Abstract
The editors and contributors for this excellent and timely volume have provided a great service to epistemology. Over the last thirty years or so, epistemology has taken somewhat of a ‘linguistic turn’. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the development of views like contextualism, contrastivism, and the ambiguity theory of ‘know’, all of which seek to explain certain persistent epistemological puzzles by examining the word ‘know’ in addition to, or instead of, the concepts of knowing and knowledge. Despite this shift to a greater focus on epistemic language, epistemology continues to be, in many ways, a quintessentially armchair subdiscipline. And many discussions in epistemology have been hampered (even if this hampering hasn’t always been acknowledged) by a lack of information about how language users around the world talk about and conceptualize the epistemic. This volume marks an important step in rectifying the situation. The twelve chapters (along with an accompanying ‘Manifesto’ and Introduction) give analytic epistemology a wealth of cross-linguistic data and related theorizing. Most chapters deal with the words ‘know’ and ‘knowledge’, but there are other contributions, such as Shane Ryan and Chienkuo Mi's fascinating examination of how Confucius’ philosophy contributes to virtue epistemology (ch. 4), and Lisa Matthewson and Jennifer Glougie's rigorous examination of the concepts of justification and truth across a half dozen or so languages (ch. 7).
Published Version
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call