Blackwell Reference Online

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(1917–87) American philosopher. Firth wrote his dissertation under C.I. L ewis , and taught at Harvard from 1953 until his death. He published an influential article on Ideal Observer theories in ethics, but the bulk of his work was in epistemology. Firth, like L ewis , was a staunch defender of foundationalism . He believed that empirical knowledge ultimately rests on self-warranted beliefs about sensory experience, and that beliefs about physical objects can be justified without appeal to any principles beyond ordinary inductive inference. His defence of phenomenalism (1950) against attacks like C hisholm 'S is subtle and cogent; it has been neglected rather than refuted. Firth contends that critics have ignored the fact that the phenomenalists’ theory of meaning entails that the sentences available to express statements about the external world will inevitably be much less numerous than the statements themselves. When a phenomenalist who initially says ‘Physical-object statement p entails sensedatum statement s ’ is led (by some version of the ‘argument from perceptual relativity’) to say ‘ s could be false and p true’, Firth contends that the second assertion should not be interpreted as strictly inconsistent with the first. What is actually going on, Firth claims, is that the sentence ‘ p ’ is being used to express different (though closely related) statements ... log in or subscribe to read full text