Cohen on 'Epistemic'

摘要

Stewart Cohen offers a critique of much contemporary epistemology. Epistemologies use the term epistemic' in order to specify the issues they investigate and about which they disagree. Cohen sees widespread confusion about these issues. The problem, he argues, is that epistemic' is functioning as an inadequately defined technical term. I will argue, rather, that the troubles come more from non-technical vocabulary, in particular with justification' and ought', and generally from the difficulty of explaining normativity. Overall, the message of this paper is that normativity is what's hard to understand, not the term epistemic.'