Foundationalists are united in their conviction that there must be a kind of justification that does not depend on the having of other justified beliefs. They nevertheless disagree radically among themselves as to how to understand noninferential justification.
~SEP entry on Foundationalism
Notice the isomorphism between epistemic foundationalism and ontological theism. Both start with a dogmatic assumption: “Surely, there must be a first cause/first principle… We know, of course, that there must be God(s)/Knowledge, to that we can all agree, though we may differ among ourselves regarding his/its precise nature.”
Contemporary analytic epistemological literature is septic with dogmatic intuitions. It needs detoxification by sceptic dispositions.
The… argument for foundationalism thus needs an additional premise, though one that all but the most radical skeptics would accept: that epistemic justification is in principle possible for beings like us. -ibid.
When a position needs a premise this contentious to get off the ground, it seems to me it ought to strike more suspicion in thinkers’ hearts than it appears to in my environment. If we allow moves this bold, the number of questions beggared impoverishes my perspective more than seems advisable. We need a campaign to feed these starving sceptical questions, [‘Only pennies a day!’] we need to cure epistemology of foundationalist yearnings. We need to prevent people from comfortably assuming so much of what they want to prove it trivializes their project and counterfeits its discursive credentials.
‘I can see the clear and distinct ideas, the a priori truths, the indubitable, the necessary, the certain. If nothing else, this claim, this formulation, this construction, is known.’
‘With what do you see them, dear Rene, dear Rene, dear Rene? With what do you see them, dear Rene, with what?’
To me, the foundationalist appears stuck in Henry’s infinite loop when one takes into account, George Santayana:
A philosopher is compelled to follow the maxim of epic poets and to plunge in medias res. The origin of things, if things have an origin, cannot be revealed to me, if revealed at all, until I have traveled very far from it, and many revolutions of the sun must precede my first dawn…
Belief in the existence of anything, including myself, is something radically incapable of proof, and resting, like all belief, on some irrational persuasion or prompting of life…
Every part of experience, as it comes, is illusion; and the source of this illusion is my animal nature, blindly labouring in a blind world.
… animal experience is a product of two factors, antecedent to the experience and not parts of it, namely, organ and stimulus, body and environment, person and situation. These two natural conditions must normally come together, like flint and steel, before the spark of experience will fly.
… the animal mind is full of the rashest presumptions, positing time, change, a particular state in the midst of events yielding a particular perspective of those events, and the flux of all nature precipitating that experience at that place. None of these posited objects is a datum in which a sceptic could rest.
The environment determines the occasions on which intuitions arise, the psyche–the inherited organisation of the animal–determines their form, and ancient conditions of life on earth no doubt determined which psyches should arise.
… the happy results and fertility of an assumption do not prove it true literally, but only prove it to be suitable, to be worth cultivating as an art and repeating as a good myth.
~ George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)
Our epistemic hole-y bucket is the animal, the body, The Chimp. Philosophers from Nietzsche and Santayana, Sartre and Heidegger, through social scientists like George Lakoff and Gregory Bateson to neurosceintists like Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman and of course most of cognitive science, much of AI and robotics and, unfortunate as this may be, common sense have all emphasized the embodiment of our thinking. The ultimate ‘thinking tool’ is the Monkey-Body–this is as close to an epistemological ‘foundation’ as it gets. We are thoroughly local, parochial, provincial. Limited, conditioned accidents of, according to the best currently available theories, biological evolution. Finite, fallible, frail, and flawed–we occupy; places, times, directions, conceptual schemes, languages, habits, the complex and confused result of genetic machinations, ontogenic contingencies, developmental defenselessness, and imprinting impotence. The hubris required to request from this susceptible simian some certainty again evokes that of the priestly class telling me, from out the robe, of the nature of God. We sleep and wake, we consume and imbibe, we ache and exert, as mesoscopic sticky structures of ooze and goop facilitating the forecasts of a calcified scaffold.
We do not perceive, but invent ‘the world’.
Animals, being be nature hounded and hungry creatures, spy out and take alarm at any datum of sense or fancy, supposing that there is something substantial there, something that will count and work in the world. The notion of a moving world is brought implicitly with them; they fetch it out of the depths of their vegetating psyche, which is a small dark cosmos, silently revolving within. By being noticed, and treated as a signal for I know not what material opportunity or danger, the given image is taken up into the business world, and puts on a garment of existence.
I would lay siege to the truth only as animal exploration and fancy may do so, first from one quarter and then from another, expecting the reality to be not simpler than my experience of it but far more extensive and complex.
