Language and the Cave

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Language and the Cave

 

In Plato’s cave the inhabitants see nothing but shadows. Shadows are etiolated compared to the objects that cast them. You can glean very little from a shadow about the object that casts it. The shadow is two-dimensional, colorless, massless, and without texture: it is merely an absence of light, conveying little beyond shape and size. If you were confined to knowledge of shadows, you would know next to nothing about the world of objects. Such is the epistemological predicament of Plato’s cave dwellers. The analogy can be used to cast epistemological aspersions on such things as television, the Internet, movies, and even local culture (including art: see Plato). But we can also apply it to language itself: are words like the shadows of objects, wispy simulacra of the real thing? Words, like shadows, contain very little information about the world they are used to talk about: they are just marks or sounds that bear no real resemblance to the objects they are used to refer to. If all you knew about were words and not things, you would have precious little knowledge of the real world of objects and facts. You would have mere shadow knowledge. We can imagine beings in just this position: they live in a world of words cut off from objects (Word and No Object), which they suppose to be all of reality. They know only words but take this to be all there is. Words are bandied around; there are internal relations between words; there is a grammatical structure to language—but there is no known reference relation to a reality external to language. This story might be used to dramatize a certain type of philosophical thesis, namely that we effectively do exist in such a world. Our conception of reality, such as it is, is shot through with language, conditioned by it, limited to it. We might call this “linguistic idealism” or “linguistic determinism”: reality (our reality) is constituted by language and determined by it. The way we see the world is permeated by language, for good or ill. On the one hand, this enables us to deduce conclusions about reality from language; on the other hand, our view of the world inherits whatever defects belong to language. Similarly, we can deduce the shapes of objects from their shadows, but shadows can also mislead us about the nature of reality. The cave of language can be comforting or it can be deforming; in any case it is all we have to go on. For (it may be said) language determines how we think, and hence what we know, and hence (ultimately) how things are. We are familiar with such philosophical theories: post-modern structuralism (Saussure, Derrida), the linguistic turn, some of later Wittgenstein, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, etc. The idea is that language forms our intellectual environment, our “frame of reference”, so that all our knowledge is shaped by it; it is a system, a reality, in its own right, with its own structures, rules, and imperatives. All our investigations are really linguistic investigations, because they are inescapably tied to language. So we may as well admit we live in a linguistic cave and make the best of it. We can certainly denounce philosophical (and scientific) viewpoints that fail to recognize these elementary considerations—realism, objectivity, immediate knowledge of things, language-independent truth, etc. Such viewpoints fail to come to terms with the hegemony of language. There is no escape from the linguistic cave.

            Is this position credible? The trouble with it is that it ignores the reality of perception. It treats consciousness as if wholly taken up with awareness of language, but it also enables the perception of objects. This is not a linguistic process. Light gets in from outside; there is a window in the cave. If I want to know about an object, I am not limited to examining its name (its linguistic shadow); I can also look at it—feel it, smell it, taste it, hear it. I don’t have to be in thrall to language, since I can deploy my senses to gain knowledge of reality. If language tries to bewitch me, I can undo the spell by perceiving the object in question—as it might be, a state of mind. Language can’t force me to see things according to its own preconceptions. Language and perception are separate faculties. The point is totally elementary, but totally decisive. We don’t live in a linguistic cave (or cage). We could have, like those purely linguistic beings I mentioned earlier, but that is not in fact our predicament: we have eyes as well as larynxes (or whatever organ is responsible for language ability). And our eyes are not the slaves of our language, contrary to the claims of some theorists. This is surely entirely obvious and scarcely needs to be argued. But it raises a more serious question: to what extent do we live in a linguistic cave a la Plato? Do the shadows of language ever interfere with or limit our ability to know reality? Here we may adopt a more moderate and piecemeal approach: sometimes language can be misleading. Language is an autonomous system with its own rules and “logic”, and it can obscure the reality we take it to represent. It can be logically misleading (quantifiers, definite descriptions, etc.) and it can also be ethically and politically misleading in myriad ways (racial slurs, sexist terminology, speciesist locutions, etc.). We are constantly negotiating and reforming language in the light of non-linguistic knowledge, as well as learning from language about things we already think we understand. I thus suggest a dialectical approach to the relationship between language and reality (or better knowledge of reality): neither has primacy, neither dictates to the other. On the one hand, we (non-linguistically) sense the world and take in its texture and structure; on the other, we describe it a certain way, classifying and articulating it. We are not completely free of language in dealing with reality, but nor are we slaves to language. Language is not a mirror of the world, a transparent flawless medium, but neither is it an all-powerful separate force, pulling us away from reality. There can be tension between language and reality—with thought caught between them–but it is not that one is completely in the driver’s seat. The faculty of language and the sensory faculties are in a dialectical relationship in the creation of human knowledge and understanding. And not only dialectical but also critical: one can correct the other, or improve it. Thus our perception-based knowledge can act critically on our linguistic practices, and our understanding of language (an immensely complex system of knowledge) can contribute to the way we see things (as in conceptual analysis and the “linguistic turn”). In ethics and politics language can be both hindrance and liberation, because linguistic practices can be both hidebound and ameliorative. It is thus wrong to be an absolute linguistic idealist, but also wrong to think that language has no effect on the way we think and feel. As is often the case, the truth lies between two extremes, which means that we have to take things on a case-by-case basis. Boring, perhaps, but whoever said that truth has to be exciting?[1]

 

[1] Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) provides some helpful discussion of these issues, particularly as regards the excesses of “structuralism” and kindred doctrines. I would say this is just not good cognitive science. We can accept that classical empiricism (including Kant) underestimated the formative power of language in the creation of thought while insisting that language is not the sole mode of mental representation at our disposal. A dialectical perspective does justice to both sorts of mental faculty.

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Death, Disgust, and a Possum

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Death, Disgust, and a Possum

 

