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The Problem of Knowledge and PhenomenologyAuthor(s): Henry PietersmaSource: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Sep., 1989), pp. 27-47Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2108107 .

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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. L, No. i, September i989

The Problem of Knowledge and

Phenomenology"

HENRY PIETERSMA

Victoria College, University of Toronto

My main purpose in this paper is to state my own positon with respect to what is commonly called the problem of knowledge. I do so, however, in discussion with the phenomenological tradition. Consequently, the sec- ond section of my paper is devoted to a lengthy statement and criticism of Husserl's theory of knowledge. And in the footnotes I indicate my critical views of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.

I

There are, it seems to me, considerations which compel us to say that knowledge is simply a relation which holds between thought and reality. From this point of view human activities and attitudes do not count for much. The fact that this is a valid point of view, however, need not stop us from introducing a point of view which does accord them great importance. For we have to admit that there is an attitude or stance which we should characterize as purely cognitive. Adopting and sustaining such an attitude for a specified time, one might say, means that we merely want to find out what the facts are, and that we therefore deliberately restrain ourselves from manipulating or interfering with them for our own purposes. There may even be, as Meinong thought, a distinctively cognitive value- feeling, by virtue of which we take pleasure simply in knowing the facts, even if the latter offend our moral or aesthetic sensibility.' Now, as to this purely cognitive attitude, there is clearly a sense in which Heidegger is right when he remarks in Being and Time (par. I3) that knowing is a 'founded' mode of being-in-the-world.2 Such a merely contemplative

* An earlier and shorter version of this paper was read at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existentialism at the University of Notre Dame, in October i987.

I Cf. Section io of On Emotional Presentation by Alexius Meinong (1917). ' That the so-called purely cognitive attitude is still part and parcel of our practical way of

being-in-the-world is clear. We can intend to adopt such a stance, or be told to do so, as

THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND PHENOMENOLOGY 27



stance, as when we look at something as a datum altogether indifferent to us from every point of view except a purely cognitive one, is surely not aboriginal in the human being. It is not the sort of stance in terms of which he or she would define himself or herself. The most we can say is that a human being, besides his or her many other purposes, at times forms the purpose of adopting that kind of stance.

I therefore want to begin by giving due weight to the fact that knowledge is an object of search. And this must mean that it emerges out of an antecedent context in which the subject understands himself or herself as a practical agent. I will single out activities which have knowledge as their goal as forming an epistemic or cognitive practice. Like other practices, epistemic practice assumes that the one who engages in it sees himself, quite unreflectively, as being able to do certain things and as having at his disposal tools or instruments he can use for specific ends. He can, for example, walk a certain distance and carefully look in a certain direction, manipulate certain things in order to reach a certain goal. And when on a particular occasion he does something like that purposefully, it means

when we are told to be objective. Even when we follow Heidegger in characterizing it as a case of merely looking on, without further concerns (unumsichtiges Nur-hinsehen (Being and Time, German ed., p. 69)), as a case in which we deliberately desist from changing, or interfering in, what is before us, it is still clearly an attitude that bespeaks itself as a resultant of antecedent activity. It is itself, for example, the realization of a purpose formed beforehand. Its passivity is therefore a polar concept, defined in terms of a contrast; it is like intuition, when this is seen in contrast to conceptualization.

My agreement with Heidegger on this point should not be construed as indicating that I agree with the conclusions he apparently draws from it. The fact that the cognitive attitude - Heidegger uses the term 'Erkennen' without explanation - is not aboriginal, that we could not adopt such an attitude, if we did not already live in a context articulated by means/end relations, does not warrant the conclusion that knowledge is not in any sense a primordial relation to objective fact. To draw that conclusion one first has to show that knowledge is nothing but a certain attitude of consciousness, which is distinctive in the way it "shapes" its object but which is nonetheless, as may be recognized from a suitable point of view, no more than a stage in the development of consciousness, grounded only in the history of how consciousness arrived at that stage. That is to say, it has to be shown that a grounding or justifying of our cognitive claims on some manner in which an objective fact is given is dispensable. This direction of thought, however, is patently idealist. Are we to assume that Heidegger is still caught up in some form of idealism? If we assume that he rejects that idealist line of thought, however, it is clear that he is not entitled to the conclusion that the mode of being of the objects of knowledge is derivative.

I have similar reservations about par. 33 of Being and Time, where propositional thinking (apophantic assertion, as he has it) is judged simply on the basis of supposedly necessary conditions of the activity of statement-making. Even if we grant that we could not make subject-predicate statements if we had not already engaged in tool-using activities, it does not follow that in statement-making we do not come to know the very same world in which we previously comported ourselves practically. The point in question will receive further attention in the conclusion of my paper.

28 HENRY PIETERSMA



that he knows quite concretely what specific capacities to exercise in a given situation. Some things he might be able to do on that occasion, he is aware, would be inappropriate and irrelevant for his present purpose. In order to gain knowledge about a spatio-temporal object of a perceptible kind, he will have to engage in the epistemic practice involving perception, a practice quite inappropriate to gain knowledge, say, of a mathematical sort. And with regard to spatio-temporal objects of certain specific kinds what is called for is not just some perceptual practice or other, but such and such a specific form of that practice. You do not usually look for ele- phants in your closet.

When I thus start with an emphasis on the search for knowledge as a practice, I am of course not committed to saying that knowledge can be completely characterized in terms of human activity. That is why I dan- gled, at the beginning of my discussion, the idea of knowledge as a relation between thought and reality. (Alternatively, that the search for truth is an activity does not mean that we should define the nature of truth itself in terms of it, although there have been philosophers who held this view, particularly in the transcendentalist-idealist tradition.) My emphasis still leaves me free to believe, as in fact I do, that what we come to know by way of our search is not brought about by our activity. An emphasis on search and inquiry, such as we find, for example, in the approaches of phenomenology and pragmatism, may tempt us here. We then ask: Isn't knowledge an intentional state, and isn't this state the fulfilment of that activity? Or in the language of William James, isn't knowledge just that which we are led to by definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experiences? But I think that this temptation should be resisted. A state of mind, I think, does not amount to knowledge unless it corresponds to a reality that is independent of it. And the real purpose of the search for knowledge is to get in touch with reality in that sense.

