On the limits of a realist conception of knowledge – A pragmatist critique of Archerian realism




A pragmatist critique of Archerian realism

Kivinen O, Piiroinen T

PublisherBLACKWELL PUBLISHING

2006

Sociological Review

SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

SOCIOL REV

54

2

224

241

18

0038-0261

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2006.00611.x



In her book Being Human (2000), Margaret Archer presents intriguing pragmatist emphases on practice, embodiment and non-linguistic knowing-how, as regards to understanding humanity. However, as Archer attempts to conjoin these ideas with the morphogenetic realism she has been working on for the last few decades, she ends up holding on to a subject-object dualism, which makes things complicated. The authors' alternative pragmatist account defended in the article flows from Deweyan pragmatist and Rortian antirepresentationalist insights. The main issues in the article concern Archer's complicated tripartite concept of knowledge, which is contrasted with a (Deweyan-Rylean) distinction between linguistic knowledge-that and embodied knowing-how. It is argued that knowledge is a natural, sophisticated tool that human organisms use when coping with their environment; it is always acquired on the strength of embodied knowing-how, from some actor's point of view, but the term `knowledge' itself should be reserved for the propositional, linguistic knowledge-that.




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