Re: "Doing" Epistemology?

[Luis Johnstone <luisjohnstone@onetel.net>]

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Greetings,

djf500

Yes, I think we agree more than disagree. What follows is more of an 
airing of my thoughts rather than a direct response.
-


Yes and this is exactly my point. In other subject areas such as ethics 
it is, for the most part, taken for granted that we have some 
satisfactory epistemological theory to fall back upon. Or, to be 
precise, for the purposes of analyses within ethics we take for granted 
that we have or can have some /useful/ grasp of what knowledge is. For 
the purposes of doing ethics we /largely/ put on hold the topic of 
epistemology (though there is a lot of room for variation here as it's 
not a hard and fast rule).

However, the problem as I see it is that epistemology is not anything 
like ethics. Let me see if I can spell out why epistemology, as I see 
it, is problematic.

The epistemologist wants to know, in your words, 'what is "the 
knowing"?' Like Plato he/ she does not want to simply enumerate all the 
"knowings"- e.g. S knows P, Q, R, S. He/ she seeks an understanding of 
what all the knowing share in common. Hence, I think, your point about 
universals. Right now not taking issue with the suggestion that what 
epistemologists come to know qua epistemology is a kind of /general/ 
concept that ranges over all knowledge-tokens (although I do think that 
there are also problems with that view). Instead, I am directly 
concerned with the topic of this discussion which is what 
epistemologists /do/.

I think we can agree that epistemologists acquire (possible) knowledge 
through their studies (which is to say that they acquire beliefs which 
satisfy their own  pre-theoretical beliefs which may or may not turn out 
to be knowledge); or, at the very least, that the practice of 
epistemology aims at knowledge of a certain kind.
I think that the point you make about universals is very important and 
revealing since it exposes a major assumption: namely, that "the 
knowing" (for want of a better phrase) is a non-arbitrary 
classification. After all, the point of a universal is that it ranges 
over all things of which it is /the/ kind. The idea that "the knowing" 
is non-arbitrary at least implies that it ranges over particulars (the 
tokens) because of some actual feature of those tokens (rather than 
their merely coincidentally being ranged over by chance). The question 
then becomes what feature of these particulars (read 'tokens') are we 
interested in? Again, this goes back to the classic claim that we cannot 
find what we are looking for unless we have some criterion by which we 
perform an identification. If we already have knowledge of those 
criterion then we already know "the knowing" (the universal) and 
epistemology is done and dusted leaving only scientists to collect 
empirical data on the particular occurences (tokens). However, it seems 
that epistemologists are not in that position. And the reason is the 
issue of identification: if I can already identify instances of "the 
knowing" then I do not need to do any epistemology (and this will be 
highly relevant to my reply to Pete) because for sucessful and 
/rigorous/ identification one must, /at least/, possess a kind of 
general concept and that concept would be "the knowing"- though whether 
one thinks that epistemology necessarily involves the /articulation/ of 
such knowledge I will leave for others to discuss. If, on the other 
hand, "the knowing" is a token of knowledge with which the 
epistemologist is soley concerned then prior to epistemological 
investigation the epistemologist must be entirely ignorant of "the knowing".

But clearly, something seems to guide epistemology such that it does not 
procede in a haphazard way, in so far that there are some general 
features that "the knowing" is supposed to consist in: these will 
minimally be Justification, Truth and Belief (JTB). But this is a far 
from satisfactory account of the activity of epistemology since it's not 
explicit why belief, truth and justification are important. To simply 
say that without them you cannot have knowledge is not any kind of 
answer (save to beg the question). The question is 'why are they 
necessary for knowledge?' The usual answer is to give a thought 
experiment in which there is JTB but doesn't 'look' like knowledge. I'll 
leave things there so as to avoid excessive overlap with my reply to 
Pete but I think that at the very least we should see that such a reply 
is appallingly bad. It is surely not the kind of reply an 
/epistemologist/ should EVER give.

Regards,

Luis.



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