This chapter explores the political significance of experience. Imperial authorities and political writers deemed experience as one of the major attributes of a good ruler, and imperial officials acquired it thanks to their mobility and by serving in different places across the world. By integrating the study of the political theory with the actual practices of the officials, the chapter reveals how officials’ expertise was gained, valued, and transferred across the different imperial locations – not only from Europe to America but also the other way around. Officials’ experience, which was logged in their informaciones de méritos y servicios, spawned a new epistemological milieu that privileged direct knowledge and sensorial experimentation.

This chapter addresses some of the classic problems of historical analysis, focusing on the ways in which the intellectual options that the complex history of the discipline can help historians address the challenges those problems pose. It presents a discussion of the problems of objectivity, bias, and judgment in history. It focuses on historians’ necessarily paradoxical yet coherent conception of their own relationship to history – of which they are, according to the logic of the discipline itself, both students and products. It suggests that postmodern theory about the nature of historical knowledge both recapitulates and deepens this fundamental historicist position. It discusses the standards of evidentiary support and of logical argumentation that historians use to evaluate the plausibility and productivity of historical interpretations. Finally, this chapter explores once again the unique pedagogical usefulness of History as a discipline that is irreducibly and necessarily perspectival, interpretive, and focused on standards of inquiry rather than on the production of actionable outcomes.

The ‘linguistic turn’ in twentieth-century philosophy is reflected through Neurath’s writings of his British period. He responded to serious criticism that Bertrand Russell made in his book An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, developing the physicalism of the Vienna Circle into a cautious approach to ‘terminology’. Neurath revealed details of his index verborum prohibitorum, a list of ‘dangerous’ words to be avoided due to their misleading and metaphysical connotations. However, Neurath was resistant to the formalist tendencies evident in the work of Vienna Circle associates, in particular Carnap’s development of semantics. Their disagreement on the matter is examined through their prolific correspondence of the 1940s. While Neurath is often portrayed as losing this battle, we discuss how his own approach to the philosophy of language (including his ‘terminology’ project) prefigured the later development of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ to a certain extent.

The chapter explores the connection between the emergence of Nature as an independent entity and the rise of modern democracy. It argues that the separation of Nature from God and Culture shaped democratic practices. Nature became a political resource in democratic society, providing concepts like “necessity” and “constraint.” Modern scholarly discourses often invoke Nature as a limit and source of legitimation for political claims. It further examines how the imaginary of Nature as an autonomous entity influenced the rise of modern democracy. It argues that the separation of Nature from God and Culture created space for human agency and democratic practices. It also discusses how Nature became a source of authority, necessity, and constraint in modern political discourses. Lastly, the chapter compares Western cosmology with non-Western ones and analyzes the impact of cosmological shifts on politics.

This chapter examines the intricate relationship between visibility, epistemology, and political power in modern democracies. Based on Ezrahi’s previous research on the development of modern democratic visual culture and the impact of the scientific revolution on reshaping the role of human perception in knowledge acquisition, the chapter underscores the role of visibility in shaping democratic epistemology. It emphasizes how visibility, in conjunction with individualism, democratic causality, and the concept of public facts, form the epistemological foundations of democracy. Visibility plays a key role in objectifying politics, which allows citizens to be informed, make judgments about their leaders, and participate in the political process. The chapter highlights the importance of visible public facts as a form of political currency for government criticism and accountability. The chapter acknowledges that the common belief in the accuracy of visible perception, equating observables with reality, has given democratic citizens unwarranted confidence in navigating the political landscape. Paradoxically, these unfounded beliefs align with democratic norms and principles. The chapter suggests that the erosion of these illusions has contributed to the erosion of democratic values.

