Search Results (14)

Fallujah, by Jonathan Holmes (2007), is one of the archetypal examples of verbatim theatre, which addresses the truths of the Iraq War through dramatised eyewitness accounts and documentation reconstructions. Sketched in the Second Battle of Fallujah, the play reveals moral, political, and epistemological aspects of how modern warfare is presented. This article hinges on the postmodern theory of Jean-François Lyotard—especially the concepts of language games, paralogy, and the differend—to discuss the play Fallujah as a subversion of official grand narratives of the Iraq War. Through the use of testimonial intertextuality, irony and fragmentation, Holmes builds a multidimensional tableau of discourse contradictions in which truth is relative, and legitimacy is constantly deferred. The play turns into a meta-discursive critique of Western power dynamics, challenging the manner in which the knowledge is created, distributed, and twisted in the name of liberation and humanitarianism. Further, the article examines both dramaturgical and aesthetic techniques that lend truthfulness to Holmes’ concept of the verbatim approach as it dislocates the truth in relation to war and victimhood. The results help us comprehend the role of modern theatre in the reconstruction of the cultural memory and morality in the post-war era. The article concludes that Fallujah is a vivid example of postmodern theatrical resistance, an ethical and artistic response to commodity violence and the obliteration of lived suffering. Full article

Urban models support sustainable, resilient, and equitable planning, but their validity hinges on underlying spatial data. This study examines the epistemological and technical consequences of relying on two dominant yet divergent platforms—OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Google Maps—for extracting proximity-based amenities within the 15-min city framework. Across four European contexts—Versilia, Gothenburg, Nice, and Vienna—we compare (i) data completeness and spatial coverage; (ii) semantic categories; and (iii) the effects of data heterogeneity on accessibility modelling. Findings show that OSM, while semantically consistent and openly accessible, systematically underrepresents peripheral amenities, introducing bias towards urban cores in accessibility metrics. Conversely, Google Maps provides broader coverage but is constrained by dependencies on extraction methods, opaque data structures, and ambiguous classification schemes, which hinder reproducibility, reduce interpretability, and limit its analytical robustness. These divergences yield distinct accessibility landscapes and competing readings of functionality and spatial equity. We argue that data source choice and protocol design are epistemological decisions and advocate transparent, hybrid strategies with cross-platform semantic harmonisation to strengthen robustness, equity, and policy relevance. Full article

I briefly address Duncan Pritchard’s ‘parity argument’ and argue that it should be pared down to parity between religious hinges and local hinges. I then object to Pritchard’s notion of ‘honest doubt’ as ‘religious epistemic vertigo’ to account—in the context of a Wittgensteinian epistemology—for the doubt that is often at the heart of religious belief. I argue that the ‘local’ nature of religious hinges offers a more plausible account. Full article

Under the ideas of ‘hinges’ and ‘pictures’, as these relate to deep disagreement, Wittgenstein’s view of religious belief is a multifaceted challenge to conceptions of thought-world relations. In this article, I discuss Cora Diamond’s analysis of this challenge. Diamond herself is not particularly interested in hinges; I try to understand why. I first bring in a discussion between Michael Williams and Duncan Pritchard on how to read On Certainty. This allows me to identify Diamond’s perspective on deep disagreement and pictures: she concentrates on making sense, and not directly on knowledge. To further clarify her perspective, I introduce Hilary Putnam’s reading of the Lectures on Religious Belief, which proposes a cognitivist view of religion as ethics, centering on the notion of picture. Although Diamond is close to Putnam, for her, the most important challenge posed by religious belief lies not with epistemological issues of rational versus arational grounds of belief, or cognitivism versus non-cognitivism in ethics, but rather in making us drop the Fregean (and Tractarian) idea of the thinkableness of all thoughts, making place for ‘irreplaceable pictures’. I end by suggesting that Diamond’s analysis sheds light on often uncontested assumptions about the natures of thought and communication. Full article

Over the last couple of decades, philosophers have been drawing on ideas from Wittgenstein’s late work On Certainty in developing an approach to epistemology known as “hinge epistemology.” Hinge epistemology has been of particular interest to philosophers of religion because it considers the role that deep commitments to particular propositions may have within epistemic life, arguably mirroring what is seen in some religious traditions. The issue that motivates the present article is whether or to what extent it is helpful to think of forms of atheism as being grounded in hinge commitments. After considering various forms of atheism, this article advances the view that there are some forms of atheism that do exhibit core grounding commitments that may be helpfully interpreted as hinges. In developing this argument, the article considers two case studies of apparent atheistic hinges: the “secular faith” of Martin Hägglund and expressions of atheism one may find in contemporary Chinese society. While many atheistic beliefs are contingent upon still more fundamental epistemic commitments, some forms of atheism may be held strongly or with such a sense of import that interpretation by means of the notion of hinge commitment will be illuminating. Full article

