ABSTRACT
Standard Analytic Epistemology typically relies on conceptual analysis of our core epistemic terms such as, e.g., “knowledge” or “justification.” A cross-cultural and cross-lingual perspective on this method leads to the worry that there may not be universally shared epistemic terms and that different languages use different core epistemic notions with different extensions. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that our epistemic common-sense terms pick out what is epistemically most significant or valuable. In my paper, I take these concerns as a starting point for exploring the prospects of an alternative methodological approach which I call “alethic instrumentalism.” The core idea behind this approach is to start with a properly designed purely epistemic goal and then to develop a framework of instrumentally valuable methods oriented towards this goal. This results in a somewhat revisionary framework of newly constructed core epistemic terms. In the paper, I elucidate the foundations of this new framework and, at the end, address a number of methodological and content-related objections to the approach.
