Abstract
In Part I, I established PCEJ and provided detailed accounts of the justification-conferring phenomenal characters of perceptual experiences and mathematical intuitions. In Part II, I will introduce the central elements of a Husserlian phenomenological-epistemological system and discuss how they fit with the findings of Part I. Thus, on the one hand, Part II has an interpretative objective: To present and systematize Husserl’s thoughts on epistemic justification. On the other hand, however, our investigations will be of systematic value. They will lead us to plausible, justified, and consistent approaches to foundationalism, rationalism, and epistemic internalism. In Chap. 9, I will provide a detailed account of Husserl’s conception of eidetic variation and eidetic intuition. These results of Part II will play an important role at the end of Part III when I clarify the benefits of Husserl’s version of a phenomenological internalism and show in which sense our phenomenological-epistemological system promises to be the most fundamental science. Our interpretative investigations in Part II will be very detailed with close attention to Husserl’s texts. This is because there exist a number of different and incompatible readings of Husserl, and, while I do not want to suggest that Husserl can only be interpreted in the way that I understand him, I wish to leave no doubt that Husserl can be read in a way that is friendly to my project and that such an interpretation makes sense not only for one particular period of Husserl’s thinking but for his overall oeuvre and phenomenological project.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout this work I use “non-inferential” synonymously with “immediate.” Non-inferential justification is immediate justification and non-inferentially justified beliefs are immediately justified beliefs.
- 2.
Radical skeptics, for instance, deny Immediate Justification as well as the possibility of justification by coherence.
- 3.
One might, for instance, hold that some of our beliefs are immediately justified but that others are justified only by coherence.
- 4.
To be sure, it is possible to be a foundationalist in a certain field of cognition and a coherentist in another. For instance, one might be a foundationalist in mathematics but a coherentist in physics.
- 5.
It is essential to note that this does not rule out that additional justification through coherence is possible.
- 6.
In my terminology, a belief that is immediately justified is adequately justified. (This means that, according to weak foundationalists, basic beliefs have some degree of immediate justification but are not immediately justified in the sense I use this term.)
- 7.
A critical response to Elgin can be found in Van Cleve, 2005, 176.
- 8.
To avoid misunderstandings, it should be noted that by “intuition” I mean what Husserl has latter specified as “originary presentive intuition.” In Husserl’s terminology, examples for intuitive acts that are not originary presentive are imaginative acts. For the sake of simplicity, whenever I use the term “intuition” in the context of Husserl or a phenomenological epistemology, what I mean is “originary presentive intuition” such as sensory or eidetic intuition. I will elaborate on the notion of originary givenness in much more detail in the rest of Part II.
- 9.
To be sure, for Husserl, intuitive acts (aka intuitions) are non-factive mental states. This means they are not success-entailing but can be false or misleading. We will return to this topic in the remaining chapters of Part II.
- 10.
In current epistemology, the claim that believing p provides prima facie justification for p goes by the label “doxastic conservatism” and is now championed by virtually no one.
- 11.
In Sect. 7.1, I will contrast my view that originary presentive intuitions are our justifiers with Hopp’s claim that it is the fulfillments that justify.
- 12.
- 13.
Similarly, in Ideas I Husserl states, “We can assert ‘blindly’ that two plus one is equal to one plus two; but we can also make the same judgment in the manner peculiar to intellectual seeing” (Husserl, 1982, 327).
- 14.
As has been indicated here, there are different types of intuition and these different types of intuition correspond to different types of objects. This means, “the precise nature of the intuitive evidence at issue varies in dependence on the respective types of objects or states of affairs that the relating acts are directed towards” (Rinofner-Kreidl, 2014, 37). Sensory perceptions and mathematical intuitions are only the most prominent examples of intuitive acts.
- 15.
We will return to Husserl’s phenomenological characterization of eidetic intuitions in much more detail in Chap. 9.
- 16.
- 17.
Concerning this explicit distinction between apodictic evidence and adequate evidence, the Cartesian Meditations enjoy a special status in Husserl’s oeuvre. The only other passage I know where this distinction is made occurs in an unpublished passage in Ms. A I 31/37a (quoted by Goossen in Hua XXXV at page XXXIV). However, as pointed out by Berndt Goossens, this distinction is anticipated in some passages of Hua XXXV (cf. Goossen’s introduction to Hua XXXV at page XXXIV). I would like to thank Sebastian Luft for pointing me towards these passages in Hua XXXV. We will discuss the significance of this distinction between apodictic and adequate evidence in Sect. 8.2.
- 18.
- 19.
