Ways and Means: When Sometimes “Knowledge-First” Epistemology Is Not Epistemology

Abstract

I will claim that the distinction Craig French describes between “specific realizations of knowledge” and “means of knowing”, after respective theorisations by Timothy Williamson and Quassim Cassam, can be seen as a faultline between epistemology on the one hand, and (merely) the analysis of ordinary language use on the other. The possibility of this disjunction, I believe, raises the question as to whether the latter kind of analysis has anything to contribute to epistemology at all. Cassam’s “explanatory” conception of ways of knowing is shown to be inconsistent as an epistemology, and prone to use of unfair examples even considered as (merely) the analysis of ordinary discourse for expressions of knowledge. Nonetheless, in order to argue that this is the case, the “explanatory” conception helps us to consider the better mode of analysis for explanations of knowledge in philosophy.