EPISTEMOLOGY AND GARVEYISM

We have Foundation metaphors for epistemology, and here are Coherence metaphors as well. But these appear to require much more study than I can give it. Each might be useful at different times and for different occasions. One philosopher has combined the two:

"Susan Haack (1993, ch. 4) articulates a position she calls "foundherentism", intended as a synthesis of foundationalism and coherentism, by comparing knowledge to crossword puzzles. The correctness of a word depends on the correctness of all the words with which it intersects, requiring a kind of coherence."

To apply these metaphors to my Aims is a thorny, if even possible, task.

- The project must be driven by art.

- The artist Edward Hopper might illuminate at least Foundation metaphors.

- If intuition matters in my project, then my age old fascination with Hopper, Vermeer and Steinberg might be examined for its relevance to the epistemological metaphors required for my main subject.

- That subject is African-oriented nation building, emphasizing thoroughness, manageable economics, order, coherence, environment and aesthetics.

- Absent some compelling reason, the elements of nation building, as envisaged, will be considered germaine to Garveyite nation building.

FURTHER READING

3. Coherence Metaphors

In 1860, Charles Peirce published an incisive attack on Cartesian epistemology, rejecting the method of universal doubt. Peirce criticized the idea of a chain of reasoning that Descartes derived from mathematical proof. According to Peirce, (1958, pp. 40-41) reasoning should be understood as a cable rather than a chain:

Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to proceed only from tangible premisses which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.

The cable metaphor is a powerful antidote to the chain and foundation metaphors that have dominated much of epistemology. What matters is not the strength of a particular proposition, but its connections with numerous other propositions. The metaphor that reasoning is a cable is based on a complex analogy that involves interrelated correspondences: fiber/beliefs, cable/set of interconnected beliefs, and strength of cable/validity of knowledge. These elements are causally related, in that just as the number and interconnection of fibers is what makes a cable strong, the number and interconnection of beliefs is what makes them justified. Justification is then a matter of coherence rather than foundations.