Epistemic Processes

Epistemic Processes
Author: Inge S. Helland
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2021-10-15
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 303081923X

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This book discusses a link between statistical theory and quantum theory based on the concept of epistemic processes. The latter are processes, such as statistical investigations or quantum mechanical measurements, that can be used to obtain knowledge about something. Various topics in quantum theory are addressed, including the construction of a Hilbert space from reasonable assumptions and an interpretation of quantum states. Separate derivations of the Born formula and the one-dimensional Schrödinger equation are given. In concrete terms, a Hilbert space can be constructed under some technical assumptions associated with situations where there are two conceptual variables that can be seen as maximally accessible. Then to every accessible conceptual variable there corresponds an operator on this Hilbert space, and if the variables take a finite number of values, the eigenspaces/eigenvectors of these operators correspond to specific questions in nature together with sharp answers to these questions. This paves a new way to the foundations of quantum theory. The resulting interpretation of quantum mechanics is related to Hervé Zwirn's recent Convivial Solipsism, but it also has some relations to Quantum Bayesianism and to Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics. Niels Bohr's concept of complementarity plays an important role. Philosophical implications of this approach to quantum theory are discussed, including consequences for macroscopic settings. The book will benefit a broad readership, including physicists and statisticians interested in the foundations of their disciplines, philosophers of science and graduate students, and anyone with a reasonably good background in mathematics and an open mind.

Knowledge by Agreement

Knowledge by Agreement
Author: Martin Kusch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2004
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199251371

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Martin Kusch puts forth two controversial ideas: that knowledge is a social status (like money or marriage) and that knowledge is primarily the possession of groups rather than individuals. He defends the radical implications of his views: that knowledge is political, and that it varies with communities. This bold approach to epistemology is a challenge to philosophy and the wider academic world.

Knowledge, Dexterity, and Attention

Knowledge, Dexterity, and Attention
Author: Abrol Fairweather
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2017-05-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1107089824

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This title provides the first thorough defense of a naturalized virtue epistemology.

Naturalizing Epistemic Virtue

Naturalizing Epistemic Virtue
Author: Abrol Fairweather
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2014-03-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1107028574

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This book explores virtue epistemology as naturalistic and presents new opportunities for work on epistemic abilities, epistemic virtues and cognitive character.

An Externalist Approach to Epistemic Responsibility

An Externalist Approach to Epistemic Responsibility
Author: Andrea Robitzsch
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2019-06-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030190773

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This monograph provides a novel reliabilist approach to epistemic responsibility assessment. The author presents unique arguments for the epistemic significance of belief-influencing actions and omissions. She grounds her proposal in indirect doxastic control. The book consists of four chapters. The first two chapters look at the different ways in which an agent might control the revision, retention, or rejection of her beliefs. They provide a systematic overview of the different approaches to doxastic control and contain a thorough study of reasons-responsive approaches to direct and indirect doxastic control. The third chapter provides a reliabilist approach to epistemic responsibility assessment which is based on indirect doxastic control. In the fourth chapter, the author examines epistemic peer disagreement and applies her reliabilist approach to epistemic responsibility assessment to this debate. She argues that the epistemic significance of peer disagreement does not only rely on the way in which an agent should revise her belief in the face of disagreement, it also relies on the way in which an agent should act. This book deals with questions of meliorative epistemology in general and with questions concerning doxastic responsibility and epistemic responsibility assessment in particular. It will appeal to graduate students and researchers with an interest in epistemology.

A Protocol-theoretic Framework for the Logic of Epistemic Norms

A Protocol-theoretic Framework for the Logic of Epistemic Norms
Author: Ralph Jenkins
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 540
Release: 2022-09-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3031085973

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This book defines a logical system called the Protocol-theoretic Logic of Epistemic Norms (PLEN), it develops PLEN into a formal framework for representing and reasoning about epistemic norms, and it shows that PLEN is theoretically interesting and useful with regard to the aims of such a framework. In order to motivate the project, the author defends an account of epistemic norms called epistemic proceduralism. The core of this view is the idea that, in virtue of their indispensable, regulative role in cognitive life, epistemic norms are closely intertwined with procedural rules that restrict epistemic actions, procedures, and processes. The resulting organizing principle of the book is that epistemic norms are protocols for epistemic planning and control. The core of the book is developing PLEN, which is essentially a novel variant of propositional dynamic logic (PDL) distinguished by more or less elaborate revisions of PDL’s syntax and semantics. The syntax encodes the procedural content of epistemic norms by means of the well-known protocol or program constructions of dynamic and epistemic logics. It then provides a novel language of operators on protocols, including a range of unique protocol equivalence relations, syntactic operations on protocols, and various procedural relations among protocols in addition to the standard dynamic (modal) operators of PDL. The semantics of the system then interprets protocol expressions and expressions embedding protocols over a class of directed multigraph-like structures rather than the standard labeled transition systems or modal frames. The intent of the system is to better represent epistemic dynamics, build a logic of protocols atop it, and then show that the resulting logic of protocols is useful as a logical framework for epistemic norms. The resulting theory of epistemic norms centers on notions of norm equivalence derived from theories of process equivalence familiar from the study of dynamic and modal logics. The canonical account of protocol equivalence in PLEN turns out to possess a number of interesting formal features, including satisfaction of important conditions on hyperintensional equivalence, a matter of recently recognized importance in the logic of norms, generally. To show that the system is interesting and useful as a framework for representing and reasoning about epistemic norms, the author applies the logical system to the analysis of epistemic deontic operators, and, partly on the basis of this, establishes representation theorems linking protocols to the action-guiding content of epistemic norms. The protocol-theoretic logic of epistemic norms is then shown to almost immediately validate the main principles of epistemic proceduralism.

