Epistemic humility has garnered increased attention in recent years, including within the realm of clinical ethics and is increasingly accepted as an important part of patient-centred practice and clinical care. However, while literature on the topic often states what epistemic humility is not, there have been few positive definitions given for the term. Further, these few positive definitions downplay the relational nature of epistemic humility, in other words, the ways in which epistemic humility is developed within the clinical encounter through the relationship between doctor and patient. In this paper, we will present a positive account of epistemic humility, situated in ethical medical education and practice, and show how it can be identified, modelled and cultivated. We provide a character-based account of epistemic humility that emphasises the relational nature of epistemic humility, that is, that views epistemic humility as formed through relationships rather than solely inhering in an individual's internal mental processes or external presentation and which is embedded in a social context such as a clinical encounter.

This chapter investigates the role experimental epistemology can play in responding to the apparent continuity in intuitions across cultures. It aims to explore the motivations behind experimental epistemology, its successes and failures, and whether cross-cultural epistemology can contribute to motivating further research in both experimental epistemology, with its methodological roots in social psychology, and a more sociohistorical perspective, provided by cross-cultural epistemologists. Cross-cultural philosophy, and cross-cultural epistemology by extension, can mean many things. A more nuanced approach can instead be offered by cross-cultural epistemology which sets into dialogue distinct, potentially incommensurable, epistemological traditions both among professional or trained philosophers and so-called ordinary folk. Philosophers, like any professional group, and individually to a greater or lesser extent, train their intuitions to respond in certain ways and this may reinforce which philosophers form part of the canon and which get consigned to posterity.

Philosophers of information, according to Luciano Floridi (The philosophy of information. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, p 32), study how information should be “adequately created, processed, managed, and used.” A small number of epistemologists have employed the concept of information as a cornerstone of their theoretical framework. How this concept can be used to make sense of seemingly intractable epistemological problems, however, has not been widely explored. This paper examines Fred Dretske’s information-based epistemology, in particular his response to radical epistemological skepticism. We discuss the relationship between information, evidence and knowledge in relation to the problem of skepticism and the options available to an information-based epistemology for dealing with it.

The topic of epistemic normativity has come to the fore of recent work in epistemology, and so naturally, theories of knowledge, truth and justification have been increasingly held accountable to preserving normative epistemological platitudes. Central to discussions of epistemic normativity are questions about epistemic agency and epistemic value. Here, our aim is to take up some of these issues as they come to bear on the rather unconventional brand of epistemology that was defended by Richard Rorty. Our purpose is to explore whether Rorty’s epistemology—or perhaps his replacement for epistemology—can preserve these normative platitudes about epistemic agency, responsibility, achievement, and the value of knowledge. Our conclusion is a negative one: that Rorty’s commitments leave him firmly at odds with some of the most plausible assumptions about epistemic agency and epistemic value.

Most accounts of what social epistemology is and what social epistemologists do will include, in some form, the study of how knowledge is produced or acquired within a group or community: a collective. This could mean, in its weakest form, that individuals depend on the efforts of others for their own knowledge or, in its strongest form, that the group, rather than the individual, is the proper bearer of knowledge.

I co-edited this textbook with members of the Society for the Philosophy of Information and co-authored three of the chapters. This textbook was developed and published by the SPI, alongside a database of course syllabi and other educational material. The Society for the Philosophy of Information aims to promote and assist in the development of interdisciplinary education initiatives that modernize undergraduate curricula by emphasizing the transformational nature of information and ICTs in society. Such initiatives should foster close interaction among the humanities, the information sciences, and the social and natural sciences, and should integrate conceptual and ethical research related to information as core element of the program. This book serves as the main reference for an undergraduate course on Philosophy of Information. The book is written to be accessible to the typical undergraduate student of Philosophy and does not require propaedeutic courses in Logic, Epistemology or Ethics. Each chapter includes a rich collection of references for the student interested in furthering her understanding of the topics reviewed in the book. The book covers all the main topics of the Philosophy of Information and it should be considered an overview and not a comprehensive, in-depth analysis of a philosophical area. As a consequence, ‘The Philosophy of Information: a Simple Introduction’ does not contain research material as it is not aimed at graduate students or researchers.

