Re: "Doing" Epistemology?

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

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I'm still somewhat worried about rambling because I have very definite
ideas on this particular subject but have not necessarily developed
the terminology, or more appropriately the explanations of the
terminology I need to deploy. I have a tendency to fall back on terms
like 'linguistic systems', 'interaction' and 'the
organisation/structuring of behaviour', which I assure everyone I mean
in very specific senses even if it seems a bit flighty. Of course, the
best way to make more sense is to keep talking until you develop some
consistency, so here it goes.

It is all very well to reject the use of intuition, and it is true
that people's intuitions differ, although there are definite
convergences upon which thought examples and the like are based. The
problem for me is what do we have if we do not have intuition. What is
it that interests us in the conditions of knowledge in the first
place?

It seems as if the only reason that there is a problem of the
conditions of knowledge is if we are already using around the term
knowledge, and as I tried to show before this necessitates an
intuitive grasp of knowledge. The problem is only created on the basis
of the existence of a word which is already structuring our behaviour
(oh the hypocracy).

I'll try and put this in different terms. I don't believe that there
is such a thing as knowledge pre-existing our invention and usage of
the term which our usage of the word picks out, regardless of whether
we have any detailed understanding of its conditions or not. This does
not mean that I think there are no conditions on the basis of which we
ascribe knowledge, but rather that it is much like their being
conditions on teh basis of which we judge the Miss World contest,
we'll make a decision but there is no pre-existing Miss World to be
picked out (unless your really really externalist).

Now if you don't agree with me, and think there is something
substantial to knowledge ascriptions (e.g. everyone who ever made an
ascription might have been wrong, but there are definitive grounds for
saying so), you cannot simply sidestep intuition, because you have to
show how epistemological concerns with the conditions of knowledge can
arise out of our pre-epistemological grasp of knowledge. Essentially
when you are claiming to develop a technical approach to knowledge,
the fundamental claim is something like even through you have
different (because more thought out and technical) conditions for the
ascription of knowledge, you are trying to ascribe what people with a
pre-epistemological grasp of knowledge are trying to ascribe. To put
it another way, you are talking about the same thing, but
epistemologists just have a better understanding of what that thing
is. So it is the case that the epistemological grasp of knowledge must
evolve out of the pre-epistemological one; it must have some relation
to intuition. This might be analogous to the case of dreams, of which
there is a pre-neurological grasp and a neurological one, the latter
being able to claim that it is talking about the same thing as Freud
or a layman, just that they can pick it out on an EEG.

Now, if as I was trying to suggest in my last post, the
pre-epistemological intuition is a phenomena caused by a particular
linguistic system that can maintain stability of usage without
referents, this would pretty much necessarily screw over the classical
epistemological understanding of knowledge too, because if there are
referents then they're talking about the same ones. Obviously this
still requires me to prove my point, it just means that if I can show
that all of the behaviour involved in the pre-epistemological usage of
the word 'knowledge' can be accounted for without the need for a
referent to stabilise the usage, then I can deploy occam's razor and
get rid of the referent, and that consequently this also affects
epistemology (I will then need to provide an account of the behaviour
involved in the technical usages in epistemology of course).

You might want to say that its 'logically possible' that the
pre-epistemological conception doesn't pick out something but that the
epistemological one does, and that they are just deluded that they're
talking about the same thing. This is true, but it's horrifically
unconvincing and I take the burden of proof to be on someone who put
this position forward.

I can accept that currently the burden of proof is on me to show that
our pre-epistemological conception doesn't require a referent, and I'm
not going to attempt to provide such an answer now. All I am saying
here is that the problem of intuition runs deep, and can't be easily
sidestepped.

Pete


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