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Carl asked:
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What do philosophers call the process of reversing the order of priority of metaphysics and
epistemology?
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I'm going to write something here out of a kind of perversity. I keep looking at this question and
wondering what it means. I'm certainly not an expert on the history of philosophy, but I've never heard
of the "priority" of metaphysics over epistemology, and so I don't have the slightest idea of what
reversing it could mean... but I'll make something up for you. Here we go: if metaphysics is concerned
with the most fundamental questions of existence, then, because of that term "most", we might
accord it "priority" over epistemology, which is "merely" concerned with how we know. Usually, we
have some sort of metaphysics worked out before we do epistemology, since in the latter we are
asking questions like how we know we've arrived at truth or meaning, and in the former we ask how
we know there are such things, or why we even bother, anyway. Or who the "we" is that's bothering.
Or the whatever of whatever.
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Now let's try reversing that... first we determine how we know, thenwe think about what it is we know,
or why bother? Well, that does seem a little strange, doesn't it. On the other hand, we can just say
that we're not too interested in metaphysics, and let's just get on with the importantquestions, like
how to do science, or the difference between science and religion. I suppose that would be something
like the positivist stance or a kind of pragmatist position. So maybe that's what philosophers call
reversing that order: being pragmatic. But Dewey actually did do some metaphysics... as did James,
at least in his later stuff (Radical Empiricism)... so I'm not really sure that anyone actually has done
this reversal, except maybe the positivists... who did actually do some metaphysics, if only to get it
out of the way. And Russell, for example, certainly did metaphysics. So all in all, I'm not sure that
anyone, really, has reversed that order. And I do notknow what that reversal is called (if it actually is
called something).
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Steven Ravett Brown
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