Survey techniques are methods used in behavioral and social sciences. Rather than acquiring information about every individual in a population, a sample is used to estimate the traits and opinions of a particular population. Advances in probabilistic sampling in the 1930s and 1940s allowed researchers to use formal survey techniques to study large populations relatively easily. These techniques are valued by researchers for being reasonably accurate, relatively inexpensive, and fast. In recent years, information technologies such as mobile phones and the World Wide Web have rapidly expanded the use of surveys by researchers and improved access for participants. Researchers across diverse areas including government bodies, market researchers, business, as well as psychologists, sociologists, researchers in health and medicine, philosophers, and many others, routinely make use of these techniques.

Nominally, social epistemology has a close connection to the book review. As many readers of this journal will know, the term “social epistemology” was initially coined in the 1960s by the librarian and information scientist, Jesse Shera, to mean “the study of knowledge in society.” (Shera 1970, p. 86) Shera developed his work with colleague Margaret Egan and in the steps of fellow librarian Douglas Waples, concerned with the ways in which society reads: broadly, how it accesses, interprets, categorizes, indexes, and disseminates the written word and the role that librarianship, bibliography, and new methods of documentation could play (Zandonade 2004). A library is a very particular filter of knowledge production. The Web may be seen as another, or as a collection of many. An academic journal yet another. These filters organize knowledge in society in their own way and we can, and do, evaluate this and make judgments of when it works well and when it does not work so well. Today, our access to information occurs within a wider ecosystem of filters that have flourished in the contemporary period, in tandem with the technological infrastructure to radically multiply and variegate filters.

A review of Bryan van Norden's "Taking Back Philosophy."

In this paper, we use trolling to illuminate the entangled and complex relationship between online debate, technological infrastructure, and justice. While a great deal of research has investigated the harmful effects of trolling in the form of cyberbullying and online harassment, attention to the infrastructure of trolling can provide new insights into information flows within digital infrastructure, and consequently, bears on questions such as access to, and quality of, information; the status and credibility of knowledge claims and claimants; and about the gatekeepers of knowledge and information. We show how trolling takes advantage of the rapidity of information transmission and reproduction; technical illiteracy; automation; and 'soft' infrastructure such as conventions, protocols, etiquette, and rules governing online communities to affect informational justice using a methodologically symmetrical approach.

This article considers how politically motivated internet trolling, within the context of the Malaysia from May 2018 until February 2020, made use of affordances of algorithms and platforms to achieve their goals, from targeted attacks on individuals to collective interventions for advancing social and informational justice. Centering on the importance of digital platforms and algorithms in framing and shaping online communication, this article explores the decisions, actions, and policies which, framed and shaped by these algorithms, produced a particular space in Malaysian political discourse that enables internet-based political trolls. Attention is given to the infrastructure of trolling, as well as the platforms supporting and cultivating the practice of trolling that are usually international in their ownership, development, and user base. By focusing on the trollish practices of a “minor” non-Western community in Asia, we attempt to theorize the effects of digital infrastructure at the periphery of multinational platforms based on participant-observation research and media-textual analysis.

Introduction to a special section of The Information Society. The adoption of mobile technologies is changed, adjusted, and refracted by local culture. These technologies, we argue, reflect and shape values and practices among users. At the same time, dominant discourses of disruptive technologies often coalesce around techno-economic viewpoints which frame problems in terms of technological solutionism, deterministic attitudes toward technological progress and development, and metrics for measuring the embededness of new technology and its impacts on the economy. There is rarely a discussion of emerging technologies' disruptive effect on cities in different global contexts. Further, these discussions are mostly based on Western discourses and contexts and set Western development trends as a role model. They often privilege state and institutional voices over those of vulnerable populations. Western-led discourses, such as those centered around privacy concerns, human rights, development, and outsourcing, map inaccurately onto Asian countries. This is a notable omission chiefly because Asia is, in several senses, leading such transformations. This special section brings together ethnographic and sociological work in three Asian countries - China, Cambodia, and Myanmar - to provide a view of different levels and degrees of the platformization of labor, perspectives on precarity, and narratives around entrepreneurship and work.

