Method
Epistemological particularism
Overview
Epistemological particularism is the view that one can know something without knowing how one knows it. By this view, one's knowledge is justified before one knows how such belief could be justified. Taking this as a philosophical approach, one would ask the question "What do we know?" before asking "How do we know?" The term appears in Roderick Chisholm's "The Problem of the Criterion", and in the work of his student, Ernest Sosa ("The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge"). Particularism is contrasted with methodism, which answers the latter question before the former. Since the question "What do we know" implies that we know, particularism is considered fundamentally anti-skeptical, and was ridiculed by Kant in the Prolegomena.
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Possible passages
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This critique of reason has now taught us that all its efforts to extend the bounds of knowledge, by means of pure speculation, are utterly fruitless. So much the wider field, it may appear, lies open to hypothesis; as, where we cannot know with certainty, we are at liberty to make guesses and to form suppositions. Imagination may be allowed, under the strict surveillance of reason, to invent suppositions; but…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Epistemological particularism is; the author is tied to Epistemological particularism in the knowledge graph.
Beyond objects of experience, and therefore with regard to things as noumena, all positive knowledge was rightly disclaimed for speculative reason. This reason, however, went so far as to establish with certainty the concept of noumena; that is, the possibility, nay, the necessity, of thinking them; for example, it showed against all objections that the supposition of freedom, negatively considered, was quite…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason
The author is tied to Epistemological particularism in the knowledge graph.
Again, it is by no means a truism, and is in fact false, that we cannot know that anything exists which we do not know. The word 'know' is here used in two different senses. (1) In its first use it is applicable to the sort of knowledge which is opposed to error, the sense in which what we know is _true_, the sense which applies to our beliefs and convictions, i.e. to what are called _judgements_. In this sense of…
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
States what Epistemological particularism is.
Related ideas
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.
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