The other day my attention was caught by a bad smell emanating from near the front gate of my yard. Upon closer inspection I discovered a dead animal, evidently a possum. It had clearly been there a few days in hot weather. Flies were buzzing all around it. A regiment of maggots was feeding on it. It smelt appalling. I had to remove it, holding my breath and averting my eyes. It was a paradigm disgust object. It set me wondering again about disgust as it relates to death (it’s dirty work but someone has to do it). This dead animal, we might say, was “alive with death”: it was proclaiming its death, making a spectacle of it, assaulting the senses with the fact of its death. The flies and maggots were literally alive, and they were the palpable proof of death. Often death looks like a mere absence: we speak of a “lifeless corpse” that could just as well be asleep and which might wake up at any moment. It doesn’t look dead—unlike my possum. We might know it is dead, but it might turn out not to be (life is still an epistemic possibility). We could say that the body is passively dead, whereas my dead possum was actively dead—aggressively and vehemently so. And disgust flowed from it. Death was rendered palpable, perceptible, a datum of sense. It was undeniable. Imagine if this was always so: as soon as an animal dies it undergoes a perceptible change, possibly a spectacular change—it suddenly disintegrates or changes color or becomes covered in warts or smells of sulfur. The death would be a perceptible quality not a hypothesis: it would appear real—a presence not an absence. The animal is not just no longer alive but presently dead, floridly so. Wouldn’t this change our attitude towards death? Wouldn’t death, being so out in the open, seem like a solid observable fact—indubitable and unavoidable. When I saw that possum I saw (and smelled) its death: its death flooded into my brain, my consciousness. I knew that death is real—including my own death. Don’t we habitually regard our own death as rather hypothetical, as not quite real, a rumor not a fact? We believe it will happen but we don’t viscerally sense it. But we could have a far more vivid sense of death’s reality—we could encounter it as an inescapable fact. The rotting corpse, alive with death, presents an impression of death. The possum could not just be “playing possum”; it was unambiguously dead. When you smell a rotting corpse you smell death—you don’t just conjecture it. The feeling of disgust brings with it these intimations, intuitions, and impressions. Death impresses itself on you as your senses recoil in disgust—not just as a thought would, but as a felt reality. It passes from the abstract world to the concrete world: the Form of Death (as Plato would say) becomes an empirical datum. We move from the Cave to the Grave, as it were: from a flimsy concept of death, a mere shadow of the real thing, we are suddenly confronted by a vivid display of it. Of course this is disturbing, because now we can’t keep death at arm’s length (I had to physically remove the body with broom and bucket). All our methods of death denial are circumvented and death hits us hard—its active malevolence becomes apparent. The disgust we feel at the rotting corpse is bound up with these psychic realities—our deep lifelong fear of dying, our horrified knowledge of our finiteness. We carry within us a psychological formation dedicated to death (the “death module”), which operates in us all the time (see Heidegger), occasionally emerging when death obtrudes itself; but it is especially active when death becomes part of the perceptible world—as in the spectacle of the rotting corpse (so sad, so revolting). No wonder disgust is such a powerful and disturbing emotion: it taps into our deepest anxieties, terrors, and disquiets. That poor possum reminds us of what we are as mortal biological beings—food for worms, walking death certificates, future nuisances for the living (the body has to be disposed of). I dropped it in the trashcan and went on with my life.[1]

 

[1] Other disgust objects such as disease and excrement partake of the same psychic formation: they elicit the same complex of death-directed attitudes, though less forcefully. We know we need food to live and that without it we would die, but also that all food is killed in the process, leading finally to the excremental corpse. The idea of eating is bound up with the idea of dying. In the case of disease the connection with death is even closer. The rotting corpse is the basic case, however, the shining exemplar. It radiates death, makes an art form of it almost. Notice that zombies occasion disgust in us, because they render death active and alive; by contrast, the recently deceased do not occasion the same reaction, because they are not so deep in death. It all depends on how salient death is, how apparent to the senses.

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A Modal Argument from Evil

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A Modal Argument from Evil

 

Some worlds are more evil than ours: we don’t live in the worst of all possible worlds. Some are a lot worse than ours: only the wicked prosper, disease is rampant and deadly, virtue leads to imprisonment, people are executed for singing in public, deep depression is the norm, and so on. One would think that if such a world had been created by an intelligent being, that being would have to be a devil or else completely incompetent at world creation. Clearly this world was not created by an omniscient, omnipotent, all-good God. The properties of the super-evil world and the properties of the traditional God are not compatible. So God does not exist in every possible world. He is not therefore a necessary being. But God is (or would be) a necessary being. Therefore God does not exist. His non-existence in one world entails his non-existence in every world, including ours. You might not think the degree of evil in our world is sufficient to disprove God’s existence, but surely you would agree that there could be a world so evil as to preclude God’s existence in it. But that undermines God altogether, on pain of declaring him a contingent being. For in some worlds atheism is true, and just where God is most needed. Surely an omnipotent God would make sure that such a world does not exist: but it does. And if God does not exist in a world because that world contains a large amount of evil, how do we know that our actual world is not such a world?[1] It certainly contains a good deal of preventable evil. The mere possibility of a world with no God undermines the whole idea of God’s existence.

 

[1] In some worlds maybe God does plausibly exist—the heavenly worlds. If a possible world is a paradise, we might suppose that it must be created by a God-like being. But our world is not such a world—or else we would already be in heaven.

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The Frog Crawl

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The Frog Crawl

 

The kick in swimming the crawl adds little to forward momentum, maybe ten or fifteen percent of the power. All the power comes from the arms. In the breaststroke the frog-like movement of the legs adds much more to propulsion, about forty percent I would estimate. The arms have less power than in the crawl (question: why?). Reflecting on these facts the other day it struck me that combining the arm movements of the crawl with the leg movements of the breaststroke would maximize power. Yet nobody ever does it, recreationally or competitively. I surmised that the reason is that this combination is physiologically impossible because of the disparate nature of the two sorts of movement. Theoretically the frog crawl would be the best stroke, but physiologically it isn’t feasible. I decided to put it to the test. It was certainly unnatural for the first few minutes, as one would expect, but it was by no means impossible. It was exhausting to be producing that much bodily movement, but it wasn’t something my body and brain couldn’t accomplish. Within ten minutes I was doing the frog crawl quite comfortably—and moving a lot more quickly. Practice confirmed theory. After half an hour trying out different variants of the new stroke it was second nature and it felt strange to go back the old kick. I had discovered a new way to swim! I venture to suggest that this is the natural way to swim “free-style” because your legs want to generate some power and not just trail behind you in a rather pointless shuffling action. You no longer feel that your arms are dragging you through the water with no real help from your legs; instead your legs are producing solid forward motion for your arms to modify and augment. I felt astonished alone there in the pool with no one to tell my discovery to. But why is this not generally known? Is it just the power of custom and habit (Hume)? Surely it has been thought of and rejected for some reason—but what? Later I tried to research the question via Google, but I found nothing to indicate that anyone recognized the existence of the frog crawl—and its superiority. So I am announcing it now, wondering if in fact the idea has already been mooted. It has certainly changed the way I swim from now on. I’m not going back to the old style.

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Is God an Atheist?

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Is God an Atheist?

