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Mark Washofsky

principles. They must choose the better or best of the available alternatives, and there is no“method” that can determine for them the right choice in a non controversial way.

This argument, which I have framed in language specific to legal theory and halakhah, stands firmly within a much more general “critique of methodology,” a term that comprehends the contemporary intellectual“attack on the claims of objectivity that have been advanced by a broad range of academic disciplines.” I cannot, within the confines of this essay, begin to do justice to this broad and deep trend in academic and professional thought and to the many thinkers who have contributed to it.”” I would only say that the critique is a reaction against the“Enlightenment project,” the effort undertaken by thinkers during the past three centuries to locate rational bases for human inquiry.” According to that conception, objective knowledge — that is, knowledge based upon reason alone, untainted by appeals to authority, prejudice, or tradition— is attainable by the human mind. The goal of philosophy, and by extension all intellectual disciplines, is to discover the proper method by which to attain it, by which to distinguish real and objective knowledge from mere opinion, This method presupposes the existence of foundations, of matrices, contexts, or categorical schemes that function as the basis of all knowledge. These foundations are the permanent, ahistorical, culturally neutral, and value-free grounding for all claims of knowledge and truth. All thought, evidence, or argument proceeds from these foundations, appeals to them, and is judged by them. A method is therefore a set of techniques that discovers information and tests it against the foundations that, within a particular form of inquiry, serve as the indices of truth and objective knowledge.” Such foundations underlie a variety of approaches in modern legal theory, from the conceptualist“orthodoxy” of Christopher Columbus Langdell, ' through the writings of the natural law thinkers”! to the analyses of the legal positivists.'® As divided as these approaches may be on fundamental issues, they are as one in their contention that true