Saturday, August 05, 2006

Non-Scholarly Epistemologies

Tim Burke has an interesting post on the problem of trying to incorporate non-scholarly epistemologies into academic discourse. For the non-academics out there, though, this will need a little translating:

The word "epistemology" in this context means something like "way of knowing." Burke is objecting to giving too much deference to non-scholarly ways of knowing or understanding things in academic discourse, not because such ways of knowing are necessarily wrong inferior, but because that courtesy is only afforded to certain groups (in this case, Native Americans), demeaning their ways of knowing by implying that they can't withstand the comparison to other ways of knowing.

Anyway, if you're a non-academic, try struggling through it; it's worth it.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous11:25 AM

    Damned interesting. Niels Bohr says in one of his essays that Physics is not Nature but its STUDY & the 2 cannot be confused; it's our Physics that needs electrons now as waves & now as particles. Post-Colonial Studies can't punch holes in what actually HAPPENED, but only nudge our current puzzlement about what happened.

    I always, when you post on this topic, harken back to a tiny novel called Publish & Perish--but now a little more academically to the Dante who tells us that the Commedia we read is not the one he origianllly gathered together. The orignal failed to persist in the poet's mind, leaving us with the leaves of the Sybil to edit & annotate instead.

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