 

God (if he exists) is a rational being. He believes in his own existence only if it is rational so to believe. So does God believe in his own existence? It might be thought that he has quick route to his existence—the divine version of the Cogito. God knows that he thinks, therefore he knows that he exists: he knows his own existence in just the way we know ours, by means of self-awareness.  But this would be a non sequitur: for it doesn’t follow that he knows he is God (or even a god). He is God (by hypothesis), and he knows by the Cogito that he exists; but he doesn’t thereby know that the thing that exists is God. For all he knows given just the Cogito, he might be a mortal man. Suppose I am in fact an immortal soul: I know by the Cogito that I exist, but not that I am an immortal soul. I might even see fit to deny the existence of all immortal souls while being one myself. Knowing my existence doesn’t entail knowing my essence. Ditto for God. We can’t infer from the de re proposition “God knows of himself that he exists” the de dicto proposition “God knows that God exists”. God might be quite certain that he exists, in virtue of the Cogito, but full of uncertainty about his divine status, since that doesn’t follow from mere existence. In order to know that he exists and is God he needs to know what attributes he has, then he can deduce his divine existence. This may be thought easy enough: can’t he infer Godhood from omniscience? There are two problems with this route, concerning knowledge of the attribute and the validity of the inference. How can God know he is omniscient? The skeptic will point out that an impression of omniscience doesn’t entail actual omniscience: people can think they know everything and be wrong. How does God know that his beliefs are all true and that they cover every aspect of reality? How can he know there is nothing he doesn’t know about? There might be aspects of reality not covered by his (admittedly extensive) knowledge, and what makes him so sure of his infallibility? Isn’t omniscience a very difficult attribute to know you have? The skeptic will question God’s justification for making such a bold claim. It may be true that he is omniscient, but how can he be certain that he is? It’s like a human claiming to know all about a certain period of history—how can such a claim ever be substantiated? Second, does it follow from omniscience that the being is question is God? Not obviously, since that being might lack other attributes necessary to being God, such as omnipotence and perfect virtue. So it would be necessary for God to know he has these attributes too: but how can he be certain he has them? Can he even be certain that they are coherent? There are well-known problems involving limits to divine power (can God do the impossible?); and on what basis is God so sure that his virtue is flawless? Of course, if he knows he is God, he can deduce this consequence; but that is the question at issue. Whence God’s certainty in his perfect virtue? Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to admit the possibility of imperfection while noting that his track record so far is pretty impressive? How can God be so sure that he has attributes of such enormous scope? Is it possible that he is in error on these points? Isn’t it an epistemic possibility that he might act imperfectly someday, or encounter a limit to his power, or slip up in his knowledge? What evidence does he have that such unlimited attributes belong to him? It might be said that he doesn’t need evidence—he is God!—but can simply know these things directly. He just intuits that he is omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect. But even if that were possible, it would have to be admitted that he could have beliefs about them by a less direct method, just as we have beliefs about our attributes by inference from something else. But God’s attributes, being so extensive, are not knowable by indirect methods, so he can’t know them in the standard way; he has to intuit them directly if he is to know them at all. But how does he do that, and why is he so constrained? His putative knowledge of his God-constituting attributes is epistemologically mysterious; the skeptic will insist that God simply can’t have such extensive knowledge. If so, he can’t know that he is God.[1]

            So far it looks as if God is doomed to agnosticism about his divine status: he can’t know he is God, but he can’t rule out the hypothesis either. He can’t accept theism (though by hypothesis it is true) but he can’t reject it either. He is like us in this respect: we don’t have good reason to accept that God exists, but that falls short of actively rejecting the God hypothesis. But this is to neglect arguments against God’s existence, particularly the argument from evil. When God is pondering the question of his existence as God it will occur to him that there is a lot of evil in the world that he allows to happen. But then he wonders how this is compatible with his alleged benevolence: how could he let such evil exist given his enormous power and goodness? Since he is trying to determine whether he is indeed God, he comes to the conclusion that he can’t be; he is just too morally indifferent, or perhaps blind. This reasoning is eminently convincing. Maybe there is a flaw in the argument somewhere, but he is damned if he can see it. We are allowing that he is God, so his conclusion is false; but his reasoning is cogent, so he would be justified in forming the belief that there is no God. Or we could take this as a reductio ad absurdum: the supposition of God contains a contradiction, since it implies that God must know that he doesn’t exist if he exists. The problem of evil shows that God (were he to exist) must truly believe that he doesn’t exist. Certainly God would rationally doubt his own existence if he existed, based on the problem of evil. The same is true of other reasons for rejecting God’s existence such as problems about his origin, immaterial nature, profligacy with respect to the extent of the physical universe, etc. God would reflect on these problems and come to doubt his own existence as God. God is supremely rational after all and not susceptible to special pleading and religious bias. He would appreciate the force of the case against him (qua God).

            In the case of humans we find resort to the concept of faith when it comes to God’s existence. Could a similar move be made to explain God’s belief in himself—does he believe he is God on faith? He has tried the ontological argument and the cosmological argument and the argument from design, finding them all wanting, so he resorts to the idea that his existence is a matter of faith. That seems like a logically available move, but it is theologically disastrous. If we can believe things on faith, then surely God has that ability too; but no theologian will be happy with the suggestion that God has no better reason to believe in his existence than we do! Does God have crises of faith about himself? Is he that epistemologically limited about his own identity? Does he pray to himself to keep his faith strong? It has always been assumed, tacitly no doubt, that God has perfect knowledge of his Godhood: but once we examine the matter more closely and remove the veil of piety, we see that God also has problems of belief—he too is at sea about his existence. The reason is plain: it is very difficult to know that one is God, even if one is. The belief is alarmingly speculative. Is it possible to know one is a ghost if one is, or an angel, or a demon? You would have to know you are not a natural thing but a supernatural thing, but such alleged knowledge is very vulnerable to skeptical doubt, because it is so strong. Couldn’t you be under the impression that you are a ghost or an angel or a demon and just be a deluded human? That seems like an epistemic possibility. You might really be one of these supernatural beings, but how can you tell you are?[2] You might just be a mere mortal dreaming you are! You think you are a ghost but how can you be certain you are? Ghosts don’t have their ghostly identity written on their sleeve. That’s not how knowledge works. It isn’t the same with human superheroes: you can know you are one of those by ordinary empirical observation—you possess obvious superhuman powers. But how does ordinary observation establish supernatural status? God could observe his exceptional powers and conclude he is some kind of superhero, but that is a far cry from establishing that he is God. Not only is it difficult to establish that you have the necessary attributes; it is also difficult to move from those attributes to an ascription of Godhood. How does God know he is infinite (Spinoza’s defining attribute of God), and how does he move from this knowledge to the knowledge that he is God (aren’t other things also infinite)? Self-knowledge of divinity is remarkably difficult to obtain. A rational God would find it impossible to achieve. Consider the nature of Jesus Christ’s self-knowledge on the traditional Christian understanding of it: does he know he is God? How could he know this? Does he infer it from his miracles? Did his virgin birth convince him? Did he hear a voice from God in his childhood? Does he just feel it palpitating in his heart? All these possible reasons are hopelessly unconvincing to any rational person in his position, so why is Jesus so sure he is the Son of God? The answer is that he can’t be sure, and probably wasn’t. You would have to be mad to believe such a thing based on that type of evidence. Even if the feeling in your heart were very strong, that would be a thin basis on which to form such an extravagant belief. Jesus was rational, so he had no such certainty—even if he was the Son of God. Ditto John the Baptist and the putative prophets. Religious knowledge of these types is just really hard to obtain given the nature of the facts allegedly known. Not even God has it! So yes, God, being rational, is an atheist—he does not accept the proposition that he exists (as God).[3]

 

[1] It might be said that God’s knowledge of his omniscience and Godhood follows trivially from his omniscience: if he knows everything, then he knows this fact and that he is God. But that has all the advantages of theft over honest toil, stipulation over explanation. God surely has reasons for believing that he is both omniscient and God, based on known facts about himself, and we should be able to specify what those reasons are. Things like an impression of general omniscience or a stellar track record in the knowledge department would constitute such reasons. The trouble is that such reasons are too weak to add up to genuine knowledge, let alone certainty (I leave open the question of the relation between knowledge and certainty), as the skeptic would be quick to point out. It is a feeble response to this to appeal to God’s stipulated omniscience to guarantee that he has such knowledge. There must be a way in which God has knowledge of his divine attributes and identity as God. He must be epistemologically intelligible.  

