RE: "Doing" Epistemology?

["Pete Wolfendale" <pete.wolfendale@gmail.com>]

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Well, as fun as the term metaphilosophy is, I find it somewhat
unhelpful. I must admit that at least one of the ways I usually define
philosophy to people is that it is the only subject which could be
said to contain its own metadiscipline, i.e., that reflections upon
the grounding of philosophical inquiry are themselves philosophy and
in a sense inseparable from the practice of doing philosophy. You
might object that metaphilosophy is just a subsection of philosophy
proper, and as such is contained within philosophy, but as I was
trying to point out toward the end of my post (though I'm not sure how
clearly), I don't think that there can be any thorough separation of
these problems.

This is why I have said that I don't think there can be a period
before we do epistemology where we set up exactly the boundaries
within which our activity will proceed. This isn't to say that we
shouldn't do any groundwork, but merely that the question as to the
nature of a epistemology is not closed before we start, but is in fact
perpetually opened up by our philosophical practice, and work done
outside of epistemology.

Essentially what I am saying is that we should continually try to
rework our understanding of what we are doing within the field, and
the problems which we are concerned. As such, the question as to
whether there is any value in 'doing epistemology' always remains
open, just as what 'doing epistemology' is can change.

It is interesting here to bring in a little Kuhnian philosophy of
science. For Kuhn a scientific paradigm involves a group of scientists
whose activity is organised around the same set of terminology and
problems, such that they can engage in a collective activity whereby
they solve the various puzzles produced by their worldview. Any
specific scientific work is assimilable into an organised whole
because of a common conceptual framework (their are all kinds of terms
you can use interchangably here) that goes unquestioned.

What interests me, is that when we consider the modern field of
epistemology and similar subfields in philosophy, how they are tending
more toward this scientific model, enabling large groups to focus on a
certain set of problems. But just as with science, this kind of study
naturally encourages a situation in which the implicit framework (both
metaphysical and methodological) that structures our activity is not
questioned, so that we can just get on with the business of puzzle
solving... you might want to call it 'normal philosophy'.

I am not trying to say that modern philosophy has developed this
tendency to the extent that something like physics has, but I do
believe that the tendency is there to 'just get on with it' rather
than asking what 'it' is and why.

This could put us in the place of choosing between an approach
something like what I outlined above, where we continually question
the foundations of our inquiry (what a friend of mine funnily enough
describes as meta-paradigmatic) perhaps at the expense of a well
defined field of problems, or do we go with the scientific tendency
and try to leave the questioning to meta-epistemologists? Or are there
shades of grey?

Pete


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