Abstract

Foundationalism and direct realism are the two poles between which epistemology has continually swung and found unsatisfying, and with good reason; neither holds out much chance of plausibility. The epistemology of understanding is no exception, and in this dissertation an attempt is made to steer between these two poles by diagnosing and dissolving motivations for recent versions of them and meeting the challenges they set for the possibility of a middle position. Skepticism about the intelligibility of such a middle position concerns the possibility of simultaneously satisfying four criteria of adequacy: the "anti-instrumentalist" status of common-sense psychological states, their third-person accessibility , their theoretical status , and their "autonomy" . The skeptical worries are explained, and responses to the challenges they pose are offered. Both foundationalism and direct realism stand opposed to a consistent holism; each, in its own way, puts significant epistemic weight on a distinction between observation or evidence and theory, which holism denies. Against this, I defend a contextualist, bootstrapping epistemology of meaning and the other attitudes; this makes the notion of understanding context-relative. However, I see this as in no way compromising a form of realism about the attitudes, and towards this end I defend a context-independent notion of literal meaning; psychological content, which is built up out of concepts, is thus strictly speaking not dependent on the particular context of explanation or the enquirer's capacities. This asymmetry between meaning and understanding is thus crucial to the overall project