Let us imagine a case where a conscientious and careful search for knowledge has led a person to utter confidently and in an assertive mode the sentence 'p'. He thus implies, though without stating it, that the assertion made by uttering that sentence is true.3 And if he has been conscientious and careful, it would seem that his present situation does not leave him room to raise questions such as these: 'Am I justified in claiming that

3 He implies this by uttering the sentence in the way he does. For him to add a clause to the effect that he has not yet reached a conclusion about truth would illustrate the kind of absurdity G. E. Moore discussed with regard to the sentence 'I went to the pictures last Tuesday, but I don't believe that I did' ("A Reply to My Critics," The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, ed. P. A. Schilpp, pp. 541-43). Worthwhile comments on this matter may also be found in H. P. Grice's article "The Causal Theory of Perception," reprinted in The Philosophy of Perception, ed. G. J. Warnock (Oxford, i967), esp. pp. 90-95.




p?'. For we can assume that he has already answered all the questions which at one time or another he had, and which at that time had kept him from asserting quite confidently that p. He may have asked himself whether at a particular time he was close enough to the object to distin- guish it from others, or whether certain emotions caused him to be too hasty, etc. We may put it more strongly and assume that he has done all he is aware ought to be done in his given line of inquiry. Yet problems may arise about his knowledge claim from a different epistemic point of view. Somebody in a different situation may not be convinced that p and wonder whether the claim was justified. Let us say that 'p' stands for 'Smith has red hair'. And let us say that the person who first claimed that p is Henry, while the person who is not sure that p is Charlie. What we now have is a responsible knowledge claim and a problem with respect to that claim.

If we assume that Charlie sets out to solve the problem that exists for him, we shall say that he sets out to appraise Henry's knowledge claim. The first thing we want to notice about this is the fact that the situation in which Henry confidently asserted that Smith has red hair reappears, so to say, within Charlie's, though not without undergoing an important modification. When we consider the subjective aspect of Henry's situation, we notice that the actual assertion performed by Henry is modified in the sense that it now figures as something to which Charlie refers but which he himself does not perform. Charlie may consider, for example, that Henry's claim was unjustified or that it is possibly correct. And as such it is of course to be carefully distinguished from Henry's actual assertion. As regards the objective side, the modification affects the object. Henry claimed that Smith has red hair, implying that the state of affairs in question, namely Smith's having red hair, obtains in truth and reality, i.e., independently of his saying so. Whether rightly or wrongly, Henry is convinced that Smith's hair would be seen to be red by whoever cared to pay attention to it. Since we assumed that Henry was careful and conscientious, we may also assume that Henry was not altogether unreflective in the making of his claim. He may have been aware, say, that he is the sort of person that gets carried away by his emotions, so that it is difficult for him to be objective, or that his eyes are weak. Yet his confidence in the matter of the colour of Smith's hair is not affected by such self-knowledge. He therefore does not, upon seeing Smith, feel it is necessary to make mention of his own state of mind, as if that was something to be borne in mind by persons like Charlie. In a less favourable situation he might indeed have done just that, by saying, for example, that it seemed to him that such and such is the case. But given the kind of situation he finds himself in now

30 HENRY PIETERSMA



which Husserl would have described phenomenologically as one in which the object itself is given - he straightforwardly claims that the state of affairs obtains objectively, period.4 As this object appears in Charlie's situation, however, its objectivity or independence seems to have van- ished and Charlie emphatically construes it as correlated with a specific mind, namely Henry's. In the terminology current in the phenomenological tradition stemming from Husserl, it would now be called an intentional object or a noema, an object-as-intended-in-such-and-such-a- form-of-consciousness. From Charlie's point of view, it is a possibly real object ('possible' understood in its epistemic sense). In short, Henry's situation figures now as a doxastic context to be appraised. (An important qualification of this will emerge in a moment.)

This is, however, only part of Charlie's point of view. If we think of him as an appraiser, we also have to assume that he ascribes to himself, quite unreflectively and without question, the capacity to come to a decision in the matter of Henry's claim that p. And this entails a great many things, principally of course that he is able to discern what is really the case in the world. He trusts his eyes, for example, as giving him access to reality. Even if his eyes do not immediately inform him with regard to Smith's where- abouts and his hair colour, they do tell him where he himself is. And if we assume that Charlie knows Smith as a really existing person, living in a particular place, then he knows where to look for Smith. But even if he does not know that, Henry's claim must somehow contain at least some elements recognized by him as designating a place in what on the basis of his own experience he holds to be the actual world, if he is to think of himself as an appraiser. Otherwise he would not even be able to find that Henry was wrong, either as regards Smith's hair or, more drastically, as regards Smith's very existence. In other words, the doxastic context or horizon implied in Henry's claim, or at least a good part of it, must be

4 To be able to make such a phenomenological observation about Henry, it is not necessary to postulate that he somehow confronts the state of affairs in question with a blank and passive mind, merely mirroring facts, directly compelled by them to believe what he does. We do not have to deny that Henry approaches things with beliefs and expectations, or insist that the givenness of objects is, at least in his case, a matter of bare, uninterpreted givenness. Neither is there any call to deny the fact that the language he speaks contains all kinds of interpretations of the world around him, most of them not originating from him. What my observation about Henry does imply is that some of the interpretations and beliefs he brings to the epistemic situation in which he claims that p, are useful, not a hindrance, to him in his desire to apprehend objectively existing things in the world, to say about them what is true, and can, under suitable conditions, also be seen to be true by any other person. Why assume that all that which we use in knowing puts an epistemi- cally relevant distance between knower and known? I will say more about this at the end of my paper.

THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND PHENOMENOLOGY 3 I



shared by Charlie in the sense that it contains beliefs he too accepts as true. What the two must in fact share extends far beyond the points I just mentioned, including conceptual and epistemic features belonging, as we might say, to their respective world-views. They will agree, for example, that a statement like that about the colour of somebody's hair is to be appraised on the strength of perception. In other words, they share an epistemic practice in which there are objects statements about which are to be appraised on the basis of the deliverances of perception.

The important point I wanted to make, then, is that the situation of appraisal must include, in addition to intentional objects, objects whose existence may be asserted without mentioning particular minds or forms of consciousness. There must be beliefs actually held and accepted as true, as well as beliefs referred to but not accepted by the appraiser himself. This is fundamentally merely a phenomenological point, inasmuch as it is no more than a descriptive analysis of a situation like Charlie's. As my terminology was meant to suggest, the describer puts himself or herself imag- inatively into a situation such as Charlie's in order to describe it from the inside, but at the same time he or she refrains from raising what Carnap has called external questions. It is therefore quite compatible with the phenomenological analysis to argue on the basis of some other standpoint that the beliefs spoken of as beliefs accepted by Charlie, as well as the epistemic principles to which the latter subscribes in his epistemic practice - for example, the principle that perceptual experience is a reliable basis for beliefs about the spatio-temporal world - should be called into question from another point of view, somewhat in the manner in which Charlie now calls into question Henry's beliefs. In fact, I will shortly introduce considerations which do just that, calling into question the entire practice in which an appraiser like Charlie is engaged. But for the moment I merely stress the sorts of things which cannot be problematical for Charlie as long as he sees himself as competent to scrutinize Henry's beliefs. His problem must have a limited, specific scope, if he is to function as competent critic - equivalently, if we as phenomenologists are to describe him as such.

Let us illustrate some features of an appraisal of Henry's beliefs by Charlie. Any appraisal is dominated by questions such as 'Is it justified?' and 'Is it true?'. As I noted, Henry may be thought of as feeling that he has done all he can and need do, and that he is accordingly justified in claiming that p. The conditions of observation were clearly optimal, let's say, and he himself was not drugged or drunk. Besides, his inclination to believe that p finds support in other beliefs he holds, for example, the beliefs based on memory. We might say that, in Henry's opinion, his belief is justified both non-inferentially and by its relations to other beliefs of his.

3Z HENRY PIETERSMA



Now there are clearly all kinds of problems Charlie may raise with respect to Henry's claim to know that p. He may, for example, think that Henry's bodily state, contrary to what Henry himself thought, was not normal due to hallucinogenic drugs, so that the perceptual claim itself has to be appraised as unjustified and false. He may also think on a given occasion that Henry's claim was not justified, because he really should have investigated further before claiming that p. Henry's claim may also be condemned as unjustified, because it was contradicted, rather than sup- ported, by other beliefs he held. In the latter kind of case, Henry's perceptually based claim may be unjustified, even if true, inasmuch as it lacks any other source of justification, so that the claim that p does not cohere with the rest of Henry's beliefs. Henry will recognize such matters as relevant, inasmuch as he shares Charlie's epistemic practice. The appraisal of claims is an internal feature of that practice. Charlie may dissociate himself from some of Henry's beliefs, in particular the belief that p, but the principles to which Henry strove to adhere in his belief-formation are also Charlie's. And the world in which both recognize they live is largely the same.

II

But as I hinted, we can imagine a point of view altogether external to their practice in the sense that it appeals to norms or ideals not acknowledged by Henry and Charlie. This new point of view of course generates its own distinctive practice. In view of the topic of this paper, the point of view that particularly interests us is the one which calls into question the entire perceptual practice with a view to appraising it in its entirety. Let us note why we should think of this neither as just an alternative practice open to us, nor characterize our reason for abandoning the previous one as simply some break-down or other of that practice. The alternative practice envisaged here is assumed to have critical relevance for the perceptual practice. And if this is so, that practice must have distinctively cognitive problems which cannot be solved within it and which therefore compel an appraiser to shift over to a point of view independent of perception. What might be these problems? In tackling this question we begin to encounter one important aspect of that which philosophers have in mind, when they speak of the problem of knowledge: namely the problem of the external world.

Why is there thought to be a problem about the external world? As I was concerned to make clear, our perceptual experience of the world is familiar only with problems of knowledge with respect to specified, limited sets of beliefs. Charlie had a problem about Henry's knowledge claims, but he had no problem about the external world as such. Doubts




arise only in situations in which the doubter is convinced that he himself is in touch with reality, that at least some of his own beliefs are worthy of acceptance. And the doubt can therefore be settled. If this is to be the case, however, no doubt should arise about the power of perception itself as a source of truth, because the adequacy of that power is a principle underlying the entire perceptual practice. But as I said in passing, it is accepted as valid without reflection. And this absence of reflection has been thought by many philosophers to create a problem that ought to be addressed. And the reason it ought to be addressed is radical or philosophical skepticism. Descartes, Kant, and Husserl were among those who thought that the refutation of skepticism is of paramount importance.

