In this thesis I explore feminist technoscience strategies in computer science, starting in “the gender question in computer science”, and ending up in communication and translation between feminist technoscience research and computer science educational practice. Necessary parts in this work concern issues of boundary crossings between disciplines, and focusing on the foundations of computer science: what it means to “know computer science”. The point of departure is in computer science (CS), in particular CS education. There are at this starting point two intertwined issues: the gender question in computer science (often formulated as “what to do about the situation of women in computer science?”) and the foundation question: “what does it mean to know computer science?”. These are not primarily questions looking for answers; they are calls for action, for change and transformation. The main focus and goal of this thesis concerns how to broaden the meaning of “knowing computer science”; to accommodate epistemological pluralism and diversity within the practices and among the practitioners of CS. I have identified translation as fundamental, to make feminist research and epistemological perspectives communicable into the community of computer science practitioners. In this, questions of knowledge and how knowledge is perceived and talked about are central. Communication and translation also depend on the ability and willingness to cross boundaries, to engage in “world- travelling” (Lugones). Additional issues of importance are asking questions open enough to invite to dialogues, and upholding critical (self) reflection. An important goal for feminist research is transformation. Because of this, interventions have been part of my research, interventions in which I myself am implicated. The work has been based in feminist epistemological thinking, where the concepts of positioning and partial perspectives (Haraway) have been of particular importance. After an introduction, the thesis consists of three parts, each part relating to one of the three issues in the title, issues identified as important for feminist technoscience work in computer science. In part A, I investigate and discuss what it means to be simultaneously an engineer/computer scientist and a feminist technoscience researcher. What boundary crossings, challenges, conflicts, negotiations and issues of being inside and outside are involved? This part also focuses on what the implications of these boundary crossings and different “mind-sets” are for transformatory work in science and engineering education, as well as a discussion of what feminist technoscience research can be and how it can be used for interventions and transformations. Part B focuses on foundations of computer science. This part consists of studies of texts, which I critically read and query from a feminist technoscience perspective, in order to challenge existing approaches and concepts within computer science. The texts are about the gender question in computer science; foundational topics of “what is computer science”, as well as epistemological questions concerning approaches to knowledge in computer science: “what does it mean to know computer science”? Part C deals with a concrete intervention project aiming at establishing conversations with computer science faculty. In this project, the issues of communication and translation appear as central. The focus in this part is communication between computer science educational practice and feminist technoscience research, language as a carrier of epistemology, and a discussion of translation.

I argue against the halfer response to the Sleeping Beauty case by presenting a new problem for halfers. When the original Sleeping Beauty case is generalized, it follows from the halfer’s key premise that Beauty must update her credence in a fair coin’s landing heads in such a way that it becomes arbitrarily close to certainty. This result is clearly absurd. I go on to argue that the halfer’s key premise must be rejected on pain of absurdity, leaving the halfer response to the original Sleeping Beauty case unsupported. I consider two ways that halfers might avoid the absurdity without giving up their key premise. Neither way succeeds. My argument lends support to the thirder response, and, in particular, to the idea that agents may be rationally compelled to update their beliefs despite not having learned any new evidence.

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This work is intended to ascertain whether Putnam’s internal realism is actually a realist doctrine. Putnam has opposed internal realism, which maintains that truth is an epistemic notion (specifically, idealised rational acceptability), to metaphysical realism, which holds that truth is a non-epistemic notion (in particular, a correspondence relationship between sentences and extra-linguistic facts). Putnam has argued that, even if metaphysical realism is untenable, realism is still defensible, for internal realism is a form of realism. In my work, I leave aside the question of the correctness of Putnam’s arguments against metaphysical realism and I directly focus upon internal realism. I first present this position and I set out its realist characteristics: Putnam’s position can be characterised as one that originated in an attempt to develop Dummett’s anti-realist notion of truth in a realist direction. I show that this effort is in part successful. Next, I raise objections against internal realism and I show that, despite its merits, Putnam’s position is not a form of realism. This is so mainly because internal realism may collapse into relativism, which – I argue – is not realism, and because the internal realist cannot explain how the world, which is causally independent of our minds, makes statements true or false. Since Putnam’s probably constitutes the best possible attempt to produce an epistemic view of truth compatible with realism, I conclude that truth conceived as an epistemic notion is incompatible with realism. I finally suggest that realism can be restored if Putnam’s arguments against metaphysical realism can be shown to be incorrect, so that a non-epistemic notion of truth can be rehabilitated.

