Loosening the Need-Concept Tie

Abstract

This chapter on E. J. Craig’s genealogy of the concept of knowledge aims to bring out four attractive features of the method. First, by examining its alleged incompatibility with knowledge-first epistemology, it is shown how genealogy allows one to treat as arising separately what in reality has to arise together, so that one can isolate a concept’s practical contribution even when it could not have arisen in isolation. Second, genealogy allows one to consider a concept’s development out of prior forms that more clearly display its relation to human needs even when these prior forms could not have been realized in history, for reasons that the genealogy itself brings out. Third, genealogy reveals practical pressures driving the de-instrumentalization of concepts, the process whereby concepts shed the traces of their origins in the needs of individual concept-users. And finally, the method allows one to assess and reconcile competing accounts of concepts.