2007/04/25 by Barry Allen · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity #Education and Critical Thinking Development #Classical Philosophy and Thought
paper · doi:10.1177/0725513607076129
openalex publication_date 2007/04/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
The so-called linguistic turn in philosophy intensified (rather than overcame) the rationalism that has haunted Western ideas about knowledge since antiquity. Orthodox accounts continue to present knowledge as a linguistic, logical quality, expressed in statements or theories that are well justified by evidence and actually true. Restating themes from the author's Knowledge and Civilization (2004a), I introduce an alternative conception of knowledge designed to overcome these propositional, discursive, logocentric presumptions. I interpret knowledge as a quality of artifacts. A surgical operation or a bridge may be as good examples of knowledge as any true scientific proposition or theory. I define the quality that marks an artifact as a work of knowledge as superlative artifactual performance. To explain knowledge in these terms is not to offer a metaphysical or epistemological theory of its essence or concept. Instead, I am explaining knowledge in terms of its good, its value, the human point of caring to know.