When you enjoy a conscious mental state or episode, you can knowledgeably self-ascribe that state or episode, and your self-ascription will have a special security and authority (as well as several other distinctive features). This thesis argues for an epistemic but nonintrospectionist account of why such self-ascriptions count as knowledge, and why they have a special status. The first part of the thesis considers what general shape an account of self-knowledge must have. Against a deflationist challenge, I argue that your judgments about your own conscious states and episodes really do constitute knowledge, and that their distinctive features must be explained by the epistemic credentials that make them knowledge. However, the most historically influential non-deflationist account—according to which such self-ascriptive judgments are based on introspective experiences of your conscious states and episodes— misconstrues the unique perspective that you have on your own conscious mind. The second part of the thesis argues that the occurrence in your consciousness of a state or episode of a certain type, with a certain content, can itself suffice for you to have a reason to judge that you are enjoying a state or episode of that type, with that content. Self-ascriptions made for such reasons will count as knowledge. An account along these lines can explain the special status of self-knowledge. In particular, I show that a self-ascription of a content, made for the reason you have in virtue of entertaining that content, will be true and rational, partly because it is an exercise of a general capacity, which I call “grasp of the first-/third-person distinction”, that is fundamental to our cognition about the world. A self-ascription of a particular type of conscious state or episode, made for the appropriate reason, will be true and rational in virtue of features distinctive of states or episodes of that type—features that contribute to determining which judgments are rational for a subject, without themselves being reasons that the subject has. I consider in detail the cases of perceptual experience and of judgment. The thesis concludes by arguing that this kind of account is well placed to explain how selfknowledge fulfills its central role in the reflective rationality that is characteristic of persons.

This thesis is an exploration of several themes in the work of Aristotle and Hegel concerning the nature of action and ethics, and discusses the issues raised in relation to modern moral philosophy. The thesis takes as its starting point both Aristotle's and Hegel's conception of rational, purposive human action as being central to ethics and morality. This is carried out in contrast to influential trends in modern moral philosophy regarding the nature of reason and desire. Part one considers Hegel's view of the task of philosophy, i. e. the assimilation and reflection of the particular subject matter of which it speaks, rather than abstract theoretical thinking. The discussion will highlight that many of the problems raised in the rationalist/empiricist debates of the 17th and 18th Centuries are due to the abstract nature of those discussions, and to attempts to assimilate the subject matter to primary assumptions about reason, experience and the individual. In particular, the metaphysics of mind and the epistemology that the debate involved, it will be claimed, draws a hard and fast distinction between reason and desire. This has led to abstract theories of reasoning and motivation. One particular consequence of abstract, theoretical thinking is that the conceptual language of debate becomes divorced from the subject matter under discussion. In particular, the cluster of concepts that form the basis of the philosophy of mind, action, ethics - reason, desire, motive, intention, purpose, etc. - become refined and specialised to a degree that they come to bear only a vague resemblance to the reasons, etc. that are features of actual (as opposed to theoretical) human conduct. In Part Two of the thesis, I will offer a contrasting perspective, discussing Aristotle's and Hegel's treatment of these concepts without the theoretical framework inherited from 17th and 18th Century metaphysics and epistemology.

In this thesis I trace the relations between thinking about space and the spatiality of thought as it relates to epistemology in the eponymous authors. I argue that the verbal,visual, and mental tools used to negotiate the ideas and objects under consideration are not merely representative or rhetorical, but are part of the process of knowledge-making itself. I contend that the spatialities of language, visual presentation, and mental image facilitate new ways of seeing and the exploring of previously invisible relationships. I show how the dynamic spatiality of the imagination is used for testing hypothesis, considering multiple points of view, accommodating uncertainties, and thinking about expansive ideas that push at (or exist beyond) the boundaries of the known or possible. In this way I offer new readings of key texts that foreground the inherent relativity of human experience, which I contend is at the heart of a scientific uncertainty found even in the new science that strove for objectivity. In four case studies I explore the elationship between external and internal space in the thinking and perceiving subject, building on Steven Connor's assertion that ‘thinking about things is unavoidably a kind of thinking about the kind of thing that thinking is' (‘Thinking Things', 2010). In addition to this unidirectional relation between thinking and things, I demonstrate a complex dialogue between interior (thought) and exterior (thing) that occurs in the ways processes of thought and perception are externalized on the page and with instruments of viewing; in the way objects are brought into the mind; and in the way the mind creates infinities within by tracing expansive external spatialities.

