If, instead of asking the question “How do we know what we know?”, we ask instead “How reliable is knowledge that’s derived according to a particular process?” then it might be something that could be objectively tested, despite there being an element of self-referentiality (or boot strapping) in the assumption that this sort of testing process is something that can lead to a net increase of what we reliably know.
However doing so depends upon us being able to define the knowledge derivation processes being examined precisely enough that evidence of how they fare in one situation is applicable to their use in other situations, and upon the concept of there being a fair way to obtain a random sample of all possible situations to which they might be applied, despite other constraints upon the example selection (such as having a body of prior knowledge against which the test result can be compared in order to rate the reliability of the particular knowledge derivation process being tested).
Despite that, if we are looking at two approaches to the question “how much should we infer from the difference between chimps and humans?”, we could do worse than specify each approach in a well defined way that is also general enough to apply to some other situations, and then have a third party (that’s ignorant of the specific approaches to be tested) come up with several test cases with known outcomes, that the two approaches could both be applied to, to see which of them comes up with the more accurate predictions for a majority of the test cases.
If, instead of asking the question “How do we know what we know?”, we ask instead “How reliable is knowledge that’s derived according to a particular process?” then it might be something that could be objectively tested, despite there being an element of self-referentiality (or boot strapping) in the assumption that this sort of testing process is something that can lead to a net increase of what we reliably know.
However doing so depends upon us being able to define the knowledge derivation processes being examined precisely enough that evidence of how they fare in one situation is applicable to their use in other situations, and upon the concept of there being a fair way to obtain a random sample of all possible situations to which they might be applied, despite other constraints upon the example selection (such as having a body of prior knowledge against which the test result can be compared in order to rate the reliability of the particular knowledge derivation process being tested).
Despite that, if we are looking at two approaches to the question “how much should we infer from the difference between chimps and humans?”, we could do worse than specify each approach in a well defined way that is also general enough to apply to some other situations, and then have a third party (that’s ignorant of the specific approaches to be tested) come up with several test cases with known outcomes, that the two approaches could both be applied to, to see which of them comes up with the more accurate predictions for a majority of the test cases.