept formation, 7.- epistemic beliefs, 8.- science education (learning science and science teaching) 9.- cognitive complexity, 10.- personal epistemology, 11.- virtue epistemology, 12.- formal logic, 13.- epistemic cognition, 14.- nature of science, 15.- epistemic emotions. A proposal for teaching and learning science from this epistemic perspective is established. Future studies should continue to explore the concepts and categories that this work leaves open.

Kai Niu, Ping Zhang

The year 1948 witnessed the historic moment of the birth of classic information theory (CIT). Guided by CIT, modern communication techniques have approached the theoretic limitations, such as, entropy function $H(U)$, channel capacity $C=\max_{p(x)}I(X;Y)$ and rate-distortion function $R(D)=\min_{p(\hat{x}|x):\mathbb{E}d(x,\hat{x})\leq D} I(X;\hat{X})$. Semantic communication paves a new direction for future communication techniques whereas the guided theory is missed. In this paper, we try to establish a systematic framework of semantic information theory (SIT). We investigate the behavior of semantic communication and find that synonym is the basic feature so we define the synonymous mapping between semantic information and syntactic information. Stemming from this core concept, synonymous mapping $f$, we introduce the measures of semantic information, such as semantic entropy $H_s(\tilde{U})$, up/down semantic mutual information $I^s(\tilde{X};\tilde{Y})$ $(I_s(\tilde{X};\tilde{Y}))$, semantic capacity $C_s=\max_{f_{xy}}\max_{p(x)}I^s(\tilde{X};\tilde{Y})$, and semantic rate-distortion function $R_s(D)=\min_{\{f_x,f_{\hat{x}}\}}\min_{p(\hat{x}|x):\mathbb{E}d_s(\tilde{x},\hat{\tilde{x}})\leq D}I_s(\tilde{X};\hat{\tilde{X}})$. Furthermore, we prove three coding theorems of SIT by using random coding and (jointly) typical decoding/encoding, that is, the semantic source coding theorem, semantic channel coding theorem, and semantic rate-distortion coding theorem. We find that the limits of SIT are extended by using synonymous mapping, that is, $H_s(\tilde{U})\leq H(U)$, $C_s\geq C$ and $R_s(D)\leq R(D)$. All these works composite the basis of semantic information theory. In addition, we discuss the semantic information measures in the continuous case. For the band-limited Gaussian channel, we obtain a new channel capacity formula, $C_s=B\log\left[S^4\left(1+\frac{P}{N_0B}\right)\right]$.

G. Forino

Disasters—the reasons why they happen, and their consequences—are relevant topics for human geography debate and its engagement with theories, social and cultural practices, politics and history, economics, and resource management. Key theories and concepts around disasters and associated topics have been under scrutiny and discussion at least since the 1970s, when reflections appeared on how hazards, vulnerability, and disasters should be conceptualized to improve disaster research, policy, and practice (O’Keefe, Westgate, and Wisner 1976). In recent years, the growth of critical approaches around causes and consequences of disasters urges the need for disaster epistemologies that grasp the complexity of modern societies (e.g., Donovan 2017) or deconstruct and challenge dominant disaster narratives (e.g., Remes and Horowitz 2021). I believe, however, that JC Gaillard and his comprehensive book, The Invention of Disaster: Power and Knowledge in Discourse on Hazards and Vulnerability, makes a step forward, and unprecedented in the field, and provides a comprehensive and rooted understanding of the reasons modern disasters are globally conceptualized as such.

