My main aim is to contribute to the exploration of the nature of the epistemic state of understanding. It seems that the most productive way in which this might be done is by (i) investigating what sort of conditions must be fulfilled in order for one to understand, and (ii) comparing understanding’s place in certain contemporary debates to the place that knowledge has in those debates. Regarding conditions for understanding, I will argue that there are two types of understanding that are most relevant to epistemology—objectual understanding and atomistic understanding. I will contend that atomistic understanding is entirely factive while objectual understanding is moderately factive, that objectual understanding admits of degrees, that both types involve some sort of grasp of explanatory relations, that both possess a measure of luck immunity, and that both are cognitive achievements with instrumental, teleological, contributory and (crucially) final value. It must be stressed that the general accounts of both types of understanding that I attempt to provide are not supposed to be exhaustive sets of necessary and sufficient conditions—I remain particularly open to the possibility that there are further necessary conditions that are as yet undiscovered, especially for objectual understanding. Regarding understanding’s place in contemporary debates, it is perplexing that existing work does not capitalise on the thought that treating understanding in conjunction with many of the most prominent issues in recent epistemology is a worthwhile project that could yield interesting and important results. I will summarise understanding's potential significance for a number of these topics, looking at all of the following (in varying degrees of detail): factivity, coherentism, norms of assertion, the transmission of epistemic properties, epistemic luck, the nature of cognitive achievement, and epistemic value. This last topic is one that I think is particularly important to an investigation into understanding, because it is quite plausible that there is a particularly strong revisionist theory of epistemic value focused on understanding. Such a view would be one on which knowledge is not finally valuable, but one by way of which we could nonetheless explain why we might pre-theoretically think that knowledge is finally valuable. Since revisionist views often involve a claim that we should think of a different, closely related epistemic state as distinctively valuable, it is natural to consider understanding as a prime candidate for the focus of such a theory.

西方哲學中的知識論就著知識的本質、知識之範圍、知識成立的條件等等問題有著深入而又精微的討論，然而反觀中國古代的先秦儒者，他們所關懷往往是內聖外王之事，且拙於運用抽象的概念進行思考，因此他們從不曾顯題化地對知識之構造、本質等等進行嚴謹而有系統的思考。然而，人一旦廁身於世，就無可避免地面對認識的問題，而無論是甚麼人，都有運用自己的感官和理性思維去認識、理解世界的經驗，因此假使我們仔細閱讀先秦儒者對於「知」的零碎文本，未嘗不可建立一套先秦儒者的「知」「識」論。 / 因此，本文將以孔子、孟子、荀子的文本為主要探討對象，分析他們所言之「知」「識」的各種意涵，具體的論述將主要分為四章：第一章「耳目之知」，闡述先秦儒者對於運用各種身體感官以認識外物的討論；第二章則為「知慮之知」，以理性思維能力為探討核心；第三章則為「知義之知」，探討在孟荀理解中，道德是如何被認識；而最後一章是「知天之知」，研究「天」、「命」這兩個觀念在孟荀文本中，是如何被理解和掌握的。本研究希望通過重新梳理「知」之不同層次之意涵，重構先秦儒者對於知識的討論，雖然當中或沒有令人耳目一新之創見，但望能為日後進一步討論作基石。 / Western epistemology has flourish, thorough discussion on the nature, scope, necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge. For Pre-Qin Confucians, as what they concerned about were how to be a sage and true king and they were weak in conceptual thinking, thus they did not have any thematic and systematic discussion on the issue of the nature and structure of knowledge. However, everyone encounters the problem of how to get to know the outside world when they are living. Besides this, everyone has the experience of using their sense organs and rationality to perceive and understand the world. As a result, although Pre-Qin Confucians has only some piecemeal texts on knowing, we can still re-construct their views on knowing through detailed, deep analysis of their words. / As a result, this research will focus on Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi, analyzing different meanings of "Zhi" "Shi" (knowledge) in their texts. It will divide into four main parts, chapter one will concentrate on the discussion of sensible knowing, while chapter two will reveal the kind of knowing by rational deliberation and inference. As for chapter three, it will study how morality is being acquired in Mencius and Xunzi’s thought. Then the last chapter will examine some transcendental objects, such as "tian" and "ming", are how to be perceived. After all, despite this research might not contain much insightful, new opinions, its clarification and division on the meaning of "Zhi" might serve as a helpful ground for further discussion on the thought of knowing in Chinese Philosophy. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / 葉德莉. / Thesis (M.Phil.) Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 143-146). / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Ye Deli.

