I only know that i know a lot: holism and knowledge

Abstract

Donald Davidson inaugurated an extremely promising and fruitful way of thinking about how thought responds to the world. He attempted to show that intelligibility and responsiveness to the world are closely tied. A critical mass of thoughts large enough to be semantically self-standing - does not require the contribution of any further thought to be understood - has to be, in some measure, already in contact with the world. Davidson’s original insight contrasts with the commonly held idea that there should be specific points where thought makes contact with the world - the idea that fuels what we shall label ‘the bottleneck picture of how thought connects with the world’. Once we fully exorcise this picture, it makes no sense to ask what we know if it becomes clear that we know. In this paper we intend to debunk this picture and to draw consequences for a thoroughly holistic picture of human knowledge.