Groundless Belief

Michael Williams launches an attack, in this text, on what he calls "phenomenalism", the idea that knowledge of the world rests on a perceptual or experiential foundation. The point of this wider-than-normal usage of the term "phenomenalism", according to which even some forms of direct realism deserve to be called phenomenalistic, is to call attention to important continuities of thought between theories often thought to be competitors. William's target is not phenomenalism in its classical sense-datum and reductionist form but empiricism generally, he examines and rejects the idea that, unless beliefs are answerable to a "given" element in experience, objective knowledge will be impossible. The mild version of coherentism that results from a radical rejection of empiricist foundationalism does not "cut people off from the world". Far from being an antidote to scepticism, empiricist preconceptions are scepticism's main source. This edition contains an afterword in which Michael Williams places his arguments in the context of some discussions of coherentism versus the Myth of the Given and explains their relation to subsequent developments in his own epistemological views.