Abstract

The relationship between philosophical inquiry and our pretheoretic, everyday convictions has always been a matter of some controversy. In large part, this dissertation constitutes an attempt to clarify that relationship specifically within the subfield of philosophy we call epistemology. ;Two types of project emerge in traditional epistemology: epistemological projects of understanding, whose goal is to analyze or explicate key epistemic concepts, and epistemological projects of validation, whose goal is to determine whether our everyday, nonphilosophical applications of these concepts are legitimate. The central thesis of this dissertation---the Methodological Priority of Understanding Thesis---is that projects of understanding, taking everyday epistemic convictions as primary data, have a position of methodological priority within the epistemological enterprise. ;Chapter 1 lays out the fundamental line of support for this thesis. Chapter 2 follows up with an extended investigation into the nature of epistemological projects of understanding. The remaining three chapters make use of the Priority Thesis to shed light on a number of contemporary metaepistemological issues. Chapter 3 defends Roderick Chisholm's common sense particularist approach to epistemological inquiry. In Chapter 4 it is argued that one common objection to typically externalist ways of theorizing in epistemology is undercut by the Priority Thesis. Chapter 5 concludes with a discussion of the Humean claim, endorsed and defended by such contemporary epistemologists as Barry Stroud and Michael Williams, that some form of philosophical skepticism is the inevitable outcome of serious and sustained epistemological reflection on putative knowledge in a given domain