19-20 PY3210: Themes from Contemporary Epistemology

There has been a sharp revival of interest in fundamental questions relating to knowledge in recent years. These include the status of testimonial knowledge; the extent to which possession of knowledge requires one or more virtues; the suggestion that knowledge can be a group rather than an individual achievement; the idea that it is unjust to place people in positions where they cannot acquire knowledge that might empower them; the relationship between knowing how to do something and that something is the case; the role of bias, discrimination and presupposition. Building on the first year course on epistemology, this course focusses on one or more of these and investigates them in depth.

This year’s course is entitled “Practical Knowlege”. So what is practical knowledge? The easiest way to understand this is to contrast it with “theoretical knowledge”, which was the major concern of philosophy for two thousand years. Typical examples of things known theoretically include “2+2=4”, “China has a population of over 1 billion people”, “Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen”, “Egham is west of London”… etc. etc. When, in the first year, we looked at the possibility of defining knowledge in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions (belief, justification, truth etc.) it was theoretical knowledge that we had in mind. Now, one problem with an emphasis on this understanding of knowledge is that it tends to reinforce the idea that knowledge is an achievement of the reflective mind. Just think about Descartes’ attempt to determine the things he knows with certainty. Another way to put this is that theoretical knowledge tends towards an account that eliminates or at least plays down the role of the body in our cognitive interactions with the world. Theoretical knowledge seems like the kind of thing that something could have even if it had no body at all. It doesn’t seem crazy to hold that a computer does or might come to have theoretical knowledge: why can’t it know the population of China, for example? But now consider something like playing an instrument or a sport, riding a bicycle, driving a car, operating on someone’s brain, and a myriad other things. It’s not that we can’t imagine a machine being able to do some of these things; it’s just that it has to have the equivalent of a body to do them. What practical knowledge expresses, then, is our ability to do things because of way we engage physically in the world. Now this raises a series of important and related questions. For example, is practical knowledge the sort of thing that only humans (and perhaps machines) can have; or is it something that animals can have too? If animals can have it does that mean it’s distinct from theoretical knowledge? And if not does that require that we credit animals with theoretical knowledge as well as practical knowledge? Since we account for our own grasp of the facts that comprise theoretical knowledge in terms of our languages does that in turn mean that we must allow that some animals at least have such a thing? Are linguistic abilities themselves a kind of practical knowledge? One way in which these questions have played out in philosophy is in the debate about the relationship between knowing how to do something and knowing that something is the case. This distinction was taken as a given for the latter half of the twentieth century but has come under pressure more recently, where what are referred to as “intellectualists” have challenged the “anti-intellectualism” they perceive in dividing up cognitive abilities in this way. This course takes that debate as its starting point but explores it in ways that illuminate its broader intellectual significance.