Brief simplified summary (others feel free to correct):
gworley looks at the philosophical discourse surrounding the ideas of interpreting the work of others to get at their meaning (I think this is what hermeneutics is?), as well as how we still fundamentally only derive information from our senses. He notes the sort of clash that occurs today where the general "scientific" has shifted far into empiricism and doesn't do a good job of exploring the other underpinnings of our knowledge.
The post persuasively displays some of the value of hermeneutics for philosophy and knowledge in general. Where I part ways is with the declaration that epistemology precedes metaphysics. We know far more about the world than we do about our senses. Our minds are largely outward-directed by default. What you know far exceeds what you know that you know, and what you know how you know is smaller still. The prospects for reversing cart and horse are dim to nonexistent.
This reads to me like you're confusing the differences between epistemology and experience and metaphysics and reality. The formers are studies of the latters. I agree that reality exists first and then experience is something that happens inside reality: this is specifically the existentialist view of reality that stuff exists before it has meaning and is contrasted with the essentialist view that meaning causes stuff to exist.
The point that epistemology precedes metaphysics is that, because you exist inside reality and know it only through experience inside of it, understanding how you know must come before understanding what you know. To be concrete, I know that 1 + 1 = 2, but I learned this information by experiencing that combining one thing and another thing gave me two things. There seems little to no evidence to support the opposite view, that I had timeless access to the knowledge of the true proposition that 1 + 1 = 2 and then was able to experience putting one thing and another together to get two things because I knew it to be true.
That we are perhaps better at metaphysics than epistemology seems beside the point that knowledge comes to us through experience.
Well if you narrow "metaphysics" down to "a priori First Philosophy", as the example suggests -- then I'm much less enthusiastic about "metaphysics". But if it's just (as I conceive it) continuous with science, just an account of what the world contains and how it works, we need a healthy dose of that just to get off the ground in epistemology..
Cool things I learned from this article:
the term "capta" as opposed to "data"
reframing "scientism" as "the cargo cult of science" (which I now discovered it linked back to LessWrong... Alas, it only clicked for me now)
Less than cool things:
torekp counter-argument seems decisive to me
the post-rationalsts humus, so to speak.
Maybe there's another way to talk about the things that we consider "post" rationality? I certainly didn't start out to adopt much the same language as post-modernists and living philosophers have, but they seem to be the only folks who have thought much about these issues before and so are the best source I know of for standard, shared terminology I can use. The alternatives would largely be to adopt Sanskrit words used in Indian philosophy or just make stuff up, the latter of which would lead to the same problems that already face rationalist discourse in that it has a lot of non-standard jargon that there are more standard terms for.