4. Intuition, Understanding, And The Human Form Of Life

Can Inferentialism Contribute to Social Epistemology?

“…Social epistemology, as the term implies, recognises the process that gives rise to knowledge; however, at least in the form proposed by Goldman, it does so in a way that pays insufficient attention to the distinctive character of humans and the features which distinguish them from other life‐forms. Hegel, according to Stekeler‐Weithofer, sees the task of philosophy as developing human self‐consciousness and turns ‘“metaphysics” in the sense of reflecting on the basic forms of physis or nature, that is, on “what there is” … into philosophical anthropology’ (Stekeler‐Weithofer, , p. 110). In this article, I will argue that, to develop an approach to social epistemology as an alternative to the competing claims of sociology and philosophy, a similar transformation needs to be made in respect to epistemology, i.e.…”

“…Therefore any concrete notion of truth and knowledge (as it is defined and developed by us) is always limited to a regional domain . It is limited to a genos in Aristotle's sense, which, as a topic of discourse, is always already situated in a larger, in a sense ‘unlimited’ and ‘holistic’ world (Stekeler‐Weithofer, , p.111).…”