Response to Lehrer

Professor Lehrer's coherence theory makes play with the metaphor of a keystone arch. The metaphor is graphic, but it may cause card-carrying foundationalists to give a little private smile. After all, no key-stone in the history of architecture ever kept even a single brick up unless the walls were already standing firmly on something solid. So there you have a reason, if you needed one, for not letting the metaphor affect your preferences as to which style of epistemology to accept-not if you are hoping to be worthy of your own trust. One thing I am not going to question in this response is whether a system of beliefs, acceptances and so on can succeed in asserting its own reliability without leaving an end sticking out with its reliability still waiting to be asserted. That sounds to me like a technical matter, and technical matters are what we are good at fixing nowadays. So although Professor Lehrer can hardly be said to have fixed it completely in the paper he has presented, that being necessarily somewhat sketchy on this point, I shall assume that he did fix it in the early chapters of his book Self-Trust, or that if not, what he did there only needs a patch or two. But of course I distinguish between asserting ones own reliability and successfully certifying ones own reliability; the latter is or would be an altogether different achievement, and it is only the former that I was talking about when I said that I was going to let it pass without further discussion. Though not an argument, nor meant as an argument, the metaphor of the loop is enjoyable; so I want one of my own. I propose to talk to you about standing, dangling and hovering. I prefer my epistemology to stand, that is to say: rest on a basis of appropriate and independently respectable facts. Epistemology can, without scandal, dangle-but you do need an impressive and airworthy machine to dangle it from, and such things are not easy to come by. Hovering, however, is positively disreputable. I wouldn't myself care to be caught hovering. But what I mean by all this will become clearer during the course of the paper, particularly in its closing section

Philosophy · Psychology · Science and Climate Studies

• Knowledge’ as a natural kind term

  Open Access•Victor Kumar•Synthese•2014

  Add to list