Episteme

Stephen Brush has, in several papers (for example Brush, 1989), examined different episodes from the history of science and argued that the scientists involved in them did not in fact regard (temporal) predictive success as carrying an epistemic premium. However, in a recent paper (Brush, 1996) on the reception of Mendeleev s ideas, he claims that this case is exceptional—here temporal novelty of predictions really did count. 

To develop such questiorrs, and hence to realize the pre-experimental phase as a meaningful learning activity, students need to activate their domain-specific knowledge (Klahr, 2000 Neber Anton, 2008). Neben and Anton have cortsidered a sequence of five procedural steps that are necessary for the pre-experimental phase Observation/phenomenon Access to prior knowledge Epistemic question(s) Anticipated answer(s) Planning for evidence. 

Neber, H., Anton, M.-A. (2008). Promoting pre-experimental activities in high-school chemistry Focusing on the role of students epistemic questions. International Journal of Science Education, 509(13), 1801-1822. 

Epistemic uncertainty —missing knowledge—is due to a lack of information that through R D you could buy directly or estimate through proxy methods, if you so chose. These are controllable risks, although in practice they may be unduly expensive to control relative to the risk exposure (threat x likelihood). 

Apostolakis (1994, 1999) Aleatory uncertainty Epistemic uncertainty Uncertainty... 

Apostolakis GE. 1999. The distinction between aleatory and epistemic uncertainties is important an example from the inclusion of aging effects into probabihstic safety assessment. Proceedings of the PSA 99, August 22 to 25, 1999. Washington (DC) American Nuclear Society. 

Hora SC. 1996. Aleatory and epistemic uncertainty in probability elicitation with an example from hazardous waste management. Reliability Eng Syst Saf 54 217-223. 

Epistemic uncertainty The kind of uncertainty arising from imperfect knowledge. Epistemic uncertainty is also known as incertitnde, ignorance, subjective uncertainty. Type II or Type B uncertainty, redncible nncertainty, nonspeci-hcity and state-of-knowledge uncertainty. 

Robust Bayes A school of thought among Bayesian analysts in which epistemic uncertainty about prior distributions or likelihood functions is quantified and projected through Bayes rule to obtain a class of posterior distributions. 

Again, this is an epistemic approach and a more rigorous approach in the philosophy of science would consider this too simplistic, as it is based on the assumption that objects and levels of structures can be considered as separated. 

The third point goes back to the queshon between the epistemic and onhc views of philosophy of science. It has been menhoned a few times that the simple examples presented in this chapter are relahve to an epistemic approach, namely to a reality in terms of descriphve terms, rather than in terms of things as they really are (the ontological view). The necessary context-independence of the ontic approach precludes its applicability to concrete cases. Conversely, as Primas (1998) states,... 

This brings about an interesting relation between the ontic and the epistemic approach (Primas, 1998) ... 

Educational constructivism extended the realism-empiricism dichotomy into how individuals learn, and assumed two main forms (19) (i) personal constructivism, which is associated with Piaget (5) and (ii) social-cultural constructivism which is linked to Vygotsky. Piagetian constructivism is associated with an idealized person (the epistemic subject ). On die other hand, according to Vygotsky (20), the learner constructs actively his/her knowledge, but this process is greatly assisted by interactions with peers and with the teacher who acts at the students zone of proximal development. 

The probabilities of different outcomes can thus be seen as resulting from the causal powers and capacities of the system and their arrangement. This makes probability a function of the nature of the system, not merely a statement of degrees of belief or the frequency with which an outcome occurs. We can account for the observed probability (in a frequency sense) by the interplay of capacities or causal powers, and we can estimate a probability (in the epistemic sense) if we know something about the capacities of the things that may influence the outcome. 

Instead of assessing risk, I suggest that we should try to assess riskiness in the everyday sense of this term, where it refers to the epistemic possibility of harm, not merely probabilities of identified types of harm. Whereas risk relates to outcomes, riskiness is a property of a thing, situation or activity and is relative to our knowledge about it. I suggest that what are normally termed precautionary approaches are concerned with riskiness, rather than just risk they are concerned with whether, for all we know, there is a possibility of harm, not just with the probabilities of known, specifiable types of harm. 

---