Against Method 47

and objectively correct legal knowledge can be attained through the application of the proper method of study.

The“critique of methodology”(or“antifoundationalism is a pervasive skepticism about the existence of self-evident foundations of knowledge that are not contingent upon human experience.'™ According to this critique, questions of fact, truth, validity, and correctness cannot be answered by any ahistorical, noncontextual, or noncontroversial set of facts or rules. All human knowledge is situated within the social and historical circumstances of particular communities. Our very perception of reality is conditioned by thought processes that we have developed through our participation in human culture and community. It follows that our modes of inquiry, the ways in which we seek out and determine the truth, are themselves products of the same circumstances:“the problems people perceive, the categories they establish, the hypotheses they generate, the methodologies they employ, the arguments they use, and the criteria of validity they accept are all specific choices, made in the midst of history, as part of ongoing intellectual traditions.”'® The implication for all forms of human inquiry is that there exists no“method” based in a value-free rationality that can serve as the index to objective knowledge. Many of the trends and“movements” within legal theory during the past century have proceeded from this sort of critique. For all the differences that separate them, the scholars associated with these schools of thought recognized that legal decision is rendered by judges who are inevitably rooted within the culturally contingent loci of particular legal communities. Exemplary of this trend are the legal

pragmatists, those theorists who reject the notion that there is a universal, rational foundation for legal judgment. Judges do not, in their view, inhabit a lofty perspective that yields an objective vision of the case and its correct disposition. Instead, these scholars understand the role of judging more pragmatically; they recognize that all judges bring their own situated perspectives to the case and do the

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