Abstract

In the past 300 years philosophy has been preoccupied with the problem of knowledge. Since Descartes, traditional, prescientific culture has eroded under the sceptical attack and has been replaced by a new culture characterized by an unprecedented growth in scientific knowledge and its powerful models of explanation. Gellner seeks to understand "the differences between its two shores, the nature of the reasons and causes which explain or justify our firm location on one side of it." His concern is with relativism, not only how to state the problem, but also how to find norms independent of any belief system which would codify or justify one system rather than another one. What this comes to is the legitimation of belief, the search for and use of final norms which are legitimate prior to any specific information about the world and serve as the final court of appeal for all study. This he claims is the central problem of the theory of knowledge.