The Bactra Review Manifesto of a
Passionate Moderate
Her epistemological works have, at least for the moment, culminated in her book
Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). She advocates a kind of compromise between
foundationalist and coherentist accounts of justification (``foundherentism''),
on the analogy of crossword puzzles. Briefly: just as a possible filling-in of
a blank in a crossword puzzle can be supported both by its consonance with the
clues, and by its agreement with other, already filled-in words, so a belief
can be supported either by consonance with sensory data or by agreement with
other beliefs, and this can be benignly circular, as when our confidence in the
solution to one word is increased by its letting us fill in another in a
reasonably manner. (This analogy is explained in several places in
Manifesto, and developed at length in Evidence and
Inquiry.) This is reminiscent of the position Russell arrived at, by a
very different route and without the acrostics, in Human Knowledge: Its
Scope and Limits (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1948).