In view of Husserl's importance in the phenomenological tradition, I owe it to my readers to discuss his views on the issues involved here, in particular the questions which he had with regard to perception of things external to ourselves. As I just hinted, his worries about skepticism were an important factor in his theory of knowledge, as can clearly be seen from the lectures published under the title The Idea of Phenomenology. His phenomenological theory of knowledge was designed to meet the threat of skepticism.5

The central concept in his epistemology is that of self-givenness. 'Self-givenness,' as Husserl uses it, designates a distinctive way in which an object may be taken to be given to us. Self-givenness is an awareness of an object that excludes every meaningful doubt, and constitutes what it is for something to be evident to someone (Evidenz) (Hua z, 3 5).6 In straightforwardly phenomenological terms, it is a case of directly seeing the intended object itself as it is. The notion of seeing the object itself is in turn described as an experienceable contrast with other forms of awareness targeting the same object or state of affairs. In the sixth of his Logical Investigations (Chap. z), Husserl discusses this in terms of a cognitive scale on which seeing is the highestpoint, while targeting an object by way of a merely linguistic reference, a sign, or a picture are lower on that scale. Seeing has therefore the phenomenological sense of an achievement: a person has the sense of having attained what he or she set out to attain. The intensive pronouns in the expressions 'seeing the object itself' and 'self-givenness' thus refer back to inferior modes of givenness which a per-

I For a documented study of Husserl's epistemology, see my contribution to the volume Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, ed. Elliston and McCormick. See also "Truth and the Evident" in Husserl's Phenomenology, ed. W. R. McKenna and J. N. Mohanty (forthcoming).

6 The references in the text are to the volumes of the standard edition of Husserl's works, Husserliana, published by Nijhoff, The Hague.

34 HENRY PIETERSMA



son in a given context of inquiry is familiar with as possible epistemic situations in which one may find oneself.

As noted above, from a distinctively epistemological perspective self- givenness is said to exclude doubt. Husserl does not mean that any claim to seeing an object itself is beyond criticism and infallible. A particular person claiming that such and such an object is itself given may very well be wrong. As critics may be able to demonstrate, he or she may have been hasty or lazy in the exercise of his or her cognitive powers, so that more inquiry is called for. What Husserl does mean is that one who expresses doubt must show that the situation in question is not one in which the object of inquiry is truly self-given, and that such and such things still remain to be done before it can be said that the object in question is so given. But what is crucially important from Husserl's phenomenological point of view is that such required ways of further inquiry are themselves indicated in the inquiry in which that person is engaged, so that the latter can be led to recognize the sense in which he or she has not fully exploited his or her powers of inquiry. If such criticism is not successful, however, an expression of doubt and a refusal to acknowledge self-givenness is not reasonable. To quote from The Idea of Phenomenology:

But to "see" and to intend absolutely nothing more than what is grasped in "seeing" and then still to question and to doubt, that is nonsense. . . . Absolute givenness is an ultimate. Of course one can easily say and insist that something is absolutely given to him when it is not really the case. . . . On the other hand, to deny self-givenness in general is to deny every ultimate norm, every basic criterion which gives significance to cognition (Hua 2,

49/50, 6i (Transl. 39, 49)).

In Husserl's Ideas this is formulated as the principle of all principles. In paragraph 24 of that work he says that such a seeing or intuition is a source of validity for cognitions, i.e., it justifies a claim to knowledge. As he acutely observed, every skeptical contestation of a particular claim (a claim to the effect that I see something in this direct way) must itself be based on something else that the skeptic for his part sees to be the case, which would be unacceptable if the general principle itself were repudi- ated. For every inquiry in which a cognitive subject engages has within itself an epistemic ideal of self-givenness with regard to the objects of that inquiry.

A primary instance illustrating the general epistemological concept just defined is perception, understood by Husserl in the twofold sense of perceiving our contemporary states of mind and perceiving things outside ourselves. In fact, the general concept was usually developed by Husserl by means of discussing perception. Perception illustrates what it means to have a presentation of an object, rather than merely to think or talk about

THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND PHENOMENOLOGY 3 5



it. If we are cognitively interested in an individual, spatio-temporal object in the external world, for example, only a perception can present it in the mode of self-givenness, which in Husserl's view makes the belief evident and thus amounts to a justification of the cognitive claims embodied in the belief. Here too Husserl's epistemological argument is directed against skeptical views, inasmuch as he contends that it is unreasonable not to accept perception as a direct apprehension of a material object. But he also argues strongly for the need for a critique of perception. And a critique seems to involve a kind of withdrawal or epoche, which bears at least a resemblance to a skeptical stance. Since epoche raises the question of the external world, we will want to know quite precisely the reasons Husserl gives for adopting that stance.

As regards the defence of perception, Husserl held that it is phenomenologically false to describe a perception as involving either a sign or an image of the object (cf. Ideas, par. 43). The perceptual object is not something presented by a picture or represented by a sign. The modes of awareness in these latter cases are essentially different because they are indirect. In perception we see something as an "it itself," not as something which stands for something else, as is the case with picturing or signification. Perception does not have two objects, one interpreted as standing for the other. It is also phenomenolbgically true that perceptions of material objects are perspectival, never giving us the entire object all at once. But as Husserl argues, that is no reason to disqualify our customary perceptions. For that perceptual mode of access is exactly appropriate to objects which we call material rather than mental. To suggest that a material object might be apprehended in a non-perspectival manner, according to Hus- serl, is to suggest something absurd (4vidersinnig) in the sense of being contrary to the Sinn of a material object. As he puts it, even God cannot apprehend spatial objects except in a perspectival manner (Hua 3, I, 3 5 I).

In other words, our human perceptions should not be discredited by appeal to a divine intuition quite different from our perceptions.

In spite of this defence, however, we also find in Husserl a strong emphasis on the inadequacy and dubitability of external perception. As Husserl tirelessly pointed out, the percipient himself is convinced that there is more to the object than is actually perceived in any one situation. If it is assumed that the object has material and causal properties, it exceeds the momentary grasp of any single perception, or any finite series of perceptions. This circumstance leads Husserl to characterize external perception as inadequate. And inadequacy as a phenomenological feature of the act of perception implies the fallibility of perception as well as its need of confirmation. Yet, although susceptible to error, the power of per-

3 6 HENRY PIETERSMA



ception can recognize error as such, which amounts to being able to correct it on the basis of something else which is (at least for the time being) taken to be truth.

