Cinta de Moebio. Revista de Epistemología de Ciencias Sociales

The digital mode of existence: a new regime of truth?

Marco Maureira — 2024-12-28

This article analyses one of the main concepts that define our contemporary age: post-truth. In the time of information technology, digitization, and Big Data, objective knowledge seems to recede in front of the proliferation of discourses that deny and distort reality. Fake news and climate denial constitute paradigmatic examples that go beyond the truth and traditional standards of objectivity. However, is it really an era in which falsehood, pure appearance, and emotionality prevail, or is it the time for the emergence of a new mode of veridiction that establishes the digital becoming? Based on the theoretical approaches of Foucault and Latour, we will argue that contemporary digitization should not be apprehended as a machine that generates post-truth but instead as a mode of existence that brings into play a regime of veridiction in which discontinuity, acceleration, and asignification prevail and arise.

Res extensa as category mistake

David Antolínez — 2024-12-28

The main goal of this essay is to approach Cartesian dualism from the philosophy of Bruno Latour. Instead offering a dissolution of the Mind/Body dichotomy which undermines the former in benefit of the latter, a complication of both terms is proposed. Thus, the well-known critiques of the res cogitans will be complemented with a deep deconstruction of the res extensa. This argument, despite its metaphysical tone, entails some practical consequences for social sciences in general and psychology in particular. After exposing the intermittent interference of Cartesian dualism in psychology throughout the 20th century, it is argued that non-mentalistic projects have been only partially successful precisely because they have left untouched the material counterpart of the Mind/Body dichotomy. Only from a detailed review of Latour’s work it could be understood how this parallel reformulation of mind and matter lead to an ontological pluralism, which, in turn, oscillates between destroying modern psychology and opening new inquiry paths.

Distributed epistemic vigilance and argumentation

Cristián Santibáñez — 2024-12-28

Sperber’s concept of epistemic vigilance refers to the natural ability of individuals to filter information when they perceive that something in the message or the source of the message may be misleading, or because the beliefs being communicated generate noise in their core beliefs. Epistemic vigilance is part of our cognitive design to balance the degree of default trust that we use and a tendency to monitor ourselves. This paper proposes that a better conceptual notion would be that of distributed epistemic vigilance, i.e. epistemic vigilance distributed across different sources that emerge coherently as a collective agency (groups with specific identities, value-based communities, corporations, institutions). In this proposal, distributed epistemic vigilance refers to the natural tendency (or capacity) of group members or the group as a whole to deposit both their beliefs and reflective processes with other members of the group or in semi-formal or formal institutional spaces, and which become mechanisms for deciding what to believe and what courses of action to take.

Ontological perspectives for the study of common goods

Jorge Vergara — 2024-12-28

This essay examines the ontological perspectives that have been developed for the study and management of the common goods, which complement the epistemological perspectives that initially characterized approaches to this phenomenon. First, we present the perspectives based on the ontological frameworks of collective action associated with the management of the common goods, and on the constitutive condition of the common goods. Subsequently, the conceptual and methodological developments of these perspectives are compared with those of other ontological assumptions within the field of science and technology studies. Finally, we discuss the possibility of a dialogue between the different approaches based on the ontological assumption, starting from their meeting points, and their usefulness for the study of the common goods in sociomaterial environments.