Abstract

Philosophical method is itself a branch of philosophy, and does not simply take philosophy as its object. An anti-foundationalist conception of philosophical method can thus be "bootstrapped." The dissertation examines different areas of philosophy which concern inquiry: e.g. , its nature , its object , its medium , finding a pattern of anti-foundationalist argument which extends without paradox to philosophical inquiry and its method. ;The pattern in question has two main aspects. In each context pragmatism occupies a space between two extremes, rejecting their common dualistic premise. For example, without the dualism of subjective and objective, we can see something as partially constituted by our subjectivity without threatening its objectivity. The second main idea is a conception of inquiry as agent-centered. Here pragmatism joins a perspectival conception of objectivity with an infallibilist epistemology, which takes the standard of judgment in a context to be the whole of an inquirer's settled belief. ;In semantics, Donald Davidson criticizes a dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content, and realigns the Quinean picture of interpretation to refer, in addition to speaker and interpreter, not to sensory stimulation, but to the external, public objects which cause it. This avoids both externalism and Cartesian internalism. Yet in regarding the relation between mind and world as merely causal, he spurns truth as a goal in inquiry. Pragmatists counter that we may reject the dualism while still trying to get the world right. ;Pragmatist metaphysics stands between realism and antirealism. Like Kant, pragmatists reject the Cartesian aim of absolute objectivity, which leads directly to skepticism, while also defending an "empirical realism" opposed to idealism. However, there is another form of skeptical threat opposed to the Cartesian variety. Instead of seeking secure foundations, neo-Pyrrhonian skeptics abandon theoretical understanding of our practices; but when we see knowledge as a standard in inquiry, resulting from critical engagement with the world's causal impacts, we see it as beyond skeptical doubt of any kind. Neo-Pyrrhonists appeal to Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, but the pragmatist reading places Wittgenstein between "constructive" philosophy and a quietism which sees philosophy as essentially self-undermining