Cultural Epistemology

About the course

Cultural epistemology is not the name of an established field of inquiry, but rather an umbrella term referring to an approach that can be taken toward questions in epistemology in which human knowledge and understanding, including self-knowledge and self-understanding, are construed as intimately interwoven with, and expressed in and through, cultural practices and artefacts. It is distinguished from social epistemology insofar as the latter is largely concerned with problems of justification, whereas cultural epistemology aims to describe the phenomena of thinking, understanding and knowing as such, and to characterize what constitutes "knowledge" in different contexts with respect to the conditioning elements of what philosopher Vincent Descombes has called our "institutions of meaning". According to Ernst Cassirer, whose works we will read for the course, human beings are most fundamentally "symbolic animals", who incorporate systems of signs with the world. The work of epistemology then becomes to elucidate the corresponding conditions of possibility for the "fact of culture", including the knowledge produced by the sciences, without reducing their complexity.