PROBLEMS IN ASSESSING EPISTEMIC AUTHORITY OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS

Fundamentalism and Epistemic Authority

I will discuss three questions in my paper: 1. What are the essential elements of fundamentalism? 2. What is the role of authority as a source of fundamentalism? 3. What is the role of trust in the spreading of fundamentalism? For each question I will outline a possible answer from a special theoretical point of view. What is " fundamentalism " ? There is an ongoing discussion about this questi...

Negotiating Epistemic Authority

Why do we trust what other people say, and form beliefs on the basis of their speech? One answer: they are taken to have epistemic authority. Intuitively this means that the other person (or institution, or group) is taken to be authoritative in what they say, at least with respect to a particular domain. Here, we want to claim that there are (at least) two varieties of epistemic authority, one...

Assessing the Viewpoint of the Professors about Teaching a Course by Several Lecturers in Babol University of Medical Sciences

Background & Objective: Since one of the common methods of medical sciences teaching is teaching by several lecturers, the present study aimed to evaluate the viewpoints of medical science professors on this type of teaching. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional, descriptive and analytical research was performed on professors of Babol University of Medical Sciences in 2013. Subjects wer...

The Ideological Orientations of Canadian University Professors

This paper analyzes the ideological orientations of Canadian university professors based on a unique 2000 study of a representative sample of Canadian academics (n=3,318). After summarizing methodological problems with extant research on this subject, and tentatively comparing the political views of Canadian and American academics, the paper demonstrates that Canadian academics fall to the left...

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