The Role of Experience in Empirical Justification: Response to Nikolai Ruppert, Riske Schlüter, and Ansgar Seide

Abstract

As I wrote in the Foreword to the second edition of Evidence and Inquiry, I was delighted by how warmly this book was received in many circles—both inside philosophy and, outside, among scientists, legal scholars, historians, etc. I was especially glad that so many of these readers had found my ideas helpful in their fields. But somehow I wasn’t greatly surprised that—despite Hilary Putnam’s comment on the back cover that Popper, Quine, Rorty, Goldman, the Churchlands, etc. “will have to reply”—none of the cynics I had criticized so comprehensively, and none of the epistemologists whose theories I had examined in careful detail, offered any relevant response. Nor was I greatly surprised that some mainstream epistemologists thought I was just willfully blind to the epistemological power of Bayes’s Theorem, or the importance of “refuting the skeptic,” or the relevance of “context,” or of gender, …, or, etc. But I was surprised, and more than a little disturbed, by how many seemed primarily concerned to show that my foundherentist theory was really just a variant of one or another more familiar approach.