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All of Husserl's arguments thus far summarized have been confined to showing that the theory of psychologism leads to a certain relativism and scepticism. But if an opponent accepts this as a consequence of his theory, then Husserl's demonstrations do not per se constitute a refutation of psychologism. Only a refutation of scepticism and relativism would serve this purpose. Only then could Husserl consider his guiding motivation as established. We can put this more formally by saying that a denial of objective knowledge implies relativism, but only a proof that this consequence is false shows that the premise — the actual denial — cannot be valid. The same holds for the three identifications which went into the psychologistic denial of objective knowledge. Insofar as they involve this denial, they too will be proved invalid; but only insofar as the consequences of this denial — i.e., relativism and scepticism — are shown to be invalid. The ultimate result of the present argumentation is, then, to establish the motivation for actually searching for the conditions of objectively valid knowledge. As we shall see, the corollary of this result is the establishment of the priority of the epistemological standpoint.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-3446-2_3

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