Final answer:
Husserl's critique of naturalism as self-refuting is that naturalism cannot empirically validate its own principles, thus it contradicts itself. This is aligned with postmodern views that question absolute or objective truth, leading to a contradiction in the universal applicability of naturalism's epistemological claims.
Step-by-step explanation:
When Husserl critiques naturalism as being self-refuting, he is pointing out that naturalism contradicts its own principles. Specifically, naturalism, which asserts only the physical and empirically verifiable as meaningful, cannot justify its own epistemological assumptions using its restrictive criteria for knowledge. Because naturalism discounts metaphysical or a priori reasoning, it can't use its own empirical methodology to validate the foundational philosophical claims it makes about the nature of inquiry, such as the rejection of non-empirical knowledge.
Further complicating this is the postmodern perspective that challenges the notion of objective or absolute truth. Applying this perspective to the claims of pragmatic theory—that there is no objective or absolute knowledge—it is evident that these claims become self-refuting within different communities as they would only be considered true under community-specific criteria. As such, these claims may not hold as objective truths but may be considered valid within particular epistemic communities, thereby highlighting the contradiction inherent in asserting universal epistemological claims from a naturalist viewpoint.