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Research keywords:
Ordinary language philosophy; social epistemology; non-ideal theory
Dissertation title:
"How Should I Know?": Making a Claim for Ordinary Language Philosophy
Dissertation abstract and research profile:
As we know only too well, speakers know how to use words like "know," though epistemologists know that the concepts those words express are something else. But goodness knows how we can be expected to know our way around this philosophical territory if we don't start with language. For all I know, epistemologists know full well that we use such words in a variety of ways for a number of purposes in a range of different contexts, but they also know enough to know that knowledge exists independently of its expression. Now, I might not know what I'm talking about, and I probably sound either like a know-it-all or a know-nothing, but I propose to think a little more about the kinds of claims we ordinarily make with a word like "know." You never know, confronting how and why we use "know" in the production of different speech acts might help us to make sense of how and why we become liable to different forms of critique when we are adjudged to have misused it. By now, perhaps you know where I am going: an ordinary language interrogation of epistemology. Who knows if it will be worthwhile. But dissertations are, if nothing else, improvisations in the disorders of linguistic misfires—know what I mean?
My dissertation is an attempt to think about epistemic discourse and critique through the lens of the ordinary language philosophy tradition, with a view to making interventions in contemporary epistemology. As gestured to above, "know" is ordinarily used in the production of all sorts of non-statemental speech acts, which matters not simply for getting clear on what speakers mean when they use the word but for bringing into view the ways in which epistemic discourse—which includes acts such as asking questions, making confessions, proposing suggestions, issuing assurances, etc.—goes wrong. Central to this work is an attempt to disrupt the widespread view that we can make sense of knowledge claims independent of paying careful attention to their modes of expression.
I make this case by outlining and defending a non-propositional speech act account of epistemic discourse through rereadings of Wittgenstein's On Certainty, Austin's "Other Minds," and Cavell's The Claim of Reason. In each case, I endeavor to rehabilitate and defend the tragic ethos of these attempts to clarify epistemic discourse and its stakes in opposition to traditional epistemology, logical positivism, and contemporary contextualism, respectively. In chapter 4, I turn to confront the political stakes of this account through an historical and philosophical rehabilitation of the ordinary language philosophy tradition, which I defend as a species of progressive, non-ideal theory. In Chapter 5, I show OLP's usefulness for contemporary social epistemology through a critique of Miranda Fricker’s influential account of epistemic injustice. While seeking to complement her powerful case for the imbrication of epistemology and ethics, I argue, in light of the previous chapters, that this case is restricted by a commitment to a propositional account of knowledge and a vision of testimony as assertion-based telling. This commitment, I propose, ushers in a distortion of the variety of ordinary epistemic injustices that speakers suffer—instances of which I highlight under the rubric of “epistemic unacknowledgment.”
My peer-reviewed publications include "Taking a Plunge: A Cavellian Reappraisal of Austin’s Analogy between ‘I know’ and ‘I promise’” (British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2019) and "Rehabilitating the City of Pigs: The Dialectics of Plato's Account of His Beautiful Cities" (Journal of Ancient Philosophy, 2018). I recently published a co-authored piece with Professor Alice Crary, “Who’s Afraid of Ordinary Language Philosophy? A Plea for Reviving a Wrongly Reviled Philosophical Tradition” (Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 2019), and Alice and I are working on a monograph under contract at Cambridge University Press, tentatively titled Wittgenstein and Political Thought (anticipated 2023).
Email:
delaj238@newschool.edu