[2] Suppose reincarnation is true: this is generally assumed to be compatible with accepting that you don’t knowyou are reincarnated, or what form your previous incarnations took. It is exceptionally hard to know your reincarnation history. You are in fact the type of being whose quasi-divine nature is not given to you. How did the Greek gods know they were gods, not just very flashy people? They must have had their doubts. How did the God of the Old Testament know he was the only God? It was at least an epistemic possibility for him that polytheism was true. If you were God wouldn’t you be open to the possibility that there might be other gods? How can you be certain of your uniqueness?   

[3] It is hard to see how we can be to blame for not believing in God if even God does not believe in God. Presumably God does not reproach himself for his atheism or agnosticism, it being a reflection of the virtue of rationality, so he can hardly blame us for our conscientious atheism or agnosticism. This puts the whole history of Christian theology in a less than flattering light (people being executed and so on for having an attribute that God himself has). Would the Inquisition declare God a heretic for not being confident that he is God? I myself would admire God for his epistemic humility.

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Seeming

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Seeming

 

Seeming is a pervasive feature of conscious life. We (and other animals) are constant subjects of seeming: things are forever seeming this way or that to us. It now seems to me that there is a red cup in front of me, that Sebastian is in a good mood today, and that seeming is a worthwhile topic for philosophical investigation. Consciousness could almost be defined by way of seeming: it is a center, a hub, of seeming. What it is like to be x is how things seem to x, and where there is seeming there must be consciousness. Sentience is seeming. Oddly, our vocabulary for it is quite limited: in addition to “seems” we have “appear” and how things “strike” us, but not much else. Synonyms are thin on the ground, despite the ubiquity of the phenomenon (is this a sign of poor comprehension?). What exactly is seeming? It might be thought to be a species of belief, perhaps the tentative kind: if it seems to you that p, then you (tentatively) believe that p. While there is certainly a correlation between seeming and believing, it would be wrong to define the former by the latter, since it is possible to disbelieve what seems to you to be the case (or to be neutral about it). If you have reason to believe you have been hallucinating recently, you may distrust your senses and reject the appearances they offer to your faculty of judgment. Seeming may be something like an invitation to belief, but you can decline the invitation. Nor is belief sufficient for seeming: I believe the Sun is 93 million miles away, but it doesn’t seem to me that way. Seeming looks like a sui generis state of mind, not to be assimilated to belief. It is also shared by different sense modalities and indeed by other modes of knowing: both sight and hearing (etc.) provide us with occasions of seeming, so the nature of seeming cannot be defined in terms of specific types of experience. What we can say is that all knowledge depends on episodes of seeming: we can’t know things without things seeming a certain way to us. Seeming plays a vital epistemological role. What we believe depends ultimately (sometimes directly) on how things seem to us. So it would be good to know what seeming is, how it is to be analyzed. When it seems to me that p what kind of mental state am I in?

            The answer might seem straightforward (note how frequently we use the word): I am in a subjective state that has representational content (intentionality, reference). In short, seeming is experience. But that can’t be right as stated, because mental images fit that specification: they are subjective states with representational content, but they are not states in which the world seems to be a certain way. Mental images are not hallucinations and do not present themselves as such. I am not tempted to believe what they represent; they don’t function as evidence for me. Here we might reach for the concept of the sense datum: a seeming is a sense datum, a constituent of perceptual consciousness. This suggestion encounters a problem with non-sensory seeming, unless we enlarge the concept of a sense; but there is a subtler problem, namely that the sense datum, as traditionally conceived, is too weak to add up to real seeming. The intuitive idea is that a sense datum is an intrinsic state of consciousness that transparently presents itself to the knowing subject—not very different from a pain or tickle (“My visual field is yellowish”). But why should that add up to a way the world seems? The sense datum is conceived as a floating element of consciousness—a quale in modern terminology—but where is the idea of how things seem in that conception?  Couldn’t such an entity be present in consciousness and not strike the subject as pointing to how things external to him actually are? The sense datum is too neutral, too isolated within itself, too uncommitted. It is too much like an image or idea or concept: it doesn’t carry within it the element of world-directed commitment. It just hangs there. You can see what I am driving at by consulting the dictionary: the OED gives an admirably concise and abstract definition of “seem”—“give the impression of being”. We could choose to build this into the notion of a sense datum, but the traditional notion is not so understood. There are two aspects to the definition: being and impression. Seeming is the appearance of being—existence, reality, externality. It isn’t a neutral quality of consciousness: it points outwards; it has (purported) objectivity. This is more than mere intentionality, since that is compatible with the fictional or subjective status of the intentional object. But in the case of seeming we have apparent reality. When visual experience makes it seem to you that there is red cup in front of you it makes that state of affairs seem real—objectively real, really there. The concept of seeming is connected to the concepts of fact and truth; indeed, it is up to its neck in the idea of an objective, shared, external reality. All seeming is existential seeming (unless explicitly about fictional entities). The senses make the external world real to consciousness (whether or not it really is). If it seems to you that p, then it seems to you that it is true that p (factual, part of being). Seeming is ontologically committed. It isn’t ontologically neutral like traditional sense data or physical stimuli impinging on the sense organs. You need not believe what it purports to reveal, but it certainly has strong opinions (as it were). Seeming is a realist: it affirms the transcendent. The second element is the concept of impression: in seeming you have the impression of reality; you are affected that way. The seeming makes a certain impact on you. Not necessarily a belief, but some sort of mental effect (the word “impress” can mean “make a mark or design on (an object) using a stamp or seal”: OED). You have, as we say, the distinct impression that things out there are thus and so—really thus and so. You may be cut to the quick by this impression, or elated by it, or sublimely indifferent to it. How things seem concerns the self: it is the self that is impressed by the (apparent) encounter with being. But this fact—the fact of having the impression that p—fits none of the standard mental categories, being neither belief nor sensation. It is sui generis and rather puzzling, despite its familiarity. Seeming is neither assent nor feeling, but somehow something in between. It concerns reality and is clear in its commitments, but it isn’t a type of belief—though it functions as an invitation to belief. We might say it belongs to its own mental faculty, alongside the faculties of belief formation, imagination, emotion, etc. It provides input to other faculties but isn’t a special case of them.[1] It demonstrates the variety of the mental (and the dangers of that overarching concept). The seeming faculty is in the business of providing impressions of being (though it can fail in its mission), which we must evaluate in order to arrive at beliefs. These impressions are useful and sometimes impressive (waterfalls, mountains, whales) and no doubt serve a biological purpose. But they are rather mysterious, being neither fish nor fowl. It is hard even to talk about them: we are left with the bare claim that the mind is capable of entertaining impressions of reality that don’t ascend to the level of belief (but do go beyond mere subjective items).

