Quote:
"J.L. Austin and his fellow 1950s philosophers of language are said to have played a game called Vish! You look up a word, and then look up words in its dictionary definition; when you have got back to the original word, you cry Vish! for vicious circle."
(Ian Hacking, "The Social Construction of What?")
|
In fact, your cite from the dictionary is a bit of a fudge: you start with definition 2a). So what is 1, and how many lettered subsections are there?
If I reach down my Shorter OED, I can see that there are 14 different definitions for the word 'knowledge'. If I were to have the full OED to hand, I don't know how many more would be added to the list, but I have no doubt that it would be considerable lengthened. And no dictionary is ever complete.
What I mean here by a 'way of knowing' is something like this: it is a process, enshrined in an institution or set of institutions, through which members achieve a minimal, agreed-upon set of statements about the world which they consider to be true.
If we are talking about a set of institutions, then some statements may be local to specific institutions within the set. For example, in the Australian desert, initiated men have a different set of statements to initiated women, and both have sets which are different to those of the uninitiated. Similarly within the set of scientific institutions some sciences have local truths that others do not share.
Each institution or set of institutions can be considered to have a set of procedures for the production of truth statements. Some of those procedures can be formally stated, while others have to be acquired by practice. The latter are apt to be strongly embedded within specific contexts - places, gatherings, settings and so on.
Institutions within a set are not cloned; they develop historically according to contingencies which are both internal - determined by developments within the domain itself - and external. So despite cross-communication, there is a natural tendency for dispersal (or entropy, if you will).
The knowledge associated with these institutions is made up, then, of both statements and of practices, some of which are codifiable, others less so. Michael Polanyi draws our attention to the fact that some scientific laboratories are more productive over long periods of time than others, and that the less productive labs were unable to produce similarly rich results even if they did their best to emulate procedures. This, he suggested, is because much of the productivity could be accounted for by un-codified and un-codifiable practices that were handed down through unwitting demonstration and imitation. (Procedural knowledge).
Your three part description of the scientific method does not seem to conform to what scientists actually do. This was one of Feyerabend's main points, and he made it by referring to how science really happened, not through the statement of a set of rules. What I think you have done is to set out very clearly the
ideology of the scientist, which remains much dependent on Popper. As I mentioned earlier on in this thread, most philosophers of science would not, today, subscribe to Popper's account.