Theater and knowledge. Dialoger 73-74(2005)

What does theater have to do with epistemology? How can it illuminate problems relating to knowledge? On the face of it, very little. The standard texts on ­epistemology generally reduce the discussion of genuine knowledge to a consideration of areas like logic, mathematics and physics but seldom literature, let alone theater. If we turn the question around we get a similar answer. How does epistemology bear upon ­theater? is the kind of question that will only be met with a bemused smile, if not down right hostility, by people working in the theater. To suggest that the two have something to learn from one another is to suggest something so curious, on the face of it, that it is unlikely to be taken seriously at all, either by conventional theater people or philosophers in the main stream. However, that by no means implies that either of the groups, the philosophers or the theater people, is justified in its assumptions about itself.