Tarjei Larsen

Husserl’s view of perceptual justification is a version of the Phenomenal Approach in the epistemology of perception: the idea that perceptual experience has epistemic force, and that its force derives from its constitutive, as opposed to its functional features. Specifically, he holds that having a perceptual experience is essentially correlated with having a physical object perceptually given to one, and that the perceptual givenness of an object provides one with truth-intimating, internalist, immediate, and defeasible justification for believing that the object exists and possesses the properties with which it is given. Recently, several authors have made a case for this account, seeking to show it to be superior to other versions of the Phenomenal Approach. Challenging this assessment, I claim that Husserl’s notion of perceptual givenness cannot be specified in the way required for it to play the epistemic role attributed to it. Specifically, noting that he specifies it in terms of three different forms of givenness, which I call mere, full, and doxic givenness, I argue that none of these can provide the kind of justification perceptual givenness is taken to provide.

What degree of justification should be required of epistemological cognition, the kind of cognition by which epistemological problems are to be solved? I consider the question by examining Husserl’s view of the matter. Challenging the current consensus, I argue that he is committed to the infallibility of epistemological cognition. I first present what he takes to be the leading problem of epistemology, which he designates as the ‘problem of transcendence’ or the problem of how ‘transcendent cognition’ is possible. I then give an account of what I call his Non-Transcendence Constraint, on which the problem cannot be solved by means of cognitions of the kind whose possibility it concerns, and so cannot be solved by means of transcendent cognition. Pointing out that he provides four specifications of the problem, I go on to argue that on the most fundamental of these it concerns the general possibility of fallible cognition. By the Non-Transcendence Constraint, however, this entails that the problem of transcendence cannot be solved by means of fallible cognition. I conclude that central aspects of Husserl’s metaepistemology commit him to the infallibility of epistemological cognition, at least as far as solving the supposedly leading problem of epistemology is concerned.

The problem of accounting for the cognitively relevant relation between experience and thought is among the defining problems of modern philosophy. I suggest that addressing this problem provides an important motive for the “genealogy of logic” that Husserl outlines in his posthumously published Experience and Judgment. Arguing that the notions of “interest” and “pregivenness” are crucial to this approach, I seek to assess it through a detailed analysis of the use to which these notions are put in its most decisive part, the account of the origin of “simple predication”. I conclude that there is reason to think that the notions cannot play the roles that Husserl assigns to them, and hence that his approach fails.