I’m a bit confused just what you are really against about street epistemology. It seems, as you describe it, that street epistemology may often not be an appropriate means to achieve ends you care about, nor necessarily even the ends the proponents of street epistemology care about, but this just seems to be saying that this relatively obscure thing of street epistemology is ineffective at serving certain purposes. So what then is there to be against, other than perhaps unskillfulness?
Maybe I’m just thrown by your post’s title and you meant this more to just be “here’s why street epistemology is ineffective” or something like that?
I gave a bunch of concrete criticisms. For those reasons I think it’s flawed as a practice and approach to discourse. What’s there to be confused about?
Well, when someone says they are “against” something I usually expect there to be a presentation of reasons why the thing one is against should be avoided. I came away from reading this with a sense that you found plenty of things you didn’t like about street epistemology but not much of an argument towards a norm that excludes it. That made me curious if there was something more you didn’t say that causes you to title the post “against street epistemology” where there is some norm/ought you meant to advance that I didn’t pick up on out of the various reasons you find street epistemology either unlikeable or failing to satisfy some criterion, including criteria street epistemology thinks it fulfills.
Put another way, you told me a bunch of reasons why street epistemology sucks at some things, but didn’t really tie together for me why that matters to you or convince me why that should matter to me, and that’s the kind of thing I expected from a title like “against street epistemology”.
If a practice is flawed and fruitless, isn’t that a reason to avoid it? That was the idea, anyway. What I said about it has to do with its structure and content, not with what I “dislike” about it.
But is it really fruitless? Yes, you showed it’s flawed, but I can immediately imagine ways it might achieve what seems to be its goal of getting people to notice better how they came to think what they think and throw it into a light where they might re-examine those reasons and move towards reflective equilibrium. Maybe it’s not the best way to do it, but it’s a way that likely works at least sometimes for some people or else I would expect it wouldn’t have been so salient to you as to be worth writing about (compare the way no one has to write a post explaining why giving yourself concussions to lose weight is a bad idea—it’s got no proponents, no reasons to think it would work, and probably no kernel of value that might be doing something in a less-than-optimal way but still doing something in the expected direction).
That’s what I’m trying to get at: why do you think it’s fruitless? I see arguments showing it has problems, but not a clear line of reasoning to show me that those problems make it not worth it weighed against whatever benefits people who promote it believe it delivers. If I was a proponent of street epistemology I’d read this and say “yeah, sure, it’s not a perfect method, but on balance it’s better than not doing it so I’m going to keep doing it” and being neutral I read this and say “yeah, okay, I see, there are a few problems, but every method has some problems for some purposes, so I remain neutral on it and am not swayed either way”. Again, since you say “against”, I anticipated and wanted to ask if there was some argument for “against” rather than “neutral but better informed of the caveats”.
I’m a bit confused just what you are really against about street epistemology. It seems, as you describe it, that street epistemology may often not be an appropriate means to achieve ends you care about, nor necessarily even the ends the proponents of street epistemology care about, but this just seems to be saying that this relatively obscure thing of street epistemology is ineffective at serving certain purposes. So what then is there to be against, other than perhaps unskillfulness?
Maybe I’m just thrown by your post’s title and you meant this more to just be “here’s why street epistemology is ineffective” or something like that?
I gave a bunch of concrete criticisms. For those reasons I think it’s flawed as a practice and approach to discourse. What’s there to be confused about?
Well, when someone says they are “against” something I usually expect there to be a presentation of reasons why the thing one is against should be avoided. I came away from reading this with a sense that you found plenty of things you didn’t like about street epistemology but not much of an argument towards a norm that excludes it. That made me curious if there was something more you didn’t say that causes you to title the post “against street epistemology” where there is some norm/ought you meant to advance that I didn’t pick up on out of the various reasons you find street epistemology either unlikeable or failing to satisfy some criterion, including criteria street epistemology thinks it fulfills.
Put another way, you told me a bunch of reasons why street epistemology sucks at some things, but didn’t really tie together for me why that matters to you or convince me why that should matter to me, and that’s the kind of thing I expected from a title like “against street epistemology”.
If a practice is flawed and fruitless, isn’t that a reason to avoid it? That was the idea, anyway. What I said about it has to do with its structure and content, not with what I “dislike” about it.
But is it really fruitless? Yes, you showed it’s flawed, but I can immediately imagine ways it might achieve what seems to be its goal of getting people to notice better how they came to think what they think and throw it into a light where they might re-examine those reasons and move towards reflective equilibrium. Maybe it’s not the best way to do it, but it’s a way that likely works at least sometimes for some people or else I would expect it wouldn’t have been so salient to you as to be worth writing about (compare the way no one has to write a post explaining why giving yourself concussions to lose weight is a bad idea—it’s got no proponents, no reasons to think it would work, and probably no kernel of value that might be doing something in a less-than-optimal way but still doing something in the expected direction).
That’s what I’m trying to get at: why do you think it’s fruitless? I see arguments showing it has problems, but not a clear line of reasoning to show me that those problems make it not worth it weighed against whatever benefits people who promote it believe it delivers. If I was a proponent of street epistemology I’d read this and say “yeah, sure, it’s not a perfect method, but on balance it’s better than not doing it so I’m going to keep doing it” and being neutral I read this and say “yeah, okay, I see, there are a few problems, but every method has some problems for some purposes, so I remain neutral on it and am not swayed either way”. Again, since you say “against”, I anticipated and wanted to ask if there was some argument for “against” rather than “neutral but better informed of the caveats”.