In my dissertation I develop and defend a deliberative account of causation: causal relations correspond to the evidential relations we use when we decide on one thing in order to achieve another. Tamsin’s taking her umbrella is a cause of her staying dry, for example, if and only if her deciding to take her umbrella for the sake of staying dry is adequate grounds for believing she’ll stay dry. I defend the account in the form of a biconditional that relates causal relations to evidential relations. This biconditional makes claims about causal relations, not just our causal concepts, and constrains metaphysical accounts of causation, including reductive ones. Surely we need science to investigate causal structure. But we can’t justify any particular account of causation independently of its relevance for us. This deliberative account explains why we should care about causation, why we deliberate on the future and not the past, and even why causes come prior in time to their effects. In chapter 1 I introduce the motivations for the project: to reconcile causation and our freedom as agents with the picture of the world presented by physics. Fundamental physics makes no mention of causes. And the lawlike character of the world seems to rule out freedom to decide. My dissertation offers a combined solution—I explain our freedom in epistemic terms and use this freedom to make sense of causation. In chapter 2 I draw on philosophy of action and decision theory to develop an epistemic model of deliberation, one based in requirements on belief. If we’re to deliberate, our beliefs can’t epistemically settle how we’ll decide, yet our decisions must epistemically settle what we’ll do. This combination of belief and suspension of belief explains why we rationally take ourselves to be free to decide on different options in deliberation. In chapter 3 I defend this model from near rivals that also explain freedom in terms of belief. Accounts of ‘epistemic freedom’ from David Velleman, James Joyce and Jenann Ismael appeal to our justification to form beliefs ‘unconstrained’ by evidence. Yet, I will argue, these accounts are susceptible to counterexamples and turn out to rely on a primitive ability to believe at will—one that makes the appeal to justification redundant. J. G. Fichte’s Idealist account of freedom, based in a primitive activity of the ‘I’, nicely illustrates the kind of freedom these accounts rely on. In chapter 4 I develop the epistemic model of deliberation into a deliberative account of causation. I argue that A is a type-level cause of B if and only if an agent deciding on a state of affairs of type A in ‘proper deliberation’, for the sake of a state of affairs of type B would be good evidence of a state of affairs of type B obtaining. This biconditional explains why we should care about causal relations—they direct us to good decisions. But existing accounts of causation don’t adequately explain why causation matters. James Woodward’s interventionist account explicates ‘control’ and ‘causation’ in the very same terms—and so can’t appeal to a relation between them to explain why we should care about causal relations. David Lewis’ reductive account relies on standards for evaluating counterfactuals, but doesn’t motivate them or explain why a causal relation analysed in these terms should matter. Delivering the right verdicts is not enough. The deliberative account explains why causation matters, by relating causal relations to the evidential relations needed for deliberation. In chapter 5 I use the deliberative account to explain causal asymmetry—why, contingently, causes come before their effects. Following an approach from Huw Price, because deliberation comes prior to decision, deliberation undermines evidential relations towards the past. So an agent’s deciding for the sake of the past in proper deliberation won’t be appropriate evidence of the past, and backwards causation is not implied. To explain why deliberation comes prior to decision, I appeal to an epistemic asymmetry, one that is explained by statistical-mechanical accounts of causation in non-causal terms. But statistical-mechanical accounts still need the deliberative account to justify why the relations they pick out as causal should matter to us. The deliberative account of causation relates causal relations to the evidential relations of use to deliberating agents. It constrains metaphysical accounts, while revealing their underlying explanatory structure. And it does not rule out explanations of causal asymmetry based in physics, but complements them. Overall this project makes sense of causation by foregrounding its relevance for us.

