About face: a reply to Suárez and Fuller

Abstract

Many thanks to Steve Fuller and Mauricio Suárez for their thoughtful comments, as they have helped me clarify and further my thinking about these matters. Suárez argues anthroepistemology is entangled in the following trilemma. Anthroepistemology is either: (a) a folk epistemology, in which case its denial of Thesis (1) is false because common sense is epistemically continuous with science; or (b) a meta-discipline, in which case it is false because there is no single universal set of epistemic aims. Anthroepistemology avoids (a) and (b) only by (c): reverting to traditional nonnatural epistemology, an option incompatible with anthroepistemology's naturalism.Suárez's argument, however, is unsound as it rests upon misunderstandings of anthroepistemology and epistemology. His first horn supposes that 'anthroepistemology merely describes our everyday cognitive and epistemic practices' and so looks for epistemology in the pre-reflective, uncritical evidential customs of ordinary folk. It does not. Following African philosophers Hountandji (1983) and Oruka (1990), I argue that a folk's myths and worldview -including its unreflective, common-sense judgments about evidence and knowledge -lack the critical self-reflection and systematicity required to constitute what we typically regard as a philosophical theory of knowledge. Just as we need to distinguish doing physics from doing folk physics, I argue we need to distinguish doing epistemology from doing epistemic folklore and psychology (pace the likes of Wittgenstein, Bloor and Michael Williams). Indeed, the latter endeavor seems little more than a systematic ethnologystyle rendering of a culture's folk evidential notions. But the latter is not anthroepistemology. Rather, anthroepistemology looks for epistemology in the self-reflective, theoretical practices of critical thinkers, not the unreflective workaday practices of ordinary cognizers.