Pragmatism and the Critique of Foundationalist Epistemology

A thread running through all three classical pragmatists, and arguably their most lasting single contribution to subsequent Anglo-American philosophy, is a sustained rejection of epistemological foundationalism — the view, paradigmatically associated with René Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), that knowledge must ultimately rest on some class of indubitable, self-evident first premises, known with absolute certainty, from which all further knowledge can be securely derived. Peirce mounted the earliest and most systematic pragmatist attack on this picture in two dense 1868 papers published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man" and "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities." There he denies, against Descartes, that human beings possess any power of pure intuition capable of yielding self-certifying knowledge unmediated by inference, denies that we have any faculty of introspection giving direct, non-inferential access to our own inner states, and denies that we can think at all except through signs — theses that jointly undercut the very possibility of the kind of unmediated, self-grounding starting point Cartesian foundationalism requires.