Critical Perspectives on Accounting (2001) 12, 247267

doi:10.1006/cpac.2000.0414
Available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

EVIDENCE AND ARGUMENT: ANOTHER

LOOK AT AUDIT FUNDAMENTALS
A LEX . A RTHUR
University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

Traditionally, accounts of fundamental audit theory have been based on a common

sense epistemological framework, incorporating a correspondence theory of truth
and a nave empirical approach to discovery and demonstration. Although these
accounts generally fail to link this theory convincingly to audit practice, most writers
on technical audit processes have assumed (usually implicitly) that no practical
problems arise as a result of this. This disengagement between epistemological
grounding and day-to-day practice is mirrored in some current writing, which takes
its inspiration from the sociology of knowledge. This writing, also, fails to (and
indeed cannot) engage in a discourse with practitioners on fundamental theory
since it conceives the practitioners rationality as constructed, and, therefore, contingent. This paper attempts to set out an approach to fundamental theory, aimed
at avoiding the errors of the early theorists; preserving the insights gained from the
sociology of knowledge, without coming to grief on its self-referential difficulties;
and suggesting a route towards reconciling practice with conceptual basics.
c 2001 Academic Press

Introduction and Aims

Fundamental theory, in the sense in which the expression is to be used in
this paper, is theory which ultimately underpins a practice, the methods of an
enquiry, or the higher level theories of a discipline. The fundamental theories
of the sciences are the subject matter of epistemological enquiryscientists
primarily make knowledge claims, and so the fundamental theories are the theories
about how reliable knowledge claims can be made. In the arts, fundamental
theories might address the most general aesthetic values, and how these values
are established. Fundamental theory in religion might address the reliability
and relevance of key revelations and traditional texts, or the source of priestly
authority. Auditing, by its own account, and in the context of the present enquiry,
is taken to be most like the sciences: it is concerned with empirical enquiry
Address for correspondence: Alex. Arthur, University of Aberdeen, Department of Accounting, Edward
Wright Building, Aberdeen, AB24 3QY, UK. E-mail: arthur@abdn.ac.uk
Received 31 May 1999; revised 24 March 2000; accepted 17 April 2000

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c 2001 Academic Press

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A. Arthur

and conclusion, and it employs, or attempts to employ, methods which bear

strong resemblances to the scientific methods of experiment and hypothesis.
Fundamental theories of auditing, therefore, would take their roots in epistemological
enquiry.
Fundamental theorizing is currently unfashionable. There are, arguably, two broad
sets of reasons for this. The first set concerns failures of particular fundamentalist
projects to produce convincing results, and the second concerns the apparent capture of the language of objectivity and proof by groups perceived to have sharply
right-wing political agendas (Sokal and Bricmont, 1998)1 . This paper, nevertheless,
sets out to be a fundamentalist paper on audit theory. It considers whether there is
a need for a fundamental theory of audit evidence. It reviews some theories of this
type that have been developed in the past, and it considers an alternative approach
to fundamental audit theory which avoids some of their difficulties.
One aim of this paper is to show that the traditional approaches were attempting
to address a genuine problem. Further, it will attempt to show that this problem
cannot respond to approaches suggested by the sociology of knowledge (although
these approaches offer many valuable insights), but can be addressed from a more
sophisticated epistemological standpoint than was offered by earlier audit theorists.
The arguments that the paper contains could be said to start from the consideration
of two conundrums. The first is associated with the fact that a fundamental study of
rationality must, obviously, be subject to its own conclusions if it is to be a rational
study. This is the case even where it claims to restrict itself to the study of a specific
set of practices, because if it wishes to study the rationality of these practices, it
must give an account of what it means by rationality in the restricted context, and
this account will need to refer to some general conception of rationality in order
to justify the use of the term. This general conception can, in turn, be used to
reflect the quality of the study that is being undertaken. The second, closely related,
conundrum is that an account of auditor rationality which tries to show that certain
fundamental evidential processes can guarantee audit conclusions cannot avoid
incorporating an argument for the reliability of these evidential processes themselves.
This is an implicit (and compelling) demonstration of the dependence of evidential
status on argument and, therefore, a demonstration that the evidential processes
themselves are not fundamental in the sense required: evidence, after all, depends
upon argument.
Traditional audit texts that rely on nave (in the sense of unreflective or intuitive)
empiricist presuppositions (these are further explained below) fail to produce the
kinds of argument that are required in support of a rational practice of auditing.
These arguments must avoid the self-referential traps that theories of rationality can
fall into. They must deal, in some way, with the conundrums outlined above. They
must also address the various truth, validity, meaning, and relevance issues involved
without losing sight of the practical and social contexts within which the auditors
demonstrations must work. This does not (as indicated) make all considerations of
legitimate knowledge claims matters for the sociology of knowledge, but it does
provide insights into how the underpinnings of these knowledge claims should
be theorized.

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The Need for Fundamental Theory

Practitioner issues
Practitioners of some disciplines may hold quite erroneous epistemological beliefs,
without necessarily damaging their ability to perform within their discipline. The nave
realism or empirical positivism of a particular physical scientist, and the idealism
or intuitionism of an unreflective mathematician are, arguably, quite untenable
fundamental epistemological positions. No matter how untenable they are, however,
the physical and mathematical arguments of these physicists and mathematicians
may be quite secure. The general credibility of mathematics and physics is not, on
the whole, under external threat, nor is it the subject of destructive soul-searching
amongst mathematicians and physicists. There are other disciplines, and I would
argue that audit practice is one, where the epistemological preconceptions of
the theorists may have damaging methodological consequences. This is, in part,
because there is evidence in the history of auditing (Power, 1992, 1996) of the use of
fundamental theory artificially, as a device designed to make practice more credible
by making it more scientific, more philosophically justifiable, etc. There is no
widespread evidence in the history of physics and mathematics of this same anxiety
over methodological credibility. Nor is there evidence in physics or mathematics of
methodologically dubious mimicry of other, more respectable, disciplines.
Additionally, it might be tentatively argued that attitudes to honest practice, amongst
practitioners and trainees, can be damaged by fundamental theorizing which is seen
to be antipathetic or incredible with respect to their concernsif, in other words
it just seems to be a lot of irrelevant philosophizing. Weak theory is corrupting.
This is particularly the case where this fundamental theorizing is held up as being
characteristic of fundamental theorizing in general, with the implication that other
disciplines are no better served. The basis of this argument is the principle that
the members of healthy disciplines believe in the possibility, at least in principle,
of ultimately justifying their methods and conclusions. They further believe that
a demonstration that this belief is erroneous should make continuing practice
untenable. An academic researcher who discovers that a fundamental element
of an argument they were putting forward in support of a thesis is, in principle,
unsupportable would be expected to withdraw or modify the thesis. This is not to
say that all supporting arguments are, in practice, made explicitit is only to say
that the presentation of an audit conclusion, a scientific theory, or an academic
argument (among other things) includes an implicit promise to the effect that they
can, if required, be made explicit.
Theoretical issues
Auditing might be characterized, along with accounting, as a soft measurement
regime. In other words, much of the language of the sciences concerned
with discovery, proof, quantification, and demonstration is used by auditors and
accountants, but the processes by which they negotiate and agree the meanings of
these terms are much more self-conscious, and these meanings cannot be written

