Michael Okpala

Descartes’ disillusionment of the kind of knowledge he received from his predecessors, the scriptures and the senses made him set out his ingenious gigantic inquiry into the basis of not just acquiring certain knowledge but purifying the epistemic discipline by reining it from undue empirical infiltration; a discipline he felt had become toxic because of the uncritical and unscathed incursion of the traditional but paralyzed over-reliance on the information received from the senses. He was obsessed with the problem of intellectual certainty. Thus, the onerous task of building an edifice of knowledge that would be fortified enough that there will be no room for truths and doubts enveloped and led him to further seek to incarcerate as incriminating, the sensible data which was guilty of deception. Buttressing his reason for this, he opines thus: “…whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise (as prudence dictates) to trust completely those who have deceived us even once…
The Meditations on First Philosophy, evinces this Cartesian non-effaceable thesis. Being one of the most engaging collections of arguments in the history of philosophy, it was a masterpiece of Rene Descartes. It resembles in many ways St Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual exercises.  It contains the most definitive and eloquent statements of Descartes’ philosophy. Throughout the meditations, Descartes’ primary concern was the undaunted search for epistemic certitude, but nevertheless, in the final three meditations he moves from the epistemological problem of certainty to metaphysical questions about reality.  Here Descartes demonstrates the existence of God and the distinction between the human soul (i.e. mind) and body. The Meditations take the form of a challenging philosophical game. At each turn he produces a belief about which he is certain; then he uses his creative imagination to see if there is any way to see if he could be mistaken. The Meditations on First Philosophy is a vivid representation of Descartes’ thoughts.

However, it is pertinent to note that, though society esteems science for its presumed quality of being based on objective facts, so that scientific research has more weight and authority than a personal opinion, the scientific enterprise has not claimed being circumcised with infallibility, so, those who criticize science on this ground not just make impotent and inept criticisms but as well confer on their criticisms, redundancy and error-animateness.

Quine’s theory of ontological relativity holds that in the realm of discourse, there are several ways of painting and picturing reality, where each picture of reality could go for an acceptable or likely picture of how things are. In defending ontological relativity, Quine moves against foundationalism in Philosophy. He seems to follow the notions of relativism, pragmatism and libertarianism which virtually all post-modernist philosophers are enamoured of.
In trying to undercut foundations, Quine’s theory implicitly posits background theory as an epistemic-determining foundation, which is fulfilled on the premises of naturalised epistemology. Again, while he sought to pattern naturalised epistemology after the methodology of the natural sciences, the foundational nature of the natural sciences also stare it at the face.  This essay deploys critical analysis to argue that contra Quine and some scholars like Richard Rorty, Quine’s theory does not imply the demise of foundationalism, for foundations are indispensable for progress, rather, it provides a framework for re-working and re-defining foundationalism along new lines. If this be so understood, then false assumptions about Quine’s programme would be dispensed with, and, the hope of an epistemology that guides knowledge acquisition, would be reached.