Is Knowledge Relative Because Epistemic Intuitions Vary?

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Is knowledge relative because epistemic intuitions vary?

In a paper entitled Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions, Weinberg, Nichols and Stich (who I will hereafter refer to as WNS) have proposed a challenge for the “normative project” (WNS 2001: 2) of epistemology, a project which involves taking an analytic perspective on epistemology and thereby setting norms for how to pursue knowledge. One knowledge-forming processes that the this project is based on, as WNS point out, our “epistemic intuitions” (WNS 2001: 5), and it is from these intuitions that we may work out a normative account of epistemology. The problem, as WNS state, is that if groups of people other than those that generally write about epistemology have different intuitions on these matters, it undermines the normative status of the epistemological standpoint that is advocated. WNS go on to make the claim that not only is this a possibility but is in fact reality, supporting this claim with data from several experiments investigating the epistemic intuitions of people from differing cultures or different socio-economic statuses (SESs). From this and other evidence, it seems that there is indeed a difference of intuitions between Westerners and East Asians, whereby the former, they claim, are more “detached” and “analytic” regarding situations, while the latter have a more “holistic” view and are more focused on the relationships in situations. If this is so, then it seems that if each group's conception of knowledge is based on their own epistemic intuitions, we would have to say that what knowledge is differed between these two groups. And, of course, unless we were able to come up with some intuition-independent way of adjudicating between them we could not...

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...ling to use speed as a measure for the objective goodness of a car. Yet whatever the value that the concepts have within their societies, knowledge itself is not relative, but is fixed to our own intuitions and therefore criteria. That which has somewhat different criteria is not to be called knowledge even though the understanding may play a similar role. There need be no conflict in assigning something cknowledge and not knowledge, if it is emphasised that these are different concepts – which may be broken down with agreement into more universal concepts.

Bibliography:

Weinberg, Nichols, Stich. 2001: Normativity and epistemic intuitions. Philosophical Topics, 29, 429-60.

Sosa 2005: A defense of the use of intuitions in philosophy. In M. Bishop and Murphy, Stich and his Critics.

All page references are to pages in the reading pack.

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