This special issue explores the conceptions of the human that emerge out of the form and the design of information and communications technologies (ICTs). Geographically, our focus compares two countries with a relatively high level of ICT penetration—South Korea and Singapore—and two countries with a relatively low level—India and Vietnam. In each country we see how different forms of the human emerge, in part out of the ways in which technological infrastructure develop and intertwine with social order. In this introduction we reflect on the long genealogy of “human” and “humanity” and the more recent history of ICTs in Asia.

The Internet or, as these authors argue, Internets (plural) in Asia are composed of cables and exchanges, protocols and firewalls, regulations and other legal devices, making them subject to investment and governance strategies, as well as treaties and court cases. But they are also composed of figures, layers, stories, and rumors. These latter descriptors provide a heuristic framework of social features that, together with metaphors from folklore, provide analytic tools for understanding the diversity, conflicts, competitions, and disengagements of the patchwork of Internet development across Asia. The authors further argue that Singapore provides an exceptionally valuable comparative site from which to explore these features. The first part of this article lays out some of the comparative features, and the second part turns to the four themes or heuristics of figures, layers, stories, and rumors, developed through an STS research cluster at the Asia Research Institute and Tembusu College, both at the National University of Singapore.

How engineers know, and act on that knowledge, has a profound impact on society. Consequently, the analysis of engineering knowledge is one of the central challenges for the philosophy of engineering. In this article, we present a thematic multidisciplinary conceptual survey of engineering epistemology and identify key areas of research that are still to be comprehensively investigated. Themes are organized based on a survey of engineering epistemology including research from history, sociology, philosophy, design theory, and engineering itself. Five major interrelated themes are identified: the relationship between scientific and engineering knowledge, engineering knowledge as a distinct field of study, the social epistemology of engineering, the relationship between engineering knowledge and its products, and the cognitive aspects of engineering knowledge. We discuss areas of potential future research that are underdeveloped or “undone”.

While systems engineers and philosophers of technology have analysed failure in artefacts, the nature of failure in sociotechnical systems has been largely underdeveloped. Sociotechnical systems differ from artefacts in that they are made up of relationships between people and technologies, and this difference means that failure needs a different analysis. In this article, we provide an account of two kinds of malfunctioning in sociotechnical systems. To accomplish this, we draw on resources from the disciplines of Human Factors, Systems Engineering, and Philosophy of Technology. We offer an account of two kinds of malfunction that are not only dependent on functions but also on roles of people involved in the functioning of sociotechnical systems. Hence, we aim to broaden the discourse of malfunctions in sociotechnical systems in terms of relations (relational roles). Primarily, we address two roles of users and operators and show how these different roles involve different kinds of malfunctions. Specifically, we highlight that two kinds of malfunctions can occur in sociotechnical systems: ambiguity-based failure and expectation-based failure.

This chapter considers the role of perception in petroleum engineering. Specifically, it looks at data analysis practices in geological surveying, wellbore navigation, directional drilling and related techniques. It begins with a familiar argument in the philosophy of science that there are no stable, non-stipulative grounds for distinguishing between ordinary cases of perception and cases where the perceptual system includes microscopes. It extends this claim to the use of gyroscopes and the data they generate. Finally, it explores the implications of this form of perception for the idea of responsible analysis.

Earthy particles make land. They make cities possible. Such tiny particles, rather than being residual matter, an accidental by-product of drilling and construction, are integral to the reproduction of the urban form. In the earth’s cracking and assembling into something greater than the sum of its particles, lies the story of how tiny and mobile objects govern global cities.

Oil and gas (O&G) production platforms are intrinsically risky environments. They are also highly visual and sensory environments. To manage hazards associated with North Sea O&G extraction operations, organisations responsible expend time and effort to ensure the workers’ safety. This article shows how construction workers see and make sense of safety and danger. The setting is an ageing O&G production platform in the North Sea undergoing extensive upgrade. In this rich sensory environment, workers interact with safety by colour, local interpretation, and demarcation of habitats and areas. The nature of the North Sea construction environment demands that they also bodily recognise their own activities as embedded in a larger, dynamically changing workplace where safety is locally produced. In this workplace, safety knowledge is achieved through the platform workers deliberately constructing the environment, outside formal safety guidelines.

