A case for integrative epistemology
- PDF / 314,020 Bytes
- 19 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 39 Downloads / 169 Views
A case for integrative epistemology Lisa Miracchi1 Received: 26 January 2020 / Accepted: 23 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Western analytic epistemology is undergoing an upheaval: the importance of social justice concerns is becoming increasingly recognized. Many of us want epistemology to reflect our lived experiences, and to do real work for us on issues that matter. Motivated by these concerns, researchers are increasingly focusing on ameliorating our epistemic concepts: finding ones that contribute to social justice. At the same time, however, many epistemologists claim that their project is purely metaphysical and thus value-neutral: epistemology is just about the truth, the facts! Ethics and politics thus have no place in epistemology proper. I will argue that, despite appearances to the contrary, these ameliorative and objectivist projects are not in conflict. Indeed, because the same concepts are our tools for both theoretical and practical reasoning, properly carrying out either project must be done in an integrated way with the other. I’ll use the example of medical research to show how social justice concerns can deeply influence scientific practice in ways that contribute to, rather than threaten, its claims to objectivity. I then develop an integrative epistemology on analogy with medical research to resolve both longstanding philosophical disputes and support our understanding and healing of public discourse. Keywords Epistemology · Justification · Conceptual engineering · Virtue epistemology · Ameliorative philosophy · Objectivity · Standpoint epistemology · Brains in vats
Introduction Epistemology as an academic discipline is changing.1 Although standpoint feminists and others have been arguing for decades that we cannot understand knowledge, rationality, and other epistemic kinds in abstraction from social context (Hartsock 1 Thanks to Carolina Flores, Rachel McKinney, Esa Diaz Leon, and Sophie Horowitz.
B 1
Lisa Miracchi [email protected] University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
123
Synthese
1983), only relatively recently have such considerations started to make a significant impact in “mainstream” Western analytic theorizing. Moreover, in today’s “post truth” sociopolitical climate, many of us want to do epistemology that matters broadly, to use academic epistemology to illuminate the pressing issues of our time. These ameliorativists see their project in epistemology as using epistemological inquiry to advance social justice agendas. However, the inclusion of social justice concerns in mainstream academic epistemology is contentious and uneasy: many researchers insist that they are interested in a more abstract project, one concerned just with illuminating the nature of epistemic kinds and epistemic normativity. These objectivists claim that the epistemic is the normative arena having to do with how we get onto the truth, the facts, not about the good or the right more broadly. Epistemological inquiry of this kind is therefore prior to, and independent of
Data Loading...
