Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism
Oxford University Press (2006)
Abstract
Relativist and constructivist conceptions of knowledge have become orthodoxy in vast stretches of the academic world in recent times. This book critically examines such views and argues that they are fundamentally flawed. The book focuses on three different ways of reading the claim that knowledge is socially constructed, one about facts and two about justification. All three are rejected. The intuitive, common sense view is that there is a way things are that is independent of human opinion, and that we are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively reasonable, and is binding on anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence, regardless of their social or cultural perspective. Difficult as these notions may be, it is a mistake to think that recent philosophy has uncovered powerful reasons for rejecting them.Author's Profile
Reprint years
2007
Call number
BD221.B64 2006
ISBN(s)
019928718X 0199230412 9780199230419 9780199287185
DOI
10.1111/j.1746-8361.2009.01199.x
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Citations of this work
Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and its Applications.John Gordon MacFarlane - 2014 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering (Open Access).Matthieu Queloz - 2021 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh between Psychology and Neuroscience.Ned Block - 2007 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (5):481--548.
Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology.Annalisa Coliva - 2015 - London, England: Palgrave-Macmillan.
The Ontic Account of Scientific Explanation.Carl F. Craver - 2014 - In Marie I. Kaiser, Oliver R. Scholz, Daniel Plenge & Andreas Hüttemann (eds.), Explanation in the Special Sciences: The Case of Biology and History. Springer Verlag. pp. 27-52.