Engineers gather, interpret, use, share, compare, debate, and study evidence every day but there is little theoretical reflection among philosophers of engineering on what evidence is when compared to the sustained conversations that take place in the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of archaeology, philosophy of law, and epistemology. This chapter presents a possible diagnosis: to the extent that it is considered at all, evidence is assumed by philosophers of engineering to be an uninteresting facsimile of scientific evidence. This conclusion, however, would mark evidence out as an exceptional concept that can be easily transposed from science to engineering while, for other concepts such as knowledge, method, and ontological categories, philosophers of engineering and technology have shown that this is not possible. Further, it would suggest that evidence in engineering is particularly exceptional since other disciplines have developed various accounts of evidence that are distinct from one another. I argue that philosophers and engineers should look at what evidence and evidence-gathering means in the context of engineering, and I give a possible way of articulating the difference between evidence in engineering and existing accounts of scientific evidence. Finally, I argue that this examination may give us reason to reassess existing accounts of scientific evidence.

My starting point is that discussions in philosophy about the ontology of technical artifacts ought to be informed by classificatory practices in engineering. Hence, the heuristic value of the natural-artificial distinction in engineering counts against arguments which favour abandoning the distinction in metaphysics. In this chapter, I present the philosophical equipment needed to analyse classificatory practices and then present a case study of engineering practice using these theoretical tools. More in particular, I make use of the Collectivist Account of Technical Artifacts (CAT) according to which there are different classificatory practices for natural, artificial, and social objects. I demonstrate that in the community studied, artificial kinds are marked by distinctive classificatory practices. The presence of these distinctive classificatory practices in engineering with regard to artificial kinds should inform discussions about the ontology of technical artifacts just as the distinctive classificatory practices in natural science inform discussions about natural kinds.

In recent years, the idea has been gaining ground that our traditional conceptions of knowledge and cognition are unduly limiting, in that they privilege what goes on inside the ‘skin and skull’ (Clark 1997: 82) of an individual reasoner. Instead, it has been argued, knowledge and cognition need to be understood as embodied (involving both mind and body), situated (being dependent on the complex interplay between the individual and its environment), and extended (that is, continuous with, rather than separate from, the world ‘outside’). Whether these various interrelations and dependencies are ‘merely’ causal, or are in a more fundamental sense constitutive of knowledge and cognition, is as much a matter of controversy as the degree to which they pose a challenge to ‘traditional’ conceptions of cognition, knowledge and the mind. In this paper we argue that when the idea of ‘extendedness’ is applied to a core concept in epistemology and the philosophy of science—namely, scientific evidence—things appear to be on a much surer footing. The evidential status of data gathered through extended processes—including its utility as justification or warrant—do not seem to be weakened by virtue of being extended, but instead are often strengthened because of it. Indeed, it is often precisely by virtue of this extendedness that scientific evidence grounds knowledge claims, which individuals may subsequently ascribe to themselves. The functional equivalence between machine‐based gathering, filtering, and processing of data and human interpretation and assessment is the crucial factor in deciding whether evidence has been gathered, rather than the distinction between intra‐ and extracranial processes or individual and social processes (or combinations thereof). To prioritize biological processes here, and to assert the superiority of human cognitive capacities seems both arbitrary and unwarranted with respect to gathering evidence, and ultimately would lead to an unattractive skepticism about many of the methods used in science to gather evidence. In other words, conceiving of scientific evidence as ‘impersonal’ (or at least not necessarily personal) not only better captures the character of evidence‐gathering in practice, but also makes sense of a large amount of evidence‐gathering that ‘personal’ accounts fail to either acknowledge or accurately describe. Whilst we suggest it is likely that all internally‐distributed evidence‐gathering processes are merely contingently internal processes, a significant number of externally‐distributed evidence‐gathering processes are necessarily externally‐distributed. Some evidence can only be gathered by extended epistemic agents.

