HUSSERL’S CONTEXTUALIST THEORY OF TRUTH

Abstract

This article draws attention to certain features of Edmund Husserl’s theory of evidence and truth which, on closer look, reveal how his thoughts on the nature of experience and cognition are current and relevant even in the early 21st century. Many of his contemporaries and subsequent authors considered Husserl to be a late representative of traditional, modernist metaphysics—an idealist, a foundationalist, and an intellectualist, etc. The publication of his vast unpublished manuscripts has evidently dispelled such charges, and a thorough and attentive perusal of his published works (or works prepared for publication) clearly shows how highly problematic such charges were. In the article I aim to highlight the contextualist character of Husserl’s understanding of evidence and truth, of knowledge and Being. Every insight and every entity in his thought fits into a wider context of further experiences, insights, and entities. This conception is manifest at every level of his experience and knowledge: (1) everyday experiences, (2) scientific and (3) philosophical cognition. The evidence at every level is fundamentally open and contextual, and their correlation constitutes an essentially organic reality. With such formulations Husserl says something quite similar to what is now found under the label ‘epistemic contextualism’ in contemporary analytic philosophy. Next to the contextual character of evidence, the second main thesis of my essay is that Husserl’s stance in this question might serve as a fruitful field of dialogue between phenomenology and analytic philosophy.