The Epistemology of Empirical Essentialism



As part of my series on the Ground Rules of Civil Society, I finally wrote up a detailed exposition of my personal epistemology (theory of knowledge):

org.radicalcentrism.drernie.EmpiricalEssentialism.20050430
1. belief = character.interpret(experience)
2. knowledge = community.articulate(belief)
3. action = purpose.apply(knowledge)
4. experience = reality.interact(action)

Apologies for the geeky Java-like syntax, which simply means:

output = context.process(input)

While not quite up to academic standards of rigor, we have some hope that this does represent a significant intellectual insight. In particular, rather than the old Platonic definition of knowledge as "justified true belief", I view knowledge as "contextually-accurate, paradigmatically-justified belief."

If anybody knows a friendly philosopher who'd be willing to help us critique/flesh this out, please pass them along via [Feedback]!

Posted: Mon - May 2, 2005 at 08:54 AM        

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