Not the only game in town: Zoöepistemology and ontological pluralism
✍ Scribed by Harlan B. Miller
- Publisher
- Springer Netherlands
- Year
- 1992
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 691 KB
- Volume
- 92
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0039-7857
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
What do you do for entertainment around here?", asks the visiting sociologist in the small town. "Well, Clem has a poker game every Saturday night, and most of us sit in", his informant replies. "Do you generally have a good time?", the interrogator continues. "Well, not exactly. You see Clem has a right mean streak, and the cards are marked, and the beer is watered or wdrse, and there's almost always a fight, sometimes with knives. To tell the truth, I don't reckon I've ever had a good time at one of Clem's games". "Then why in the world do you go?". "It's the only game in town". I'm not sure when I first heard some version of this story, or what the moral was supposed to be. I want to use the notion of 'the only game in town' in two somewhat different ways. The first, closer to the story, rejects the whole traditional (since Descartes, at least) framework of epistemology as fundamentally misconceived, a crooked game no honest thinker can win. The second rejects reductionism, the notion that some single specified game is not just honest but the only honest game, the only real game.
What I am trying to do is to formulate what I take to be a couple of strands of contemporary Greneanism. 'Zo6epistemology' is my term for a very central strand in Grene's thought. 'Ontological pluralism' is her term (I think) for a less prominent strand that I want to expound and perhaps expand.