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off as obvious, or given, as convincingly as is the case in some apparently more

concrete disciplines (Hines, 1988). This has two consequences. Firstly, it makes
the job of auditing difficult, because it is harder to know what the rules are, and
because they are more likely to change. Secondly, it makes auditing a philosophically
interesting discipline, because some of the ways in which measurement principles
are established are revealed through the processes of negotiation referred to (Lyas,
1984, 1993; Stamp, 1981). The practitioners of ontologically and epistemologically
more straightforward disciplines can take these processes for granted, and render
them almost invisible. Unfortunately, the direction that traditional audit meta-theorists
(e.g. Mautz and Sharaf, 1961) have taken has been to try to obscure, rather than
explore, the very differences between auditing and the natural sciences that give it
this philosophical interest. This results in audit theory which attempts to mimic one
popular view of what natural sciences does (a kind of nave empiricism) in a way that
misrepresents both auditing and the natural sciences, since the latter is not nearly
so mechanically empirical as this view might suggest (Popper, 1963; Kuhn, 1970;
Feyerabend, 1975)2 .
If one accepts this attribution of a soft disciplinary status to auditing, then the
possibility is opened up of developing a type of fundamental theory which is quite
different from what has previously been offered3 . This paper will attempt to develop
a theory of this type. It will suggest some clear criteria by which the rationality of
audit decisions can be adjudicated, and will show how the limits of proof (on the one
hand) and audit method (on the other) can be related without requiring a (usually
unconvincing) reconstruction of auditing in the image of the sciences.
It will also avoid relinquishing exploration of disciplinary foundations entirely
to social theory. The application of social theory to the study of disciplinary
methodologies has been a source of contention since Kuhn (1970) argued that there
were aspects of scientific theorizing which could only be understood in terms of
categories that many later theorists characterized as sociological4 . This contention
has partly focused on the question of whether, ultimately, only social analyses
were needed herewhether, in fact, sociology could supplant (or encompass)
epistemology. In auditing, a number of writers have become associated with this
approachexamples are Power (1995; 1996; 1992; 1997; and methodological
considerations in Power, 1986), Francis (1994), who takes a closely similar
hermeneutical approach, and Pentland (1993). Hacking (1999) provides a very
accessible discussion of the issues as they relate to the hard sciences.
The difficulty for the view that sociology can supplant epistemology here, is that the
claim that social processes determine standards of validity, and rationality is, itself,
a claim which needs rational support. If these standards are contingently dependent
upon social processes, then so is the validity of the social theory to that effect. Social
theory cannot show that questions about the ultimate rationality of some disciplines
are a mistake without raising questions about its own rationality, and, therefore,
about the validity and reliability of any account that it wishes to giveincluding
its account of the discipline under question (Fuller, 1996). It may be possible, for
example, to represent the rationality of a discipline as a social construction, based
upon conditioned views of reality and learned discursive practices. A general account
of this kind must either: (a) accept the consequences of this for its own rationality,

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which are damaging exactly to the extent that they comprise a critique of the discipline
being considered or (b) must show itself to be rational by some other, more reliable,
standard. Approach (a) cannot avoid questioning its own legitimacy, as it investigates
the legitimacy of the discipline about which it theorizes. Approach (b) admits that
there must be other ways of accounting for disciplinary rationality, and that social
theory cannot tell the whole story here.
Despite its successes, social theory can, therefore, only give a certain kind of
account of disciplinary rationality. For the reasons given above, this kind of account
cannot directly address questions about the validity of the arguments used within the
discipline it is describing. It can examine the creation of norms within a discipline,
but cannot normatively evaluate it.
A very similar problem exists for other closely related theoretical approaches.
The various flavours of hermeneutic theory might, for instance, be regarded as
the philosophical versions of sociology of knowledge approaches. It is somewhat
beyond the scope of this paper to explore them in detailPower (1986), who
suggested a hermeneutic response to Lyas (1984), gives a very approachable
account. In summary, however, hermeneutic theory attempts to explicitly recognize
the history embedded within any rational enquiry, pointing out that we can never
achieve a complete ahistorical perspective. In recognizing this, however, we are not
recognizing some limit to rational enquiryjust that it is a matter of pushing back
present horizons, rather than hoping to achieve complete knowledge. Unfortunately,
the hermeneutic approach, while offering a good heuristic model for enquiry, also
fails the self-referential test: either hermeneutic theory can be non-hermeneutically
supported, which is self-contradictory; or it is hermeneutically revisable, which means
that another epistemological model could take its place. In passing, it is worth noting
an important problem for writers such as Francis (1994), who explicitly explores the
possibility that auditing is a hermeneutic practice (in the sense of being constantly
under revision by practitioners acting out their professional understanding). This is
that general hermeneutic theory does not allow for epistemological closure: it cannot
be used to excuse a discipline which cannot support its methods. In other words,
hermeneutical theories of knowledge do not create space for either a lack of rigour
or an absence of normative roots.
A principal aim of this paper is to indicate a way out of these self-referential
dilemmas that does not abandon the considerable insights of the sociology of
knowledge, or the benefits of the hermeneutic heuristic, but avoids the more or less
explicit, and therefore incoherent, relativism which these seem to entail. It attempts
to achieve this aim by reviewing some of the more significant traditional approaches
to theorizing about audit evidence, and about its role in the audit process. It then goes
on to review their deficiencies and comment on the relevance of these deficiencies to
audit theory and practice. Finally, it suggests an alternative approach to audit theory
at this level, and shows how quality of argument, rather than quality of evidential
experience (and of audit judgement), is fundamental to the audit process.
Finally, this paper has an ethical dimension: It is difficult to reconstruct, within
a sociology of knowledge framework, a convincing account of what is involved in
doing an audit properly. A comfort of epistemological empiricism is its appeal to an
external arbiter of true knowledge: the world as experienced through our senses.

