Tuesday,
7 October 2003
Partial Knowledge
Daniel Andler, Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV)
& Ecole normale supérieure
12:05 pm, 817R Cathedral of Learning
Abstract:
The knowledge which any given agent, community, or subagency, possesses
at any given time is typically partial or incomplete, or so it appears
in the usual situations where that knowledge is notionally immersible,
possibly at the cost of some changes, in at least one larger or
richer body. But is partial knowledge genuine knowledge? On the
one hand, it seems that it had better be, if it is in fact pretty
much all we've got, except perhaps in special cases. On the other
hand, partiality may well affect the robustness of knowledge as
traditionally construed. Nor is this a merely theoretical worry:
some forms of relativism, for example, feed off the apparent brittleness
of partial knowledge. Several further problems arise, in connection
with the distributed character of scientific knowledge, commensurability
of subspecialties, growth of scientific knowledge, etc. Also, one
may wonder why partial knowledge fails to regularly lead to disaster,
practical or theoretical, when it is applied or deployed. To recover
some realistic and reasonable notion of working knowledge, we may
need to reconsider some tacitly held models of partial knowledge
and its relation to complete, or less partial, knowledge. One aim
of the paper is to suggest that we should pay more attention to
the partiality of knowledge and seek better models of the above
relation. Another aim is to suggest that a promising place to look
is the matrix of common skills which allows situated partial knowledge
to be deployed. By focusing on partiality, we may eventually be
led to view knowledge in a new light.
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