In his final notebooks, published as On Certainty, Wittgenstein articulated a radical conception of the structure of rational evaluation, one that had arational hinge commitments at its heart. This proposal has recently been extended to the religious case, in the form of quasi-fideism, which treats basic religious commitments as being hinge commitments. My interest in this paper is how religious hinge commitments relate to one’s fundamental ideological commitments, such as the kinds of basic political or economic certainties that prevail in a predominantly capitalist society. While I argue that there are significant overlaps between fundamental religious and ideological commitments, there are also some significant divergences, which is why the former tend to be more plausible candidates to be genuine hinge commitments. In particular, I maintain that while allowing that there can be religious hinge commitments extends hinge epistemology beyond the paradigm, commonsense, cases that was Wittgenstein’s focus in On Certainty, it doesn’t thereby open the door to there being ideological hinge commitments, given the important ways in which religious and ideological hinge commitments diverge in their properties. Full article

The wrong idea that Wittgenstein proposes a version of hinge epistemology has stalled progress in understanding and applying his insights into religious life. The concepts of “belief system” and “hinge proposition” were nothing more than metaphors for Wittgenstein, not theoretical posits. The misinterpretation of that point by hinge epistemologists has obscured and diminished what Wittgenstein means when he says that religious believers “think differently” than non-believers do. The difference is not merely a matter of fundamental assumptions, as hinge epistemology suggests, but a matter of living and thinking entirely differently, so that our ordinary concepts of “belief”, “assumption”, “inference”, and so on fundamentally misrepresent them. To understand such different modes of living, Wittgenstein’s philosophy implies that we must strive to see life from the believer’s point of view. We must give up trying to explain other ways of life and instead strive to “catch on” to what it would be like to live as others live, to think as they do. Full article

In his article ‘Epistemic Injustice and Religion’, Ian James Kidd raises the possibility that some epistemic injustices might be deep. To spell out exactly what might be involved in deep epistemic injustices, especially those involving religious worldviews, an obvious place to look is Wittgenstein’s work on religion. Careful reflection on Wittgenstein’s remarks in the ‘Lectures on Religious Belief’ and his late work collected in On Certainty will have implications for how we are to understand the relationships between belief and evidence and for the ways in which we might enrich our hermeneutical sensitivities, and so Wittgenstein’s remarks are helpful for understanding epistemic injustices more generally. This paper will focus on epistemic injustices involving Islamophobia since Islamophobia has, so far, been given little attention in the literature on epistemic injustice. Full article

In a series of papers, Duncan Pritchard has argued that Wittgenstein’s remarks in On Certainty (OC) provide the foundation for a quasi-fideistic account of religious belief. This account seeks to navigate a middle path between evidentialism—the view that religious belief is rational only if supported by epistemic reasons—and fideism, which holds that religious belief cannot be rationally justified precisely because it is not grounded in epistemic reasons. Central to Pritchard’s quasi-fideism is a parity argument, which asserts that religious and non-religious beliefs are on equal footing. For the rationality of both depends on their connection to a background of a-rational foundational commitments, or “hinges”. In this paper, I challenge Pritchard’s account on two fronts. First, I argue that his quasi-fideism relies on a contentious interpretation of OC, and of Wittgenstein’s views about religious discourse, making it questionable whether it can genuinely be considered an application of Wittgenstein’s views to religious epistemology. Second, I contend that quasi-fideism, as developed by Pritchard, is inherently unstable, as it risks either collapsing into fideism or permitting relativism, contrary to Pritchard’s intentions. I then explore the potential for quasi-fideism—or, at any rate, a position meant to steer a middle path between evidentialism and fideism—under an alternative interpretation of OC. While this alternative framework may offer better prospects than Pritchard’s original formulation for avoiding the pitfalls of fideism and relativism, while sidestepping evidentialism, I argue that it ultimately fails to support a parity argument between religious and non-religious beliefs. Consequently, it cannot sustain a religious epistemology that avoids both evidentialism and fideism. Full article

In this article, I argue that Newman’s emphasis on a gestaltic model of reasoning and the role played by the imagination in informal reasoning is a fruitful starting point for an exploration of convergence between the Grammar of Assent and Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. I claim that Wittgenstein, like Newman, challenges both the claim that justification must be neutral and the prejudice according to which any form of persuasion that is not demonstrative is irrational or arational. Arguments are mainly focused on the picture of Newman’s epistemology provided lately by Duncan Pritchard. I argue that Pritchard misrepresents Newman’s conception of the illative sense so as to ascribe to him the thesis that religious belief is evidentially grounded in a broad sense of evidence. This creates a false dichotomy between the arational view of religious principles and the account of religious certainties as epistemically grounded. I suggest that Newman’s reference to both living persuasion and the role played by the will in religious conviction is part of his attempt to expose this false dichotomy. Full article

