This multidisciplinary study examines the complex relationships between two fundamental notions of the humanities and social sciences: discourse and knowledge. It accounts in detail for the general insight that in order to be able to produce and understand discourse, language users need vast amounts of knowledge of the world, and that most of this very knowledge is precisely acquired by discourse.

These symbiotic relationships between discourse and knowledge have partly been studied in nearly all disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, but until now a general integrative monograph dealing with the discourse–knowledge interface was lacking. This book for the first time offers such an integrated approach by systematically examining the myriad of related aspects of discourse and knowledge as they have been studied in epistemology, cognitive and social psychology, sociology, anthropology and linguistics.

Details of these aspects have been accounted for in many thousands of works on knowledge since Antiquity, and many hundreds if not thousands of books (and even more articles) on language and discourse published since the 1960s. This book cannot possibly come even close to studying the technical details of these earlier works. On the contrary, its aim is precisely to offer a broad, multidisciplinary perspective lacking in the more detailed earlier studies. In this final chapter, we summarize some general findings of our general, integrated approach.

Introduction

Eleven years ago, on March 8, 2003, Tony Blair, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, introduced and then defended a motion in the House of Commons urging the Members of Parliament to, among other things,

After a debate of many hours, with the support of the Conservative Opposition, but against the position of many Labour and Liberal Members of Parliament (MPs), and defying huge public protests, British parliament voted to go to war against Iraq – as did the conservative governments in the USA and Spain, led by George W. Bush and José María Aznar, respectively. Defending his motion, and according to the official record in Hansard, Blair argued:

After a decade, we now know the consequences of that parliamentary decision and the ensuing war. Using his very words, we now also know “with history” that what Tony Blair in his motion presupposed to be true, namely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) – a main reason to go to war, as the motion suggests – turned out to be false. Does this mean that Tony Blair lied in his motion? Or was he simply mistaken and ill-informed by the security services of the UK and the USA?

Introduction

A relativist conception of knowledge associates the justification of beliefs with the variable criteria of epistemic communities. In the previous chapter, we have seen that such is the case for different communities of society, for instance for scientific or professional communities. In this chapter, we extend that argument to cultural communities, especially also those in non-Western societies.

Epistemic criteria and authorities in Ancient Greece, the European Middle Ages and in most Western and non-Western cultures today, have changed continuously. Indeed, one of the many ways to define culture would be in terms of its epistemic standards. What is knowledge about spirits or angels, or the assumed influence of one or more gods or ancestors in everyday life, for the members of one (sub)culture may be seen as superstition or mere religious belief by those of other (sub)cultures, as was the case in traditional anthropology talking about the beliefs of “savages” (e.g., in Frazer, 1910).

Whereas today, in many cultures, knowledge is defined as such by scientists or other experts, before and elsewhere it may have been what was declared as justified true belief by priests, gurus or school boards, as we know from creationist ideas about evolution in the USA. In that sense, all knowledge is local, indigenous or folk knowledge. Despite important differences between everyday and scientific thinking, between Our knowledge and Their knowledge, especially as to their contents and methods, the fundamental processes involved are very similar (Kuhn, 1996: 280).