Minding the Gap

Epistemology and Philosophy of Science in the Two Traditions

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects Philosophy

by Christopher Norris

University of Massachusetts Press

Due/Published June 2000, 368 pages, cloth

ISBN 1558492550

Norris challenges the view thatthere is no room for productive engagement between mainstream analyticphilosophers and thinkers in the post-Kantian continental line of descent.On the contrary, he argues, this view is simply the product of a limitingperspective that accompanied the rise of logical positivism.

Norris reveals the various shared concerns that have often been obscuredby parochial interests or the desire to stake out separate philosophicalterritory. He examines the problems that emerged within the analytic traditionas a result of its turn against Husserlian phenomenology and its outrightrejection of what came to be seen as a merely "psycho-logistic" approachto issues of meaning, knowledge, and truth.

Norris shows how these problems have resurfaced in various forms fromthe heyday of logical empiricism to the present. He provides critical readingsof such philosophers as Willard Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Donald Davidson, HilaryPutnam, Richard Rorty, Michael Dummett, Thomas Nagel, and John McDowell.He also offers a running discussion of Wittgenstein's influence and itsharmful effect in promoting a placidly consensus-based theory of knowledge.

On the continental side, Norris argues for a reassessment of Husserl'sphenomenological project and its potential contribution to present dayAnglo-American debates in epistemology and philosophy of science. He discussesBachelard, Canguilhem, and the French tradition of rationalisme appliquéas an alternative to Kuhnian conceptions of scientific paradigm change.This leads him to suggest a non-Wittgensteinian way around the problemsthat have dogged more traditional theories of knowledge and truth.

In two chapters on the work of Jacques Derrida, Norris explores the"supplementary" logic of deconstruction and compares it with otherrecent proposals for a nonstandard logic. Here again he stresses the communityof interests between the two philosophical cultures and the extent to whichcontinental thinking has engaged certain issues with a rigor largely ignoredby Anglophone writers.