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Traditional fundamental accounts of audit evidence processes which refer, explicitly

or implicitly, to an empiricist epistemology, attempt to avail themselves of this comfort.
In doing so, they reveal their own ethical intent to give a general account of honest
auditingas auditing which refers to, and depends upon, the best source of reliable
knowledge. A problem for accounts which relinquish this empiricist foundationin
order, for instance, to avoid its very real conceptual difficulties (see below)is to find
an alternative touchstone.

Characteristics of Existing Fundamental Accounts

In the UK, the revised Statement of Auditing Standards 400Audit Evidence (APB,
1993), states that Auditors should obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence to
be able to draw reasonable conclusions on which to base the audit opinion. The
original exposure draft for the standard defined evidence as the information auditors
obtain in arriving at the conclusions on which the audit opinion is based. It goes
on to say: Audit evidence comprises source documents and accounting records
underlying the financial statement assertions and corroborative information from
other sources. Curiously, this definition was dropped from the final standard, which
contains no definition at all. The standard does comment on the mixed concept of
sufficient and appropriate evidence, indicating that sufficiency relates to quantity
and appropriateness to quality. It does not give operational guidance on how these
properties are to be tested. It gives, instead, only general guidance, using the
language of materiality, risk, and audit judgement, leavened by considerations of
other available information (whether discovered through audit procedures or coming
from other sources).
Although most of what this standard states about types of evidence and about
sources of evidence can be related to the writings of audit theorists, the standard does
not refer to any theoretical context. For instance, the standard distinguishes between
the reliability of external and internal evidence, between evidence collected by the
auditors and evidence from the entity, and between oral and documentary evidence.
The standard also lists methods of collecting evidence (inspection, observation,
enquiry, and confirmation). These distinctions and these methods are clearly related
to the types of evidence theory outlined by Mautz and Sharaf (1961) and Hatherly
(1980), but neither this, nor the underlying epistemological considerations which
Mautz and Sharaf, for instance, refer to are made explicit in the standard. This raises
the question of whether the APB regards the theoretical bases of these statements
as either self-evident, at least to practitioners, or irrelevant. If they are self-evident to
practitioners, then why is the standard required, since it does not go much beyond
them? If they are irrelevant, then why does the standard not explain why, and what
other conceptual underpinnings does it have?
This question has a flavour of perverse navete about it because, in a sense, the
answer to it is clear: the standard does take the principles to be obviousto everyone,
not just to practitionersand considers that it would be ponderous to state them
because they are part of our common sense. They are embedded in our social
patterns of trust and mistrust, and are based on an unreflective epistemology based

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on what might be called a kind of psychologistic empiricismpsychologistic, because

the discussion is usually developed around methods of producing confidence and
certainty in the auditors mind, and empiricism because features of the auditors
direct experience are taken to be fundamental to the effectiveness of these methods.
Traditional audit evidence theorists have tended to restate these underpinnings rather
than review them. Gray (1991), in a review of audit evidence theory, starts (p. 131)
with what he clearly takes to be an uncontroversial summary of the basic position:
The word evidence describes the whole range of things, such as documents, reports,
guesses, inferences and calculations, upon which the auditor exercises his or her expert
judgement in evaluating whether or not the accounts show a true and fair view. More formally,
evidence is the facts presented to the mind of a person for the purpose of enabling him to
decide a disputed position (Mautz, 1958, p. 208). Now, obviously, different facts will have
different influences on different persons. We cannot examine individual differences here,
but, assuming a homogeneity of auditor judgement for the time being, we can examine how
compelling to the mind different categories of facts are.

Gray then goes on to reflect on the various hierarchies of evidential types which
his picture suggests, focusing on Mautz and Sharaf (1961), Hatherly (1980), Keenan
(1979) and Keenan and Anderson (1979). Mautz and Sharaf set out a typology of
natural evidence, created evidence, and rational argumentation5 , with natural
evidence being the most reliable and argumentation being the least. Hatherlys
hierarchy places more emphasis on the source of the evidence. He distinguishes
between evidential processes that are under the auditors control and those which
are under the control of third parties; and both of these from sources that are
under the control of the directors. Keenan makes a distinction between primary
best availableevidence, secondaryother direct, but not bestevidence, and
circumstantial evidencewhich is somewhat like Mautz and Sharafs rational
argumentation. There are some similarities between these accounts (especially
between Keenans and Mautz and Sharafs), although it could be argued that
Gray over-emphasizes these and under-emphasizes the differences. Hatherlys
framework, in particular, seems to reflect social (trust and mistrust), rather than
empirical, concerns, and is different from the others in some other ways as well.
It is much more concrete and more closely related to audit practice, insofar as it
depends on categories familiar to auditors rather than attempting to construct general
categories of evidential reliability. In this respect, it operates at a different level from
the other theories that this paper addresses, and is possibly also out of place in
Grays review for the same reason.
Flint (1988) addresses audit evidence in his postulate no. 4 (p. 31):
The subject matter of audit, for example conduct, performance or achievement or record of
events or state of affairs, or a statement or facts relating to any of these, is susceptible to
verification by evidence.

He explicitly refers to Mautz and Sharaf (1961) in his discussion of the nature of
evidence, and clearly aligns himself with their epistemological framework, giving the
following account:
It is a matter of personal skill for auditors to judge how much, what kind, and what
combination of different types of evidence are necessary to enable an opinion justifiably to

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A. Arthur
be formed and a report to be made. There must be what Mautz and Sharaf (1961, pp. 43, 68)
describe as sufficient competent evidential matter. Verification, they say, is the vehicle
that carries one to a position of confidence about any given proposition.