            We can now define “seems”, notwithstanding its puzzling status. It seems to an organism that p if and only if the organism has an experience in which it has the impression that p. More briefly, seeming is having an experience-based impression of being. Here we leave “impression” as undefined (the dictionary is no help); it must be taken as primitive. All we can say is that it is not a case of belief (or disposition to belief). Such states, however, are the basis of all knowledge. Hamlet’s famous line “Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not ‘seems’” encapsulates a good deal about seeming: its relation to being and its puzzling status. The traditional philosopher would put “is” after “I know not” (skepticism etc.), assuming that how things seem can be known; but Hamlet seems (!) to be saying that he doesn’t know anything about seeming. What is this strange seeming, this curious hybrid, this committed agnostic? I understand “To be or not to be”, but what are we to make of “To seem or not to seem”? I know not that, Horatio. Poor Hamlet, he doesn’t even know how things seem, let alone what really happened to his father or the nature of the afterlife! Our ordinary language also seems to be in some doubt on the matter: there are verb and adjective forms of “seem” (“seems” and “seeming”), but there is no noun form, as if English is reluctant to engage in the ontology of seeming. I have spoken in noun form of “a seeming” and “seemings”, as if there are such things, but that is not regular English. English, like Hamlet, knows not “seemings” or “a seeming”. Yet seeming seems real (I have the strong impression that seeming has being)—there are seemings of seemings. But they are puzzling conceptually; perhaps this is why they are seldom discussed, or assimilated to something else. We need a philosophy of seeming (not of physical sensory inputs or amorphous “sense data”); in particular, we need a better understanding of the notion of “impression”. Perhaps seemings are supervenient on other mental phenomena such as experiences of one kind or another, but we should be wary of any attempt to reduce them to such a basis. Do experiences cause seemings? Is it because of experiences that things seem a certain way, even though seemings strictly transcend experiences as such? Or are the things we call “experiences” really compounds of seeming and some more primitive sensory material? And how do experiences make an impression on the subject, whatever that effect is exactly? Hume spoke of impressions and ideas, recognizing that the senses do more than just parade ideas before our minds, but he said nothing to explain what an impression is, i.e. what it is an impression of and what it is an impression to. We are constantly having impressions of this or that, but what this operation amounts to remains obscure. Metaphorically, it is something like an imprinting (a type of denting), but that tells us little of any theoretical use. All knowledge therefore rests on something we don’t understand.[2]

 

[1] Someone might try saying that seemings are the beliefs of the perceptual modules, potentially in competition with the beliefs of the central system, as in cases of visual illusion (see Jerry Fodor’s The Modularity of Mind). But that is an anthropomorphic picture of the perceptual systems: nothing in you believes that the lines of the Muller-Lyer illusion are unequal (assuming you know the illusion). The seemings of the senses are completely non-doxastic. It is merely as if your visual system believes what it delivers. Belief is really the icing on the cake not fundamental epistemological reality.

[2] If we say all knowledge rests on observation, we tacitly bring in the idea of seeming: an observation is a mental act in which something seems to be the case. That is, observations are precisely conscious states that embed an impression of being: the observer is affected by reality in a certain way and he seems to himself to be so affected. We can’t avoid admitting seeming into the epistemological picture in favor of something (seemingly) less obscure. Seeming is inescapable.

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Philosophical Knowledge

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Philosophical Knowledge

 

I wish to examine the distinctive nature of philosophical knowledge. I don’t want to place much emphasis on the concept of knowledge; if that is too vaunted a term, we can as well speak of opinion or hypothesis or reasoning—whatever it is we do mentally when we do the thing called philosophy. But I will speak of knowledge for convenience (and because I don’t myself think the term is too strong). So: what kind of knowledge is philosophical knowledge? Two positions have been staked out: either such knowledge is a posteriori or it is a priori. It is either knowledge “by experience” or knowledge “independently of experience”. The former position is held by those who believe that philosophy is “continuous with science”: it is empiricism with respect to philosophical knowledge, i.e. the five senses are the ultimate basis of this knowledge. The latter position is held by those who think that philosophy proceeds by conceptual analysis or is akin to mathematics (hence synthetic a priori): no sense experience is essentially involved in acquiring philosophical knowledge. But this ignores a third possibility: philosophy relies on some sort of experience but not traditional sense experience.[1] That is, there are philosophical experiences and these play a role in producing philosophical knowledge. This position allows for a kind of extended empiricism with regard to philosophical knowledge: such knowledge is based on experience, but the experience is not of the kind associated with the five human senses. It is sui generis. But what kind of experiences are these? We may cite feelings of conceptual confusion, impressions of mystery, intellectual cramps, magical imagery, theoretical frustration, moments of exhilaration, sensations of sudden insight. Philosophy has its phenomenology, its what-it’s-likeness: there is a way that consciousness configures itself when philosophy is going on in it. So these experiences are available to play a role in generating knowledge, and hence qualify philosophy as an empirical discipline in the extended sense—like logic, mathematics, and semantics (also ethics). Thus we can accept a rationalist conception of the epistemology of philosophy while maintaining that philosophy falls under a general empiricism—rationalist empiricism. We have philosophical knowledge in virtue of having philosophical experiences—episodes of consciousness in which philosophical thought is embedded. Philosophy turns out to be a posteriori, though not in the sense usually intended, but simply because experience is epistemologically ubiquitous. Yet it is also a priori in the sense that it is prior to (independent of) body-based sense experience, i.e. the five senses. We don’t need to use our five senses in order to arrive at philosophical knowledge (it is a priori relative to those), but we do use—and must use—our experiences in a broader sense (and so is a posteriori in that respect). For we use experiential consciousness when we are employing our mind about philosophical questions. Our phenomenology shapes our cognition.

