Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The production, validation and justification, legitimation, refinement and maintenance, distribution and mediation, and utilization of various forms of certified “knowledge” are endeavors (hereafter referred to collectively as “knowledge production”) that must be undertaken, more or less successfully, by authorized persons of every generation in every society that wishes to survive, reproduce, and live well across successive generations. For members of the human species do not enter the world already equipped with programs of beliefs, understandings, and action-guiding strategies – forms of knowledge – that will insure survival and well-being. Consequently, such “programs” must be produced; and those effective in enhancing the prospects of survival and well-being must be sorted out from those less effective. These imperatives, then, give rise to the need for “knowledge programs” for sorting programs of knowledge: that is, for epistemologies or accounts of and criteria for knowledge production. Furthermore, to whatever extent tens of thousands of years of evolution, of successful survival and flourishing (more or less) through adaptation, have affected the genetic make-up of humans, the genetic programs of each individual, and those of the pools of genes of the population groups from which an individual's genes are derived, while directly determining most of physical make-up and ... log in or subscribe to read full text