If someone claims that all empirical and historical knowledge is limited according to one's time and place, is this not itself a claim that has to be true independently of one's time and place? In other words, do people who make this claim not contradict themselves?
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Maybe... every "absolute" claim is at least suspect.– Mauro ALLEGRANZACommented Jun 28, 2023 at 14:59
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This is just a pseudo-problem. I know that my knowledge is biased, limited and restricted in space and time. But I have the right to make claims about my abode even if I can't leave it. It's like saying "Heidegger doesn't have the right to claim that we are 'beings-in-the-world' because he never ceased to exist"– tacCommented Jun 28, 2023 at 15:18
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Consider how it is arrived at. It's like Heraclitus' "There is nothing permanent except change". An observation about the character of things, that would be incoherent if applied to itself. You might add as an example, the scientific stance, that all knowledge is tentative. You can't prove certain knowledge is possible, from the observation that we can't be completely sure of anything.– CriglCraglCommented Jun 30, 2023 at 13:14
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1 Answer
do people who make this claim not contradict themselves?
There is no contradiction. The proposition "all empirical and historical knowledge is limited according to one's time and place" is at the level that we may consider metahistory whereas the knowledge to which the proposition refers pertains to history. That type of proposition is a statement in a metalanguage used for characterizing a field or branch of knowledge.
In fact, the proposition would make no sense if it depended on one's time and place. That is because that notion of dependence reflects that the validity of that proposition is variable, thereby contradicting the quantifier "all".
One might refute the preceding paragraph by suggesting that the proposition does not constitute "empirical and historical knowledge". Such suggestion implies that the set of "empirical and historical knowledge" and the set to which the proposition pertains are disjoint. In that case, an attempt to derive a inconsistency entails comparing apples to oranges.
answered Jun 29, 2023 at 23:58
