Abstract

The schism between ‘ordinary’ and scientific perception and knowledge implies that we lack any total or systematic means of describing the world or identifying any framework -independent reality. Philosophers as diverse as Kant, Putnam, Strawson, Barthes, and Foucault have attempted to overcome this epistemological divide by constructing a unified, continuous theory of knowledge capable of accounting simultaneously for an allegedly primitive, unreflective, unmediated view of the world and an abstract, highly technical, scientific product. Rather than identifying analytic and continental epistemologies, adverting to continental philosophy to resolve the analytic problems of defining knowledge or determining its necessary and sufficient conditions, as in Gettier problem cases, or homogenizing ordinary and scientific cognition, I assess diverse epistemological responses to the Cartesian problem of bridging perceptual experience and conceptual knowledge in order to catalog and validate the turn from a structuralist phenomenology to a historical deconstruction of isolated, ahistorical notions of subjectivity and objectivity. However, in place of Foucault’s closed, tripartite model of space, time, and power, I use certain late nineteenth-century, neo- Kantian scientific models to develop and justify an open, critical, pragmatically validated, historical heuristic for scientific explanation able to account nonreductively for ordinary experience, ordinary perception, and ordinary knowledge.