Ernest Sosa has long been a leading advocate of a virtue-theoretic approach to the traditional problems of epistemology. However, in a recent book his thoughts take a striking new turn. Appealing to our epistemic competencies, he argues, will not suffice to meet the skeptical challenge to our claim to have knowledge of the world around us. We must recognize that our epistemic competencies are exercised against a background of “proper default assumptions”: commitments concerning the world and our place in it that we cannot justify but can rely on without incurring epistemic fault. Sosa finds anticipations of this idea in Wittgenstein’s appeal to propositions “hinge” propositions which, though not known, “stand fast”. However, mere fast-standing beliefs, “unhinged from any broader virtue epistemology”, cannot explain how we come to have knowledge of a world whose character is independent of what we happen to think about it. I argue that the claim that our everyday knowledge of the world rests on a body of assumptions is a serious concession to skepticism, which Wittgenstein shows we need not make. Hinge propositions are not mere “standfast” beliefs: they are known with certainty. Wittgenstein offers a way of thinking about knowledge that Sosa does not consider. He also poses a challenge to commonly held views about how epistemology, to the extent that there is such a subject, should be pursued. Full article

Maps are the culmination of numerous choices, with many offering multiple alternatives. Not all of these choices are inherently guided by default, clarity, or universally accepted best practices, guidelines, or recommendations. In the realm of cartography, it is a distinct feature that individual decisions can be made, particularly regarding data preparation and selection and design aspects. As each map is a product of a multitude of decisions, the confidence we place in maps hinges on the reasonableness of these decisions. The trustworthiness of maps depends on whether these decisions are sound, unquestioned, readily accessible, and supported by dependable groups of decision makers whose reliability can be assessed based on their track record as an institution, reputation, and competence. The advent of user-friendly map-making software and data manipulation tools has placed some of these decisions in the hands of the general populace and those interested in using maps to convey specific agendas. This mirrors other forms of communication and has given rise to a growing discourse on “fake news”, “fake media”, and “fake maps”, ultimately prompting us to question how we can trust the information being conveyed and how we can differentiate between “fake” and “trustworthy” maps. This paper highlights the fundamental aspects determined by the pure nature of cartographic modeling, which influences every attempt to understand, analyze, and express the context and trustworthiness of maps. It then identifies fundamental aspects of trustworthiness with respect to maps. Combining these two fundamental considerations represents an epistemological attempt to identify a research portfolio. An example of an empirical study on identifying selected aspects of this portfolio demonstrates the potential of gaining a better understanding of the context given. Full article

This paper uses an ethnographic approach to explore the religious practices of the modern religious organization called the Mahamevnawa Buddhist Temple. This study aims to investigate the spiritual information practices of both monks and devotees of the temple. The findings reveal that participants’ religious practices lead to a range of outcomes, expressed in terms of the Bourdieusian notion of capital, with karmic capital emerging as a very important outcome of these practices. An essential argument posited by the author pertains to the distinctive nature of karmic capital—a hybrid manifestation of capital that is intricately interwoven with cultural and symbolic capital. Unlike the conventional influence of economic capital or social affiliations, the potency of karmic capital hinges upon a distinct paradigm. However, the fact that a resource gives power within a society also applies to karmic capital too. Furthermore, the author underscores the epistemological standing of karmic capital, which derives its essence from the principal sociological forms of capital—namely, economic, cultural, and social forms. This article also delves into the characteristics of karmic capital and its transformative nature. A key contribution of this study lies in its recognition of the impact of cultural norms on the consequences of information science. Full article

This article develops a philosophy of the humanities by reading C.P. Snow’s famous thesis of “the two cultures” through the early work of Alfred North Whitehead. I argue that, whereas Snow refers to Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, he ultimately paves the way for a reductive interpretation of humanities scholarship, which is a move that can be repaired by delving into Snow’s own reference to Whitehead following a diffractive reading methodology. This way of reading was first formulated in the context of feminist epistemology (but can be found elsewhere and under different names) in an attempt to generate constructively conceptual rather than closed hermeneutical readings of theoretical texts by making the reading dynamic and open-ended (in Karen Barad’s terms: reading their insights “through” one another). As such, reading diffractively shies away from relying on classification and is playful with the past, present, and future of the humanities. The article argues that the diffraction of Snow and Whitehead hinges on theories of “beauty” and will demonstrate (with Whitehead) that humanities scholarship originates in a total environment in which works of art—as the subject matter of humanities research—stand out and preserve themselves as “enduring objects”. Full article