Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Susan Haack (Coral Gables, FL) is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, professor of philosophy, and professor of law at the University of Miami. She is the author of numerous highly acclaimed books, including Defending Science-Within Reason; Philosophy of Logics; Evidence and Inquiry; Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic: Beyond the Formalism; and Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays; and the editor of Pragmatism, Old and New. She is one of the handful of living philosophers in Peter King's 100 Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World's Greatest Thinkers, and she was included in the Sunday Independent's 2005 list of the ten most important women philosophers of all time.

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evidence and inquiry

Prometheus Books

Contents

Foreword to the Second Edition.......................................................11Preface..............................................................................35Introduction.........................................................................371. Foundationalism versus Coherentism: A Dichotomy Disclaimed........................472. Foundationalism Undermined........................................................733. Coherentism Discomposed...........................................................934. Foundherentism Articulated........................................................1175. The Evidence of the Senses: Refutations and Conjectures...........................1416. Naturalism Disambiguated..........................................................1677. The Evidence against Reliabilism..................................................1918. Revolutionary Scientism Subverted.................................................2139. Vulgar Pragmatism: An Unedifying Prospect.........................................23910. Foundherentism Ratified..........................................................263Endnotes.............................................................................285"Know" Is Just a Four-Letter Word....................................................301Knowledge and Propaganda: Reflections of an Old Feminist.............................331"The Ethics of Belief " Reconsidered.................................................345Epistemology Legalized: Or, Truth, Justice, and the American Way.....................361Consolidated Bibliography of Works Cited.............................................383Index................................................................................399

Chapter One

A Dichotomy Disclaimed

One seems forced to choose between the picture of an elephant which rests on a tortoise (What supports the tortoise?) and the picture of a great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in its mouth (Where does it begin?). Neither will do. Sellars 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind'

Once upon a time—not so long ago, in fact—the legitimacy of epistemology was undisputed, the importance to epistemology of such concepts as evidence, reasons, warrant, justification was taken for granted, and the question of the relative merits of foundationalist and coherentist theories of justification was acknowledged as an important issue. Now, however, it seems that disenchantment reigns. The most disenchanted insist that the problems of epistemology are misconceived and should be abandoned altogether, or else that they should be replaced by natural-scientific questions about human cognition. The somewhat disenchanted, though still willing to engage in epistemology, want to shift the focus away from the concepts of evidence or justification and onto some fresher concept: epistemic virtue, perhaps, or information. Even those who still acknowledge that the concepts of evidence and justification are too central to be ignored are mostly disenchanted enough to want to shift the focus away from the issues of foundationalism versus coherentism and onto some fresher dimension: deontologism versus consequentialism, perhaps, or explanationism versus reliabilism. A great clamour of disenchantment fills the air, to the effect that the old epistemological pastures are exhausted and that we must move on to fresher fields.

I disagree.

A full explanation of the now-fashionable disenchantment would no doubt be quite complex, and would require appeal to factors external to the philosophical arguments, as well as to those arguments themselves. I don't think it is unduly cynical to speculate that part of the explanation of the urge to move away from familiar epistemological issues towards questions more amenable to resolution by cognitive psychology or neurophysiology or AI, for example, lies in the prestige those disciplines now enjoy. But part of the explanation, and the part which concerns me here, lies in a widely-held conviction that the familiar epistemological issues have proved to be hopelessly recalcitrant, and, most particularly, that neither foundationalism nor coherentism will do.

I agree that neither foundationalism nor coherentism will do. Obviously, however, no radical conclusion follows about the bona fides of the concept of justification, let alone about the legitimacy of epistemology, unless foundationalism and coherentism exhaust the options. But, as I shall argue, they do not; and, as I shall also argue, there is an intermediate theory which can overcome the difficulties faced by the familiar rivals.

So my first moves 'towards reconstruction in epistemology' will take the old, familiar debates between foundationalism and coherentism as their starting point.

Lest I raise false expectations, I had better say right away that I can offer neither a fell swoop nor a full sweep. The former would require perfectly precise characterizations of foundationalism and coherentism and knock-down, drag-out arguments against both rivals, neither of which I am in a position to supply. The latter would require a comprehensive examination of all the variants of foundationalism and coherentism, which, again, is beyond my powers (and your tolerance). What I offer is a compromise, a hodgepodge of the two desirable but impossible strategies. In the present chapter, I shall characterize foundationalism and coherentism as sharply as I can, and state the sturdiest arguments in the field as strongly as I can, hoping to show at least that there seem to be powerful arguments against each of the traditional rivals, which, however, the intermediate theory looks to be able to withstand; that, in other words, there is a pull towards the middle ground of foundherentism. In subsequent chapters I look in detail at specific foundationalist and coherentist theories, hoping to show not only that they fail, but that they fail in ways that point, again, towards the desirability of an intermediate theory.

One last preliminary: something should be said about how one should judge the correctness or incorrectness of a theory of justification. This task is surprisingly, but instructively, far from straightforward. In offering an explication of our criteria of justification the epistemologist is aiming to spell out with some precision and theoretical depth what is implicit in judgements that this person has excellent reasons for this belief, that that person has unjustifiably jumped to a conclusion, that another person has been the victim of wishful thinking ... and so forth and so on. I call this project 'explication', rather than 'analysis', to indicate that the epistemologist will have to do more than faithfully describe the contours of usage of phrases like 'justified in believing' and its close relatives; since such usage is vague, shifting, and fuzzy at the edges, the task will involve a lot of filling in, extrapolation, and plain tidying up. But one way in which a theory of justification may be inadequate is by failing to conform, even in clear cases, to our pre-analytic judgements of justification.

But this is only part of the story. The concept of justification is an evaluative concept, one of a...