Are notions of objective knowledge and truth really any more tenable than relativist and constructivist notions of such things?
A brief critique of Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge
This paper could be construed, in part, as a critique of Paul Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge. It will give both accolades where this is due as well as elaborate on certain fundamental disagreements with his primary conclusion.
It seems obvious that the social construction of knowledge about issues such as, for instance, the origins of matter must lead to a priori inconsistent ‘truths’ about an event that can surely not be a matter of opinion. Boghossian, therefore, has my sympathies in his pursuit to expose the deep fallacies of epistemic relativism. And ‘equal validity’ just cannot, as Boghossian wisely argues, effectively resist the accusation of the overt irrationality of holding that many beliefs could be true about, what seems to be accepted by all as, only one event.
However, on account of the difficulties of locating an absolute system of thought by which to judge which relative and specific conceptual network, or system of rules, is the correct one by which to, then, judge which beliefs are actually true, it becomes indeed hard to side step the relativist challenge. And the relativist succeeds, thus, to lock us into a somewhat sceptical quagmire. Or a ‘norm-circularity’, according to Boghossian.
The suggestion with this paper is that Boghossian would have done better to have ended his project with a counter argument which looks more like a sceptical position, rather than proceed to argue in favour of some sort of defence for knowledge based in the real possibility of objectively located knowledge and truth. Since, in doing the latter, he finds himself in an awkward position of having to resort to attacking a straw-man; weak and strong constructivism.
But winning ground here, which, naturally, he does very easily, unfortunately, does not get him to where he claims it does: that it seems to be intuitively true ‘that there is a way things are which is independent of human opinion, and that we are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively reasonable, binding on anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence regardless of their social or cultural perspective’.
A brief critique of Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge
This paper could be construed, in part, as a critique of Paul Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge. It will give both accolades where this is due as well as elaborate on certain fundamental disagreements with his primary conclusion.
It seems obvious that the social construction of knowledge about issues such as, for instance, the origins of matter must lead to a priori inconsistent ‘truths’ about an event that can surely not be a matter of opinion. Boghossian, therefore, has my sympathies in his pursuit to expose the deep fallacies of epistemic relativism. And ‘equal validity’ just cannot, as Boghossian wisely argues, effectively resist the accusation of the overt irrationality of holding that many beliefs could be true about, what seems to be accepted by all as, only one event.
However, on account of the difficulties of locating an absolute system of thought by which to judge which relative and specific conceptual network, or system of rules, is the correct one by which to, then, judge which beliefs are actually true, it becomes indeed hard to side step the relativist challenge. And the relativist succeeds, thus, to lock us into a somewhat sceptical quagmire. Or a ‘norm-circularity’, according to Boghossian.
The suggestion with this paper is that Boghossian would have done better to have ended his project with a counter argument which looks more like a sceptical position, rather than proceed to argue in favour of some sort of defence for knowledge based in the real possibility of objectively located knowledge and truth. Since, in doing the latter, he finds himself in an awkward position of having to resort to attacking a straw-man; weak and strong constructivism.
But winning ground here, which, naturally, he does very easily, unfortunately, does not get him to where he claims it does: that it seems to be intuitively true ‘that there is a way things are which is independent of human opinion, and that we are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively reasonable, binding on anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence regardless of their social or cultural perspective’.
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