Toward a Better Epistemology: Why Do We Care About What We Know?
A reaction to the ‘Gettier problem’
Why should we assume, with Socrates, that it is useful or even possible to give one single account of the many instances of knowledge? Why should we expect that each instance of knowledge is a branch off the main tree of Knowledge? What if, instead, each instance of knowledge is loosely bound to others by a Wittgensteinian “family resemblance”?
Epistemology
The study of the definition and meaning of knowledge has, since Socrates, been known as epistemology. And the project of epistemology, as traditionally conceived, is too restrictive. It is restrictive in at least three ways.
First, it tries to make a clean taxonomy of two broad types of knowledge: “propositional” knowledge, which is a statement we make about something, and “non-propositional” knowledge, which includes subtypes like ability (e.g. riding a bicycle, learning to swim) and familiarity (e.g. recognizing a person, navigating a neighborhood). It’s not actually possible to do this cleanly. We can’t always distinguish when our knowledge is propositional or not.
Bicycling and swimming are only truly learned by “doing,” yet we call out support to those who are learning, like: “Once the bicycle has momentum…