Epistemic Values

Epistemic Values
Author: Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2020-09-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0197529194

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This collection showcases the most influential published essays by philosopher Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski. One of the most distinguished thinkers working in epistemology today, particularly where the theory of knowledge meets ethics and the philosophy of religion, Zagzebski is well-known for broadening epistemology and refocusing it on epistemic virtue and epistemic value. Her work has greatly influenced the trajectory of contemporary epistemology, opening up new fields in analytic epistemology. The papers collected here are organized into six sections to underline the scope of her impact on six key subject areas of epistemology: (1) knowledge and understanding, (2) intellectual virtue, (3) epistemic value, (4) virtue in religious epistemology, (5) intellectual autonomy and authority, and (6) skepticism and the Gettier problem.

Epistemic Consequentialism

Epistemic Consequentialism
Author: Kristoffer Ahlström
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2018
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198779682

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An important issue in epistemology concerns the source of epistemic normativity. Epistemic consequentialism maintains that epistemic norms are genuine norms in virtue of the way in which they are conducive to epistemic value, whatever epistemic value may be. So, for example, the epistemic consequentialist might say that it is a norm that beliefs should be consistent, in that holding consistent beliefs is the best way to achieve the epistemic value of accuracy. Thus epistemic consequentialism is structurally similar to the family of consequentialist views in ethics. Recently, philosophers from both formal epistemology and traditional epistemology have shown interest in such a view. In formal epistemology, there has been particular interest in thinking of epistemology as a kind of decision theory where instead of maximizing expected utility one maximizes expected epistemic utility. In traditional epistemology, there has been particular interest in various forms of reliabilism about justification and whether such views are analogous to-and so face similar problems to-versions of consequentialism in ethics. This volume presents some of the most recent work on these topics as well as others related to epistemic consequentialism, by authors that are sympathetic to the view and those who are critical of it.

The Theory of Epistemic Fields

The Theory of Epistemic Fields
Author: Kofi Kissi Dompere
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 581
Release: 2024
Genre: Decision making
ISBN: 3031424700

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The book is about the development of the theory of epistemic fields with the corresponding relational and information fields as a framework for the understanding of strategies and tactics of the theory of knowing as the production of intellectual investment flows and the theory of knowledge accumulation as the production of intellectual capital stocks in systems of factories and departments providing the foundations for the development of open algorithms in the open space of problem-solution dualities. The concepts and the roles of thinking and reasoning with curiosity, creativity, hope, Ill-posed problems, phantom problems, unsolved problems, misinformation, disinformation, fake news, and courage are introduced, defined, and analyzed on the cognitive journeys over the space of ignorance-knowledge dualities, where dualistic-polar conflicts between duals in the space of ignorance-knowledge dualities are resolved with the instruments of fuzzy optimization, the results of which are used to induced the zones of ignorance, the zones of knowledge, and the zones of contentions. A complete development of the set of connecting paths of spaces and sub-spaces is provided, where all varieties, categories, and spaces reside in dualistic-polar structures with knowledge stock viewed as a single tree with the same roots, one trunk, many branches, and a fruit cocktail. The ontological space contains the space of actual-potential dualities as the primary category of knowing, and the epistemological space contains the space of imagination-reality dualities as the derived category of knowing within the space of primary-derived dualities. The space of potentials contains the space of imaginations which contains the sub-spaces of possibility-impossibility, probability-improbability, and possibility-probability dualities with corresponding spaces of necessity-freedom and anticipation-expectation dualities leading to the conception of the possible-world-impossible-world dualities in the space of semantic-non-semantic dualities. This book is also a continuation of the sequence of my works on the theories of paradigms of thought, rationality, info-statics, info-dynamics, entropy, problem-solution dualities in self-contained mathematics and philosophy, and their relational connectivity to information, language, knowing, knowledge, cognitive practices and open maching learning relative to nominalism, and the space of construction-reduction dualities over the spaces of fundamental-applied, production-consumption, input-output, and cost-benefit dualities.