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- Radu Bogdan, What is Epistemic Discourse About?In the 1960’s and 70’s Jaakko Hintikka has written extensively about epistemic logic, epistemic concepts and ordinary epistemic discourse. As a (graduate) student of Jaakko’s toward the end of that period, I was somewhat familiar with that body of work and even discussed some fragments of it in my dissertation on the pragmatics of knowledge. Since then my interests developed in different directions, toward philosophy of mind and cognitive science in general and commonsense or naive psychology in particular. This paper looks back at Jaakko’s work on epistemic discourse from the vantage point of my later work on naive psychology.
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Philosophy of scientific practice aims to critically evaluate as well as describe scientific inquiry. Epistemic norms are required for such evaluation. Social constructivism is widely thought to oppose this critical project. I argue, however, that one variety of social constructivism, focused on epistemic justification, can be a basis for critical epistemology of scientific practice, while normative accounts that reject this variety of social constructivism (SCj) cannot. Abstract, idealized epistemic norms cannot ground effective critique of our practices. I propose a new approach, placing SCj within a general framework of social action theory. This framework can be used to explicate epistemic norms implicit in our scientific practices. *Received July 2009; revised July 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: MS 14, P.O. Box 1892, Houston, TX 77251‐1892; e‐mail: mbf2@rice.edu.
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are ambiguous. In the mouth of someone who cannot remember whether it was Michael, or rather someone else, who was top scorer, (1) can express the epistemic possibility that Michael led the league in scoring. But from someone who knows that Michael did not even play last season, but is wondering what would have happened if he had, (1) means something quite different. Now where it has this quite different meaning, (1) may still turn out to be the expression of some epistemic possibility. Perhaps where (1) does not express the epistemic possibility of ‘Michael led the league in scoring’, it expresses the epistemic possibility of ‘Michael would have led the league in scoring’. Analysis of this ‘would have’ statement, together with an exploration of the suspicion that the ‘might have’ statement is ambiguous between these two epistemic possibilities, will have to await another occasion. (Although a first stab at the ‘would have’ statement’s analysis is this: for some contextually relevant p, if p were true, then Michael would have led the league in scoring.) The important point for present purposes is that (1) is ambiguous between an expression of the epistemic possibility of ‘Michael led the league in scoring’ and some quite different reading.
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Discussion of Radu Bogdan, What is epistemic discourse about?
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