Rafał Lewandowski

This article aims to analyze the theory of truth contained in Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations. In my analysis, I start from a detailed description of conditions of the possibility of truth based on Husserl’s alethiology. I show that his theory assumes correlation, the parallelism between subjective and objective conditions of the possibility of cognition as a condition of truth. Based on this, I explain Husserl’s interpretation of the correspondence definition of truth found in Logical Investigations. I also provide arguments that this interpretation presupposes the ontological definition of truth and the idea of the infinite intellect as the ideal of a direct and exhaustive presentation of the object of cognition. Nonetheless, my conclusions don’t provide a complete interpretation of Husserl’s alethiology because I refrain from drawing metaphysical consequences from it. That is to say, I neither answer the question about realism/idealism in Logical Investigations nor the question of whether the idea of the infinite intellect should be understood in some metaphysical way (e.g. theistic one) or only as a regulative idea in the Kantian sense.

The article aims to show that the criticism of the psychophysiological theory of cognition, formulated by Ingarden in the work U podstaw teorii poznania, is in some aspects still sound. The psychophysiological theory of cognition is the forerunner of modern naturalized epistemology. Therefore, the author of this article tries to show that Ingarden's critique applies to this modern epistemology. The work focuses on a selected aspect that occurs in both theories, i.e. the problem of causal generation of cognition. It also focuses only on assessing the topicality of the two selected allegations that Ingarden formulated against the causal explanations of the possibility of knowledge, namely the objection of a vicious circle in theory and the objection that causal theory is unable to provide essential epistemological concepts and criteria necessary for the analysis of cognition. The author of the article defends the validity of the vicious circle objection by referring it to the problem of a causal vicious circle. He then shows the topicality of the second objection by showing that it can be interpreted as the claim that causal theory is incapable of solving the problem of causal underdetermination of cognition. This problem occurs irrespective of the adoption of foundationalism or anti-foundationalism in epistemology.