A perceptual mode of givenness, then, justifies a knowledge claim about an individual object, but it does not entail the existence of that individual object. It would be unreasonable to believe that the object does not exist, if it is given in an awareness phenomenologically describable as a perception, and particularly if it continues to be given in a generally harmonious series of perceptions. But this does not exclude the possibility that it might later become doubtful that it exists (par. 46). This possibility is accordingly not to be construed as implying that there is now some ground or evidence that the belief that the object exists is false. Husserl calls it an ever open possibility (Hua 3, I, 97). In a later treatise he remarks that Descartes' heavy emphasis on the ever present possibility of decep- tion led that philosopher to lose sight of the fundamental sense of experience, which is original self-givenness of objects (Hua 17, z88). Descartes, he alleges, did not see that it is essential to the very being of material objects to be given in a fallible way, that something not so given would not be a material world.

To sum up the preceding account of Husserl's doctrine: perceptual awareness of the external world is a form of self-givenness, even though it is incomplete and fallible. There is no reason to doubt its veridicality in a given case until other perceptions reveal details which contradict the content of our belief. To have a doubt about a particular perception requires that we are perceptually sure about something else. Doubt presupposes beliefs accepted as true, and it is therefore always limited in scope. In fact, underlying particular beliefs there is a conviction that there is a world beyond whatever particular beliefs might one day turn out to be doubtful or false. The term 'world' designates here, not a particular, determined set of beliefs (i.e., a known world), but simply that reality or truth which we believe we can discover and thus resolve our actual as well as our future doubts. Husserl attributes to the pre-philosophical percipient an unshakable belief in the existence of this world; the latter is said to be empirically indubitable (Hua 8, 54). It is an indubitabililty which is intrinsic to that perception of the world which we constantly have. What he means is that this unshakable belief or conviction with regard to the existence of the world is not a particular belief acquired from experience - which can always turn out to be mistaken - but rather a constitutive feature of that experience. It is therefore not a belief that within our perceptual experience can become doubtful or be subjected to testing.




Yet in the same context Husserl also writes that this perceived world may be a mere appearance (ein blofler Schein). The certainty with respect to its existence is not altogether invulnerable. The percipient, to be sure, cannot but believe that he or she can settle whatever doubts and problems may be encountered. But there is, according to Husserl, a point of view beyond perception as such, namely that of conceptual thought. As he explains at length in his Ideas, the present style of our perceptual experience is harmonious, in spite of occasional corrections. And it is by virtue of this over-all harmony that there exists for us a world. For a percipient whose experience is generally harmonious there are no rational grounds for doubting the existence of the world (par. 46). And he presumes that his experience will always be the way it is now. It is, however, conceivable that experience might be so chaotic as not to warrant belief in re- identifiable objects, or in the reliability of generalization and inductive inference (par. 49). It is possible that experience should be such that there would be no question of correcting errors and arriving as a truth beyond them in the shape of a unified world. And if this possibility were to become actual, there would be ground for doubt about the existence of the world; or better, if that state of affairs were to continue, its non-existence would be evident. As we already mentioned, skeptical argumentations should not mislead us to think that there do not now exist any grounds for believ- ing in the existence of the world. The possibility in question is open, rather than empirical. To assert this kind of possible non-existence is, according to Husserl, compatible with an undoubted empirical belief in the world's existence. Considerations supporting the assertion of this possibility are transcendental, which is to say that they pertain to a certain epistemic-on- tological framework as a whole, and that they presuppose a point of van- tage lying beyond that framework. In the case under discussion, the framework is that of natural, prephilosophical perception. Husserl's transcendental observation about it is that the framework is contingent.

But why does the non-necessary nature of the existence of the external world constitute a problem? As will be recalled, the question which led me to the present discussion of Husserl's views was formulated this way: Why is there thought to be a problem about the external world? In different terms, why should we ask epistemological questions about all perceptions, whereas the epistemic appraisals envisaged earlier limited the scope of their questions to a small subset of perceptions? I suggested that certain philosophers, of whom Husserl was one, thought that there is such a problem, because our perceptual experience of the external world is unreflective and therefore vulnerable to the threat of radical or philo- sophic skepticism. According to the philosophers in question, it is in order

3 8 HENRY PIETERSMA



to confront skepticism that we should go beyond perception and raise questions about the whole of that form of experience.

Has the discussion of Husserl served to clarify the question as to why this should be undertaken? The point we have reached in our discussion seems to suggest that the essential defect of perception is its empirical, contingent style. But why exactly does the empirical nature of our perceptual certainty about the world constitute a problem? As noted before, it isn't a problem for the natural percipient. He does not push epistemic doubt and appraisal beyond the limits of perception itself. And Husserl himself acknowledges not only the phenomenological character of perceptual experience but also its epistemological validity. We heard him say that it is reasonable to believe in the existence of the object of perception, and that to expect a material object to be given in a fundamentally different sort of perception is absurd. What then is the epistemological point he wants to make by emphasizing that experience is not necessarily coher- ent?

I think, however, that Husserl's most fundamental point is different. The real reason why perception of the external world has to be considered as such, i.e., from a transcendental point of view, is that it is by its very nature insufficiently reflective. The percipient has assumptions that have not been articulated or clarified, most basically the one just mentioned, namely the assumption about the perdurance of our present style of perceptual experience. That the natural percipient makes this assumption might be said to be clear from the fact that in situations like Henry's (see above, pp. 30-3i) he asserts objects to exist independently, which is to say, he does not contextualize or index them with reference to either a particular state of mind (e.g., 'It seems to me to exist') or a contingent style of experience. According to his way of thinking, the world of external objects would be what it is regardless of any particular style or pattern of consciousness. This is why the percipient feels justified in referring to his objective field without specifically mentioning any mind or any general mental characteristic. Husserl insists, however, that from a philosophical point of view we can speak of the existence of the world only in conjunc- tion with an expressly mentioned style of experience, namely our present one. In other words, the philosopher's situation is analogous to Charlie's in regard to the objects of Henry's belief at the time when he is not (yet) prepared to go along with Henry's assertion that p.

