On the limits of a realist conception of knowledge: a pragmatist critique of Archerian realism

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2006.00611.x Byline: Osmo Kivinen (1), Tero Piiroinen (1) Abstract: Abstract In her book Being Human (2000), Margaret Archer presents intriguing pragmatist emphases on practice, embodiment and non-linguistic knowing-how, as regards to understanding humanity. However, as Archer attempts to conjoin these ideas with the morphogenetic realism she has been working on for the last few decades, she ends up holding on to a subject-object dualism, which makes things complicated. The authors' alternative pragmatist account defended in the article flows from Deweyan pragmatist and Rortian antirepresentationalist insights. The main issues in the article concern Archer's complicated tripartite concept of knowledge, which is contrasted with a (Deweyan-Rylean) distinction between linguistic knowledge-that and embodied knowing-how. It is argued that knowledge is a natural, sophisticated tool that human organisms use when coping with their environment; it is always acquired on the strength of embodied knowing-how, from some actor's point of view, but the term 'knowledge' itself should be reserved for the propositional, linguistic knowledge-that. Author Affiliation: (1)University of Turku Article History: Received 11 March 2004Finally accepted 19 August 2005