The genealogical method in epistemology

Abstract

In 1990 Edward Craig published a book called Knowledge and the State of Nature in which he introduced and defended a genealogical approach to epistemology. In recent years Craig's book has attracted a lot of attention, and his distinctive approach has been put to a wide range of uses including anti-realist metaepistemology, contextualism, relativism, anti-luck virtue epistemology, epistemic injustice, value of knowledge, pragmatism and virtue epistemology. While the number of objections to Craig's approach has accumulated, there has been no sustained attempt to develop answers to these objections. In this paper we provide answers to seven important objections in the literature.

From Paradigm-Based Explanation to Pragmatic Genealogy

“…the operation with assumptions known to be false)-what is known as 'Galilean' idealisation (McMullin 1985); or to the mixture of both which is known as 'caricature' (Frigg and Hartmann 2017). See Kusch and McKenna (2018a) for further discussion. 10 For a defence of model-building in philosophy, see Williamson (2017).…”

“…18 What makes pragmatic genealogy and paradigm-based explanation equally powerful in Fricker's eyes is that she interprets the genealogies as not only starting out from a prototype, but as suggesting also that the prototype is really the paradigm case or core of our (Lawlor 2013), to distinguish between blameless and blameworthy behaviour (Beebe 2012), or to honour the subject of knowledge attributions (Kusch 2009). See also Moore (1993), Kusch and McKenna (2018a), and Gerken (2017, chs. 3 and 9) as well as the essays in Greco and Henderson (2015) for overviews and critical discussions.…”

Genealogy and Knowledge-First Epistemology: A Mismatch?

“…10 You will be in the situation of the inquirer if you are ignorant as to whether p and need to find out, if you are to be successful in navigating your environment and satisfying even your most basic needs, whether p-whether, for example, the bear went into the cave. 11 This means that we can preserve neutrality between belief-first and knowledge-first accounts without prejudice to Craig's account: we can say that human beings need truths about their environment, leaving it open whether the 9 In developing this interpretation, I have particularly benefited from Kusch (2009Kusch ( , 2011Kusch ( , 2013, Kusch and McKenna (2018), and Fricker (2016), but see also M. Fricker (1998Fricker ( , 2007; E. Fricker (2015); Gardiner (2015); Gelfert (2011Gelfert ( , 2014; Greco (2007) 10 See Grimm (2015) for a supporting view. 11 Craig's focus on the inquirer's situation is informed by Williams (1973: 146), who sees a déformation professionnelle in philosophers' tendency to start from the perspective of the examiner rather than the inquirer.…”

“…Even among interpreters of Craig who are sympathetic to KFE, this is not a claim one often finds. Kusch and McKenna (2018), for example, argue that Craig's genealogy undercuts the claim that the concept of knowledge is primitive: by taking the failure of traditional analyses of the concept of knowledge to motivate a pragmatic genealogical approach to it, Craig's genealogy undercuts a crucial motivation for KFE, for Williamson takes that same failure to motivate the claim that the concept of knowledge is primitive. But I do not think we need to see these motivations as competing with each other; on the contrary, if the concept of knowledge is taken to be primitive, that just renders all the more pressing the question why this primitive notion should have been found useful, since its utility cannot then be explained in terms of the individual utility of its conceptual components.…”

“…I shall argue for the stronger claim that this problem does not in fact arise in the first place. 6 Kusch's own position is that this problem can be overcome: see Kusch (2009: 90) and Kusch and McKenna (2018). I say more about this proposal below.…”