taylor argues that procedural liberalism is not viable, or is insensitive to the conditions of social and political possibility, since it cannot justify the political furtherance of common goods. this is because the ontology and epistemology behind it disregard the “transcendental conditions” of human identity and the “dialogical” way of its formation. taylor’s own version of liberalism, on the...

This article explores the role of ‘robustness-notions’ in an account of the engineering sciences. The engineering sciences aim at technological production of, and intervention with phenomena relevant to the (dis-)functioning of materials and technological devices, by means of scientific understanding thereof. It is proposed that different kinds of robustness-notions enable and guide scientific ...

The concept of uncertainty is difficult to comprehend, even when we restrict our focus to safety science. In a world with various scientific philosophical stances, “uncertainty” is debated in various contexts. However, in an effort to go deeper into a more basic understanding of uncertainty our knowledge is quickly challenged. What exists? How do we know what exists? What can we know about it? ...

We argue that information technology-related privacy research is changing from ontological to epistemological research interests. Privacy cannot be seen as a static and ontologically fixed analytical concept anymore, and its status as an object of research is called into question in the new domains of information and communication technology. This, we argue, is founded in the use of research th...

The impetus for this paper came from our experiences as learner-teachers of re-considering the epistemological and ontological roots of our undergraduate-nursing curriculum. It began as an earnest dialogue regarding particular aspects of first year undergraduate-nursing theory content, specifically, caring and compassion, self-concept and nursing identity, spirituality and culture, a simple que...

This paper presents an epistemological approach to the investigation of material properties that is opposed both to phenomenalistic epistemology and recent linguistical and ontological accounts of matter/mass terms. Emphasis is laid on the inherent context dependence of material properties. It is shown that, if this is taken seriously, some deep epistemological problems arise, like unavoidable ...

Following calls to enhance risk-sensitivity of second generation Operational Risk-Aware Information Systems (ORISs), this paper aims to address the lack of ontological/epistemological grounding for the concept of Operational Risk (OR). Herein, OR is regarded both as a property of a real system and as a representational phenomenon forming part of the core of ORIS in line with Weber’s (2003) view...

Abstract Models typically have actual, existing targets. However, some models are viewed as having non -actual I argue that this interpretation comes at various costs and propose an alternative fares better along two dimensions: (1) agreement with practice (2) ontological epistemological parsimony. My proposal is many of these actually actual