Grounded Knowledge, Place and Epistemic Virtue

摘要

Christopher J. Preston's Grounding Knowledge: Environmental Philosophy, Epistemology, and Place is a rich, wide-ranging work that carefully draws upon the history of Western philosophy, contemporary work in analytic philosophy, sociology of knowledge and cognitive science (among other fields) in developing a powerful defence of the importance of place to our cognitive lives and, in turn, to epistemology. In so doing, Preston presents us with intriguing new paths to follow in both environmental philosophy and the theory of knowledge. Grounding Knowledge could well be regarded as the first book-length study of environmental epistemology and will certainly come to be seen as a touchstone against which future work in the field will be measured. In what follows, I first argue that Preston's work strongly suggests that epistemologists would do well to re-examine and pay greater attention to 'knowledge how' (though Preston himself does not focus on this possibility). Second, I briefly consider several of Preston's proposals through the lens of contemporary virtue epistemology and suggest how Preston's work might inform and shape theorizing in this area. Finally, I turn to a set of potential questions for Preston, focusing in particular on his proposal that we ought to preserve a wide range of places in order to allow for an epistemically valuable cognitive diversity.