RE: "Doing" Epistemology?

[djf500@york.ac.uk]

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In reply to Craig:

First, my use of 'charity' and its morphemes seems to have annoyed people. 
Any offence taken from this must be from assuming that I say we have been 
charitable towards Craig. Not so. I say that we have given a charitable 
reading of his sentences - that's impersonal and so shouldn't be offensive. 
Davidson says (I think) that a level of charity is required to interpret 
all language, but that isn't to say that we treat everyone speaking as 
stupid. I do apologise if the insinuation came out differently.

Second, I don't say that the questions we are talking about 'ought' to be 
distinctive, I just say that they might be.

(a) If they are, then the results we are getting by applying them to 
epistemology are limited to just epistemology. If they are not, then it 
would be reasonable to suspect that we'd get results in other subject areas 
too. This makes my question of wider (meta)philosophical interest.

(b) specifically with regard to epistemology, if the questions are 
distinctive of epistemology, then we ought to ask where the questions come 
from. If, rather than just floating freely, they are generated by 
previously expressed epistemological content, then I suppose they will be 
effected by what kind of epistemology generates them. Bad epistemology in 
the first place might lead to bad meta-epistemology. Oddly enough, we might 
have to get our epistemology right before we get our meta-epistemology 
right If the questions are of independant generation, then what i have 
described might take place on a larger scale. It might be that we have to 
get meta-philosophy right before we get philosophy right. In that case, the 
problems with epistemology might lie in other areas of philosophy, 
correcting them could change the meta-philosophy, and so improvements in 
epistemology would come indirectly from areas that we might previously 
thought of as being independent.

That's why distinctiveness might be - and so as yet, is - important. 
Throughout a and b i've used 'might' alot. I don't assert any of these mere 
possibilities to be true, but that the framework is there to investigate 
means it should be investigated.


In reply to Luis:

It is not worth noting that epistemology is not the study of knowledge, 
because it is. What you seem to have done is to conflate 'knowledge' as 
something like a mass-term and epistemology as a type-term. The difference 
is like that between referring to a class and referring to its members. 
Epistemologists study knowledge qua knowledge, and may well refer to 
particular bits of putative knowledge as an example of the type.

The rest of what you say seems to be correct, although, as you seem to say, 
how far the net should/does go is probably part of epistemology.

In apology to Akosua: Sorry if I typed 'he' rather than 'she' at any stage. 
I'm ususally quite good on that sort of thing! Maybe that it slipped my 
mind is good thing - perhaps it suggests that i'm at least *capable* of 
thinking about people without regard to gender in the correct 
circumstances. That might be pushing it a tad, but I really am sorry.

In memoriam: the debate about the debate and the original question is dead, 
I take it.
     


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