<p>This corpus-based study analyzes different types of epistemic markers used in argumentative essays by University students. More specifically it compares Swedish L2 writers and English L1 writers. The scope of the analysis covers epistemic modal verbs, lexical verbs and adverbs. A number of markers are counted to see which expressions are preferred by L1 and L2 writers respectively and if the frequency rates differ between the two groups. Further, it discusses whether the non-native writers use epistemic markers appropriate to an academic register, and an attempt is made to see whether the L1 and L2 writers show similar patterns of ‘committing’ to and ‘distancing’ themselves to their arguments. The results reveal a few notable differences between the Swedish and English writers. A tendency is seen among the L2 writers to ‘overuse’ certain expressions, particularly in the category of lexical verbs. Compared to the native writers, the L2 writers display higher frequency rates when it comes to markers that are most commonly found in spoken conversation. Further the L2 writers seem to display more ‘writer visibility’ than the L1 writers do, which could perhaps be due to differences in writing culture. The findings also suggest that Swedish L2 writers, even on a relatively advanced level, may have difficulties in mastering modal expressions in English.</p>

This dissertation presents a logical investigation of epistemic protocols, focussing on protocol-dynamics, epistemic modelling, and epistemic model checking. In Part I, we introduce logics for specifying epistemic protocols including their goals and their dynamics. Chapter 3 departures from the existing discussions about protocols in the field of Dynamic Epistemic Logic by introducing a logic which can specify both the epistemic protocols and their goals within the language. We formalize the verification problem of epistemic protocols under the assumption of meta knowl- edge about the intended goal. The subtlety of this verification problem is discussed in theory and examples. In Chapter 4, we address the question: “How can people get to know a protocol?” For this, we develop logics which are convenient for reasoning about knowledge change and protocol change. With various protocol-changing op- erators we can handle the dynamics of protocols and formalize how actions acquire new meanings as a result of protocol change. We show that all the three logics we introduced can be translated back to Propositional Dynamic Logic (PDL) on standard Kripke models, thus the techniques of modelling and model checking we develop in the other parts of the dissertation can be applied to these logics. In Part II we address the issue of epistemic modelling, in order to study model checking for the logics introduced in Part I. In Chapter 5 we propose new compo- sition operations on static and event models with arbitrary vocabularies, aiming at a compositional method for generating initial epistemic models. We prove decom- position theorems w.r.t. our new operator and demonstrate the use of our methods by various examples. Chapter 6 reports results on counting the number of different models given a finite set of initial assumptions. Restricted to image-finite models, we show that if a modal μ-calculus formula has an infinite model modulo bisimulation thenithas2א0 (cardinalityofthecontinuum)differentmodelsmodulobisimulation. On the other hand, if it does not have any infinite models modulo bisimulation then all its models can be represented in a normal form. Part III introduces abstraction techniques that are particularly useful on making the model checking more efficient. A 3-valued semantics for Public Announcement Logic is defined and studied in Chapter 7 to facilitate abstractions of models. We define a relation with vocabulary and agent mappings between concrete models and their abstractions, thus making it possible to also abstract the signatures of models. We then give a logical characterization of this abstraction relation thus showing it is safe to check properties on the abstract model instead of the original concrete model. Chapter 8 studies the PDL on so-called accelerated Kripke models where the transitions in the models are labelled by regular expressions in order to obtain informative ab- stractions. By making use of a technique of regular expression rewriting, we analyse the complexity of the model checking and satisfiability problems of this logic and give a complete axiomatization. In Part IV (Chapter 9) we survey the epistemic approaches to security protocol verification. We summarize the most important techniques in the Epistemic Tempo- ral Logic and Dynamic Epistemic Logic approaches to security protocol verification, and compare these two approaches in term of convenience. We argue that some se- curity properties can only be faithfully formalized by temporal logic with knowledge operators, but are not expressible by standard temporal logic. However, we need to pay some cost in model checking complexity, in exchange to the expressiveness we gain.