His account adds something to Mautz and Sharaf, however, in explicitly referring to
the auditors personal skill. According to Power (1990), this is a weak move, since
it appeals to personal qualities at a point where something more formally robust is
required.
In Flints defence, he at least recognizes that something is needed here to credibly
link theory (per Mautz and Sharaf) with practice. Within the generally psychologistic
framework (where verification is taken to be about achieving confidence rather than
proof ) that he and they adopt, personal qualities might reasonably seem to be a
possible starting point. If psychological conviction is to be taken as fundamental,
then we might wish to be able to distinguish between more and less reliable
psychological dispositions. A good audit would be one carried out by someone who
was psychologically disposed to be convinced by appropriate evidence, and not
by inappropriate evidence. Flints postulate implicitly contains a declaration (which
Power, 1990, also notes) on the possibility of auditing. It can be restated as: If
something cannot be verified by evidence, then it is not auditable.
Schandl (1978, pp. 2324) evidence postulate is very similar to Flints, but replaces
the auditors skill, which is a personal quality, with a system of norms. By this, he
means the criteria that are applied to items of evidence in order to reach a conclusion.
In his further postulate on norms (p. 24), he says:
We have to accept without proof that the norms (criteria) exist in our thinking. We see only
the effect of the norms in the acts, writings, or verbal utterances of other individuals, and we
can arrive at the concept by analyzing our own thinking. The judgementssuch as good,
bad, niceare unthinkable without the assumption of an underlying standard of values
(norms) which are implicit in the quality judgements, just as the unit of measurement is
needed if we want to express an opinion as the result of the measurement process.

Throughout Schandl (1978), this picture of the auditor having experiences and
forming judgements, mediated by norms, re-appears. In a short section explicitly
devoted to audit evidence (pp. 8992) he attempts to construct a theoretical
framework for audit judgement consisting of experiences, normative conceptual
structures, and mental comparisons. Where he gives a more general account of the
concept of a norm (pp. 8186), he relates the learning of norms to infant development
and not, significantly, to any more fundamental framework of justification. The
implication of this seems to be that this is all justification is aboutfollowing a set of
normative rules which have been learned at an early age.
From the above, it can be seen that many writers on the fundamental theory
of audit evidence do not distinguished between: (1) theorizing about why certain
kinds of evidence processes are psychologically convincing and (2) theorizing about
whether they lead to valid and supportable conclusions. Most depend upon their
readers professional understanding to establish the connection (with Flint, as noted,
making this an explicit part of this account). As indicated, the accounts given tend
to incorporate an epistemology of common senseas in this example (Mautz and
Sharaf, 1961):
Evidence provides the means by which we can achieve that state of assurance described

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as knowing as opposed to merely believing. It is thus the key to truth, which may be
described as conformity to reality.

Mautz and Sharaf go on to develop this account, distinguishing between truths

that are impressed on our minds by natural evidence (material truths), those that
depend upon the basic postulates of mathematics (mathematical truths), and other
abstract truths that are not necessarily mathematical. Examples of these latter
truths are statements about material objects (e.g. the existence of the Empire State
Building) about which we might not have direct personal experience. Acceptance of
material truths in the presence of natural evidence supporting them is taken to be
simply a capacity or feature of the mind. Calculations in mathematics are held to
be similarly compelling, so long as they are not so complicated as to confuse us.
It is interesting to note, here, that Mautz and Sharaf do not go on to consider the
status of mathematical proofs which are both confusing and validwe must accept
these, but we are not immediately compelled by them. This circumstance throws
the distinction between psychological conviction and proof into sharp relief. Abstract
truths, about objects or states of affairs that we can neither directly experience nor
mathematically prove, can, according to Mautz and Sharaf, never by shown to be
certain, but can be known with more or less probability, depending upon the quality
of the evidence which supports them.

Problems with Existing Accounts

In summary, a common starting point of existing fundamental audit theorists is a
more or less psychologistic or empirical/psychologistic epistemology incorporating
a simple correspondence theory of truth. That is, the theorists believe that
psychological conviction through sensory experience is the key stage in the process
of belief confirmation and in the production of knowledge, and that true knowledge
is knowledge which corresponds to the way the world actually is6 . It is possible that
neither of these beliefs would seem in the least problematical to a casual reader, but
both contain difficulties which make them more or less unsustainable. A principal
purpose of this paper is to attempt to review some of these difficulties, and make
them immediately relevant to the problem of audit evidence.
To begin with, it is worth making it quite clear why an account which confuses
psychological conviction with grounds for belief must be wrong. The way that we
come by beliefs cannot count as justifications for them. Many people probably first
learn basic arithmetic from a primary school teacher, but this account of how they
come to believe, for instance, that 1+1 = 2, is clearly not an argument for the validity
of basic arithmetic. There are no mathematical arguments which rely on references
to the early educational experiences of the mathematicians. Also, the mere fact of
conviction, however sincere and complete, does not imply that the conviction is well
grounded. It is easy to think of cases where compelling convictions, based on natural
evidence, have been overturnedconvictions that the earth is flat, that the stars are
fixed, that the magician really does have a rabbit in his hat, etc. Finally, the absence
of a conviction about something does not imply that good grounds for believing it do
not exist. A mathematical proof may be valid, even though we fail to understand it,

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and are therefore unconvinced.

Returning to Gray (1991), we find that there are two aspects of the accounts
that he reviews which are puzzling to him. One is that the psychologistic account
of evidence that he has taken from Mautz and Sharaf offers no very useful clues
about how we should study auditor judgement. Judgement, under these accounts,
seems to be to do with the processes we go through in the absence of evidence
which is immediately compelling7 , and it is not at all clear (from Mautz and Sharaf,
or elsewhere) how we should decide that an acceptably low probability of error has
been achieved. That is to saywe do make these decisions, and may even be able
to say when they are made well, but we have no general theoretical basis (within the
accounts given) for assessing the reliability of our conclusions. Grays second puzzle
is that, despite this, fee pressure has apparently led to an increased dependence
on judgement, and a decreased dependence on evidence collection. This suggests
the possibility that auditors are more confident about their judgement than they are
about the evidence collection processes. Of course, what counts as an exercise of
judgement, and what as part of evidence collection, is not always clear. Gray clearly
regards analytical review as being supported only by auditor judgement, and this
is plainly arguable. What is clear, however, is that it is not based on an evidential
process that can be easily analysed using Mautz and Sharafs type of theoretical
framework. At the very least, the analytical review process seems to put a higher
value on rational argumentation than on the collection of natural evidence. If this
change in audit method is supportable, then clearly a different kind of framework is
required to explain it.
There are other puzzles in addition to Grays. First of all, there is a puzzle associated
with Mautz and Sharafs need to give an account of evidential compulsion at all, if
some account of the type they offer is true. If there were some circumstancesour
experience of natural evidence, for instancewhich were simply compelling to the
mind, then nothing would be added to this compulsion (as a compulsion) by giving an
account of it. We would simply be compelledthe question why we were compelled
would not arise, since this would be equivalent to asking for support for something
which, in itself, represented the highest possible standard of certainty. Putting this
another way: Mautz and Sharaf seem, at least partly, to be trying to explain why
natural evidence is better than other kinds, thereby making our dependence upon
natural evidence more theoretically sound. However, if natural evidence is the best
kind available, it is vacuous to argue for its reliabilityparticularly since rational
argumentation is, for Mautz and Sharaf at least, a distinctly inferior source of reliable
conviction.
Secondly, and more firmly in the context of auditing, it is clear that natural
evidence (the best kind) is useless unless supported by created evidence (invoices,
accounting records, etc.), and that both of these need arguments to support their
relevance to the audit opinion. According to Gray and to Mautz and Sharaf, good
natural evidence of the existence of a fixed asset would be either a direct experience
of the asset, or, possibly the asset itself. However, without the created evidence of
titles, invoices, and records of account, and a rational argument for the relevance
of these, the mere existence of the asset would be meaningless, since ownership
could not be attested from the natural evidence alone. It is difficult to imagine

