Abstract
In her book Evidence and Inquiry (1993/2009), Susan Haack develops an account of epistemic justification called “foundherentism.” Foundherentism is supposed to be an intermediate position between foundationalism and coherentism that leads to a solution of well-known problems these standard accounts face. In our paper, we discuss Haack’s foundherentism and argue that it shares an important trait with foundationalism, a trait that is at the core of one of the biggest problems of foundationalist theories. And as it seems to us, Haack’s foundherentism does not supply the resources for a satisfying solution to this problem.
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Notes
- 1.
Actually, as will turn out, Haack thinks that this holds for every justified belief.
- 2.
For these distinctions, see (Haack 1997, 26).
- 3.
“[N]o form of foundationalism can accommodate the mutual interpretation, the quasi-holism, of beliefs, which is the real insight of coherentism; for if one takes this coherentist insight seriously, one realizes that no distinction of basic and derived beliefs, such as all forms of foundationalism require, is viable.“(Haack 1997, 26).
- 4.
This way of spelling out (FD1) is part of what Haack calls “weak foundationalism,” as opposed to a strong form of foundationalism that demands that basic beliefs are conclusively justified independently of any other belief (cf. Haack 2009, 54).
- 5.
- 6.
This is a claim at least indicated by Haack: “Foundherentism permits a consistent acknowledgement that one couldn’t have—that it makes no sense to imagine someone’s having—just the belief that there’s a dog in the room, say, with no other beliefs about dogs, about where one is, about one’s ability to recognize a familiar animal at a distance of three yards, etc.” (Haack 1997, 28 f.).
- 7.
For reasons of brevity, we give only a short sketch of the account and abstract from many distinctions Haack introduces. For example, we will consider only sustaining evidence and neglect inhibiting evidence.
- 8.
- 9.
“A’s experiential C-evidence, however, consists of propositions which are true of A—he is in the kind of perceptual, etc., state they say he is—but which A need not believe.” (Haack 1997, 30; italics in original).
- 10.
This part of her epistemological account is what Haack calls the “project of explication” (Haack 2009, 37).
- 11.
To be sure, while the main topic of Evidence and Enquiry is justification, this passage is about warrant. But the account of warrant indicated in this passage can be transformed into an account of justification in a very straightforward way. A claim is warranted if “the evidence indicate that the claim is non-neglibly likely” (Haack 2003, 73). A subject is not automatically justified in holding a claim to be true if the claim is warranted for him: He may belief the claim to be true for the wrong reasons or he may fail to give it the credence it deserves on the basis of the evidence (cf. Haack 2003, 73). In order to abstract from these complications, we imagine the ideal case of a subject that gives the claim exactly the credence it deserves.
References
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Ruppert, N., Schlüter, R., Seide, A. (2016). Problems at the Basis of Susan Haack’s Foundherentism. In: Göhner, J., Jung, EM. (eds) Susan Haack: Reintegrating Philosophy. Münster Lectures in Philosophy, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24969-8_3
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