Haack's Evidence and Inquiry

Abstract

The foundherentism of Professor Haack's Evidence and Inquiry is presented as an alternative to epistemic foundationalism and coherentism. Although I regard her criticism of these alternatives as penetrating and conclusive, I am not convinced by her foundherentism. The principal cause of my skepticism is that she fails to supply some of the detail I regard as crucial for a plausible theory of epistemic justification, but I also think that she does not come fully to terms with a basic problem faced squarely (though not successfully) by the alternative views that she rejects. These limitations in the presentation of her foundherentism may perhaps be overcome by an elaboration or further development of her views. I am convinced that an elaboration capable of overcoming these shortcomings will move her in a different direction, but I will not defend that conviction here. I begin with the basic problem with which she does not, in my view, fully come to terms. This is the problem of how epistemically justified empirical propositions can reasonably be supposed to be true, approximately true, or probable. Foundationalists argued that any propositions to which we can justifiably accord this status must either (a) report facts that can be ascertained by direct inspection or (b) be ultimately inferable by truth-preserving rules from premisses that do report such facts. Although the evident need for nondeductive inference in empirical matters has always raised formidable problems for foundationalists, they have usually expressed the belief that permissible rules of nondeductive inference have the property of taking one from true premisses to true conclusions more often than not. If such rules can reasonably be said to have this property, then the propositions that happen to be justified by foundationalist criteria (however few, relatively speaking, they may be) can reasonably be said to be true more often than not. Such criteria are, in Haack's terms, truth-indicative.