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what exactly would count as natural evidence of a socially constructed quality

such as ownership.

An Alternative Epistemological Approach

Some of the problems discussed in the previous section arise as a result of audit
evidence theorists commitment to a correspondence theory of truth, that is, a
theory which makes the truth of a statement depend upon it correctly corresponding
to some facts in the world. However, much this type of theory might sound like
common sense, no specific correspondence theory can be made to work, because
the concept of correspondence itself turns out to be highly problematical. In fact, any
account of the truth of the account of correspondence that might be offered turns
out to be either circular or question begging. This possibly needs some expansion:
In order to make a correspondence theory of truth work, we must give an account
of how the things we say can, in fact, correspond to reality. It is only by giving this
account that we can make sense of the idea of correspondence at all. Much of
the controversy over correspondence theories of truth has been concerned with the
various attempts which have been made to give (or to justify avoiding giving) such
an account.
There is an argument which suggests that all attempts to give such an account
must fail, which goes as follows: If we could give an account of correspondence,
and it was a true account, then it would have to correspond to reality. Its truth would
(according to correspondence theory) depend upon its corresponding correctly. Now
if two things, say a statement and a state of affairs, correspond correctly, and
that correct correspondence made the statement true, then we would need to be
able to say what corresponding correctly would be before we could assess the
truth of the statement. In other words, we would need to be sure that our theory
of correspondence was correct before we could judge the truth of our theory of
correspondence. One might argue against this that we just know when a statement
corresponds to reality, and that no account is required. Unfortunately, this knowledge
is by no means completely reliablewe often make mistakes about what is true and
what is notand is therefore a flimsy basis for an account of truth. Another counterargument goes as follows. Mathematical truths cannot be based on correspondence
(unless to some Platonic world of idealsa more or less discredited proposal),
so is there a possibility that some correspondence theory of truth itself can be
shown to be mathematically true, thereby breaking the circularity? This counterargument, however, makes correspondence truth dependent upon something like
mathematical truth. We would say of a statement that it corresponds to reality, that
we have a mathematical account of correspondence which shows that a statement
which corresponds to reality must be true, and that this statement is, therefore,
true. What we would have constructed, in our attempts to justify a correspondence
theory of truth, is a theory of truth which can actually dispense with the concept of
correspondence and replace it instead with whatever mathematics underpins our
notion of correspondence.
This is not the place to dwell further on the difficulties with correspondence theories

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A. Arthur

of truth, but the scale of the problem should be apparent. For a more comprehensive
investigation, a good place to start might be with Putnam (1981) and Quine (1969,
and elsewhere), who are concerned with the problem of referencethe putative
relationship between words and, where relevant, objectsbroadly definedin the
world, which, for a correspondence theorist, gives the words their meanings and
allows definite truth conditions for sentences to be spelled out.
Coherence, rather than correspondence, theories of truth avoid these difficulties,
but at the expense of intuitive appeal. These theories give accounts of truth in terms
of coherence between statements. In other words, if statement X is coherent with
all the other statements which we hold (perhaps for the moment) to be true, then
X is also true. It is easier to give a non-circular account of coherence than to give
such an account of correspondence. This is partly because we do not have to step
outside the domain of statements to do itwe do not, in other words, have to try to
elucidate a relationship between things which are statements and things (to which
the statements correspond) which are not. Also, conveniently enough, we have a
set of ready-made relationships between statements which are essentially related to
the concept of truth, since they are used to determine the truths of some statements
from the truths of others. These are the relations of formal logic, used to analyse the
steps in an argument in order to determine whether each properly follows from the
preceding one, so that the truth of one implies the truth of the other.
In passing, those with an interest in legal evidence theory will have noted a recent
trend away from correspondence theories and towards coherence theories of truth.
The traditional picture of neutral evidence collection followed by theory construction
is breaking down here, also, and being replaced by a view of evidence collection as
hypothesis driven. The focus has shifted from picturing reality to telling a coherent
story. (See Jackson and Doran, 1996, for a review of the issues. They refer further,
in this context, to Tillers, 1988 and Jackson, 1998.)
The principal theme of this paper is to develop a fundamental theory of audit
evidence based on a coherence theory of truth, and avoiding psychologistic errors,
which is directly related to the discussions of truth, reality, and proof that are found
in the later Wittgenstein (particularly Wittgenstein, 1972 and 1979; in contrast to
Wittgenstein, 1974). In order to do this, it is necessary to develop some of this
philosophical background.