For the sake of accuracy, it should be mentioned that this passage allows for two readings. According to the first one, apodictic evidence is fallible. This is the reading I advocate. According to the second reading, only infallible evidence can really be apodictic, while those evidences that happen to be false can only be ostensibly apodictic. Hence, this second reading implies the infallibility of (really) apodictic evidence. I prefer the first reading as I believe that evidence must be interpreted phenomenologically. Different types of evidence denote how their contents/objects are presented to us. Accordingly, an evidence that p is apodictic if it presents p as apodictic, i.e., if p is experienced as being absolutely indubitable. Such an interpretation is in accordance with Drummond, 2007, 37f. and Soffer, 1991, 132f. For an extensive and highly valuable discussion of this passage, cf. Heffernan, 2009. Enlightening remarks concerning the fallibility of a priori insights can be found in BonJour, 1998, §§4.4, 4.5. We will return to the fallibility of apodictic evidence in more detail in Sect. 8.3.
- 20.
We will discuss this passage in more detail in Sect. 8.3.
- 21.
Sometimes Husserl’s terminology is misleading and often it differs from contemporary terminology. However, from the context it should be clear that “relative” is here synonymous with “fallible.”
- 22.
“[S]ie [the judgments] haben eine Urteilssinn mit Urteilssinn verknüpfende, sich im Fortgang des Urteilens sinnvoll aufbauende Einheit, die eines zusammengesetzten, übergreifenden, in den einzelnen Urteilen fundierten Urteils, das ihnen allen Einheit einer innerlich zusammengehörigen Geltung erteilt [my emphasis].”
- 23.
It should be noted that memories lack originarity which means they are not originally presentive intuitions. However, Husserl maintains that each concatenation of memories can in principle be traced back to an originary perception (cf. Hua III/1, 328).
- 24.
Apart from terminological adaptations and clarifications, there is the need of elaborating the role of coherence in more detail, especially concerning the relationship between basic and non-basic beliefs. Husserl claims that evidence can be shattered by new evidence, but is this supposed to mean that beliefs based on originary intuitions can only be overruled by new originary intuitions? What about, for instance, justification by testimony? Current phenomenology has to engage in contemporary analytical debates and deal with recent topics in order to address “new” problems like the evidential status of testimony. Between phenomenology and current analytic epistemology, there is a great potential of rich and mutually beneficial synergies. For me, it is beyond doubt that current debates in analytic philosophy could profit significantly from adopting elements of Husserl’s phenomenology, first and foremost his conceptions of intuition and evidence. The following chapters of Part II are intended to shed more light on these rich and mutually beneficial synergies.
- 25.
HF4–HF8 are identical to (4)–(8) identified in Sect. 5.1.2. HF1–HF3 and HF9 are Husserl’s specific versions of (1)–(3) and (9).
- 26.
Remember that in Ideas I Husserl tells us that immediate seeing, aka originary presentive intuition, “has its legitimizing function only because, and to the extent that, it is an originally presentive source” (Husserl, 1982, 36). Cf. also Hua XXIV, 347, where Husserl calls this justification-conferring phenomenal character “consciousness of givenness.” We shall discuss these passages in great detail in Chap. 7.
- 27.
One of his essential achievements is to show that Husserl’s talk of apodictic and indubitable evidence does not commit Husserl to strong foundationalism. For Husserl, indubitability does not imply infallibility (Drummond, 1991, 65).
- 28.
For an enlightening response to Beyer, cf. Erhard, 2012.
- 29.
- 30.
This argument was suggested to me by an anonymous referee of the journal Husserl Studies.
- 31.
Here dependence is used in the following sense: A depends for B on C if without the (former) existence of C, A would not have the feature B.
- 32.
In this context, consider also Husserl’s conceptions of eidetic variation and eidetic intuition. A belief justified by an eidetic intuition is epistemically independent of other beliefs, i.e., immediately justified. However, eidetic variation which is intended to produce eidetic intuitions is possible only in virtue of underlying mental states intentionally directed towards concrete objects or states of affairs. We will discuss Husserl’s method of eidetic variation in Chap. 9.
- 33.
One might argue that Husserl’s conception of horizonal intentionality is a commitment to coherentism simply because co-givenness is just another term for background beliefs. This is clearly not Husserl’s view. Co-givenness – just like originary givenness – is a name for how certain experiences present (parts of) their objects/contents. This means it denotes a distinctive kind of phenomenal character. Joel Smith has convincingly argued that the phenomenal character of co-givenness is “belief independent” (Smith, 2010, 736).
- 34.
In the following chapter, when we disclose Husserl’s conception of evidence, we will discuss this in more detail.
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Berghofer, P. (2022). Husserl as a Moderate Foundationalist. In: The Justificatory Force of Experiences. Synthese Library, vol 459. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96113-8_5
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