Clare, the titular character of The Time Traveller's Wife, reflects that "Everything seems simple until you think about it." (Niffenegger, 2003, 1) This might well be a mantra for the whole of philosophy, but a fair few terms tend to stick out. "Knowledge", "goodness" and "happiness" for example, are all pervasive everyday terms that undergo significant philosophical analysis. "Luck", I think, is another one of these terms. Wishing someone good luck in their projects, and cursing our bad luck when success seems so close to our reach or failure could have so easily been otherwise, happens so often that we rarely stop to reflect on what we really mean. Philosophical reflection on the nature of luck has a rich tradition, that is by no stretch confined to the Western philosophical canon. However, it has only very recently become one of the goals of philosophy to provide a clear account of what luck actually amounts to. This, in part, is the goal of this thesis. The thesis has two primary motivations. The first is to offer and defend a general account of luck that overcomes the problems faced by the current accounts of luck that are available in the current philosophical literature. The second is to apply this general account of luck to the areas of metaethics and epistemology where luck has been a pervasive and problematic concept, and demonstrate how this account of luck may resolve or further illuminate some of the problems that the notion has generated. The thesis is roughly split into two parts. The first half of the thesis focuses on the former objective of offering an account of luck. Chapter 1 offers a selected history of the philosophy of luck that spans from the Ancient Greeks to the present day, so that we might properly situate the current work on luck as part of the broader historical importance of the concept. Chapter 2 will set out the major rival to the theory of luck that I will offer - the lack of control account of luck (LCAL). LCAL has various iterations across the literature, but is most clearly articulated by Wayne Riggs (2009) and E.J. Coffman (2006, 2009). Both Coffman and Riggs add and adapt their own conditions to LCAL specifically so that the account may overcome several problems that have been levied against it. These further conditions are not incompatible so, to provide the strongest lack of control account possible, I have combined them to form a lack of control account I have called Combined LCAL - (c)LCAL. The latter part of the chapter pits (c)LCAL against some of the problems that have been raised against LCAL. However, despite the efforts of both Riggs and Coffman, even (c)LCAL fails to counter some of these objections. For these reasons I have rejected LCAL has a viable candidate for an account of luck. Chapter 3 sets out a modal account of luck (MAL), as argued for by Pritchard (2004, 2005, 2014), where an event is lucky only if it occurs in the actual world, but not in a relevant set of nearby possible worlds. Here I further elaborate on how we should understand the modal distances using Lewisian possible world semantics, and what worlds should be taken into consideration when fixing the relevant set of nearby possible worlds. I argue that these relevant sets of worlds should be fixed according to the domain of inquiry of which the luck is being applied - this I call the type of luck. Examples of this is the current literature are resultant luck - the type of luck concerned with the results of our actions, and veritic luck - the type of luck concerned with the modal safety of our belief formation. Due to the multitude of types of luck across disciplinary areas, a general modal account of luck requires flexibility in what factors should fix the relevant sets of possible worlds. I achieve this by providing a [TYPE] function for the general modal account of luck, which is used as a mean of inserting the relevant fixing conditions for any domain of inquiry. Chapter 3, in a similar vein to Chapter 2, pits the general modal account of luck against some of the problems that have been levied against MAL, specifically the Buried Treasure problem raised by Lackey (2008) and the agent causation problem as raised by Levy (2011). More successfully, the modal account offered stands up against these criticisms. For these reasons, the modal condition understood with the [TYPE] function and Lewisian semantics concerning modal distances, will be adopted to make up one half of the conditions for my account of luck. Chapter 4 will look at the second condition for an account of luck - the significance condition. The chapter will set out the reasons for adopting a significance condition at all, and some of the ways in which the condition has been articulated by Rescher (1995), Pritchard (2005) and Ballantyne (2011). All of these current views of the significance condition will be found wanting due to their inability to make sense of certain kinds of luck in specific normative