C. Atuire

Pratt and de Vries pose an important and uncomfortable question to all stakeholders in the global bioethics space. If global bioethics as they define it is ‘the ethics of public health and healthcare problems that are characterised by a global level effect or that require action beyond individual countries, and the ethics of research related to such problems’, one would expect justice and inclusivity to be among the ethical priorities. Yet, Pratt and de Vries carefully demonstrate how different forms of epistemic injustice and coloniality are embedded in the structure, generation of knowledge and praxis of global bioethics. They do this by unpicking three layers at which coloniality and epistemic injustice operate; knowledgeproducer, knowledgeapplied and knowledgesolicited. The authors also offer a threepronged incremental approach to how individual and institutional actors in global bioethics can contribute to epistemic justice in the field. Pratt and de Vries present their work as ‘a first step towards reorienting the field’ of global health bioethics away from epistemic injustice. Indeed, theirs is a mapping, problem statement and recommendations piece that will be useful for future conversations on epistemic justice in global bioethics. My commentary is not so much a critique of the meticulous work done by Pratt and de Vries, but an attempt to highlight key structural barriers that need to be addressed if knowledge from the global South is to be given a fair space within global bioethics. I will do this following the threelayered structure proposed by the Authors and conclude by offering a conceptual suggestion that broadly encompasses the pathways suggested by the Authors for increasing epistemic justice in global bioethics. In the unpacking of the knowledgeproducer layer—who is producing knowledge in bioethics—a key actor is the university institution. A 2023 critique of the conceptual flaws and colonialitybiased university ranking criteria by NassiriAnsari and McCoy shows that the top 20 ranked public health study programmes are all in the global North. They argue, based on empirical data that university ranking systems are designed to reinforce the concentration of power and prestige among universities in the global North. Universities are among the principal knowledge producers in global health. Thus, rethinking how we classify and rank knowledge producers is an important step toward epistemic justice within the knowledge producer layer. When we consider the knowledgeapplied layer—what theories and concepts are being applied to produce ethics knowledge—Pratt and de Vries call for the inclusion of epistemologies and ethical frameworks from the global South in education and praxis. Here too, it would be important to consider that, as pointed out by Cloartre, the Law has been systemically used to ‘other’ nonbiomedical ways of conceiving health and practicing healthcare. A thorough inclusion of global South epistemologies in healthcare and bioethics would require a legal framework that avoids putting ‘nonstandard’ conceptualizations on the backfoot or even worse, considering them as ‘alternative’ or complementary. And finally, on the knowledgesolicited layer,—whose voices are sought, recorded and used to generate ethics knowledge—while much progress has been made in recent times to include representation from the global South in international organizations, what remains to be seen is how these representatives are selected. Is the selection of these global South representatives based on their capacities to understand and propagate the ideas emanating from the global North or are they capable of shifting the existing conversations by introducing global South views and epistemologies into global conversations? Pratt and de Vries suggest that the way forward is a threestep approach of understanding the problem, engaging in dialogue, and implementing structural change. These, in my view, can be captured under subsidiarity, a notion that has not been sufficiently explored in the global health governance space. The specific moral wrong of colonialism can be traced to the subtraction of agency of peoples and communities while reorienting all agency towards the interests of the colonizers. From this viewpoint, subsidiarity is both a principle of decolonization and justice because it insists on a bottomup approach to governing multilayered structures in a way that the agency of local organizations, usually closest to the issues at stake, is given space, and assisted—subsidium—to be able to resolve the issues that are within their capabilities. Global North bioethicists, rather than seeking to find universal solutions to global health issues, would do better by assisting and empowering local bioethicists to find solutions to their problems. This approach is quite different from the multiple capacitybuilding initiatives that often entrench epistemic injustice and coloniality by acritically transferring global northern knowledge systems and epistemologies to the global South. The way forward for global health bioethics is arguably pluriversality and deimperialisation. Where pluriversality recognises that there is not a single, but multiple ways of knowing and understanding and deimperialisation requires a departure from the assumptions of cultural superiority to a humbler position of seeing others, although economically poorer others, as equals. Pratt and de Vries have offered the global bioethics community a key and a framework that can stimulate further conversations, but above all, transformations, in global health bioethics.

Vinicius Jacques, Henrique César da Silva

A partir de uma perspectiva histórica e cultural articulada à noção de textualização, este artigo apresenta uma análise da produção e circulação da história em quadrinhos (HQ) “Aventuras no coração do átomo” (1956), publicada num período em que se costura um emaranhamento de atores/agências e interesses em relação à temática nuclear. A análise evidenciou diversos aspectos: o apagamento da bomba atômica e de agências envolvidas na produção da HQ, como Atomic Energy Commission e United States Information Agency (Usia); a circulação em outros países, incluindo o Brasil, favorecidas pela Unesco e Usia como bom exemplo de HQ educativa; como a HQ se tornou um dos instrumentos do programa Átomos para a Paz.