            But this is somewhat thin gruel unless we can say more about the distinctive characteristics of philosophical cognition. Granted we have philosophical experiences, but how are they related to the essence of philosophy as an intellectual discipline? What is the nature of philosophy such that it produces such philosophical experiences? What exactly constitutes a philosophical experience? To answer these questions we need to say more about the general character of philosophy; then we can say that philosophical phenomenology reflects this character. We need to link phenomenology with cognitive architecture—consciousness with cognitive science. So let us try to develop a cognitive science of philosophy and see what kind of experience falls out of that. This will enable us to be more explicit about the type of experience that drives the epistemology of philosophy. We will then be able to unify the structure of philosophical cognition, the epistemological status of philosophy, and the phenomenology of philosophy. So what is that structure? What makes philosophy unlike other subjects? What specific methods does it adopt? How is it related to preexisting properties of the human mind? We may begin by noting that other academic disciplines are rooted in aspects of the mind that pre-date and anticipate their academic form; they don’t spring from nowhere, psychologically speaking. They have their origins in folk psychology. Thus physics has its roots in what is called folk physics—our primitive understanding of the physical world. Obviously we need this understanding in order to survive in a world of material bodies subject to the laws of physics; and there is every reason to believe that it has a substantial innate component. It would be possible to spell out the basic operating features of the innately based folk-physics mental module (compare the innate language capacity). The general point is that academic physics has its counterpart in a preexisting psychological capacity with a specific structure and application to the real world. No doubt this capacity arose for good evolutionary reasons (organisms that are bad at folk physics don’t stick around for long). Geography clearly grows from a basic competence in mapping the surroundings of the organism: where things are, how to get from A to B, what kinds of environmental features to look out for. We used to have local mental maps (like other animals), now we have maps of the entire planet. History is made possible by memory, by an ability to keep track of the past—vital in an organism that needs to learn from the past. Primitive people told stories about what happened in days of yore (or yesterday) and academic history exploits this basic ability to construct its sweeping narratives. Chemistry is a little more obscure as to origins, but a primitive understanding of chemical reactions could prove useful in practical activities—how metals rust, water dissolves, acid burns. Perhaps cooking encouraged chemical knowledge by drawing attention to the way heat changes the form of substances. Psychology obviously develops from folk psychology, useful in a social species, and also innately based. Astronomy has its origins in our perception of the night sky and our observations of the sun and moon, which are also useful things to know about. Economics grows from primeval bartering. Political science arises from the need for government in a social species. Linguistics builds upon basic linguistic competence, a central feature of the human animal. Biology is anticipated by our ancient awareness of species, reproduction, predation, etc. Even anthropology, apparently about people from remote locations, can be seen as having seeds in our need to understand strangers, even if only from the neighboring tribe. That is, each academic discipline has roots in preexisting mental competences that serve broadly biological purposes, and it reflects those competences. A cognitive science of these basic mental capacities clearly carries over to the more sophisticated edifices that make up a modern university. The historian, say, is using the same basic capacities used by his ancestors in reconstructing the past—memory, traces left by the past, and narrative talent. Generally speaking, academic disciplines have precursors in human psychological nature, which typically serve biological functions. They thus have a certain kind of evolutionary history, or pre-history.

            But what about philosophy—where is its primeval precursor? From what biological adaptation did it intelligibly spring? Here we seem to draw a blank: philosophy looks distinctly de trop, biologically pointless, lacking in identifiable function. Did it just spring from nowhere? Does it lack a natural history comparable to those just indicated? Is it humanly unnatural? I think the answer is that it stems from what psychologists call meta-cognition—the ability to think about thinking. In philosophy we reflect on thoughts, concepts, theories, arguments, inferences, reasoning: we engage in a second-order cognitive activity. And we do so in an evaluative mode: we assess validity, plausibility, coherence, cogency, etc. That is the basic structure of philosophical cognition—evaluative meta-cognition. Philosophical competence is largely meta-cognitive competence. But why do we have this kind of competence? The answer, I suggest, is that criticism came to be a useful trait in a social species—the ability to evaluate other people’s beliefs and assertions. Our ancestors used meta-cognition in their critical behavior the better to aid the group, or to establish primacy within it. A gene for criticism evolved by the usual mechanisms. The criticism might concern hunting strategies or agricultural methods or personal conduct; in any case it led to an ability to evaluate chains of reasoning and accept or reject the claims of others. Being a good critic conferred reproductive advantage—the same old evolutionary story. Language will have played a part in this because it enabled critics to express their criticisms: disputes could be aired, conclusions reached, plans adopted. All this required meta-cognition and logical competence. Self-criticism came along with it—not as a form of humility but rather as a way to prepare oneself for effective rebuttal in case of challenge. Dialectical skill had social value. So philosophy as an academic discipline has its early roots (partially at least) in the critical practices of meta-cognitive creatures. Socrates is a prime example: energetically arguing in the marketplace with overconfident conspecifics. Socrates is a born critic, a logical evaluator, a meta-cognitive savant. The dialogue form thus perfectly reflects the origins of the philosophical mind. In the course of evolving and refining this trait certain problems were discovered and grouped together—forming the subject we now call “philosophy”. So philosophy does have a quotidian source or precursor just like the other disciplines, though of a special sort. The sophists and the skeptics are natural descendants of the aboriginal arguers and persuaders of primitive human groups. Immanuel Kant no doubt had an ancestor particularly adept at tribal-gathering argy-bargy. The more meta-cognitively able you are the better (Wittgenstein was nothing if not meta-cognitive). Philosophy thus arises in a social context employing a certain cognitive toolbox: that is its cognitive science. A solitary life does not naturally lead to it; nor will a life of cognitive complacency (ants have more aptitude for it than eagles, and it will not arise in the socially uncompetitive). Perhaps our primate cousins have an inkling of philosophy, being somewhat meta-cognitive themselves. It is hard to see how far one can go in it without a language, because that is the primary means of social persuasion—though language is not by itself sufficient to kick-start philosophy. It is language used critically that contains the magic ingredient. Philosophy begins with verbal confrontation.[2]

            We can now return to the phenomenology of philosophy. Given that evaluative meta-cognition has been identified as the psychological deep structure of philosophy, it will follow that the experience of doing philosophy will embody this structure. Philosophy has a meta-cognitive evaluative phenomenology. It seems to us that certain propositions are consistent with other propositions; that some propositions follow from others; that a particular concept has such and such necessary and sufficient conditions (or otherwise); that a particular theory has a lot to be said for it; and so on. These appearances play a role in shaping our philosophical beliefs and producing philosophical knowledge. So this is the specific type of the philosophical experience—evaluative meta-cognitive experience. The philosophical experience thus resembles the logical experience, not surprisingly. Feelings of necessity and contingency are central to both philosophical and logical knowledge. Accordingly, philosophical knowledge is a species of empirical knowledge in the extended sense (but not in the traditional sense). Rationalist empiricism applies to it. Its cognitive architecture, phenomenology, and epistemology fit tightly together: cognitive architecture generates experiential phenomenology and experiential phenomenology generates knowledge. It is the same with philosophy as with other subjects.[3]

 

[1] See my “Rationalist Empiricism” (2021).

[2] If science begins with wonder at the natural world, then philosophy (in the modern sense) begins with wonder at other people’s stupidity—at their ratiocinative failings. The heart of philosophy lies in the pronouncement: “That doesn’t follow”. 