domains. For example, Ballantyne's account of significance focuses on the interests of an agent, yet for certain types of moral luck, the interests of the agent are irrelevant. Instead, I propose a relativised significance condition, where the value of the event is relative to the value of the normative domain in which the luck is being ascribed. Epistemic luck requires a focus on the epistemic significance of the event for the agent, moral luck requires a focus on the moral or ethical significance of the event for the agent, and so on. This I call the kind of luck. Similar to the [TYPE] function for the modal condition for luck, the significance condition requires a [NORMATIVE DOMAIN] function where the relevant normative domain can be inserted depending on the kind of luck. This version of the significance condition will be conjoined with the modal condition as set out in Chapter 3 to form the correct general account of luck. Chapter 5 is the first chapter of the second half of the thesis that concerns applying the account of luck set out in part 1 to more specific domains of inquiry. Chapter 5 concerns moral luck, more specifically, resultant moral luck. Moral luck has traditionally been understood in terms of lack of control. This chapter looks at how Pritchard (2005) and Driver (2014) have attempted to understand moral luck using modal conditions. However, it is argued that these attempts would be more successful if we adopted the account of luck that I have offered in previous chapters. The chapter will go on to look at two possible problems that may be faced by this modal account of luck, and how it may resolve these problems. Chapter 6, the final chapter, looks at epistemic luck, specifically how the adoption of the modal account I have offered resolves a particular problem targeted at anti-luck epistemology by Ballantyne (2013). The problem, Ballantyne argues, is that given that luck requires a significance condition, the degree of significance affects the degree of luck and that the degree of luck involved in our belief formation affects whether we are in a position to know the target proposition, that the result is that degree of significance affects our ability to know. For at least some instances of this - such as the aesthetic significance that we assign to the target proposition - the result will be that non-epistemic factors that have no relevance at all whether an agent is in a position to know will (absurdly, in Ballantyne's view) affect that agent's position to know. The resolution to this problem can be found in a two part solution. The first part is to demonstrate that any degree of veritic epistemic luck results in the agent failing to know. The second is that through the relativisation of the significance condition, any type of value will not affect an agent's position to know, only the epistemic value. / With these two considerations in mind, the latter of which that can only be held through the adoption of the modal account of luck I have offered, the problem may be resolved.

The privatization of outer space has in recent years crossed the boundary from science fiction to science fact. As such, this thesis argues that creating and diffusing an intersubjective shared idea of an apocalyptic imagined future through securitizing speech acts, where humanity's only chance of survival will be an established permanent privately owned and operated colony in outer space, will be a crucial aspect required to build an epistemic community large enough and with enough influence to reconceptualize outer space from an international regulatory and regime perspective. This in turn will serve as a catalyst for the normalization and legitimization of free-market private enterprise in outer space. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

This dissertation motivates and defends what I call non-inferential epistemic circularity. Traditionally epistemic circularity is understood to be a property of arguments, where justification to believe these arguments’ premises depends upon the truth of their conclusions. I argue that epistemically circular arguments face a dilemma. If the conditions for non-inferential justification to believe their premises are too weak, these arguments are either indiscriminate or permit one to bootstrap trivially to higher-order justification. If to avoid these problems the conditions for non-inferential justification are strengthened on the basis of evidence, then epistemically circular arguments beg the question because they collapse into logical circularity. To address these problems I argue that an account of non-inferential justification should be developed that limits the role of evidential grounds and finds room instead for non-evidential sources of justification. I conclude that epistemic circularity is constitutive of non-inferential justification because it is a property of the intentional acts in virtue of which this justification is earned.