The sensibility of animals, as judged by their motions and behaviour, is due to their own structure. The surrounding facts and forces are like the sun shining and the rain falling on the just and the unjust; they condition the existence of the animal and reward any apt habits which he may acquire; but he survives mainly by insensibility, and by a sort of pervasive immunity to most of the vibrations that run through him.
It feels hot or cold according to the season; so that cold and heat becomes signs of the seasons for the spirit, the homely poetry in which the senses render the large facts and the chief influences of nature.
… else ideas must be explained as imports from the outer world, prolonging the qualities of things, as if the organs of sense were only holes in the skin, through which emanations of things could pass ready-made into the heart or head, and perhaps in those dark caverns could breed unnaturally together, producing a monstrous brood of dreams and errors… Nothing given exists.
~Santayana again
The received view of
{ Objective World –> Impinges Upon –> Minds –> Causing –> Knowledge }
has not, somehow, yet been properly and thoroughly transcended, Sellars be damned. Nor, in an even greater abomination, has
{ Mind –> Employs –> Reason to –> Discover –> Truths }.
There are myriad arguments against these juvenile anachronisms, but for me, only one is needed and it is a short one.
-
1) Epistemological endeavors are undertaken by embodied agents.
2) Embodiments entail contingencies.
3) Therefore: Our epistemologies ought avoid absolute attributes.
Or, as Santanaya puts things, more beautifully:
So each tribe of animals, each sense, each stage of experience and science, reads the book of nature according to a phonetic system of its own, with no possibility of exchanging it for the native sounds.
Not the data of intuition, but the objects of animal faith, are the particulars perceived: they alone are the existing things or events to which the animal is reacting and to which he is attributing the essences which arise, as he does so, before his fancy.
The ideas we have of things are not fair portraits; they are political caricatures made in the human interest; but in their partial way they may be masterpieces of characterisation and insight.
Discourse is a language, not a mirror. The images in sense are parts of discourse, not parts of nature: they are the babble of our innocent organs under the stimulus of things…
In regard to the original articles of the animal creed–that there is a world, that there is a future, that things sought can be found, and things seen can be eaten–no guarantee can possibly be offered.
… the body exists first, and in reacting on its environment kindles intuition expressive of its vicissitudes; and the commentary is like that which any language or chronicle or graphic art creates by existing.
The radical stuff of experience is… a lingering thrill, the resonance of that much-struck bell which I call my body, the continual assault of some masked enemy…
This argument, as I read it, applies not only to human primates, but to any epistemic agent [unless or until some-no-body figures out how to philosophize without metaphysical participation of any kind]. The particularities of each will differ as do the conditions of their engagement. According to the theories that I currently find persuasive, my body is the result of what they call ‘biological evolution’ on Earth. Including such kludgey tropes as ‘having a front and back’, ‘using a nervous system to process information’, ‘manipulating metabolic energy to maintain a homeostatic but flexible status as a dissipative structure’, etc. etc.
We are all now, I hope, familiar with the gory details about the ranges, limitations, and falsifications of our ‘five senses’ [and that we have more than five ‘senses’]. Can’t see ultraviolet light, yada yada. What more do foundationalists need? Every activity we participate in, empirical to rational, is an activity partaken by a body. And there there is no certainty. No purity. No truth. It’s time to stop seeking.
Sense is a faculty of calling names under provocation; all perception and thought are cries and comments elicited from the heart of some living creature. They are original, though not novel, like the feelings of lovers: normal phases of animation in animals, whose life carries this inner flux of pictures and currents in the fancy, mixed with little and great emotions and dull bodily feelings: nothing in all this discourse being a passive copy of existences elsewhere.
If all data are symbols and all experience comes in poetic terms, it follows that the human mind, both in its existence and in its quality, is a free development out of nature, a language or music the terms of which are arbitrary, like the rules and counters of a game. It follows also that the mind has no capacity and no obligation to copy the world of matter nor to survey it impartially. At the same time, it follows that the mind affords a true expression of the world, rendered in vital perspectives and in human terms, since this mind arises and changes symptomatically at certain foci of animal life; foci which are a part of nature… alternative systems of religion or science, if not taken literally, may equally well express the actual operation of things measured by different organs or from different centres.
I am a sensitive creature surrounded by a universe utterly out of scale with myself: I must, therefore, address it questioningly but trustfully, and it must reply to me in my own terms, in symbols and parables, that only gradually enlarge my childish perceptions. It is as if Substance said to Knowledge: My child, there is a great world for thee to conquer, but it is a vast, an ancient, and a recalcitrant world. It yields wonderful treasures to courage, when courage is guided by art and respects the limits set to it by nature. I should not have been so cruel as to give thee birth, if there had been nothing for thee to master; but having first prepared the field, I set in thy heart the love of adventure.
~George Santayana