Philosophical Background
If the statement There is no limit to what can intelligibly be believed about the world
was true, then it would be intelligible to believe that some fact about the world could
make it false. For some, this contradiction would count as a reductio ad absurdum8
proof that there are limits to what can be intelligibly believed, and would possibly
inspire their inquiries into the foundations of true knowledge. For others, the various
paradoxes of justification are just logical puzzles, which sophistically fence with the
plain evidence that we are unable to provide satisfactory foundations for even the
most obvious common sense certainties. These others might feel their scepticism
to be reinforced by the reflection that there is a non-trivial circularity associated

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259

with needing to know that epistemological theory is reliable, since a fundamental

epistemological theory could only be reliably known on the basis of its own criteria.
From the time of the Greeks, philosophers have aligned themselves on one or the
other side of this divide, or have contrived cunning bridges or disguises for it. Kants
fundamental epistemological insightthat the limits of intelligible belief must be as
at least as securely established as our reasons for believing in themis a milestone
on this third way. It represents a crucial recognition: that the contrary of whatever our
fundamental epistemological theory is, must, in a strong sense, be inconceivable,
and not just shown to be wrong, if we are to avoid the circularity mentioned above
(Smith, 1933). In other words, the possibility of being wrong about certain basic
facts about the world must be literally unthinkable. Unfortunately, the successes
of the physical sciences, and some eighteenth century misconceptions about how
these were achieved, placed empirical discovery and sensory experience at the
centre state of his enquiry, so that Kants approach to the synthetic a priorithe
necessarily true foundations of our empirical knowledgebecame a search for the
necessary forms of possible experience, rather than a more appropriately focused
search for the necessary forms of possible knowledge.
During the twentieth century, various writers have explored the role of language in
scientific and philosophical theorizing. This paper will focus on Wittgenstein, most
particularly themes from Wittgenstein (1972) and Wittgenstein (1979). Previously,
language had been regarded simply as a neutral and transparent tool (however
flawed, see Russell, 1974, and, arguably, the early Wittgensteinalso 1974), and
it was, more or less, assumed that any intelligible scientific or philosophical theory
could be expressed in language. However, there can be a tension, to the point of
incoherence, between what we believe and what we can say about these beliefs. It
is easy to establish this with a familiar type of argument against radical scepticism:
A radical sceptic must be uncertain even of the reliability of language to convey
meaning correctly. In order to articulate their scepticism, they would need to be sure
that they were saying what they meant to say about it. They could never be sure of
this (since they are radical sceptics), so any attempt to articulate their scepticism
would contradict it. In other words, saying I am a radical sceptic is also to say I am
sceptical about the meaning of what I say. If I am sceptical about the meaning of I
am a radical sceptic, then I must allow that I may be saying that I am not.
Some beliefs about language (e.g. that what we say makes sense) are
presupposed by our use of it. A scepticism about these beliefs may not be
unintelligible, but an articulation of this scepticism by the sceptic certainly would be.
Our scientific and philosophical theories, as well as other theories we might entertain,
are (at least insofar as we entertain them publicly) articulated theories, so they must
also, a fortiori, presuppose these beliefs. Wittgenstein discusses the importance and
nature of rule following in a number of places, both in Philosophical Investigations
(Wittgenstein, 1972), On Certainty (Wittgenstein, 1979), and elsewhere. It is possible
to read one of the themes that appear in these discussions as an argument that
requests for instructions about how to follow a rule cannot simply go on ad infinitum,
and that we have to accept, at some stage, that rule following is just something that
people can do. It is a feature of our form of life, and fundamental to being able to
play the language game at all. Bearing in mind the conflicts that can arise between

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A. Arthur

what we believe and what we can say about these beliefs, however, a more formal recasting of this argument suggests itself. How can someone be completely ignorant of
what is involved in rule following, and yet still be able to ask a question about how to
do it, since asking questionsusing languageis an example of sophisticated rule
following? This version of the argument does not rely on our instinctive repugnance
for ad infinitum explanations, nor on an unanalysable appeal to a form of life, but,
instead, directly reveals the incoherence of the request.
This kind of argument takes the language game metaphoranother Wittgensteinian themecompletely seriously: the articulated study of any discipline (including philosophy, sociology, and auditing) is undertaken by making moves in a
language game. One kind of move is to ask a question, but certain questions, e.g.
questions about whether the game is playable, can have only a restricted range of
answers. If the game is unplayable, then a question about it fails to be a question at
all, and so would not have an answer (far less a negative one, which is what we might,
initially, expect). It can, therefore, only have the answer yes within the game. For
a special subset of these questions, the reasons for this restriction are synthetic.
They depend upon a kind of incoherence, but not on an incoherence between different moves in the game: they depend, instead, on an incoherence between the
truth of certain statements and the possibility of seriously playing the game at all.
Statements such as language works, for example, are synthetic statements about
the world that cannot be false. They are synthetic, because they are not statements
about the rules of any particular language practice (i.e. they are not logical rules,
meaning rules, or grammatical9 rules), and they cannot be false in the sense that
their falsehood cannot form part of any articulable theory.
This is important, and needs a little amplification. Coherence theories of truth focus
on incoherence between statements, and they also tend to take logical incoherence
as the paradigmatic case. In other words, if some set of statements (S) could be
shown to have, as a strict consequence, that some further statement was both true
and false, then S would be shown to be incoherent. In the case of a coherence theory
of truth: if S was some set of coherent statements which represented our current
beliefs about something, and adding some statement C to S made S incoherent,
then C would be false. Consider, however, the statement It is possible to make
statements(P). It should be clear that it must be possible to add this statement to any
set of statements S without rendering S incoherent. This means that P can never be
false. Which also means that not P (It is not possible to make statements) can never
be true. It is not possible to make statements is not tautologically false, however,
in the way that a logical contradiction is. It would be quite intelligible to describe
someone as believing that it was not possible to make statements (if, for instance,
they never made any)10 . In addition, this statement does not contain or entail a
contradiction in the way that Fred is a married bachelor doesthe contradiction
is between its truth and the possibility of saying it, rather than being a result of the
meanings of the words it contains.
In summary, the search for synthetic a priori beliefs may be hopeless, so that what
Power (1986) refers to as our Cartesian anxietythat we can never be relieved
of personal doubtcannot be satisfactorily addressed. However, there are clearly
statements (typically about the possibility of language) that are both synthetic and

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261

irrefutable (in the sense of not being articulably falsifiable). Attempts to approach,
exploit, or find methods of refuting this conclusion lie, arguably, at the heart of what
has been called the linguistic turn in philosophical theory. Wittgensteins (1972)
repeated insistence that questions can only be asked from within an epistemological
framework (what he called a form of life, or, on occasions, a language game) is
possibly the key insight of twentieth century analytical philosophy.
Insofar as epistemological fundamentals are concerned, the Kantian project of
exploring what it is possible to believe has been replaced by the Wittgensteinian
one of exploring what it is possible to say. Since we can only ask questions
about our beliefs, i.e. can only publicly consider them, if we can state them,
this second approach turns out, so far as articulable theorizing is concerned,
to be the equivalent of the first. It is perfectly comprehensible, therefore, to talk
about a linguistic fundamentalist epistemology. The most fundamentally supportable
empirical theories are not those whose contraries deny our experience, but those
whose contraries deny the possibility of articulated theorizing itself.

