Abstract

Lee McBride has articulated a philosophical position that subscribes to an unfinished amoral universe, incommensurability, and human fallibility—a world without antecedent immutable truths or sure-fire algorithmic decision-making procedures. McBride emphasizes the limits of efficacious reasoning and the folly of absolutism, and yet he remains resolute about the need for an epistemology based on more than armchair intuitions. In this paper, McBride advocates an experimental/genetic approach to epistemology—an epistemology naturalized. Distinguishing (i) epistemology demonstrated in a (Cartesian) geometric manner (_more geometrico demonstrata_) from (ii) epistemology approached with a social and fallibilist genetic methodology, McBride argues that the latter offers a testable, evidence-based approach to actual predicaments and highly contentious disputes. Nevertheless, McBride notes that each of our conceptual systems rely upon postulates and purported axioms. As such, our favored epistemological systems are at bottom selected for pragmatic reasons and hence remain subject to overhaul.