89. THE EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE OF COVID 19 - Checking For Symptoms In The Dark

“Miranda Fricker wrote of what she called “epistemic injustice” - “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower”. She identified two forms of such injustice: “testimonial injustice”, the injustice of denying credibility to someone’s word, and “hermeneutical injustice”, the injustice of disadvantaging someone in their access to interpretive resources and forming an obstacle to their capacity to know. This week a member of Sage, the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, urged the UK to expand its official list of Covid symptoms so that UK citizens could better identify if they have the virus. In this article I intend to show that by ignoring this advice, and keeping the official list of symptoms restricted to a high fever, a new continuous cough, or a loss of sense of smell or taste, the UK government is permitting a continuing epistemic injustice to occur which is causing unnecessary and highly preventable suffering.“

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67. DISPATCHES FROM THE CAVE - Why Being "Realistic" Demands The Impossible

“The pandemic has shown just how flimsy “the way things are” actually are. From basic norms of social interaction to entire economic systems, COVID-19 has unwittingly acted as the liberating hand breaking the chains of Plato’s epistemological prisoner and dragging them out of the cave and into the light…This isn’t, however, a post about the coronavirus…“

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60. THE TONE OF OUR OPPRESSION - Truth and Authority Under Trump

“The Trump virus found the ultimate weaknesses in organised human life: 1) we have such shaky foundations at the best of times for what constitutes as real “knowledge” that if you repeat an untruth enough times, from enough “sources”, it can seem just as “true” as any legitimate truth; and 2) that the notion of external authority on which our political systems are based is entirely illusory. As any criminal can tell you: that there are laws against doing certain things impose no actual limitation on doing that which is against the law. Criminals, by definition, break laws all the time. And the only differences between those who break laws who we call “criminals” and those who break laws that we don’t, are either that they have been caught or that we don’t really enforce the law.“

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46. AN EXPERIMENT IN TIME TRAVEL - In Which A Teacher Attempts To Prove Time Travel Impossible

“Inspired by listening to Olivia Coombes talking about the philosophy of time travel on a recent episode of The Panpsycast philosophy podcast, I was reminded, sadly, that I have already empirically proven the impossibility of time travel several times over in my career as a teacher. Or at least I have attempted to.”

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34. DID I SLEEP OR NOT? - An Insomniac's Epistemological Struggle

“When we are, and when we are not, conscious seems to be a fairly fundamental piece of self-knowledge every human being should have access to. The more I worry about my insomnia, however, the more I realise how little about our own unconsciousness we actually know.”

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14. WHEN BAD MOVIES GO GOOD - Mind vs Celluloid.

“although we did watch the same movie on the screen, in our heads, we perceived two very different things. The cause of these alternative experiences being the mental environment into which the sense-data was ultimately processed, our mental experiences of the movie being more than merely passive acceptance of the sights and sounds projected inside the cinema.”

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5. BIG DATA - The Importance of Remembering there Can be a Data/Facts Disjunction

“Data, in theory, means measurability, tracking and accountability, and therefore is favoured and celebrated by those in the business of measuring education, tracking education, and holding education accountable.  Every year teachers across the country collect spreadsheet after spreadsheet of meaningless data on their pupils.  They analyse that data and discuss it endlessly with managers and leaders and make decisions about future planning based on what the data says.  But the data gathered is, invariably, pure garbage.”

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