The point Husserl really wants to make becomes clear, when we realize that he subjects to transcendental investigation also such non-empirical sciences as mathematics and logic (cf. his Formal and Transcendental Logic). In fact, hardly any topic occupied him as much as the transcenden-




tal clarification of these sciences. A mathematician or logician is engaged in a form of inquiry that is of course very different from empirical inquiry. When he becomes clear about a mathematical fact - as Husserl would say, when it is apodictically evident to him that the corresponding proposition is true - he sees not merely that something is the case, but that it has got to be that way, necessarily, because its contradictory is inconceivable, i.e., impossible. Justification of such claims, like the inquiry as a whole, is quite different from that found in empirical inquiry. But as our perceptual and scientific experience rely crucially on the powers of perception, so the mathematician also relies on certain cognitive powers, although different from perception. And both empirical and mathematical inquiry take for granted the cognitive value of the exercise ofthose powers. And this is, from Husserl's point of view, of the utmost importance. For it means that both kinds of sciences are equally in need of so-called transcendental clarification.

The reason why these sciences are in need of transcendental clarification is that both kinds of sciences are 'positive'. This term covers a great many things, but the main idea is that these sciences are object-directed in an exclusive sense, which is to say that they are not theoretically interested in the powers of cognition of which they make use. In Husserl's own terminology, this is the matter of the constitution of objective fields in pure transcendental consciousness. A person who is aware of something as evident, for example, takes a proposition to be true, but does not reflect very much about that particular state of mind and the context to which it is causally or otherwise related. Although mental states are lived through and connections between them get practically established by mental performances, the direction of inquiry is toward the objective field which supposedly shows itself in and through all that. The circumstance that such subjective matters are not thematized in a theoretical way is what makes empirical and a priori sciences 'positive'.

Now that these sciences are positive in this sense means, according to Husserl, that they are vulnerable to skepticism. The form of skepticism Husserl had primarily in mind was psychologism. Psychologism amounts to a skepticism because it presents a naturalistic, causal account of mental life such that the assumptions of ordinary perceptual experience, empirical, and mathematical science lose their reasonable character. A causal- psychological account of the human'subject undermines the assumption that cognition as a complex of mental activities canwgive us knowledge of objective states of affairs, empirical or a priori. A perceptual awareness in which something is evident to someone, for example, might be interpreted psychologically as nothing but a mental episode causally related to previ-

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ous episodes or to physical stimuli in the environment. If that were so, however, there would not exist any ground for our epistemic-practical confidence of getting in touch with reality via perception.

In terms of Husserl's theory of knowledge, knowledge is distinguished from true belief by being evident (Hua i 8,, z8-z9). In the light of what we have just seen, however, a case of something being evident to someone may also be merely on the plane of positivity in the sense just discussed (cf. Hua 8, z7-3 8). According to the internal features of an epistemic-ontolog- ical framework a claim may be evident, i.e., justifiable. That is to say, among those who share such -a framework there is agreement that it is justified. And this might be further characterized, for example, by mentioning other constituent features of the framework, such as the system- atic correlation between recognized categories of objects and powers of cognition persons ascribe to one another. But the evident so defined may of course be relative to a given framework, and consequently subject to skeptical attack, if there is an alternative framework in which it is described and explained in ways damaging to its cognitive status. This would be the case if it were described as merely a mental episode and explained in causal terms, as it would be in a naturalistic psychology. The assumption underlying our entire perceptual practice would no longer seem plausible, if we accepted this alternative framework.

According to Husserl, a cognitive claim does not really amount to knowledge in the full sense, if it is still vulnerable to such radical attacks on the subject's very competence to claim a cognitive relation to an object. What is attacked is not any particular claim about something in his objective field, e.g., a claim about certain mathematical functions, but the subject's power to make any cognitive claim whatever. The point of view from which such an attack is launched lies therefore beyond the scope of a mathematician's competence to adjudicate. His competence is restricted to mathematical things; in Husserl's terms, his knowledge is naive, positive, abstract, one-sided. Damaging skeptical claims must therefore be invalidated or refuted, if we are to attain knowledge in the full sense. As he puts it in one place, the transcendental and metaphysical mists in which skepticism and mysticism have their day must be dispelled.

This is, in the last analysis, Husserl's ground for withdrawing from the realm of perceptual experience. The nature and status of the subject responsible for perceptual knowledge claims must be thematized and clarified in philosophical reflection. The purpose is to show quite concretely, by reference to experiences of cognition, that the skeptical account is phenomenologically wrong. As we have seen, Husserl makes essentially three points. He argues (i) that as a matter of plain experience

THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE AND PHENOMENOLOGY 4I



there are situations in which a targeted object or fact is given in that mode which he characterizes as self-givenness. He also argues (z) that we should accept such forms of awareness as prima facie justifying a cognitive claim. And finally, he argues, that (3) the skeptic himself cannot but accept at least some instances of self-givenness when he wants to give reasons for his skeptical conclusions or when he appeals to given principles of argu- mentation.

