Epistemology Without History is Blind
Erkenntnis 75 (3):505-524 (2011)
Abstract
In the spirit of James and Dewey, I ask what one might want from a theory of knowledge. Much Anglophone epistemology is centered on questions that were once highly pertinent, but are no longer central to broader human and scientific concerns. The first sense in which epistemology without history is blind lies in the tendency of philosophers to ignore the history of philosophical problems. A second sense consists in the perennial attraction of approaches to knowledge that divorce knowing subjects from their societies and from the tradition of socially assembling a body of transmitted knowledge. When epistemology fails to use the history of inquiry as a laboratory in which methodological claims can be tested, there is a third way in which it becomes blind. Finally, lack of attention to the growth of knowledge in various domains leaves us with puzzles about the character of the knowledge we have. I illustrate this last theme by showing how reflections on the history of mathematics can expand our options for understanding mathematical knowledgeAuthor's Profile
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Citations of this work
Remembering (Short-Term) Memory: Oscillations of an Epistemic Thing.Uljana Feest - 2011 - Erkenntnis 75 (3):391-411.
Explanation, Existence and Natural Properties in Mathematics – A Case Study: Desargues’ Theorem.Marc Lange - 2015 - Dialectica 69 (4):435-472.
Pluralists about Pluralism? Versions of Explanatory Pluralism in Psychiatry.Jeroen Van Bouwel - 2014 - In M. C. Galavotti, D. Dieks, W. J. Gonzalez, S. Hartmann, Th Uebel & M. Weber (eds.), New Directions in Philosophy of Science (The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective Series). Springer. pp. 105-119.
References found in this work
Philosophical Investigations.Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein - 1953 - New York, NY, USA: Wiley-Blackwell.
The Advancement of Science: Science Without Legend, Objectivity Without Illusions.Philip Kitcher - 1993 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.