[3] The degree to which various cognitive competences are modular is up for debate. It is generally supposed that physical competence, psychological competence, and moral competence are separate modules. If so, we can predict a variety of phenomenological styles to be associated with them. In the case of philosophy, its meta-cognitive structure will align it with competences also aptly seen as meta-cognitive, such as regular introspective knowledge. The feeling of pain has a specific experiential quality, but so does knowledge of feeling pain; and this knowledge will resemble philosophical knowledge in so far as both are second order. If there were a distinctive meta-cognitive quale, it would be shared by all meta-cognitive activities. I suspect that philosophical competence is, or rests upon, a separable mental module, which is why it is not necessarily correlated with other kinds of intellectual competence. Are there any philosophical idiot savants? 

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Rationalist Empiricism

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Rationalist Empiricism

 

Classical empiricism maintains two main theses: all concepts are acquired by experience and are not innate; and all knowledge is based on experience. Classical rationalism by contrast maintains that some or all concepts are innate and not derived from experience; and some knowledge at least is not based on experience. These are independent propositions: it would be possible to hold that all concepts are innate and that all knowledge is based on experience. That is, one could be a rationalist about the acquisition of concepts (including the content of experience) and an empiricist about the basis of factual or propositional knowledge. Everything about the way we perceive and understand the world could be innate, but still we only know truths about it by means of perception.[1] This position—rationalist empiricism—avoids the traditional empiricist claim that our means of representing the world is derived by abstraction from sense experience, but it accepts that all justification is experiential. How we see things comes from within the mind, but knowledge of facts requires commerce with the world outside the mind (except when it is knowledge of the mind). The constituents of thought (knowledge, perception) are innately given, but all factual knowledge results from some sort of experience of reality: nativism about concepts, empiricism about knowledge. Alternatively put, ideas are innate but beliefs are acquired by experience. This is in many ways an attractive position given the difficulties of the empiricist theory of concept acquisition, i.e. abstractionism, and given the obscurity of rationalist accounts of knowledge.[2] It allows us to have a uniform theory of knowledge that possesses a fair degree of intelligibility while avoiding the problems inherent in the idea that concepts can be derived from objects by some sort of imprinting or copying procedure. The rationalists were right about one thing; the empiricists were right about another. Yet the position is seldom if ever occupied: instead we get a rigid divide between pure experience theories and pure reason theories. The rationalist will accept that some knowledge is based on experience, but the knowledge that isn’t so based is conceived as radically different from empirical knowledge. Wouldn’t it be better if we could develop a more unified picture of human knowledge without such a sharp dichotomy? So we should look with favor on the project of articulating a rationalist empiricism that has a more workable theory of concept acquisition and a more seamless picture of knowledge, thus combining the best elements of both traditions.

            But that project faces a formidable challenge: how can knowledge that is traditionally deemed a priori be assimilated to empirical knowledge? How can mathematics, say, be based on experience? The senses alone cannot deliver mathematical knowledge; for that we need a faculty traditionally labeled “Reason”. One approach to this problem for a general empiricism is to claim that human knowledge forms a seamless whole that collectively faces the test of experience. We adopt a holism of human knowledge and then claim that mathematics is justified by its place in the totality of knowledge as it confronts experience (see Quine). The advantage of this approach is that we can apply an intelligible framework for understanding all knowledge (the senses operating in intelligible ways) and at the same time deliver a uniform picture of all knowledge (we don’t have to postulate two completely different ways of knowing). Such a picture could be combined with nativism about the building blocks of knowledge to produce a streamlined and appealing theory of the whole of human knowledge: so we get the best of both worlds, rationalist and empiricist. But the holistic doctrine is hard to accept, and the account of the actual epistemology of mathematical knowledge quite implausible. Couldn’t we find a way of thinking that achieves the same end but without the implausible claims? Can’t we broaden the notion of experience so as to include mathematical (and other) knowledge—why must it be restricted to sense experience, and indeed to bodily sense experience? The old empiricists held that the five human senses are the sole origin of knowledge, with vision preeminent, but why insist on that limitation? Certainly we would want to include other possible senses, and why restrict ourselves to these? For one thing, we need to make room for introspective knowledge—knowledge by reflection, as the empiricists put it. Here it is natural to invoke the idea of an inner sense: I can sense my own mental states and come to know about them. I thus come to know about them by experience (in one sense of “experience”)—not by logical deduction or revelation or sacred texts. I can receive data about my own mind: information, evidence. It seems to me that I am in pain and so I form the belief that I am in pain. The OED gives three definitions of “experience”: “practical contact with and observation of facts or events”, “knowledge or skill gained over time”, and “an event or activity that leaves a lasting impression”. Each of these can fit the case of introspective knowledge: I can be practically aware of my mental state, can gain knowledge of it over time, and it can leave a lasting impression on me. We don’t need to limit the notion of experience to the particular types of experience characteristic of the five bodily senses. Nor is the notion of a sense so limited: that is just empiricist dogma. So we already extend the concept of experience beyond the five senses, along with allied concepts. What about the concept of mystical experience, or experiences of cosmic despair, or experiences of the oneness of nature?

            How should we view the mental faculties involved in producing so-called a priori knowledge? There are four cases to consider: knowledge of meaning, logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, and ethical knowledge. I propose assigning these to separate mental faculties: they are not homogeneous and deserve to have their own specific module. Then our question is whether they can be seen as lying on a continuum with other types of knowledge; in particular, can they be said to involve types of experience? I think they can: we have semantic experiences, logical experiences, mathematical experiences, and ethical experiences. That is, our consciousness can be affected in specific ways according to the relevant subject matter: there is something it is like to think about these things. When we acquire these types of knowledge our consciousness plays a role—we have a kind of basic awareness of the properties and facts in question. I am aware of what my words mean; I feel the compulsion of a logical deduction; I notice mathematical relations; I have a sudden sensation that such and such would be very wrong. Of course, these states of consciousness are elusive and hard to put into words, but it is undeniable that consciousness reflects the subject matter we are thinking about. We learn about these things over time by attention and practice, so that the knowledge comes more easily to us; and we do it without divine assistance or by recourse to supposed authorities. The individual using his or her natural faculties can come to have knowledge of the kinds in question—a key tenet of the empiricist philosophy. So why not say we have such knowledge “by experience” (notmeaning by the kind of experience proper to the five senses of the body)? We just need a more relaxed and inclusive notion of experience—one that is not at all alien to common sense. Then we can formulate a more liberal form of empiricism that includes types of knowledge usually labeled a priori. Knowledge arises from the individual’s natural faculties operating without divine assistance or deference to supposed authorities: so we know these things by “personal experience” not by external means (custom, the church, our parents, God’s messages inscribed on the soul). Our own consciousness is the source of all our knowledge—whether employed about the physical world or about more “abstract” matters. We have experience of many things and thereby come to know about them, not all of it connected to the five senses.[3]

