Representationalism as a Paradigm and Knowing How

Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen (University of Oulu)

Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom and others have suggested that representationalism in epistemology and the philosophy of language has been a dominant paradigm since the seventeenth century. Pragmatist philosophers specifically have tried to outline an alternative to it. Also in Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography I labelled my position as non-representationalist. In this lecture, I consider in some more detail, what it means to make this shift in historiography. My suggestion is that historiography is still taken as knowledge producing activity but that knowledge is defined as being knowledge how, and not knowledge that.