Essay On Propositional Epistemology

Propositional epistemology is field of study in philosophy that deals with theories of knowledge. Traditionally, epistemology consisted of the idea that if one was to have knowledge, one must have a justified true belief. This was held to be the case until Edmund Gettier wrote a paper titled “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” challenging the traditional account of knowledge. This was one of the first times that epistemic norms had been challenged. A more recent criticism of propositional epistemology is the feminist critique of the field. Propositional epistemology is the idea that a subject knows a proposition, simplified in atomic language as “S knows P”, where S, stands in for any possible knower and P stands in for any possible predicate. Many epistemologist never truly thought of the importance of who the …show more content…
Her paper explores the idea of a “master-epistemology” that is able to critique the epistemic knowledge of other cultures and belief systems. She conveys this idea by writing that “epistemology presumes its right to judge, for example, the knowledge claims of midwives, [and] the ontologies of First-Nations peoples[…]” (Alcoff 68). This idea is similar to Kuhn’s and Strathern’s claiming that a paradigm exists in which a field of study has natural and socially generated biases that occur due to the lack of an application of values in a field. Alcoff rejects epistemology due to its “lack of political reflexivity” (69). If epistemology was to incorporate values into its studies, situations of discrimination and assumption could be prevented. An easy way of doing this leads back to Longino’s suggestion of expanding one’s epistemic community. If a group of First-Nations peoples are in your epistemic community there is no longer a need to assume their ontologies, instead you can have something closer to objective knowledge from a direct