Metaepistemology
[1] The traditional view of epistemology holds that it is an a priori, normative field that is methodologically autonomous from the sciences.
Expressivism argues that epistemic statements do not aim to represent facts in the first place, but instead express attitudes such as approval or disapproval.
Views such as quasi-realism and constitutivism attempt to reap some of the benefits of realism without accepting the existence of mind-independent epistemic facts.
[4] In 1978, also inspired by the work of Roderick Chisholm, William Alston released "Meta-Ethics and Meta-Epistemology", the first paper with the explicit aim of defining the distinction between metaepistemology and "substantive epistemology", in which he defined metaepistemology as the study of "the conceptual and methodological foundations of [epistemology].
"[5] Whilst subsequent theorists using the term have agreed on the need for a distinction between metaepistemology and other areas of epistemology, there are substantial disagreements about how and where to draw the lines.
[14] Some theorists, such as William Alston, characterise metaepistemology as dealing with the analysis of epistemic concepts such as knowledge.
[9] Others, such as Dominique Kuenzle and Christos Kyriacou, argue that the analysis of knowledge is a paradigmatic example of a substantive first-order epistemological question, not a metaepistemological one.
For example, according to this view, a person being an epistemic realist, anti-realist, or relativist has no implications for whether they should be a coherentist, foundationalist, or reliabilist, and vice versa.
[21] Epistemology is traditionally viewed as an a priori discipline focused on reflective thought rather than empirical evidence, and as autonomous from the results and methods of the sciences.
[26] More traditional methods include the use of intuitions about particular cases or thought experiments to support epistemological theories or ideas.
[31] However, the problems posed to the conceptual analysis of knowledge by Gettier cases have led some philosophers such as Timothy Williamson to become pessimistic about such approaches.
Williamson and naturalists such as Hilary Kornblith have also argued that epistemologists should be concerned with actual epistemic phenomena and states rather than words and concepts.
[34] Practical explication, also known as a function-first approach, identifies the purpose or function of a term to clarify its meaning.
Proposed functions of the term knowledge, for example, include its role in identifying reliable sources of information and in marking an end-point for inquiry.
[36] Inspired by Craig, Jonathan Weinberg has proposed an explicitly metaepistemological pragmatism that allows epistemic concepts to be redesigned to fulfil practical goals, resulting in a method of "analysis-by-imagined-reconstruction".
Generalists, on the other hand, argue that the principles underlying knowledge are required to reliably identify cases.
[40] At the same time, feminists typically argue against a value-free of "disinterested" methodology, holding that epistemology is inherently value-laden.
[44] For example, Sally Haslanger has argued from a pragmatist feminist perspective that epistemic concepts should be reformed to remove androcentric biases so they can better serve their purposes within epistemology.
[55] It constitutes a major departure from the realist's semantic framework of cognitivism, which claims that epistemic statements attempt to accurately represent facts.
[58] Within metaepistemology, this view generally argues that it is a constitutive part of the concept of belief that it aims at the truth.
The parity thesis holds that because metaethics and metaepistemology have important structural similarities to one another, their answers to metanormative questions such as whether there are any normative facts will be the same.
Similarly utilising the parity premise, Sharon Street, Allan Gibbard and Matthew Chrisman have argued that reasons for being moral anti-realists extend to epistemic anti-realism.
