Michael Hannon, "What is the Point of Knowledge? A Function-First Epistemology" (Oxford UP, 2019)
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What is the function‑first approach to epistemology and why does it matter?
Hello, thanks for joining us for this episode of New Books and Philosophy, which is part of the New Books Network. I'm Robert Talese. I'm Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. My guest today is Michael Hannan. Michael is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. He works primarily in epistemology with interests in skepticism, fallibilism, and questions of epistemic value. He's also interested in the intersection of epistemology and political philosophy. In fact, Michael is the founder of the Political Epistemology Network. His new book is titled What is the Point of Knowledge? A Function-First Epistemology. It's just been published by Oxford University Press. Now, epistemologists working in the traditional modes have typically sought to discover the necessary and sufficient conditions under which one has knowledge.
This has led to several tricky philosophical problems, as I'm sure many readers will be aware. Perhaps the most notorious of these are the problems that deal with skepticism. For it seems that any analysis of knowledge admits of cases where the analysis is satisfied and yet knowledge seems to have not been secured. This has led some philosophers to seek other starting points for epistemology. Perhaps one should begin with the anti-skeptical premise that there are clear cases of knowledge, and then from there attempt to provide analyses of its constitutive elements like belief, justification, evidence, and so on. But alas, this approach also has invited difficulties. In his new book, What is the Point of Knowledge?, Michael Hannon takes up a different approach.
He argues that the place to begin in epistemology is with the question of the function of knowledge, or more precisely, he proposes to begin with an examination of the function of the concept of knowledge, the purpose for the sake of which we evaluate others as knowers. The result is what he calls a function-first epistemology. Now, as usual, there's a lot to talk about. But also, as usual, let's begin with our guest. Hello, Michael. Hi, Bob. How are you today?
I'm great, thanks. How are you doing?
I'm doing fine. I wanted to start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself.
Sure. So I am Canadian. I grew up in Toronto, and I did my undergraduate there. I was first a criminology major, and I think I graduated went into that just because I didn't really know what else to go into. And it sounded cool. Uh, I was also told that, uh, Batman majored in criminology. Um, but, uh, yeah, it became, uh, quickly clear to me that I have, you know, neither the financial resources nor, physical skills to be Batman. So instead I, uh, turned to philosophy. Um, and it was really, uh, a course on free will that got me interested first in philosophy and, And so that was the kind of question or puzzle that gripped me. And then I started taking more courses and ended up doing this double major between criminology and philosophy.
And then eventually I applied for both graduate school and law school at the same time. And I was really lucky. I managed to get into this one year MPhil program at Cambridge and was just really delighted to go there because I ended up having an interest in metaethics around that time. And some great people were there. So Simon Blackburn, Halford Lillehammer and so forth. So, yeah, I moved to Cambridge, planned to do this one year MPhil and then was going to come back to Toronto to do law after that. But, yeah, when I was there, I just fell in love with the program, with the town. Met some amazing people, including actually the woman who designed the cover for the book, which is probably the nicest thing about the book, actually.
Well,
it is a nice cover, but I don't know it's the nicest thing.
Well, that's nice of you to say, but yeah. So yeah, I spent the first year at Cambridge and then ended up sticking around for the Ph.D., Um, and that was when my interest shifted to something closer to the book actually. So, uh, I was doing meta ethics and then got more interested in questions about moral epistemology, which led me just to kind of straight up epistemology.
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