ABSTRACT
Anglo-American philosophy of science has tended to define itself squarely against the kinds of (so-called) ‘metaphysical’ approach that have characterized (so-called) ‘Continental’ philosophy in the line of descent from Husserl. Indeed, Husserl’s project of phenomenological enquiry was the target of criticism by Frege – and later by Gilbert Ryle – which pretty much set the agenda for subsequent debate.1 That project seemed to them just a form of ill-disguised ‘psychologism,’ one that purported to address issues of truth, validity, rational warrant, and so forth, but which fell far short of the logical rigour attained by thinkers in the other (analytic) tradition. Thus Husserl might claim – like Descartes and Kant before him – to be raising questions about the a priori forms of human knowledge and experience, forms that were given (necessarily presupposed) in every possible act of cognition.2 Moreover, he might claim to have advanced beyond Kant in distinguishing more clearly between formal and transcendental logic, or judgments whose necessity followed from the ground rules of this or that logically binding system of thought, and judgments that resulted from a rigorous reflection on the genesis and structure of human understanding in general.3 However these claims counted for little with Husserl’s critics in the other, that is, postFregean ‘analytical’ camp. What they chiefly objected to in Husserl’s project was the approach via thoughts and ideas ‘in the mind’ of some perceiving or reasoning subject, even though Husserl was very often at pains to reject any merely empirical (or psychologistic) construal of his claims. To their way of thinking, all this talk about ‘transcendental’ truth-and validity-conditions was just another variant of the bad old Cartesian-Kantian retreat to consciousness
as the last court of appeal in epistemological matters. Only by rejecting that entire line of thought – that is to say, by adopting a strictly analytical or logicosemantic approach – could philosophy at last break free of its attachment to naive, subject-centered or ‘metaphysical’ notions of meaning and truth.
