Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Articles
1.
INTRODUCTION
What's so special about human knowledge? In a word, accountability. Only epistemic subjects can possess knowledge; and to be an epistemic subject just is to be accountable for what one believes, just as to be an agent is to be accountable for what one does. But while simply stated, this answer is controversial and rich in implications. Defending and explaining it will initially circle around two closely related questions. What sort of thing (phenomenon, object of study) is knowledge? And how is this thing, whatever it is, to be investigated? Later we will get to one of the central questions raised by linking human knowledge with accountability: namely, to what extent does human knowledge depend on critical reflection? The answer will be that, while a capacity for critical assessment is an essential characteristic of epistemic subjects, the role of reflection is much more circumscribed that some influential philosophers have supposed.
2.
EXAMINING KNOWLEDGE
We readily ascribe knowledge to animals as well as to adult humans. This leads some philosophers to think that there is no essential difference between knowledge-ascriptions in the two cases. This conclusion is too hasty. Clearly, human knowledge is more extensive and in various ways more sophisticated than animal knowledge (though animals can do things we can't). But is human knowledge, at bottom, more of the sort of knowledge that animals have, or do the differences amount to a difference in kind? This could be so, even if there is a generic concept of knowledge that applies both to animals and human beings.
We can ask many kinds of questions about knowledge. We might be curious about what is known about various matters at different times and places, and how that knowledge was obtained: a matter for historians of science, amongst others. Alternatively, we might want to investigate the capacities and processes that produce and sustain the individual human being's beliefs about the world around him, and how those processes sometimes lead a person astray: a matter for psychology or cognitive science. Looking beyond the individual, we might study the workings of the social institutions that make possible large-scale investigative projects of the kind we see in modern scientific research: a...