Epistemology's Practical Sides
Very quick update just to throw some thoughts out there. I am working on a slightly longer piece on meritocracy for a blog post, so that will be my real contribution for this period. But! For now I will just say some rather unoriginal things about the practical consequences of epistemology, simply for the sakes of having my own thoughts set out and ordered. An epistemology is a theory of knowledge. For present purposes, I will assume that differences among epistemologies correspond to differences in what one purportedly must do (in at least some cases of social or scientific interest) to have actually attained knowledge, and that people generally think it important to attain knowledge. For that latter, I am going to make the rather strong assumption that something like a knowledge norm of action is held to, and so licensing something as knowledge is the way in which something is licensed as being the kind of thing one can sensibly act on the basis of. This is probably stronger than