Just some quick thoughts here. Peter Elbow challenges the intellectual community to attack his notion that "good thinking" should be constituted by both doubting and believing and not just doubting. He points out that James Berlin accused him of being a Platonist who believes that knowledge is private... Seems to me that either Elbow misunderstood him, or Berlin is confused about what it means to be a Platonist. Plato generally saw knowledge as innate but not private. True knowledge did not come from inside one's self, but rather from seeing the higher realities in the world of forms. While self knowledge was part of the path to truth (the unexamined life is not worth living), the social component was key in that one must participate in the dialectic process. If that process is solopsistic, the process fails.
Back to Elbow... his challenge engages the doubt system to test his ideas. If we were to agree with his epistemology and engage him, we must not say what is wrong with his ideas, but to say what is more right with another. Since he has opened up the process from a restriction to doubting only, replacing it with doubting and believing, we can only "attack" his idea by believing him, and yet simultaneously posing yet another more attractive notion. What that new notion or epistemology would be... Hmmm
Back to Elbow... his challenge engages the doubt system to test his ideas. If we were to agree with his epistemology and engage him, we must not say what is wrong with his ideas, but to say what is more right with another. Since he has opened up the process from a restriction to doubting only, replacing it with doubting and believing, we can only "attack" his idea by believing him, and yet simultaneously posing yet another more attractive notion. What that new notion or epistemology would be... Hmmm
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