[lit-ideas] Epistemology
- From: "Eric Dean" <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 19:43:28 -0600
My wife's son (i.e. my step-son, but I hate that phrase) Marcus is a
philosophy undergraduate. One of his professors, Aron Edidin, wrote a
paper called "What's an Epistemologist To Do?" about ten years ago in
the American Philosophical Quarterly (Vol. 31, Number 4). Marcus gave it
to me to read when he was home for a month with a broken collar bone.
He found the paper frustrating, not so much for its obscurity (Marcus
has an amazing capacity to penetrate the most obscure thickets) but
rather as for what he sees as its unwarranted self-satisfaction.
I sympathize with what I think is the source of his frustration, beyond
the paper's intensely coy title, and have been trying to articulate just
what I think is amiss with the line of thought Edidin pursues. It has
proved more difficult than I initially expected.
Edidin is, by his own assertion, an analytic epistemologist. From what
he says, that seems to mean someone who works on fixing what's wrong
with the definition of knowledge as "justified true belief". He traces
the lineage of this endeavor to the rejection of Descartes' attempt to
identify a source of absolute certainty. He says Descartes had a "clear
conception of the epistemic good he was after (absolute certainty); his
problem was that of developing ways of effectively pursuing that good.We
have.astonishingly powerful and effective ways of pursuing epistemic
goods. What we lack is a clear vision of the epistemic good that we
pursue."
He explains that a successful analytic epistemology would provide a
definition of fallible epistemic good. He goes on to say, "A great deal
of current discussion of issues in education and broader intellectual
culture seems still to be preoccupied with a Cartesian notion of
epistemic accomplishment...[I]n an intellectual climate in which it is
widely assumed that the only alternative to Cartesian epistemology is
relativism, and in which this assumption is frequently mobilized in
defense of relativism (and sometimes in attacks on fallibilism), an
important task is to investigate possible alternatives to the Cartesian
view of the epistemic good..."
I am of two minds about all this. On the one hand, it seems a
hopelessly grandiose ambition to come up with even a limited surrogate
for a definition of knowledge ('epistemic good'). After all, the debate
has been going on for millennia (in a footnote Edidin says the
Theaetetus "provides the main source of historical respectability" for
the projects analytic epistemologist pursue). It would seem we have to
muddle through our own debates about education without a clear
definition of what knowledge is, just like everyone else has. On the
other hand, long-running debates do sometimes get settled, or at least
shifted, by developments from the most unlikely quarters.
For my part, I've thought a lot about a special case of knowing over the
years -- assertions of knowledge in the context of organizational
decision making. In such contexts I think the political and objective
are inextricably entwined and can only be sorted out, if at all, in
retrospect. That doesn't mean there aren't facts of the matter, just
that at the time of making a decision the problem is precisely to
recognize reliably that which is fact and that which is posturing
without being in a position to know the whole story oneself. I'm
acutely aware that that is only one kind of setting in which the word
'know' gets used, but in that limited setting it seems to me that both
the relativists ("it's just an exercise of power") and the realists
("we're pursuing the truth") have part of the story right but seem hell
bent on denying the relevance of other party's part.
Anyway, I'd be very interested in any references to reasonably
accessible books or articles (I mean physically accessible -- I don't
mind slogging through the arcane and recondite) or any thoughts people
have on the debate about epistemology.
Best regards to all,
Eric Dean
(now in Rockford, Illinois, not Chicago...)
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