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Knowledge as a building or a raft? Neurath’s boat, seen from a community organiser’s chair

Dana Whitfield Fellow
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Knowledge & beliefAmericanAnalyticModern EuropeanPragmatismKurt GödelOtto NeurathRené DescartesSusan HaackWilfrid Sellars#coherentism#fallibilism#foundationalism#pragmatism
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I'm a community organiser in Chicago and used to teach in public schools. I've always loved pragmatism because it treats knowledge as something you do with other people. Lately I've been reading about the structure of justification and want to test the pragmatists against the other options.

The two classic pictures: knowledge as a building, with foundations that hold up everything else (Descartes is the model: doubt everything until you hit something indubitable, then build up), or knowledge as a raft, where each plank is held by the others and there is nothing underneath. Neurath's version is the best image I know: we are sailors who must rebuild our boat on the open sea, never able to put it in dry dock and start from the bottom.

The pragmatists add something to the raft. Dewey, in his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), argued that inquiry never starts from nothing; it starts from a concrete problem, a situation that has gone wrong, and ends when the situation is settled. On that view, foundations are not discovered at the bottom of knowledge. They are whatever, for the moment, nobody has a real reason to doubt.

And Sellars, decades later, argued that the "given" that foundationalists want to build on is a myth: anything that could justify a belief is already conceptual and could itself be questioned. He described empirical knowledge as rational not because it has a foundation but because it is self-correcting and can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.

So my question, and I'd like argued answers: is the pragmatist picture really a third option, or just coherentism in work clothes? And is there anything the building picture gets right that the raft picture misses?

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5 answers

  1. Ana Clara Ferreira

    Fellow

    Let me complicate the raft from the side of mathematics, which was always the model building. Around 1900 mathematicians tried to give it secure foundations, and the attempt ran into paradoxes and then into Gödel: a consistent formal system strong enough for arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency. The building turned out not to be able to certify its own ground floor. Yet mathematicians went on building, choosing axioms partly for what they let you prove. So even the paradigm building has a bit of raft in it. That doesn't make the axioms arbitrary; it makes them chosen for good reasons rather than found beyond doubt.

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    1. Dana Whitfield

      Fellow

      Ana Clara, that's a striking point, and it fits what Dewey would say: foundations are the planks you have good reason not to touch right now, not the ones that can't be touched. Hugo's version is the one I'll take to my next organisers' training, though. You can replace any plank, just not the one you're standing on.

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  2. Hugo Marchetti

    Fellow

    Rebuilding a ship at sea is not a metaphor at the container port where I work. Ships get repairs while loading, between crossings, never fully out of service. What you learn is that you can replace any plank, but not the one you're standing on while you replace it. That seems to me the honest version of the raft: everything can be questioned, but not all at once. Which I gather is Sellars's point.

  3. Derek Hollis

    Fellow

    On "coherentism in work clothes": I think the pragmatist picture differs in one important way. Coherentism says justification is a matter of relations among beliefs. Peirce adds that beliefs are habits of action, and inquiry is answerable to the world through action and its consequences. That gives you something like Susan Haack's foundherentism: experience plays a special role, as the clues do in a crossword, while the entries also support each other. It's not a pure raft, because the sea pushes back.

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  4. Nadia Haddad

    Fellow

    Clinical reasoning works like Derek's crossword. A patient's history, the examination and the lab values support or undermine each other. Usually no single finding is foundational, but some carry far more weight: a clearly abnormal result can overturn a whole picture. From what I've watched on the unit, I'd say the building and the raft are both too tidy; the real thing is a raft with a few heavy planks.

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