Two Papers on Cross-Cultural Knowing

Shaun Nichols, Stephen Stich and Jonathan M. Weinberg, (2003). Metaskepticism: Meditations in Ethno-Epistemology In S. Luper (ed.), The Skeptics (Ashgate), pp. 227-247.

Throughout the twentieth century, an enormous amount of intellectual fuel was spent debating the merits of a class of skeptical arguments which purport to show that knowledge of the external world is not possible. These arguments, whose origins can be traced back to Descartes, played an important role in the work of some of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, including Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, and they continue to engage the interest of contemporary philosophers (for example Cohen 1999; DeRose 1995; Hill 1996; Klein 1981; Lewis 1996; McGinn 1993; Nozick 1981; Schiffer 1996; Unger 1975; Williams 1991). Typically, these arguments make use of one or more premises which the philosophers proposing them take to be intuitively obvious. Beyond an appeal to intuition, little or no defence is offered, and in many cases it is hard to see what else could be said in support of these premises...

Jonathan Weinberg, (2006). What's Epistemology For? The Case for Neopragmatism in Normative Epistemology. In Epistemological Futures, ed. S. Hetherington, (Oxford University Press) pp. 26-47.

How ought we to go about forming and revising our beliefs, arguing and debating our reasons, and investigating our world? If those questions constitute normative epistemology, then I am interested here in normative metaepistemology: the investigation into how we ought to go about forming and revising our beliefs about how we ought to go about forming and revising our beliefs -- how we ought to argue about how we ought to argue.