            There is a kind of epistemological spectrum at work here. Suppose we think of touch as the most basic and tangible way of knowing things: things actually come into contact with our body in a mechanical manner (mechanism applies to knowledge by means of touch). Then we might rank taste and smell as the next senses on the continuum, since they too involve actual contact with the sense organs. Hearing comes next with sound waves in the air impinging on the tympanic membrane etc. Sight is a further step away from the paradigm of touch, being a distance sense (the idea of photons hitting the retina is far removed from the idea of observable bodily contact and is not part of the ordinary concept of vision). The next step brings us to introspection, in which the idea of physical contact starts to look misguided (at this point some people start to speak of the a priori). Not so far away from this we reach knowledge of meaning, which strikes us as a form of introspective knowledge, since meaning is a psychological fact of some sort. Closely following this we get to logical knowledge, which flows from knowledge of meaning, logical consequence being a type of meaning relation. Then we have a bit of a leap to mathematical knowledge: now we seem to be speaking of a realm of objects bearing properties about which we have information, but which make no contact with our body at all. Finally, we reach ethical knowledge: here we lose any analogy to the case of touch, and mechanism has been thoroughly defenestrated. There isn’t a sharp dichotomy, more a series of similarities and differences. In all cases we have some type of experience proper to the subject matter in question—some condition of individual consciousness—and knowledge springs from this basis. So empiricism applies to all cases—relaxed non-bodily empiricism. It is true that mechanism runs out of steam half way up the ladder, thus leaving us bereft of a theoretical structure that seems to render things intelligible to us; but mechanism is a doctrine long ago abandoned in physics and shouldn’t shape the way we do epistemology. Is it a tacit mechanism that lies behind our tendency to favor old-fashioned empiricism? All knowledge, we think, must spring from mechanically intelligible causes, and the bodily senses, particularly touch, conform to this model (or seem to). But once we abandon that ideal we can allow that all knowledge belongs on a continuum: it is all based on experience in the broad sense.[4] Thus empiricism turns out to be true of all knowledge no matter how “abstract” or “a priori”. In fact no knowledge is a priori in the sense of being independent of all experience—though it can be independent of the experiences of the five senses (but so what?). Knowledge is a priori only relative to a type of experience; in this sense knowledge obtained by vision, say, is a priori relative the experiences delivered by the other four senses. We have a mathematical sense that produces mathematical experiences, and that sense is a priori relative to the other senses: it doesn’t depend on them. That is, we have conscious data in all cases that lead to knowledge—sense-data if you like (if we accept that we have a mathematical sense and a moral sense). The main dogma of old-style empiricism is the doctrine that only the five bodily senses deserve to be called senses. But a sense is just a faculty for receiving and processing information—for generating knowledge. So it is possible to be as rationalist as you like about mathematical and moral knowledge and still be an empiricist about them. Someone who thinks that we literally see numbers (but not with our physical eyes) is a firm rationalist but at the same time a staunch empiricist (he believes that mathematical knowledge springs from the unaided individual consciousness). He thinks we need more than just mathematical concepts in order to have propositional mathematical knowledge—we need to do the kind of seeing he has in mind—so he thinks that experience is necessary to knowing mathematical facts. His view is that mathematical concepts are innate but we also need mathematical experience in order to obtain actual mathematical knowledge—so he is a rationalist empiricist about mathematics. And he does not appear to contradict himself. Similarly an ethicist can hold that moral perception is necessary for moral knowledge, not just a stock of innate moral concepts; so she is in effect an ethical rationalist empiricist (we don’t get our moral beliefs from religion or tradition but from our own inner consciousness). She might indeed stress the importance of moral experience, so affirming her commitment to moral empiricism (it’s not all a matter of logical deduction in the style of Kant). Innate endowment gives you the building blocks; experience enables you to form these into actual knowledge. So it might reasonably be maintained: the result is a mixture of rationalist and empiricist tenets, suitably modified and extended. A nice result is that there isn’t the kind of sharp dichotomy envisaged by traditional epistemology: all knowledge is experience-based, but the experiences are of different types. Plato’s slave boy in the Meno learned Pythagoras’s theorem by experience (guided by Socrates), i.e. by applying his mind about geometrical concepts; he didn’t know this theorem before encountering Socrates that day—though he did already possess the necessary concepts. He is not essentially different from someone coming to know that it’s raining: such a person knows this fact by experience but all the concepts he employs are innately based (as we are supposing). We thus obtain a pleasingly uniform account of knowledge that builds in the best insights of rationalism and empiricism. The empiricist can be right that no knowledge of facts is strictly speaking innate, since some kind of eliciting episode of conscious experience is needed; yet the rationalist can also be right that all knowledge depends on a stock of innate concepts not put there by experience. Babies don’t actually have explicit mathematical and ethical knowledge, i.e. true justified beliefs in these things, but they do have the conceptual resources to have such knowledge once suitable experience comes their way. Both sides win: knowledge is always a mixture of the innate (rationalism) and the experiential (empiricism). All propositional knowledge is dependent on experience, but no concept is so based.[5]

 

[1] We don’t have to say that every complex concept is innate qua complex concept; we can hold that all primitiveconcepts are innate. We can thus allow for post-natal concept combination. It will still be true that all concepts are composed wholly of innate concepts—none is acquired by any process of abstraction from sense experience.

[2] I discuss the difficulties with empiricist accounts of concept possession and the mysteries of rationalism in Inborn Knowledge: The Mystery Within (2015).

[3] We might also list a modal sense and an aesthetic sense. It seems to us that some things are necessary and some contingent, and it seems that some objects are beautiful and some are not. We accordingly form beliefs about the modal and the aesthetic based on these appearances. Neither of these senses can be assimilated to the five bodily senses. Note that we don’t just de novo form beliefs and possess knowledge in these cases (as in others); we also experience presentations—ways things seem, appear, strike us. This is part of what makes it natural to talk of a sense: there is a way things seem and a belief based on this. Thus the concept of a sense has a wider application than traditional empiricists have supposed (it need not be causal, for example). Consider also the proprioceptive sense and the temporal sense: neither of these is quite like the Big Five and yet they are senses in good standing.    

[4] In the case of knowledge of language, i.e. grammar and syntax, we might hold that the framework of categories and rules of combination is innate but that we only form propositional knowledge of language by being exposed to linguistic data in the course of our upbringing. We are not, on this view, born knowing that such and such a string is grammatical, but we are born with a mastery of the concepts and principles that enter into such judgments. (The case of knowledge of grammar may not be typical of other types of knowledge traditionally considered in epistemology, and requires a separate discussion.) 

[5] If we ask who was basically in the right in the traditional debates about rationalism and empiricism, I would say the rationalists. The type of empiricism I defend here is quite far removed from anything the old empiricists had in mind: they were dedicated to the five bodily senses and insistent on the sensory origins of concepts. The “empiricism” I defend is really thoroughly rationalist in spirit (though not in letter!). But it does provide a way to unify all propositional knowledge conceptually: all such knowledge is true experientially justified belief.

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