Kye Palider

Epistemology characteristically operates at an intellectual level, being primarily restricted to the cognitive states of human individuals and the factors that influence these states. This restriction may be undesirable for a more generalized epistemology that discusses non-individual or non-human systems that may be said to be intelligent, such as communities, animals, and complex systems whose parts may not be independently intelligent. Here, I show how such a generalized epistemology may be possible under a teleological, non-intellectual, and not conventionally mechanical view of knowledge. I establish a teleological schema of knowledge-how, where a system is understood to know how to X if it is capable of being goal-directed towards X. This schema is analogous to how philosophers of biology are increasingly describing organismal agency. After developing this view, I show how it handles many controversial cases of know-how in the literature. I then show how knowledge-that may be constructed out of this teleological know-how, showing that all knowledge may be understood teleologically, without the need to reference to individual human cognitive states. Thereby, I show a generalized approach to epistemology through teleology that can extend naturally to topics in social epistemology and non-human intelligence.

Philosophy of science and history of science have been unable to integrate in a meaningful fashion. The major difficulty has been the question of how the history of science can inform the philosophy of science. By making several distinctions to characterize the type of philosophy of science relevant for integrated HPS, I show how traditional approaches to integration failed. These include a top-down and a bottom-up philosophical approach to integrated HPS. I then present a more fruitful way of integrating the disciplines, that of iterations.

The question of how we come to accept new theories is a central area of inquiry in scientonomic discourse. However, there has yet to be a formal discussion of the subjective reasons an agent may have for accepting theories. This paper explores these epistemic reasons and constructs a historically sensitive definition of reason. This formulation takes an abstractionist stance towards the ontology of reasons and makes use of a composite basing relation. The descriptive and normative components of reasons are fully formulated in scientonomic terms through the application of the newly introduced notion of implication, and its separation from the notion of inference. In addition, the paper provides scientonomic definitions for sufficient reason, support, and normative inference. The fruitfulness of this formulation of reasons is illustrated by a few examples.

This paper presents a diagrammatic notation for visualizing epistemic entities and relations. The notation was created during the Visualizing Worldviews project funded by the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute and has been further developed by the scholars participating in the university’s Research Opportunity Program. Since any systematic diagrammatic notation should be based on a solid ontology of the respective domain, we first outline the current state of the scientonomic ontology. We then proceed to providing diagrammatic tools for visualizing the epistemic entities and relations of this ontology. These basic diagramming techniques allow us to construct diagrams of various types for both synchronic and diachronic visualizations. The paper concludes by highlighting some future research directions. As the notation presented here is de facto accepted and used in scientonomy, the paper suggests no modifications.