scholarly journals Keynes, Kuhn and the sociology of knowledge: a comment on Pernecky and Wojick

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 1415-1424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rod Thomas

Abstract Mark Pernecky and Paul Wojick use T.S. Kuhn’s philosophy of science to diagnose The problematic nature and consequences of the effort to force Keynes into the conceptual cul-de-sac of Walrasian economics. But their diagnosis is itself problematical in nature and consequence. It assumes the virtues of a pre-Kuhnian philosophy of knowledge that the Kuhnian meta-framework overtly discards. One way to eliminate the inconsistency is to recognise that Kuhn’s philosophy of science and sociology of knowledge function to immunise theories from criticism. Anyone who wishes to embrace a sociologically more critical philosophy ought to consider instead the philosophical attitude of critical rationalism.

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (9999) ◽  
pp. 83-94
Author(s):  
Stanisław Czerniak ◽  

This article aims to reconstruct Max Scheler’s conception of three types of knowledge, outlined in his late work Philosophical Perspectives (1928). Scheler distinguished three kinds of knowledge: empirical, used to exercise control over nature, eidetic (essential) and metaphysical. The author reviews the epistemological criteria that underlie this distinction, and its functionalistic assumptions. In the article’s polemic part he accuses Scheler of a) crypto-dualism in his theory of knowledge, which draws insufficient distinctions between metaphysical and eidetic knowledge; b) totally omitting the status of the humanities in his classification of knowledge types; c) consistently developing a philosophy of knowledge without resort to the research tools offered by the philosophy of science, which takes such analyses out of their social and historical context (i.e. how knowledge is created in today’s scientific communities).


2005 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 291-307
Author(s):  
Ernest C. Lucas

A discussion of the history of interpretation of three passages in Daniel (3:17; 2:31-45; 9:24-27) is used as the basis for some initial reflections on how it is possible to accept a ‘hermeneutic of unfolding’ which involves the participation of the reader while maintaining that a text has an inherent meaning. It is suggested that a distinction can be made between this ‘meaning’ and the differing ‘significances’ that a text may have for particular readers. Michael Polanyi’s ‘post-critical’ philosophy of knowledge, which involves the personal participation of the knower in the act of understanding, is outlined briefly. It is argued that his concepts of ‘tacit knowledge’, ‘indwelling’ and ‘imaginative sympathy’, and the roles they play in gaining knowledge, provide support for the approach to a hermeneutic of unfolding proposed earlier in the paper.


Author(s):  
Adam Chmielewski

AbstractIn this paper, I consider whether the critical rationalist philosophy of science may provide a rationale for trusting scientific knowledge. In the first part, I refer to several insights of Karl Popper’s social and political philosophy in order to see whether they may be of help in offsetting the distrust of science spawned by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the second part, I address the more general issue of whether the theoretical principles of the critical rationalist philosophy of science may afford a foundation for building trust in science. Both parts of the discussion, confined for the sake of the argument largely to the repudiation of the concept of good reasons for considering a theory to be true, imply that this question would have to be answered negatively. Against this, I argue that such a conclusion is based on a misconception of the nature of scientific knowledge: critical rationalism views science as a cognitive regime which calls for bold theories and at the same time demands a rigorous and continuous distrust towards them, and it is precisely this attitude that should be adopted as a compelling argument for trusting science.


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