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Epistemological Position (epistemological + position)
Selected AbstractsEngaging Science Education Within Diverse CulturesCURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 3 2003James Gaskell At the heart of discussions about an appropriate school science in a diverse world are questions about the status of modern science versus other schemes for understanding the natural world. Does modern science occupy a privileged epistemological position with respect to alternative beliefs? There has been a movement from an emphasis on replacing students' ideas based on traditional cultures to one of respecting those ideas and adding to them an understanding of modern science ideas and an exploration of when each might be useful. Respecting both sets of explanations need not deny discussions about credibility in particular contexts. School science, however, is always located within wider educational and political structures. Broad elements of the community must be engaged in dialogue concerning what knowledge about the natural world is important, to whom, and for what purposes. [source] Knowing Truth: Peirce's epistemology in an educational contextEDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2005Christine L. McCarthy Abstract In this paper I examine Peirce's epistemological and ontological theories and indicate their relevance to educational practice. I argue that Peirces conception of Firsts, Seconds and Thirds entails a fundamental ontological realism. I further argue that Peirce does have a theory of truth, that it is a particular non-traditional ,correspondence' theory, consistent with, and implicit in, an over-arching position of pragmatic realism. Peirce's epistemological position is subject to misinterpretation when the ontological realism on which it rests is overlooked. Finally I suggest that such a re-consideration of Peirce's pragmatic ontology and epistemology in an educational context is needed. [source] Coherence and Ambiguity in HistoryHISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2000Thijs Pollmann This article is about the logic of the concept of "coherence" as used by historians to justify an argument. Despite its effectiveness in historical arguments, coherence is problematic for epistemologists and some theorists of history. The main purpose of this article is to present some insights that bear upon the logical status of coherence. As will be demonstrated, this will also shed some light on the allegedly dubious epistemological position of coherence. In general I will argue that, logically seen, coherence is a property of a set of related beliefs that makes it possible to justify a choice out of different factually justifiable interpretations. Coherence disambiguates vague or ambiguous observations. As words lose their vagueness or ambiguity in contexts, so do contexts disambiguate historical facts. My argument will be based on some relatively recent findings about the cognitive processes underlying vision and reading. Research in the field of text linguistics is used to show what kinds of relationships exist between historical representations that might be considered to cohere. [source] Epistemological and theoretical challenges for studying power and politics in information systemsINFORMATION SYSTEMS JOURNAL, Issue 2 2007Leiser Silva Abstract., The study of the role of power in managing information systems (IS) still offers a major epistemological challenge to researchers in the field. Although significant work has been done, there is yet to emerge a research approach that permits a penetrating study of the phenomenon of power by virtue of adopting a Machiavellian stance. This paper proposes such an approach in the form of an interpretivist position combined with a theoretical framework whose origin lies in political science and the sociology of technology. In developing its philosophical argument, the paper compares three meta-theories that have been applied to study IS: Phenomenology, Critical Theory and Structuration Theory. All three are compared in terms of their epistemological position regarding the relationship between power and IS. We argue that, although enlightening, those meta-theories fail to unravel the hidden and strategic nature of power. The paper concludes by proposing a particular theoretical formulation that, rather than censoring power and politics, will provide the epistemological means for unravelling them. [source] The Death of the Collective Subject in Uwe Johnson's Mutmassungen über JakobORBIS LITERARUM, Issue 6 2003David Kenosian In previous interpretations of Uwe Johnson's Mutmassungen über Jakob, critics have focused primarily on Johnson's relationship to socialism on the complex narrative structure of the novel. In this essay, I explore a topic that has received comparatively little attention: Johnson's notion of subjectivity. I show that Johnson's attempt to challenge Marxist concepts of the collective subject is inseparably linked to his views on representing history. Johnson's first move is to eliminate the omniscient Socialist Realist narrator who is supposed to have a greater understanding of societal forces than do the characters in the fictional world. But in Mutmassungen über Jakob, it is the protagonist (Jakob) who has a greater understanding of politics than the former Socialist Realist narrator (Rohlfs). Their relationship undermines the political hierarchy constituted by workers and party. In addition, history in the novel is not narrated from a privileged epistemological position. Rather, it is reconstructed in a negotiation among various subjects (characters) at the porous border between history and memory. This self-reflexive model of historiography is, as implied by Uwe Johnson, democratic, in contradistinction to Socialist Realism. Finally, I point out that this model of writing history in Mutmassungen über Jakob anticipates the polyphonic representation of the past in Johnson's Jahrestage (1970,83). In Johnson's final work, German history is consequently written in dialogues with Germans, immigrants from Eastern Europe, Holocaust survivors, and textual sources from various countries. [source] | |||||||||||||