Sara Garcia

This article examines how digital diasporic journalism changes epistemic practices in the Cuban context. The last decade has seen a practical transnationalization of digitally native independent news sites in Cuba in light of two phenomena: the emigration/ forced exile of many young journalists and the affordances of digital technologies, making it possible for these journalists to continue reporting despite their spatial dispersion abroad. How are digital and diasporic ways of knowing changing Cuban journalists’ epistemic practices? By taking a relational approach, we explore digital diasporas as a site of connectivity co-inhabited by multiple and hybrid traveling imaginaries. The article is based on 44 interviews with Cuban independent journalists, which are analyzed through postfoundational discourse analysis (PDA) and situational mapping. The data reveals three important epistemological cleavages that shape digital diasporic journalists’ access to knowledge. These are (1) place as an epistemic category, (2) the epistemic status they confer on themselves and other social actors, and (3) the autonomy they claim when constructing clear boundaries between journalism, activism, and propaganda.

In the present study of Descartes’ epistemological investigations, I have tried to show that his renowned principle of clarity and distinctness is not, in fact, one but two axioms. Most interpreters and critics have taken the two formulations of such a principle here considered as successive moments of it. At best, this position is insufficient, for each “version” of the principle of clarity and distinctness guarantees different kinds of cognitive content. Moreover, while the validity of one “version” is not dependent on the thesis of God’s veracity, no such thing can be asserted of the validity of the other. These two formulations of the principle of clarity and distinctness are: 1. Whatever is clearly and distinctly perceived is true; 2. whatever we perceive clearly and distinctly as belonging to the nature of something can indeed be predicated of the thing in question. The fust formula corresponds to what I have characterized as “presentative” knowledge; the second one expresses the guarantee of “representative” knowledge. This distinction is all-important for solving the question of whether Descartes’ proofs of God’s existence and veracity---both the a priori and the a posteriori proofs that we find in the Cartesian corpus-are circular. On the basis of such a distinction, it is possible to argue that at least the ontological argument---and possibly as well the proof “par les effets”---is not at all dependent on the principle of clarity and distinctness, which in turn draws its ultimate validity from God’s faithfulness. In other words, as suggested above, only the second “version” needs to be guaranteed by God’s veracity. On the other hand, the first “version” has no normative value, for it merely describes what is the case whenever a clear and distinct cognition occurs. An example of this is our knowledge of God as the most perfect being.