V. I. Sergevnin, O. V. Tukacheva, O. E. Mikova et al.

Relevance. The mortality rate of patients with HIV infection, including concomitant tuberculosis (HIV/TB), continues to increase. The goal of the work is to study the long­term dynamics of HIV­infected mortality and risk factors of the lethal outcome in the presence and absence of concomitant tuberculosis.Materials and methods. An assessment of the mortality rates of HIV­-infected people among the population of the Perm Region during the period from 2005 (the year of registration of the first cases of HIV/TB) to 2021 was carried out. In order to determine the life expectancy of patients and risk factors of the lethal outcome the analysis of 414 outpatient records of HIV­infected people who died in 2021 was carried out. The degree of immunodeficiency and viral load in patients was taken into account based on the results of examinations conducted in the period 6 months before the lethal outcome.Results. During the 15­year period of registration of the incidence of HIV/TB in the study area, 57.0% of those who died from causes directly related to HIV infection had TB. At the same time, despite the decrease in mortality from monotuberculous infection as a result of a decrease in the incidence of TB, in recent years there has been an increase in mortality from HIV/TB due to the intensification of the epidemic process of HIV infection. The average life expectancy of HIV­-infected people who died directly from HIV infection in the absence of TB was 6.7 ± 0.3 years, with concomitant TB ­5.7 ± 0.3 years. The lethal outcome of patients with HIV infection in the presence of TB and without TB was most often recorded with the number of CD4 + < 200 cells /ml and viral load > 100,000 copies /MBNA of HIV. At the same time, immunosuppression in deceased HIV/TB patients was more pronounced than in HIV­-infected patients in the absence of TB.

Lenny Fukshansky, Camilla Hollanti

In this editorial survey we introduce the special issue of the journal Communications in Mathematics on the topic in the title of the article. Our main goal is to briefly outline some of the main aspects of this important area at the intersection of theory and applications, providing the context for the articles showcased in this special issue.

S. Cooke, A. Jeanson, Ian Bishop et al.

Dimitrios Alivanistos, Selene Báez Santamaría, Michael Cochez et al.

Language Models (LMs) have proven to be useful in various downstream applications, such as summarisation, translation, question answering and text classification. LMs are becoming increasingly important tools in Artificial Intelligence, because of the vast quantity of information they can store. In this work, we present ProP (Prompting as Probing), which utilizes GPT-3, a large Language Model originally proposed by OpenAI in 2020, to perform the task of Knowledge Base Construction (KBC). ProP implements a multi-step approach that combines a variety of prompting techniques to achieve this. Our results show that manual prompt curation is essential, that the LM must be encouraged to give answer sets of variable lengths, in particular including empty answer sets, that true/false questions are a useful device to increase precision on suggestions generated by the LM, that the size of the LM is a crucial factor, and that a dictionary of entity aliases improves the LM score. Our evaluation study indicates that these proposed techniques can substantially enhance the quality of the final predictions: ProP won track 2 of the LM-KBC competition, outperforming the baseline by 36.4 percentage points. Our implementation is available on https://github.com/HEmile/iswc-challenge.

L. Zagzebski

L. Gurung

Feminist Standpoint theory challenges the notion of conventional scientific practices that had excluded women from the inquiry and marginalize them in every aspect of knowledge benefits and construction. Amidst the prevalent controversies, standpoint theorists have proposed alternative knowledge construction with the theses of ‘strong objectivity’, ‘situated knowledge’, ‘epistemic advantage’, and ‘power relations’. Feminist standpoint theory is claimed to be a successful methodology and the author support this argument based on the four reasons; the logic of discovery, insider-outsider position, study up, and methodological innovation. The author also put forwards the various challenges confronted by feminist standpoint theory and the justification given by the theorists. The cognitive, methodological, and epistemological interrogations toward this theory have widened its scope and adoption in social science research. The paper aims to suggest this analysis as the most suitable analytical and theoretical approach to do feminist inquiry which brings the understanding of feminist epistemologies as the most appropriate alternative approach of recent inquires against the dominant practices.

