"It is characteristic of the epistemological tradition to present us with partial scenarios and then to demand whole or categorical answers as it were"
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Philosophy loves a rigged game: it hands you a carefully cropped vignette of reality, then insists you deliver a clean, final verdict. Avrum Stroll is calling out that move with the cool irritation of an educator who’s seen too many students (and colleagues) bullied into premature certainty. The “epistemological tradition” he’s aiming at isn’t knowledge in the everyday sense - it’s the academic habit of turning messy human cognition into stylized puzzles: brains in vats, evil demons, perfectly reliable sense-data, neatly bounded “cases.” These are partial scenarios by design, stripped of the noise that actually makes knowing hard: context, stakes, social practices, history, language.
The subtext is methodological skepticism about epistemology’s favorite demand: categorical answers. Yes/no. Justified/unjustified. Knowledge/ignorance. Stroll’s “as it were” is doing quiet damage; it suggests that the demand for wholes is a performance, a discipline’s ritual of closure rather than an honest response to how inquiry works. When the setup is artificially narrow, the resulting “whole” answer is less a discovery than a product of the framing.
Contextually, this lands in the late-20th-century pushback against grand epistemic architectures - a moment when ordinary language philosophy, pragmatism, and later naturalized and social epistemology all raised the same suspicion: that many classic problems are manufactured by abstraction. Stroll’s intent isn’t to ban thought experiments; it’s to expose the power move behind them. If you control what counts as the scenario, you can demand an answer that looks rigorous while quietly avoiding the world.
The subtext is methodological skepticism about epistemology’s favorite demand: categorical answers. Yes/no. Justified/unjustified. Knowledge/ignorance. Stroll’s “as it were” is doing quiet damage; it suggests that the demand for wholes is a performance, a discipline’s ritual of closure rather than an honest response to how inquiry works. When the setup is artificially narrow, the resulting “whole” answer is less a discovery than a product of the framing.
Contextually, this lands in the late-20th-century pushback against grand epistemic architectures - a moment when ordinary language philosophy, pragmatism, and later naturalized and social epistemology all raised the same suspicion: that many classic problems are manufactured by abstraction. Stroll’s intent isn’t to ban thought experiments; it’s to expose the power move behind them. If you control what counts as the scenario, you can demand an answer that looks rigorous while quietly avoiding the world.
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| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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