Making it Public: Testimony and Socially Sanctioned Common Grounds

Making it Public: Testimony and Socially Sanctioned Common Grounds

Contrary to current individualistic epistemology, classical rhetoric provides us with a pragmatical conception of ‘testimony’ as a source provided to the orator by the particular community in which he acts. In order to count as usable ‘testimony’, any linguistic instance must comply with specific rules of social sanction. A deliberate attention to the social practices in which ‘testimony’ is gi...

Making it Public : Testimony and Socially Sanctioned Common

Contrary to current individualistic epistemology, Classical rhetoric provides us with a pragmatical and particularly dynamic conception of ‘testimony’ as a source made available for the orator by the particular community in which she acts. In order to count as usable testimony, a testimony to which one could appeal in further communications, any discourse must comply with specific rules of soci...

Difference - Making Grounds

We define a notion of difference-making for partial grounds of a fact in rough analogy to existing notions of difference-making for causes of an event. Using orthodox assumptions about ground, we show that it induces a non-trivial division with examples of partial grounds on both sides. We then demonstrate the theoretical fruitfulness of the notion by applying it to the analysis of a certain ki...

Common Grounds, Questions and Relevance

Modeling without amnesia: Making experience—sanctioned approximations

Accuracy plays a central role in developing models of continuous physical systems, both in the context of developing a new model to fit observation or approximating an existing model to make analysis faster. The need for simple yet su.fficiently accurate models pervades engineering analysis, design, and diagnosis tasks. The central problem is determining when a model will be sufficiently accura...