Thesis advisor: Michael Barnett / Practitioners and scholars have begun to recognize the need to fracture disciplinary boundaries in K-12 learning settings in favor of more holistic approaches. STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) education, in particular, has been proposed as a means to reimagine science education based on youths’ widespread interest in art, design, and making, and the encouragement of multiple forms of expression in these endeavors. This dissertation documents the development of an art-science program and research on the experiences of middle-school-aged participants, who predominantly identified as Latinx and bilingual, in three papers. In the first paper, I used design-based research to investigate how an art-science program evolved to support youths’ interests and disciplinary integration from a teacher perspective. A cross-case analysis of two program iterations yielded two design guidelines. First, it is important to create opportunities for youth to engage in STEAM education in ways that allow them to build on their interests while also cultivating desirable social images. Second, ongoing teacher collaboration and foregrounding youths’ development of project artifacts supported disciplinary integration. In the second paper, I draw on a longitudinal case study approach to investigate two focal youths’ enactment of art-science thinking practices—or practices common to artistic and scientific fields—over three program iterations. Results highlight three insights: (1) the program’s approach to disciplinary integration played a key role in which art-science thinking practices youth enacted and how; (2) the incorporation of multiple STEAM disciplines encouraged youth to build on a wide range of interests; and (3) developing artifacts supported youth to engage in STEAM projects while maintaining their social standing. The third paper is a practitioner study documenting the program design and outcomes regarding case study youths’ perspectives of art-science thinking practices. Results demonstrate how STEAM education can support youth to appreciate imagining and creating in the context of science. I conclude with the program’s successes and challenges and implications for in- and out-of-school STEAM practitioners and program designers. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

Actuarial Science is a sought after profession in South Africa with high attrition rates at university. The profession is small and dominated by white males. Slow transformation of the profession to reflect a more representative sample of the population is exacerbated by the long route to qualification. This study is an analysis of the first module of the redesigned course reader for the course 'Introduction to Actuarial Science' at the University Cape Town. It was prompted by the change in student engagement with and sentiment about the course in 2013. Data is concurrently analysed from two interviews with the course convenor exploring (a) the nature and description of the profession as well as what knowledge is valued in the field of practice and the discipline and (b) the reasons for the redesign of the course reader and the process itself. The first module of the course reader is analysed in tandem with the second interview data. The research aims to reveal the complexity of the knowledge of actuarial science which makes mastery of its content, methods and ways of thinking (summed up in the term epistemic access ) challenging. Thus careful curriculum design is important in orientating first year students to the discipline and profession. Educational theorists from the school of social realism provide conceptual frameworks through which one can identify knowledge structures and elements thereof in data. Basil Bernstein's Pedagogic Device is used in locating the course reader data in the field of recontextualisation, relying on recontextualising rules which 'regulate the formation of specific pedagogic discourse' (Bernstein, 2000, p.28) to examine the ways in which access to the discipline is facilitated in the course reader. In addition, Bernstein's pedagogic codes analysed by means of his concepts classification and framing are employed to analyse (a) the nature and description of the profession and (b) the knowledge valued in the discipline and in the field of practice. Karl Maton's Legitimation Code Theory and in particular the identification of specialisation codes on the basis of epistemic and social relation s affords the potential of understanding the key principles by which this knowledge form is legitimated. The writings of Young (2008) and Muller (2009 and Young and Muller (201 4 ) assist in delineating a few crucial issues on professional knowledge and the curriculum. This project seeks to analyse the curriculum knowledge and the pedagogic codes employed in the course reader of a newly designed introductory course to ascertain the nature of actuarial science and to suggest what forms of pedagogy might enable students to access that knowledge. Regarding the nature of actuarial science, the study found that it is a complex region that combines highly specialized techno-theoretical knowledge with specific forms of inferential reasoning and professional judgment required to address knotty problems in the business world. Regarding an effective pedagogy, the analysis of the course reader provides clues as to what an explicit, visible pedagogic discourse capable of providing access to this complex field to first generation students might entail.