Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

Non-sceptical Infallibilism

The ethical practices of credit rating agencies (CRAs), particularly following the 2008 financial crisis, have been subject to extensive analysis by economists, ethicists, and policymakers. We raise a novel issue facing CRAs that has to do with a problem concerning the transmission of epistemic status of ratings from CRAs to the beneficiaries of the ratings (investors, etc.), and use it to provide a new challenge for regulators. Building on recent work in philosophy, we argue that since CRAs have different stakes than the beneficiaries of the ratings in the ratings being accurate, what counts as knowledge (and as having ‘epistemic status’) concerning credit risk for a CRA may not count as knowledge (as having epistemic status) for the beneficiary. Further, as it stands, many institutional investors (pension funds, insurance companies, etc.) are bound by law to make some of their investment decisions dependent on the ratings of officially recognized CRAs. We argue that the observation that the epistemic status of ratings does not transmit from CRAs to beneficiaries makes salient a new challenge for those who think current regulation regarding the CRAs is prudentially justified, namely, to show that the harm caused by acting on a rating that does not have epistemic status for beneficiaries is compensated by the benefit from them acting on a CRA rating that does have epistemic status for the CRA. Unlike most other commentators, therefore, we offer a defeasible reason to drop references to CRAs in prudential regulation of the financial industry.

background

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10551-019-04260-2.pdf

Stakes Sensitivity and Credit Rating : A New Challenge for Regulators

On the Nature of Indexical Beliefs

This research explores the nature of teacher knowledge constructed over four years in a multimodal environment. Fourteen K-12 teachers, from Ontario, Canada and Michigan, USA, met online for two hours during a monthly research release day, participated in online chats, a forum site called Virtual Professional Learning Community, as well as participated in four three-day summer institutes. The teachers used these times to engage in knowledge building, creating research for their specific schools/classes in a recurring cycle of learning. The data consist of multiple forms, including the online meetings, the forum, and the summer institute discussions. The research investigated what types of knowledge teachers developed and how those knowledges informed their professional learning. Grounded Theory informed the data gathering and an hermeneutical approach was used for the analyses. Three types of professional knowledge emerged, associated with the classical Aristotelian intellectual virtues: episteme, techne and phronesis. Teachers’ discourse revealed the complexity of their professional knowledge and the wide range of scope of their action — a finding that goes beyond many neoliberal conceptions of the profession. Findings provide ways to develop models of professional development with teachers leading to their sustained journey for meaningful professional learning.

methods

/pdf/the-nature-of-the-teacher-knowledge-constructed-in-a-3uydupeobo.pdf

Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

Citations

Non-sceptical Infallibilism

Stakes Sensitivity and Credit Rating : A New Challenge for Regulators

On the Nature of Indexical Beliefs

The Nature of the Teacher Knowledge Constructed in a Multimodal Professional Learning Community

Pragmatic Structures for Action‐Directed Pragmatics

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