To many observers, one of Singapore’s major accomplishments in past decades has been the development of a knowledge-based economy. Exporting the products of this economy, knowledge and expertise, to the developing world, in the name of the ‘Singapore model’, has been widely noted (Chua, 2011; Pow, 2014; Woods & Kong, 2017; Lee et al., 2025).2 This commentary maps the conceptual and spatial dynamics of knowledge transfer projects and initiatives between Singapore and Africa. By articulating these dynamics, we identify some distinctions between Singapore’s contribution to African development and other examples of knowledge transfer in Africa and elsewhere.

Smoke from Australia’s bushfires has travelled far beyond its origins. It crossed New Zealand and South America, and within days had drifted halfway around the globe. NASA predicted the smoke would complete a full circuit and arrive back where it started. As climate change takes hold and global temperatures rise, bushfires are set to increase in severity and frequency. The underlying cause of the fires and resulting smoke haze are often numerous - spanning both natural variability and climate change caused by individuals, governments and corporations. Legal and policy frameworks - local, national and international – fail to capture these diffused responsibilities. Despite the proliferation of climate-related laws in recent decades, bushfire smoke still largely escapes regulation and containment. In this new era of monster fires, our laws need a major rethink.

Sydney and its suburbs have been enveloped in haze over the past few days. The haze is a mixture of bushfire smoke and dust blown in from western New South Wales. As particles move from rural locations, like Gospers Mountain in this case, they make grey cities. In Australia, dust blurs the distinction between the bush and the city. Elsewhere it blurs the farmlands with the concrete jungles, and nation-states with regions. Spiralling dust challenges our usual ways of thinking about bush, farm, industry, rich city and poor city divides. It travels across geographical and socioeconomic boundaries. There is no easy way to stop it.

A review of Jeremy Fernando's "On Thinking With - Scientists, Sciences, and Isabelle Stengers."

A review of Bruno Latour's "Down to Earth".

This chapter discusses the entanglement of knowledge, technology and environment within a formal and an informal learning space of a residential college during the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning spaces are defined as physical or virtual environments that are, or aim to be, conducive to learning. Its focus is on diagnosing, within a particular context, how learning spaces shape the ways in which students think about the knowledge they are acquiring, the technologies involved in doing so and, relatedly, self-reflect on their own learning. The context centres on an interdisciplinary seminar about how our ideas about knowledge have changed historically in relation to the technologies we use and a makerspace whose purpose is to encourage students to reflect on the technologies they make and use. The environment, physical or virtual, is shown to play a key role in forming students’ self-reflections on their own epistemologies, the ways they think about knowledge and the methods they use for acquiring and evaluating their beliefs.

Life under COVID-19 has come to be thought of as being marked by restrictions. As I write, my phone is receiving regular, persistent updates describing what will or will not be open, and what is or is not permitted. At the same time, much of university life is being delivered through virtual classrooms. Here, in a sense, there are fewer restrictions. This is a reversal of the normal order of things. In classrooms, there are physical restrictions (walls, chairs, tables) and temporal restrictions (timetables). There are also technological restrictions including, sometimes, bans or limits on the use of internet-enabled devices.

Current approaches to information and communication technology (ICT) ethics education often take three approaches: ethical guidelines, fairness toolkits, and activity-based co-design (Zhang, 2022). Using ethical guidelines can be problematic, as they take an action-restricting, checkbox-based approach, making them limiting and hard to adapt to individual situations (Hagendorff, 2020). Fairness toolkits provide a more tangible bridge between abstract values and technical implementations but often have limitations in adaptability, and if poorly designed can give a false sense of security (Lee & Singh, 2021). Finally, activity-based techniques such as design fiction and speculative design (Baumer et al., 2020; Pierce, 2021) take a playful and engaging approach to ICT ethics, and can potentially help designers to reflect on their decisions and play the role of stakeholders. However, such activity-based techniques are currently underexplored.

After a necessary period of being apart from students over the last months, it is sometimes hard to remember a face-to-face teaching experience. What seems central to such encounters, at least for seminar-style teaching, is conversation. But can real conversation be mediated using communication technology such as video-conferencing and chat platforms? And, is the face-to-face conversation, especially when deployed for teaching and learning, now under threat in a time of social distancing and ‘digital education’?