Followers of French Fashions: Neo-Cartesianism and Analytic Epistemology

Abstract

Evidence and Inquiry falls into three parts: chapters 1, 4 and 10 incorporate a presentation of Susan Haack's epistemological position (foundherentism); chapters 2-3 and then 5-9 provide criticisms of several contemporary epistemologies, and contribute to the formulation of the positive theses expressed in the pars construens. A somewhat neo-Cartesian perspective (see below) informs the whole project. In an escalation that reminds one of the Meditations, C. I. Lewis, BonJour and Davidson are criticised for reasons internal to the family of theories sharing some interest in the Cartesian enterprise (foundationalism and coherentism); whereas Popper, Quine, Goldman (who might have been discussed in the first half of the pars destruens before his cognitivist turn), Stich, the Churchlands and eventually Rorty are challenged as contemporary detractors of Cartesian epistemology. In the passage from the first to the second half of the pars destruens, the dialogue becomes a querelle within which the interlocutors seem to speak rather different languages (p. 96). Both Popper and Haack reject psychologism as the ultimate answer to the problem of critical assessment of knowledge, but while the former is repudiating the neo-Kantian, genetic psychologism of the Fries'chen Schule in favour of a more Platonistic approach, Haack is rebutting contemporary trends in cognitive sciences, on the basis of a revaluation of a partially Cartesian perspective within which only the doxastic activity of the subject is interpreted as fundamental, transparent to itself, and fully examinable on purely rational grounds. I take it as an unfortunate, but I hope not inevitable, repercussion of Haack's personalism (as opposed to subjectivism, see p. 20) that in her book Popper's fruitful concern for the nature and evolution of objective knowledge remains excluded from the agenda of foundherentism.