As I remarked, the refutation or repudiation of skepticism is paramount for Husserl. Let us now ask: has he actually refuted the radical, philosophical form of skepticism? Let us imagine a skeptic who has heard the entire phenomenological account of the search for truth, not only in perception but also in the area of pure thought. But behold, this skeptic still wonders whether the problem of knowledge has really been solved. Has Husserl actually shown that cases of self-givenness give us access to what is truly real? This skeptic might admit that Husserl has quite clearly shown that self-givenness is a cognitive ideal which we cannot but use in our search for truth. But he adds that he has also noticed that this optimal epistemic situation is defined by Husserl himself in terms of a given inquiry or practice. That is to say, the sense in which seeing or intuition is a direct experience of reality is determined solely by way of a phenomenological contrast with a variety of other admittedly less favourable epistemic situations. That it brings one in touch with reality is therefore determined by the way it is related to other experiences, namely as their fulfilment. More broadly stated, it apparently owes its epistemic status to its experiential context, for example, the particular process that led up to it. The skeptic himself, however, thinks that we are still left with the question whether self-givenness amounts to access to a reality. And he wonders out loud: Isn't the being of things quite independent of the internal logic of inquiry? Would entities not be what they are, even if there were nothing like epistemic practices?

This kind of skeptic, it is clear, brings into play a realist concept of being. According to this concept, the objects-to-be-known have a being such that it is not essential for them to be known, even if in fact they are. Neither the existence nor the nature of a cognitive capacity is entailed by their own existence. The skeptic himself, of course, is not at all convinced that there really are such things, but to him the concept does make sense. And that makes him wonder whether any phenomenological description of cognitive powers and of the ways they achieve satisfaction, of relations of fulfilments between intentional forms of awareness, has really convinc- ingly demonstrated that we are in touch with reality.

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What was Husserl's answer to this skeptic? I cannot recall a text in which he clearly acknowledged this form of skepticism, but I submit that his answer may be discerned in his rejection of the concept of being just mentioned. (That he rejects it seems to me to be implied by his insistence on the adequacy of the transcendental-phenomenological method.) This rejection of the concept on which the present form of skepticism depends for its meaningfulness, removes the ground from under the skeptic. It does not show that a denial of the world would be false, but it maintains that even a doubt about it is meaningless. For it is meaningless to suggest that there might be entities transcendent in the sense defined by the realist concept of being. Husserl, to be sure, talks a great deal about transcendent objects, but from a realist perspective it is all too clear that their transcen- dence is no more than a projection of the scope and validity accorded to specific cognitive powers, in particular the power of reason.

What about this response? Isn't this rejection of the realist concept of being an instance of cognitive powers practically insisting on their own scope and validity, while this rejection is being used unreflectively as a kind of higher-order epistemic principle justifying that insistence? In other words, it appears to re-enact at a higher level what Husserl felt to be objectionable in the attitude of the natural percipient who insists on the scope and sufficiency of his perceptual powers. What I am suggesting may also be put as follows. If a complete theoretical justification of the validity of reason were to be constructed, the undemonstrated falsehood of metaphysical realism would have to figure as one of the premises. But the pres- ence of that undemonstrated premise would destroy the strength of the argument.

The rejection of realism is tantamount to an acceptance of an epistemic principle to the effect that it can be demonstrated that thought properly conducted yields truth. In the practice of his thinking Husserl, like all of us, accepts this to be a valid principle. But unlike some others, he claims to be able, on a theoretical level, to justify the belief that this principle is valid. I do not think that he managed to do this, without at the same time practically accepting it in the effort required here. In any event, it is clear that Husserl was one of those philosophers who think that knowledge in the strong sense requires that all things which essentially contribute to an epistemic situation have been brought into the open and shown to be true or, in the case of rules and principles, valid. That is why in his view not even science amounts to knowledge in the full or strong sense. And that idea explains why he held that there is a problem about perceptual knowledge.




III

The question I wish to ask is this: should we require that much from ourselves as knowers? Are we irresponsible, if we require less? Would any less show hastiness, superficiality, thoughtlessness, or credulity? Permit me to outline my own position. I want to return to that part of my paper where I observed that Henry, confident as he was in his epistemic situation, simply claimed that p, without indexing the state of affairs symbolized by 'p' (Smith's having red hair) with reference to his own current state of mind (see above, pp. 30-3i). Henry implied, I commented, that the state of affairs obtained in objective reality, independently of his saying so and independently of anything else constitutive of his mental make-up. Now his avowed realism may be brushed aside as naive. And indeed, we can imagine that somebody like Charlie would come along and show to him that his confidence was misplaced. But Henry's being wrong on a particular occasion actually does not matter for my point, since it is a feature of the epistemic practice in which both are engaged that in some situations one may be non-inferentially justified, at least prima facie, in accepting a belief based on perception.

With regard to such situations my point is this. A person in such a situation undoubtedly holds all sorts of beliefs, general beliefs about the world and particular beliefs reflecting his own past. He has habits of all sorts, inclinations, expectations, aspirations, and so on. As an embodied percipient he has sensuous capacities many of which, as Merleau-Ponty would have it, are not so much controlled by the individual as by the field of his sensuous awareness. And let us not forget to mention that he speaks a language, which contains already many interpretations of the world around him. All of these things, to which one could easily add, he brings into the epistemic situation. Consequently, it is far from being the case that he confronts the facts with a blank mind on which facts can imprint themselves directly. And since he is reflectively unaware of most of them, it is also far from being the case that his mind is one for which everything which contributes to his current epistemic situation is transparent, clear, true, and valid (in Husserl's language: selbstgegeben).

