Phenomenological Evidentialism

Year 2012, Issue: 18 - Kaygı (18) 2012, 165 - 185, 15.04.2012

Çağlar Koç

Abstract

In this article I argue for a position I call evidentialism, which is mainly Husserlian. Evidentialism should be stationed in a middle road between foundationalism and coherentism. It differs from foundationalism in that it does not take evidences to be “infallible premises”; evidences are insights that might turn out to be wrong in the course of experience. But evidentialism cannot be a version of coherentism either. For the mere coherence among beliefs, rather than justifying them perfectly, needs to be constrained by experience. In first section my concern is with what we are to understand from “conceptuality”; there I try to situate evidentialism in terms of a moderate conceptualism. Yet the conceptuality I argue for is minimal, that is, taken in a narrower sense. It is not something we construct, but something we immediately see. Seeing what is meaningful reveals the constitutive conceptuality of our experience. The rest of the paper deals with Husserl and envisage him as a genuine evidentialist.

Keywords

Edmund Husserl, Conceptualism, Nonconceptual Content, Evidentialism, John McDowell

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