Auditing and Coherence

So far, the argument of this paper has tried to show three things: that a fundamental
theory of auditing is desirable; that theorists who adopt a common sense
epistemology of sensory perception and psychological conviction cannot produce
such a theory; and that there are good reasons for believing that such a theory is,
nevertheless, possible. The argument for the last of these three has focused on a
certain type of fundamental theorizing which takes as its starting point the synthetic
possibility of articulating anything at all. This starting point is fundamental in the
sense that its falsehood is incoherent with any articulable theory.
The next task is to show the direct relevance of this to auditing, and this can
be straightforwardly accomplished. Instead of the conception of audit judgement
based, ultimately, on sensory perception, which is offered by the traditional writers
reviewed above, what is required is a conception of an audit conclusion based on
valid argument and agreed discursive moves. The ultimate practical foundation of
this argument may be an agreement that certain tests have been correctly carried
out, and that they have had certain agreed results. The ultimate epistemological
foundation will be a demonstration that if the audit argument is unreliable, or if
the articulated agreement is unreliable, then no articulation is possible. The link
to reality, which Mautz and Sharaf sought in sensory experience and empiricist
epistemology, is found instead in the possibility of articulation: the world must be
the kind of place where language is possible, because the possibility of language is
presupposed by any articulable theory, and we cannot articulate to the contrary. If
fundamental epistemological theory can be intelligibly re-cast as discursive, then it
is clearly no longer necessary to look to empiricism for auditing fundamentals. The
kind of fundamental theory of auditing we need is one which shows how it can be
firmly rooted in the nature of discursive practice.
Clearly, practical audit procedures will not, in general, attempt to produce
demonstrations of this rigourany more than all mathematical proofs refer explicitly

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A. Arthur

to the fundamental logic of mathematical demonstrationbut this is not required.

What is required is that auditors be prepared, in principle, to go on producing
arguments to support their methods until any relevant interlocutors, by questioning
them further, express a scepticism about the possibility of talking at all. At this
point, either meaning collapses and noise replaces discourse, or the complete
demonstration has been given. Flints (1988) comment (noted above) that we must
consider the auditability of a report or other audit object can now be brought into a
sharper focus. The normatively unanalysable professional judgement he appeals
to can be replaced with an argument that has the overall form of the following
conditional: Either doing X counts as an audit, or no audit is possible, since no
further relevant tests can be carried out. A statement of this kind can, of course,
also be disputed, and supported, until either it or its contrary is shown to have the
impossible consequence indicated.
Further, if an audit is requested or required, either by statute or by individual
contract, then the presumption that the requested audit is possible to do has already
been accepted.
It might be thought conceivable that auditors are being asked to do something
which cannot be done; but this could only be the result of some kind of a mistake
or deception. It cannot be a valid move, within any discourse, for a request to be
both seriously made and recognized by the discursive parties as impossible to fulfil.
This is easily demonstrated by an example. Let A ask B to do some task X. If B
knows that A believes X to be impossible, then B has the best kind of grounds for
believing that he/she has not properly understood the request. This is because B
can consider A as having said the equivalent of X is impossible and Do X. X
cannot be done and You must do X are contradictory, and contradiction makes
meaning indefinitely ambiguous. It might be argued against this that there are many
counter-examplese.g. in political discoursewhere demands are made which are
impossible to fulfil. These are exceptions which prove the rule, however, since they
help to distinguish the sense of seriously in for a request to be. . . seriously made.
Many political demands are not seriously made (in this sense), since the demand
makers do not expect them to be fulfilled.
In this case, the argument can take the stronger form of: having agreed that an
audit is possible, and having agreed that certain procedures are all that could count
as auditing in this case, then demonstrating (agreeing) that these procedures have
been carried out will be equivalent to demonstrating that the audit has been carried
out. If the only possible test of a sales ledger balance is, say, to carry out a detailed
sales ledger review (or some other relevant test), and this has been correctly done,
then the auditor has fulfilled the statutory requirement. If it cannot be agreed that this
test is adequate, then it is not possible to test the sales ledger, and, consequently, not
possible to provide an audit opinion. The arguments arising in this paper do not, by
any means, rule out the possibility that statutory auditing, as it is currently conceived
and required, is impossible. What they are intended to do is provide a fundamental
epistemological framework within which the possibility and reliability of auditing can
be addressed.

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263

Conclusion
Considerations such as the above lead to a conclusion that the audit argument
(including the elements of the argument that support the evidential statements) is a
more important focus of fundamental audit enquiry than the evidence process itself,
and that a fundamental theory of auditing which does both the practical and the
ethical work of Mautz and Sharafs empiricism can be constructed on this basis.
This paper has attempted to review traditional fundamental accounts of audit
evidence with two purposes: to show their relevance, on the one hand, and their
errors, on the other. Their relevance has been related to questions of honest practice
and normative professional direction. Their errors, it is suggested, have been to do
with their adherence to a psychologistic empiricism and a correspondence theory of
truth. In their place, an alternative account has been suggested, which incorporates
a coherence theory of truth and relates the underpinnings of auditing to the underpinnings of discursive practice in general. This type of theory has the advantages of
avoiding the conceptual difficulties associated with empiricism and correspondence,
and suggests a framework for the normative analysis of audit argumentsomething
which is notably missing from empirical research into auditor judgement.
A possible, and mistaken, interpretation of the argument of this paper would be
that it tries to rationalize present audit practice by constructing a fundamental theory
of auditing whose starting point is that the way we do it must be right because it is
the only way available. The reason this interpretation would be mistaken is that the
paper does not argue that what auditors actually do now is correct, or even that a
coherent concept of an audit can be developed within any particular circumstances.
Flints (1988) warning that we must decide whether an audit is possible remains
central, although it should be re-focused as a warning to clearly negotiate and agree
the audit task with the various participants before agreeing to carry it out.
What the paper suggests is a fundamental framework for reviewing audit practices
and, importantly, for recognizing their limitations. The growth of the audit culture
(Power, 1994, 1997) has been made possible, partly, because of poor understanding
of the limitations of auditability. The frameworks of traditional fundamental audit
theorists (Flint, 1988, possibly excluded) do not reflect on these limitations, and
do not offer any approach to analysing them. If truth is correspondence, and our
best access to it is via natural evidence, then the only limitation on auditing is our
access to appropriate natural evidence for the attestation of the audit outcome. While
a complete audit, under this conception, may be expensive or time-consuming,
there is no reasonin principlewhy it cannot be done. The approach suggested
by this paper explicitly recognizes that such a standard of complete auditability
does not, even in principle, make sense, and that we must negotiate, for each new
type of engagement, what would count as an audit under those circumstances.
This has never, notably, been done by parties to the traditional corporate audit.
This negotiation would not have a concept of possible complete auditability as its
background. It would need, instead, to construct such a background by agreeing what
the limitations of auditability were: this agreement would be based on an argument
of a certain form. It would say, in effect: if this is an appropriate subject for audit,
then the following procedures must count because they are all that is available, and

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if this cannot be agreed, then the audit is not possible.

