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As a first-year doctoral student, I experience challenges of confronting conflicts between my secular education, my Islamic beliefs, my past in Guyana, and my present and presence in Canada, while simultaneously contemplating my future. In this paper, I share my struggles with identity and epistemology through the contours of clarity, confusion, and twilight as I think about my doctoral research. I will present a brief synopsis of my professional and educational background, as well as my identity as a Muslim immigrant, and examine what emerged from this as a personal epistemology that will guide my qualitative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines one such example of the process of abstraction and simplification, involving the producing of an 'absolute' as a transformation of a 'possible', and of the 'erecting of barriers' to prevent access to the derivation of the absolute and thereby to alternative 'possibles'. The paper is thus concerned with de-ossification of certain organizationally and societally entrenched 'absolutes'.
The development of 'shared results and consequences' of the ontological abstraction and simplification process is, in other words, not static but pervasively reactive. More fundamentally, to suggest that a structural entity (i.e. involving an element of 'sharedness) could be identified and demonstrated by investigating individual perspectives is surely to posit an unsustainable phenomenology of 'other minds'. To argue for such a demonstration is indeed to return to a demand for a kind of causal explanation which such phenomenological proponents themselves have insisted is untenable in social analysis. Authorial imputation of meaning is, therefore, in this paper, approached rather less self-consciously than has become the trend--which is not to neglect epistemological and methodological justification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'Eurocommunism' is an ideological construct. Our object in this paper is to chart its origins, development and elaborations in current ideological struggles. Of particular interest is the way in which the term 'Eurocommunism' has been incorporated into communist discourse. In this paper, for the sake of clarity, we have decided not to explore the theoretical developments within the communist parties but to concentrate on how they have handled a term which originally came from bourgeois discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to consider the links between engineering and philosophy in order to understand what their synthesis, in a discipline we might call 'engineered epistemology', might be like. This article will attempt to defend the thesis that engineering and philosophy are complementary ways of approaching the same reality, distinct methodologically but not distinct in kind. I will do this by demonstrating internal, rather than external, links between these two disciplines. I will begin by investigating the types of external links different historical traditions have established, with particular attention to two recent attempts to define a philosophy of engineering. Then I will address the problem of characterising some possible internal links, first by trying to understand how engineering can be understood as a philosophical discipline, then secondly how philosophy itself can be interpreted as a discipline related to engineering. These sections will take the form of an investigation of some problems in established traditions. I will conclude by drawing together the consequences of these different approaches to the concept of 'engineered epistemology'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an investigation into the age of acquisition of object names and object knowledge in a cross-sectional study of 288 children aged between 3 years 7 months and 11 years 6 months, comprising equal numbers of boys and girls. The objects belonged to four categories: animals, fruit and vegetables, implements, and vehicles. They were presented in three image types: line drawings, black-and-white photographs, and coloured photographs. In the knowledge test, five probe questions were asked for each object given the spoken name. Results showed that line drawings were more difficult to name than either black-and-white photographs or coloured photographs, which did not differ. The boys significantly out-performed the girls at naming and knowing, both overall and specifically for the category of vehicles. Naming and knowledge increased steadily with age but while young children below about 6 years 6 months showed an advantage to naming, older children showed an advantage to knowing. Similarly, age-of-acquisition measures for each item revealed a significant shift in the relationship between naming and knowing at around 80 months. We argue that differences in learning experience lead younger and older children to associate object names with different types of information, and we suggest that this difference probably accounts for the age-of-acquisition effects reported in adult object naming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between the discursive character of Irish republican ideology, the 'pluralist' and 'two tradition' perspective that underpins the latter. It suggests that mainstream contemporary Republican thought is the product of changing material conditions, externally generated ideological forces and an inherited spectrum of political ideas. These ideas range from the radical and universalist to the ethnically centred and particularist. The paper further argues that it is a communalist rather than a class-based and universalist agenda within republicanism that tends to be promoted by the institutions established under the Belfast Agreement. It is in the contestation of this trend that the future potential of a positive, dynamic and radical republican politics will be won or lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an examination of the development of standpoint epistemologies and their impact on the objective status of scientific knowledge. I explore both the origins of these epistemologies and their ironical maintenance of a textual or social realism while dispensing with the natural realism of science. I argue that both scientific realism and standpoint epistemologies are in need of a new, reconfigured understanding of realism. Borrowing from the work of Steve Shapin, Niklas Luhmann and Stephan Fuchs, I contend that realism can best be viewed as an associational code which links people together into a scientific community and differentiates science from other forms of life. Without these codes, science becomes something entirely different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is concerned with the intellectual origins of Lévi-Strauss's structuralism. In the first section 1 define this structuralism, arguing that it consists of far more than a simple method, bemg underpinned by an epistemology and a theory of man m society. I argue further that this structuralism cannot be seen as the application of a method pioneered in linguistics, indicating that the `structural' aspects of Lévi-Strauss's first major theoretical work, The Elementary Structures of Kinship derive rather from Gestalt psychology than from linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper plays critic to Quentin Skinner's much tougher role as methodological innovator in the practice of the history of ideas. It argues that the continuing centrality of intentions in Skinner's proposals as illustrated in his historical examples results in descriptions which are too often unproven or unproveable or unenlilghtening or wrong. Serious doubts are raised about the theoretical propriety of Skinner's doctrine of intentions as a key to the proper understanding of historical texts, and the legitimacy of the explanatory power Skinner attributes to his imputed intentions is disputed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The core problems of sociological and philosophical theories of knowledge remain insoluble and unrelated as long as both theories start from static models. The problems can be solved, and the respective theories related to each other, without undue difficulties if the acquisition of knowledge is conceptualized as a long-term process which takes place within societies also considered as long-term processes. This approach has the added advantage of being in closer agreement with the evidence. The paper indicates what needs to be unlearned and what to be learned in order to prepare the way for such a unified theoretical framework which can serve as a guide to, and which can be in turn corrected by, empirical sociological studies of all types of knowledge, scientific and practical as well as non-scientific or ideological. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper clears up some misunderstandings of Woodard's Phenomenological and Perceptual Research Methodology presented by Beshai in a recent critique. Beshai's critique helps demonstrate and validate a number of themes in Woodard's Perceptually Oriented Hypnosis. First, for each of us, our historical learnings provide the basis for scientific progress but at the same time may impede new views and even a more comprehensive understanding of hypnosis. Second, hypnosis is fundamentally a process of differentiating personal meanings that can be vastly different for various individuals. Third, Beshai uses a quantitatively based approach to under- standing phenomenon different from Woodard's qualitative research process. Last, holistic understanding of hypnosis is impeded when aspects of the phenomenal field are taken quantitatively Out of context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]