Topics Knowledge

Question My question concerns epistemology and "post-modernism". Why do philosophical books on epistemology fail to discuss the problem of how one knows what a text means? Postmodernism have raised various questions about the possibility of how one knows what a text means, but the only books on epistemology I've seen talk about things like foundationalism, coherence, Gettier counter-examples, etc, but miss talking about Derrida's deconstructionism, and the positions of people like Fish and Foucault. Furthermore, who are the philosophers working on epistemology "answers" to postmodern thinkers? Is there a must read rejection of postmodern scepticism? I am aware of important critiques amongst Christian thinkers (e.g. D.A. Carson's "The Gagging of God") but I suspect there must be more philosophical responses.

Accepted:
December 19, 2013

Comments

I discern the following meaning in your text: You're asking why epistemology books generally don't cover postmodernist arguments for skepticism about our knowledge of a text's meaning.

One reason might be this: Arguments for skepticism about our knowledge of a text's meaning are merely applications of more general skeptical arguments about, for example, our knowledge of other minds. If so, then it's probably best to focus on the more general skeptical arguments to see if they're good enough to warrant applying them to specific cases such as textual meaning.

A second reason might be this: Arguments for skepticism about our knowledge of a text's meaning arise mainly from philosophical issues outside epistemology per se -- for example, issues in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. If so, then you'd be more likely to find them discussed in books on those topics.

Some analytic philosophers have engaged with postmodernist thinkers in detail. Two examples come to mind: (1) John Searle's extended critique of deconstruction in the pages of the New York Review of Books in the 1980s; (2) Paul Boghossian's book Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford University Press, 2006). No doubt there are others I'm now forgetting, but you might start with those.