The chapter examines the impact of human imprinting on Nature, blurring the boundaries between humans and Nature and diminishing human freedom. Enlightenment ideals granted individuals rationality, emphasizing their will in the realms of science and politics, enabling them to differentiate absolute truth from human-dependent matters. The blurred boundaries challenge rationality as a measure of norms and erode commonsense – the shared understanding of how the political system operates and the comprehension of causality. These developments lead to the “loss of the subject” and threaten the perception of the individual as an autonomous political agent. The erosion of the dualistic cosmology is also due to feminist theories arguing that women were wrongly placed within the realm of Nature rather than Culture. Similarly, postcolonial perspectives contend that Indigenous peoples were dehumanized and considered part of Nature under the dichotomous cosmology. In the postmodern era, there is a tendency towards hybridization and interactive dynamics. Ezrahi asserts that democracies in a hybrid world require “human-like” judgments from machines and algorithms, necessitating an examination of the intentions and interests of their designers. The question that needs to be asked is whether “humanized machines” serve the interests of a politics of freedom.

This chapter discusses different types of evidence that conversation analysts use to ground their claims about social action. We begin by reviewing the epistemological perspective of CA, which demands that evidence reflect participants’ orientations; as a critical part of understanding the terms ‘participant orientation’ and ‘relevance,’ here we also discuss two ways in which CA’s position and emphasis on them are commonly misunderstood. The bulk of this chapter then reviews and illustrates a range of types of participant-orientation evidence. We organize our presentation of types of evidence roughly by sequential position vis-à-vis the focal action about which the analyst is making claims, including evidence to be found in: (i) next-turn, (ii) same-turn (e.g., same-TCU self-repair, accounts), (iii) prior turn or sequence, (iv) third turn/position (e.g., repair after next turn, courses of action/activity), (v) fourth turn/position, and (vi) more distal positions. We also discuss other forms of evidence that are not necessarily defined by sequential position, including: (i) third-party conduct, (ii) reported conduct, (iii) deviant cases, and (iv) distributional evidence. We conclude by offering some brief reflections on bringing different types and positions of evidence together toward the construction of an argument.

This chapter provides an overview of foundational principles that guide CA research, offered both on the basis of our own experiences as researchers, and from our discussions with other conversation analysts as they authored contributions for the present volume. We begin by briefly sketching of some of the fundamentals of human social interaction, in order to underscore CA’s central focus, the study of social action, and describe some of the basic features of how interaction is procedurally organized. These basic features of interaction, which CA research has rigorously evidenced and which guide our examination of new data, are then shown directly to inform CA as a research methodology. Put another way, it is precisely due to the procedural infrastructure of action in interaction that conversation analysts use and work with interactional data in particular ways. We conclude with advice for readers as they continue to explore the volume’s contents.

The introduction outlines the volume’s main impetus: to encourage historians, global and not, to reflect on ‘their daily task’, as Marc Bloch put it – on their methods, craftsmanship, and conceptual basics. It is an invitation to rethink the field’s forms of inquiry and argumentation and the tacit assumptions underlying its practice, at a time when the ground under global historians’ feet – with globalisation in crisis – is moving fast.

Global history and other relational approaches to history, the introduction holds, have methodological implications and require theoretical reflection: because many of the classic analytical instruments commonly employed by historians require some reduction of complexity – to explain, to periodise, or to compare – a task naturally more difficult when scholars deal with an unusual abundance of factors; because the field’s assault on Eurocentrism requires reflection on the matter of perspective and authorial vantage point; or, indeed, because of the field’s inherent teleology, with its understanding of history inseparable from the telos of continuously increasing global integration.

In this chapter, we discuss the relationship of individual personal thriving to fairness and worthiness by exploring the concept of epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice refers to the rejection of people’s capacity as knowers, such that these individuals are treated as being less knowledgeable and less believable than other people, frequently on the basis of their social identities. In the first half of the chapter, we will explain how epistemic injustices take place and how they interrupt human thriving. In the second half of the chapter, we will profile the ways that psychologists and others can work to prevent epistemic injustice.

This chapter introduces modal logic, an expansion of propositional logic designed for reasoning about more subtle ways of modifying statements, including claims about what is known or believed, what might happen tomorrow or after some action is taken, what is justified, permitted, obligatory, and so on. There is a huge variety of different modal logics, but they all share the same common mathematical core, which we motivate and rigorously define. For intuition we focus especially on logics of knowledge, known as epistemic logics. No prior background in modal logic is assumed. After establishing the basics we progress to deeper model-theoretic results including invariance and expressivity, definability, and several important and useful completeness theorems. Altogether this chapter consitutes the core of an upper-year university course on modal logic.