Beckian epistemology

Beck, back in the classroom after several days at the front directing artillery fire, lodged a comment at NRO's The Corner this morning about the effective utility of concepts as the enabling force of knowledge. He didn't get credit for the bit at The Corner but owned up to it later at his blog. A snippet from The Corner entry:

In "The Gulag Archipelago", Solzhenitsyn wrote that "To taste the ocean requires only a single drop." He did not explicate it in these terms, but he was referring to the utility of concepts to human affairs. Juan Cole is essentially arguing a radical empiricist angle, the necessary implication of which (in a consistent -- not hypocritical -- application) is that transmission of knowledge is impossible because only direct experience with every discrete detail (grains of sand, even) can result in knowledge.