It is the aim of this practice-led PhD to explore the processes that attend to the production of a linocut relief print through a framework whose key concepts are liminality and embodiment. In this pursuit the thesis investigates the subjects of skin and surface as well as cuts and cutting through themes and issues of touch and time that include connection and continuity, 'direct' creative touch, artist-tool/technology relations, memory, repetition and rhythmicity, transmissions of time, translation, tracking, chronology and equivalence. These subjects and themes' liminal qualities and characteristics are mirrored by a methodology devised and employed throughout the research. This methodology employs the interpenetrative, interconnected, reflexive and autoethnographic methods of a durational, physically challenging repeat printmaking project, longhand letter writing, and the multiple-register writing of this thesis. It does so in a purposely oblique and 'wayfaring' (Tim Ingold, 2011) approach. Binaries and boundaries are thus explored without risking their further enforcement, allowing diverse aspects and subjects to flow into and between one another with the freedom to contrast, contradict, and manifest inconsistently whilst ultimately moving towards a more comprehensive understanding of the thesis' subjects. This liminal methodology contributes a set of research tools and framework propositions to the existing field of research in and of creative practice, including printmaking, and its embodiment.

Arising out of the work of Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, Jacques Derrida and Gregory Ulmer, among others, it is widely thought there are three stages in the history of human communication: the oral, the literate and the electronic. Nonetheless, debate is ongoing over the integration, ordering and the substantive separation of these stages. An upshot of these debates is that each stage is loosely allied to a particular socio/political structure: hunter/gatherer or tribal societies, nation states, and globalisation respectively. In the current alloying of ‘electronic communication’ and ‘globalisation’ though there is a rising interest in what is termed ‘new regionalism’, or regionalisation, even regionality. Accordingly, Chora-Logic: Electracy as Regional Epistemology examines the possibility of an emerging conceptual alliance (and through reference to two Australian regions a sometimes embodied and situated one) between the embryonic communicational infrastructure of electracy and the age-old spatial scale of the region, a relationship that might just come to represent a means of rethinking the civic and the psychic, the commercial and governmental frameworks of an electro-energised global skein. It may also be a way of reinvigorating a study in the relation of the body (in its capacity as a citizen-subject) to the nation state, especially as all these entities are increasingly though ambiguously constituted in and through globalisation. The method of synthesising and antagonising these relations between electracy and regionalism is through the philosophy of chora, Plato’s conception of embodied place as found in the middle section of the Timaeus, coaxed along by a range of interpretations of this important genesis myth in Western philosophy. In particular, chora is taken up in the work of Gregory Ulmer as a key method in the ongoing conceptualisation of an electrate epistemology. Arising out of these concerns Chora-Logic is an experimental re-configuration of the sovereign, abstracted and disembodied citizen-subject of the Cartesian mould (a significant psycho-political mooring of the literate national character) to one situated both in the virtual density and multidimensional actuality of a particular place (organically conceived of herein as an idiosyncratic mix of psychic, domestic, workplace, local and regional proximities), but whose both [dis][embodied] self-knowledge and world-knowledge are now increasingly realised by access to an electronically arbitrated global/regional polis. In sound-bite terms, the bumper sticker could just as easily proclaim the following inversion: ‘Think and feel chora-logically, act globally’. Finally, the nucleus of Chora-Logic: Electracy as Regional Epistemology is a risky praxis whose experimental eddy (in both formal and content terms) spins within the current ambivalence, uncertainty and fast-paced change in electronic communicative arrangements (electracy), as these are themselves wrapped in the psychic and socio-political variabilities of spatial affiliation, all of which are symbiotically entwined regardless of the historical period and/or the geographical context.