Davidson's Transcendental Arguments

Abstract

In recent years philosophers from both the continental and analytic traditions have subjected what has come to be known as foundationalism to a sustained barrage of attacks. Not the least of what is controversial about these attacks is that they seem to render suspect not only a good part of the philosophical tradition, but also the idea or ideal of epistemic and metaphysical objectivity associated with it.2 Denying that there is anything like an undistorted or neutral cognitive standpoint-a foundational, God'seye, view from nowhere-anti-foundationalists have asserted the perspectival, embedded, or located character of all cognition.3 Their claims about the impossibility of attaining a foundational standpoint-put positively, their assertion that knowledge conditions are unavoidably opaque-and their consequent claim concerning the embeddedness of knowledge are usually accompanied by a rejection of metaphysical and epistemological realism. We are counseled to abandon the notion that we can meaningfully lay claim to manifestly objective knowledge of a real world of mind-independent objects.