ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3 I defended a realist approach to meaning. This chapter begins my attempt to provide an alternative to postmodern feminism.
Traditionally, there are four issues in which philosophers with a predilection for epistemology have been interested. One is the question to which Socrates demanded an answer: ‘What is knowledge?’ What do we mean by ‘knowledge’? Answers have ranged from Plato’s, in TheMeno, that knowledge is recollection, through to the theory to which analytical philosophers devoted so much attention, that knowledge is justified, true belief. Connected to the first question has been a second: ‘Are we justified in claiming to know anything at all?’ Descartes, the arch bourgeois individualist, during a break from the Thirty Years War in France in the seventeenth century, sat in his room, contemplating the extent to which he could trust his senses. Thought seemed to him to be far more trustworthy. Locke, a little later, argued just the opposite: that one could tell, by the nature or character of the perceptions, which ones were caused by qualities in objects and which arose out of the mind’s own musings. Both thinkers, however, were ‘foundationalists’ to the extent of setting out to build the whole edifice of knowledge on secure foundations: in the one case ‘thoughts’ and, in the other, ‘sensory experience’. Subsequent attempts to answer the questions, by those who regarded each of these solutions as inadequate, have been many and varied. They range from Kant’s: ‘No experience would be possible unless I had knowledge of the external world; I do have experience. Therefore I have knowledge of the external world’; through to pragmatist and ‘common sense’ solutions.