M. Boon, Sophie van Baalen

In science policy, it is generally acknowledged that science-based problem-solving requires interdisciplinary research. For example, policy makers invest in funding programs such as Horizon 2020 that aim to stimulate interdisciplinary research. Yet the epistemological processes that lead to effective interdisciplinary research are poorly understood. This article aims at an epistemology for interdisciplinary research (IDR), in particular, IDR for solving ‘real-world’ problems. Focus is on the question why researchers experience cognitive and epistemic difficulties in conducting IDR. Based on a study of educational literature it is concluded that higher-education is missing clear ideas on the epistemology of IDR, and as a consequence, on how to teach it. It is conjectured that the lack of philosophical interest in the epistemology of IDR is due to a philosophical paradigm of science (called a physics paradigm of science), which prevents recognizing severe epistemological challenges of IDR, both in the philosophy of science as well as in science education and research. The proposed alternative philosophical paradigm (called an engineering paradigm of science) entails alternative philosophical presuppositions regarding aspects such as the aim of science, the character of knowledge, the epistemic and pragmatic criteria for accepting knowledge, and the role of technological instruments. This alternative philosophical paradigm assume the production of knowledge for epistemic functions as the aim of science, and interprets ‘knowledge’ (such as theories, models, laws, and concepts) as epistemic tools that must allow for conducting epistemic tasks by epistemic agents, rather than interpreting knowledge as representations that objectively represent aspects of the world independent of the way in which it was constructed. The engineering paradigm of science involves that knowledge is indelibly shaped by how it is constructed. Additionally, the way in which scientific disciplines (or fields) construct knowledge is guided by the specificities of the discipline, which can be analyzed in terms of disciplinary perspectives. This implies that knowledge and the epistemic uses of knowledge cannot be understood without at least some understanding of how the knowledge is constructed. Accordingly, scientific researchers need so-called metacognitive scaffolds to assist in analyzing and reconstructing how ‘knowledge’ is constructed and how different disciplines do this differently. In an engineering paradigm of science, these metacognitive scaffolds can also be interpreted as epistemic tools, but in this case as tools that guide, enable and constrain analyzing and articulating how knowledge is produced (i.e., explaining epistemological aspects of doing research). In interdisciplinary research, metacognitive scaffolds assist interdisciplinary communication aiming to analyze and articulate how the discipline constructs knowledge.

D. Sui, S. Elwood, M. Goodchild

Daniel Cardoso

Maria do Mar Pereira’s book can be seen as several different books all very cogently rolled into one. It manages to be, at once, a book about the role of feminism in academia, about the dynamics of Women’s, Gender and Feminist Studies (WGFS) as an academic activity, about feminist critiques of scientific epistemology, about the situatedness (geographical and temporal) of knowledge production within a very anglo-centric academic ecosystem, about the neoliberalisation of academia, about the embodied experience (and harm) of academic work, and about the self-reflexiveness of writing an academic book about people who write academic books. At no point are all these layers confused or confusing, and they flow consistently and methodically, demonstrating a superb command of the literature involved, both in depth and in breadth – as many references are from outside the anglosphere of most-cited authors. From here, it follows that this book has several target audiences – people focusing on WGFS, on mental health, on academic praxis, on epistemology, on postcolonial studies, on guides for self-reflexive writing, on cultural studies, on ethnography, on neoliberalism and precarious work, among others, will find here plenty of interesting material, and an absolutely impressive literature review from which to draw. The author is quite aware that this, too, is a way for her to perform academic status – that she is not outside of the dynamics that she is studying – and it shows how familiar she is with the field of sociology and WGFS. The main idea behind the book is that, in order to understand the processes of power and knowledge at work in academia, an ethnographic analysis is necessary – one that combines structural aspects (funding, politics, marketing) with situated events, even those that are often seen as unremarkable, such as ‘corridor talk’, or backand-forth conversations in classes. To do this, Maria do Mar Pereira creates a new conceptual tool a feminist theory of epistemic status: