Knowledge is tricky. In fact, it's a minefield. Unbelievably, given that Plato draws our attention to Socrates' attempts at consciousness-raising in this regard a good two point five plus millennia ago, I have to feel that the philosophy department hasn't been doing particularly well on this question. Of course, there is another way to look at it; the philosophy department is still being funded to sort this question out, so they have been successful in fending off the need to pursue any new questions to think about for quite a while. If your idea of a stressful day is a nice quiet think, then obviously you don't need to be bothered with the stress of working out what to think about it.
It seems to me that the best overview of the problem is that we know something when we have sufficient evidence for it; that seems perfectly clear until you have to define sufficient and evidence & I'm certainly not going to try. My own feeling is that we only ever know things inside a closed framework & that the foundations of that framework, the axioms, are inevitably matters of faith. That's how it is. It's irritating for the scientists, but it shouldn't be. It makes the god-botherers feel superior to the scientists (that's what annoys the scientists really, no-one like being looked down on), but it shouldn't. There are many things that could be used as a basis for comparison between the two frameworks, (scientific & god-bothered) and in fact I imagine there's a sufficient plethora to support on-going dissent for a few more millennia. It's wouldn't hurt if we could raise the standard of debate though - eh, Richard, now, would it?
One thing that puzzles me though, and that's how it is that my pseudo-scientific colleagues in the linguistics faculty imagine that "falsification" is the last word in scientific methodology. Frankly, I haven't even found much evidence that they can do that successfully - there are honourable exceptions, mostly in the, guess where, cognitive science faculty - but even if they could, falsification isn't such a big deal. Popper is usually credited with it as a response to the problem of empiricism, which, simply put, is that induction requires the future to resemble the past so that the assumptions made from past experiment can be held as future laws. Falsification purports to do away with this by positing a one-time event, falsification, which mysteriously underwrites the future. Of course falsification relies on the future being the same as the present just as much as induction. Plus, as Noam demonstrates admirably through most of the sixties, a bit of countervailing evidence is no obstacle to a good theory. There are a large number of political and rhetorical strategies to ignore it. One thing is for sure; if linguistics IS a science, then it provides some of the best evidence that science is another human activity dependent largely on the vagaries of human behaviour; a love of fashion, a desire to be popular, the pursuit of power.
I like linguistics & it has achieved a lot; predicting population movements well in advance of DNA testing, for example. I like science & it would be insane to trivialise its achievements or its methodology. "Science is bunk", he typed into his computer wirelessly connected to the internet. Ho, ho, ho.
I don't like all the claims made for knowledge: it's too stressful. I haven't got the time to unpick the contingency in everything I study - but the authors have. That would be a kind of scholarship that I would like to see.
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