Because our common sense epistemology tends to focus on experience, and
on correspondence between language and reality, it is possible that this languagebased approach to fundamental audit theory will not be particularly easy to sell to
the audit profession. Two points need to be made in response to this. One is that
actual audit practice cannot be explained in terms of any basic theory of the type
that Mautz and Sharaf propose. As Gray observed, reliance on careful argument
analytical review, in particularis becoming a larger part of audit practice. Also, as
explained above, the actual evidence collection processes which auditors rely on
need argument to support their value. Argument precedes evidence collection in the
audit hierarchy. The second is that audit professionals may be as unreflective about
and as ignorant oftheir basic epistemological rules as physical scientists are. In
A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking (Hawking, 1988) spells out his empiricist
credentials, claiming (in a joke aimed at philosophers) that he knows the world is
round because he has flown round it. The research for which he is most famous is
into the nature of black holes, which he has not flown round nor, in any other way,
empirically inspected. Good audit professionals actually produce arguments which
make sense in terms of the framework suggested in this paper. In discussions with
colleagues about what audit work needs to be carried out, in debates about auditing
standards, and in courts of law, standards of validity, coherence, relevance, and
reasonableness are routinely applied. Arguments based on psychological facts about
the characteristics of an auditors sensory apparatus, or about whether the inputs
from that apparatus are likely to result in sound judgements, are notably absent.
It is unfortunate, but academically irrelevant, if auditors themselves are unable to
recognize the significance of this focus.
An appropriate auditing standard couched in terms of the type of fundamental
theory this paper proposes would state something like the following. The auditor
should construct an argument from statements which are not disputed, or would not
be disputed by the participants in the audit process, to a conclusion which expresses
the audit opinion. These basic statements will include both statements of fact and
statements which explain exactly what is meant by auditing in the circumstances in
question. If there are no statements which are indisputable, then there is no language
with which to construct an audit argument. The standard might go on to explain
current evidence collection processes in something like the following terms: If an
interested party agrees that a well-designed test of a certain kind has been carried
out, then it would be incoherent of them to dispute the results of the test. This may
seem a perverse way to say that tests need to be carried out, but it makes explicit the
vital fact that a test is only useful to the audit argument if those whom the argument is
aimed at agree that it has been properly carried out. This agreement is a discursive
move, not an empirical one.
It is worth restating the ethical consequences of the present gulf between
fundamental theory and daily practice. If the fundamental theories of a discipline
lack credibility among its practitioners, then this not only weakens the conceptual
framework of the discipline, but also sets a poor standard of fundamental theory in
general to neophytes of the discipline. Audit practitioners who believe in the possibility
of being able to ultimately justify their procedures, and who recognize the value of this

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265

belief, will have a more secure concept of honest auditing than those who regard the
business of justification within auditing as being part of a less than generally credible
game, evenor perhaps especiallyif it is a game which is thought of as being no
worse than that played by members of any other discipline. This paper suggests that
doing auditing properly means being prepared to ultimately justify ones methods,
and that, although the details of this justification may be negotiated, there is an
ultimately non-negotiable discursive framework within which this can be done.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Mike Power of the London School of Economics for his comments
on an early draft of this paper, Stefano Zambon of the University of Padua for being a
helpful discussant at the 1997 IPA conference, and Penny Ciancanelli of Strathclyde
University for comments on a late re-draft.

Notes
1. These writers give a thoughtful and committed critique of the errors that this has led critical theory
into, but unfortunately they have some erroneous epistemological convictions of their own
2. Various writerseven some with distinctly positivist prejudiceshave commented on the underdetermination of scientific methodology by empiricist epistemology. Karl Popper is possibly the best
known example of this. Post-positivist writers, such as Kuhn and Feyerabend, have taken, or been
taken to support, more radical positions.
3. Arguably, it is a type of theory which also fits the natural sciences better than positivistic empiricism
does, although this is a claim which would need to be defended elsewhere.
4. Kuhn himself does not explicitly argue this.
5. This is related to, but not equivalent to, Mautzs (1958) division of evidence into real (requiring no
further inference from evidence to conclusion), testimonial (depending on the statements of a third
party), and indirect (everything else).
6. A reviewer of an earlier draft of this paper raised a question about the role of probabilistic inference.
The point of the question was that auditors do not believe that they can get at the world as it actually
is because they can only use statistical and probabilistic tests, which necessarily leave room for
uncertainty. This, however, does not cause any problems for their belief that there is a realityit
only means that it is a bit inaccessible. No matter how, probabilistic statements about the world are
not statements whose truth is uncertainin other words, the statement there is a better than 99%
chance that I will wake up tomorrow may be quite certainly (100%) true. If a correspondence theory
of truth were viable, then there would have to be some probabilistic fact about the world to which this
true statement corresponded. In other words, as far as theories of truth are concerned, probabilistic
statements are no different from any others
7. Empirical studies of audit judgement may throw light on how this is actually done by auditors without
being able to throw any general light on the question of how they should be doing it.
8. A reductio ad absurdum proof of a statement is a proof which shows that the contrary of the statement
entails a contradiction, so that the statement must be true.
9. Arguably this is a question of grammatical rules in the (somewhat idiosyncratic) sense intended by
Wittgenstein in some of his earlier writingfor a neat example, see Stern (1995, pp. 4445)but a
development of this perspective could render an already difficult line of argument completely opaque.
10. The consequences of this are not, in general, taken very seriously by philosophers (or academic
theorists in general?), who are inclined to think that if a belief is intelligible in any sense, then it must
be philosophically addressable. (This may be closely related to a belief that it would not be intelligible
to believe that doing philosophy is impossible.) Part of what I am suggesting is that it is possible that
some beliefs could be perfectly intelligible (at least in the sense of not being logically incoherent, and

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possibly according to other standards as well), but just could not form part of any valid philosophical
theory, because they would be inarticulable

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