מטרות אפיסטמיות והשפעתן על תהליכי החשיבה

Epistemology concerns the nature of knowledge, its sources, and standards of justification. In the last 20 years, educational psychologists and learning scientists have shown growing interest in the epistemic thinking of non-philosophers. The researchers’ concerns have included describing epistemic understandings, examining their relationship with reasoning processes, and investigating how they develop with particular, increasing attention to the role of educational activity as a means of promoting epistemic growth. There has been a recent paradigmatic shift from emphasis on domain-general belief categories to consideration of topic-specific, situated epistemic cognition. There is now more emphasis on fine-grained analyses of a wide range of cognitive activity about epistemic matters rather than on characterization of larger belief or theoretical systems. The proposed research will test aspects of the newer approach along with examining the relative contribution and interplay of characteristics of the traditional and newer approaches in how people approach a complex reasoning task.

In the new approach, Chinn’s AIR model of epistemic cognition (Chinn, Rinehart, & Buckland, 2014) specifies three components involved in thinking about aspects of knowledge; epistemic aims and value, epistemic ideals, and reliable processes. Epistemic aims and value concern the goals one sets in considering epistemic matters and how one perceives the importance of these goals. Epistemic ideals are the criteria one uses to evaluate if epistemic aims have been met. Reliable processes are the strategies, procedures, and cognitive processes people use to successfully achieve their epistemic aims. However, as transformative as the construct of epistemic cognition as conceived by Chinn and his colleagues, and its refinement in the AIR model, has been among educational and psychological researchers of everyday epistemic thinking, the relationships among the components have been subject to little empirical testing. To do so is the major purpose of the proposed research. In addition, to address theoretical debates, the research will test the relative or complementary contribution of an approach that characterizes types of epistemic thinking as emergent epistemic perspectives. Finally, the research will afford an examination of another understudied underpinning of epistemic cognition, social epistemology. The reasoning context will be a juror case, which exemplifies social epistemology in that it has institutionally defined epistemic constraints, group knowledge building, and social evidence in the form of testimony. 

The proposed research will examine how adults reason toward a jury verdict individually and in groups. The study will exploit the nature of jury trials by inserting divergent epistemic aims into the judge’s instructions to the jury. The expectation is that particular epistemic aims will affect the use of reliable reasoning process suited to the aims, and thus reasoning patterns should differ between of groups provided with different epistemic aims. It is also expected that the degree to which the reasoning processes are reliable and suited to achieve the aims will depend on epistemic perspective. The expected findings would highlight the importance of specifying epistemic aims in educational and real-world reasoning contexts in order to achieve valued epistemic products.