The question I now pose seems to me altogether crucial: Does all that which a person quite unreflectively carries with him into an epistemic situation necessarily form an obstacle to his coming to know the facts as they are in their objective being?7 If we admit that objects do not come to us as

7 Merleau-Ponty clearly approaches the epistemological problem in this spirit, although his solution is altogether different from mine. He construes the problem as one that calls for a reconciliation between, on the one hand, the ineluctable subjectivity of the cognitive percipient (embodiment, historicity, etc.), and the cognitive goal of contact with the

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pure data (which is another way of saying what I just emphasized in the preceding paragraph), does that admission force us to conclude that knowledge can no longer be seen as a relation between thought and objects? Epistemic appraisal, as I viewed it above, is designed to examine whether a person is actually in touch with reality, and implies that the appraiser already is. Are we now forced to re-evaluate this and suggest that 'conversation' would actually be a more suitable expression than 'appraisal', that all we have is a succession of interpretations?' As I already indicated, such a conclusion clearly does not follow from the above considerations. It is very unfortunate that nowadays so many self- styled anti-foundationalists nevertheless draw that conclusion, which in fact is no better than an ill-considered leap, an over-reaction to the foun-

things themselves in their own distinctive being, on the other. A passage from Le Visible et l'invisible shows this quite clearly: 'On comprend alors pourquoi, a la fois, nous voy- ons les choses elles-memes, en leur lieu, oa elles sont, selon leur ftre qui est bien plus que leur ftre-perqu, et a la fois nous sommes 6loignes d'elles de toute l'epaisseur du regard et du corps: c'est que cette distance n'est pas le contraire de cette proximity, elle est pro- fondement accorded avec elle, elle en est synonyme. C'est que l'epaisseur de chair entre le voyant et la chose est constitutive de sa visibility a elle comme de sa corpor&et a lui; ce n'est pas un obstacle entre lui et elle, c'est leur moyen de communication' (p. 178). The unusual expression 'thickness' (epaisseur) refers, in the first instance, to matters such as embodiment and other features of our sensuous awareness, e.g., perspectivity. But it must undoubtedly also be extended to refer to the sorts of things I mentioned in the text: in short, all those things which, as I put it, a knower carries with him into a cognitive situation. According to Merleau-Ponty, for good phenomenological reasons such matters should be recognized as making up the character of our cognitive access to sensible objects. But he of course knows that it is precisely these things that have so often been taken to be obstacles in the way of cognition. To show that knowledge of things is nonetheless possible, the percipient was accordingly construed, for example, as a disembodied observer, to whom physical things are presented as pure data of sensation. Or when this was conceived to be unworkable, knowledge of things in themselves was deemed to be out of the question.

Merleau-Ponty, for his part, wants to argue that the matters alluded to need not be taken as creating a cognitively important distance between knower and known. The manner in which he tries to make this plausible involves a metaphysical doctrine. As far as I can make out, it is a variety of neutral monism, reminiscent of the later philosophy of William James and that of some American New Realists. According to this doctrine, the percipient with his subjectivity and the perceptible object, in spite of their difference, are nonetheless unified at the level of being, which Merleau-Ponty designates as flesh. As is well-known from the history of New Realism, the problem with this kind of position is that, in introducing a metaphysics for the purpose of reconciling subject and object, it safeguards truth all right, but at the same time a problem arises with respect to error. To put it a bit crudely, if being is there to bring the two together in the event of truth, how do we have to regard error? For a more detailed study, see my article "Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Knowledge," Critical and Dialectical Phenomenology, edited by Donn Welton and HughJ. Silverman (State University of New York Press, I987), pp. 176-oI.

8 here allude to Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.




dationalist's vain search for a disengaged mind and a pure given. My own conclusion from the above considerations is simply this. I

emphatically admit that the cognitive mind does not confront reality devoid of all in-put from various sources, e.g., conceptual and linguistic frameworks or personal experience. But why not draw the conclusion that knowers of ages wiser than ours have drawn? What a particular knower brings with him or her into the cognitive situation is often extremely useful, rather than being something that forces us to despair of our ability to know what is really there or to sacrifice the concept of objective being. We do on occasion recognize that some matters brought into it are simply irrelevant or unnecessary for the purpose in hand. Such things we then brush aside as just baggage, perhaps useful elsewhere but not now. And finally, and of course most importantly, there are those matters which do stand in our way, whether we recognize this at the time or only as the result of criticism. These are the matters that do create an epistemic distance between knower and known.

As I myself stressed, the search for knowledge presupposes a searcher, i.e., a person practically motivated, familiar with means-ends relations. The search requires the use of capacities and instruments, many of which have not yet been examined as to their serviceability, and some of which are such that they cannot be so examined. But the fact that knowledge is reached by way of an eminently practical stage of tool-using does not at all warrant the conclusion that what we come to know is a derivative mode of being (which seems to be the conclusion Heidegger draws from his the- sis that knowing is a founded mode of being-in-the-world). My view is that we do come to know a reality with its own properties and relations, that the capacities which come into play are often precisely those we need, as is surely the case with our naturalrcapacities of sense and thought.

I frankly admit that there is an element of trust or faith in the knower I have in mind. That is to say, there are things he makes use of which he has not himself designed for that use. If he had, he would of course have assured himself that they are in fact serviceable for the end envisaged, in this case, to know an independent reality. But why should that element of trust bother us, unless we are still under the spell of foundationalism. The knower cannot but use capacities which he cannot validate, because that kind of attempt would require their use. Consequently, because in my view a knower does not repudiate all elements of trust, a knower simply accepts their credentials in the practical business of the search for knowledge. That perceptions put us in touch with a reality other than their own, for example, is not a self-evident proposition or one which we can validate with a good, non-circular argument.

4 6 HENRY PIETERSMA



I am also aware that there are skeptics who do not have this kind of trust. I cannot refute them, though I might try to get them to lay aside their a priori distrust of our human capacities. In fact, I rather appreciate their insistence on the meaningfulness of my own realist concept of being. And I certainly would not give up my realism for the sake of being able to put such a skeptic out of business. The search for knowledge, as I see it, is a matter of working with what we have got, trusting that at least our most important capacities - namely, those we cannot but use to examine any other capacities - come from a source in which our being was wisely designed.




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