Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Katya Lukianova and Tim Steffenmeier who have recently co-authored a paper entitled: "Well, in the case of my mom… Personal stories as negotiable arguments in public forums" , appeared in the Journal of Argumentation in Context . Ekaterina (Katya) Lukianova is a program officer at the Kettering Foundation in the United States, with an interest in developing linguistic tools for analyzing public deliberation. Prior to this, she taught in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Studies at Saint Petersburg State University in Russia. Tim Steffensmeier is Professor of communication & leadership at Kansas State University. He is the founding director of Third Floor Research at the Kansas Leadership Center. Katya Lukianova The other day my husband and I (Katya) were having a late night chat about everything and anything after having put our two kids in bed. He was telling me a story about a friend from his student days, and how that friend, who m...

This post is by Abigail Gosselin (Regis University). Here she is telling us about her paper, " Philosophizing from Experience: First‐Person Accounts and Epistemic Justice ", published in Social Philosophy in 2019. Many philosophers appreciate hearing the first-person accounts that philosophers sometimes give when they disclose their personal connection to the topic about which they are philosophizing. First-person accounts are valuable for many reasons, including the fact that they establish the first-person authority of the speaker, who has privileged access to and hermeneutical command over their first-person experience. Sharing first-person accounts can also be harmful in many ways, however, such as by exposing the speaker to various vulnerabilities, and must be employed cautiously. First-person accounts of experience that is potentially epistemically impairing—such as accounts of mental illness, intellectual disability, or brain injury—can undermine a speaker’s...