(University of Oulu)
ABSTRAKT: In my forthcoming book, Doing, Knowing, and Getting it Right: Methodologism as Pragmatism (Cambridge University Press), I call my approach to knowing and meaning ‚methodologism.‘ Building on the influential philosophies of Wilfrid Sellars, Robert Brandom, Jaroslav Peregrin, and Huw Price, this book introduces a novel neo-pragmatist philosophy. In this talk, I will explain how my approach differs from these and what methodologism means.
Firstly, methodologism is resolutely anti-representationalist in both epistemology and the philosophy of language. A key idea is that knowing can, in general, be defined as a correct way of doing. This view applies to both the sciences and more mundane ways of knowing in our various forms of life. Colloquially speaking, ‚methods‘ are correct rule-bound ways of doing things. Another key idea is the classical pragmatist view that our most fundamental aim in epistemological approaches is to settle our beliefs. In the absence of a settlement (or the possibility of achieving a settlement in practice), the secondary aim is to guide our conversational practice. These are two general goals for our ‚methods.‘
Further, while the methodologist framework and a path to methodologism are laid out in the book, many open questions remain. One is the exact meaning of correctness. Is it possible to distinguish correct from incorrect with regard to any practice and in any context? Additionally, methodologism is pluralist and recognizes that there are many field-specific forms of correctness. This seems to be a consequence of Sellars’s idea of material inference. It is therefore also necessary to ask how it is best to investigate these variable practices and their entailed normativity.